The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Sorry (again) for the long gap between posts but rest assured, I’ve not been idle …

The walking book club discussing Ali Smith’s How to be Both in the sunshine

Last week, as well as Sunday’s gloriously sunny walking book club, when we discussed Ali Smith’s staggeringly brilliant How to be Both (which I’ve written about here), aided by a cheering bottle of Bailey’s sent courtesy of the Bailey’s Prize, I took another book club – sitting, not walking – as part of the Asia House Literary Festival.

For this, I picked Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in part because it’s set in Asia, thereby being appropriate for the festival, but also because it seems to be a book of the moment, having won the Booker Prize, and recently out in paperback. As you might have gathered, I adore Ali Smith’s book, which was on the Booker shortlist, so for this to have trumped that, I was expecting something pretty extraordinary.

And I’m afraid I was disappointed.

But credit where it’s due: the core of The Narrow Road to the Deep North is very good indeed. For those of you who don’t know, it is largely about Australians in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp during the Second World War, building the Burma Railway. There is a great deal about the awful conditions – the rain, the heat, the dysentery, the mud and the lack of food and medical supplies, and the effect of this on the hundreds of men: ‘there were only the sick, the very sick and the dying’. Richard Flanagan’s father was a Japanese POW; in a radio 4 interview, Flanagan said how he talked to his father about the details of his experience rather than anything large, and how in his writing he describes the small-scale because ‘the truths existed in the shit and the mud and the rock and the rain’.

This focus on detail means that the POW camp is brilliantly rendered and terribly oppressive. An especially powerful passage is when Dorrigo Evans – our hero of sorts, a doctor in command of the prisoners – performs an amputation. The equipment was:

Contrived out of bamboo, empty food and kerosene tins, and bric-a-brac stolen from the Japanese – bottles, knives and tubes out of trucks – it was a triumph of magical thinking. There were candles set in reflectors made out of shaped tin cans, a steriliser made out of kerosene tins, a bamboo operating table, surgical instruments made out of honed steel stolen from engines and kept in a suitcase that sat on a table so the rats and mice and whatever else couldn’t crawl over them.

He uses a kitchen meat saw to amputate, and a table spoon to keep the pressure on the wound. A gut twine is employed to do the stitches, ‘improvised out of a pig’s intestine casings’:

These had been cleaned, boiled and pared into threads, then cleaned and boiled again, then boiled a third time before the operation. Compared to surgical ligatures, they were coarse, but they held. But this time he was sewing into nothing, wetness, a blur of tissue and blood.

Each and every thing adapted and used for surgery is described with such a close eye that you can really see it in front of you – the scene comes to life. Perhaps this is particularly apt here as the surgery needs to be so precise, and all these precise details contrast so well with the mess of it, the ‘nothing, wetness, a blur of tissue and blood’.

So that’s the good bit. If only this were the total of the book: a triumph of reconstructing life in a Japanese POW camp.

Alas, there is more … rather a lot more. There is a very hackneyed love story, which doesn’t just have embarrassing sex scenes – ‘bodies beading and bonding in a slither of sweat … her lips were parted just enough for her shallow pants to escape, a short, repetitive cascade of sighs …’ – but is also full of clunky coincidences, e.g. the pretty woman Dorrigo meets in a bookshop turns out to be his uncle’s wife.

I suppose I could forgive it the sloppy love story, but the love story is a symptom of a much larger problem with the book. It is so baggy. Rather than being about the POW camp, realised in such intense detail, Flanagan has extrapolated out from this. We get Dorrigo and his love story, but we also get moments with the other surviving POWs and the Japanese and Korean guards. And there is a seemingly entirely gratuitous bit about Dorrigo rescuing his family from a forest fire. There is just too much; it is trying to be too many things at once.

Even stranger is that after the intense detail of the POW camp, for which huge chunks of the book are given over to capturing the precise horror of it, we then get the rest of a Japanese guard’s life, for instance, in just a few pages. Having looked down the microscope, we are now give a telescope; we’ve been in backwards slo-mo and now we are in fast-forward and it feels highly discombobulating.

Presumably the multiple perspectives are supposed to foster a sense of empathy with the different characters, showing us that the guards are not pure evil because they also like poetry, and that the POWs are not pure victims they also act nastily when they suspect one amongst them of stealing a duck egg, but I don’t think Flanagan’s quite pulled it off, especially when time is thrown so playfully into the equation too.

It’s not a terrible novel, bits of it are very good, I just wish it could have stuck to those bits rather than stitching on all the baggy rest of it. And quite how it could have won the Booker Prize – especially when up against the genius of Ali Smith – is beyond me. But, no doubt, some of you feel differently, so please argue (or agree!) in the comments below – I’d love to know what you think and why I just didn’t get it.

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How to be Both

Some of you might remember my passing through Ferrara a few months ago, at the end of the Italian adventures of Emilybooks. I say passing through because we literally parked the car (rather too far out of the centre thanks to my misunderstanding of the map’s scale), walked up the main street which stretched on and on and on, reached a castle, turned right, saw the Palazzo dei Diamante (thank you architect husband), dunked my head in a fountain, ate two ice creams, and then returned to the car via a prettier windier route, and drove onwards to Vicenza.

I wish we had stayed a little longer, but we had to get to Vicenza in time to meet our Air BnB host. I was so excruciatingly hot that all I can really remember from our couple of hours in Ferrara was the sudden joy of having my head covered in cold fountain water, vastly overriding any embarrassment caused by the amused looks we got from nearby Italians. I wished we had stayed longer as I love the work of Giorgio Bassani, who wrote some very poignant, very brilliant novels (or perhaps technically novellas) set in Ferrara, including The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, which I’ve written about here and here. And now I wish we had stayed longer because just around the corner from the Palazzo dei Diamante is the Palazzo Schifanoia where I have just learned there are some extraordinary frescos by Francesco del Cossa. Frescos so extraordinary that one of the main characters in Ali Smith’s staggeringly brilliant new novel How to be Both goes all the way to Ferrara with her Mum just to see these paintings, and the other main character is Francesco del Cossa the artist. How could I have missed them?!

At least I haven’t missed the book. What a book! You must all read it. It must win the Booker. But how on earth to begin to write about it?

Ali Smith does a clever trick with How to be Both. The novel is split into two halves: part one set in the present day about smart, precocious teenager George (short for Georgia) whose mother has died; and part one about the fifteenth-century artist Francesco del Cossa. Half the print run of the novel has the George part one as its first half, and the other half has Francesco del Cossa’s as its first. It is a canny way of dodging Forster’s assertion:

it is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel

which Smith rails against in her previous book Artful. Forster points out that prose must be one word after another, but with this trick the words come simultaneously before and after. It just depends on which copy you pick up.

So, let’s pause to reflect for a moment about how clever someone is who can write two halves of a novel, twist them around each other with connections and parallels and then engineer the plot to work both ways you encounter them. Right. And let’s not dismiss it as a gimmick, because really it is a signposting of Smith’s ongoing attempt to push at the very boundaries of what fiction can achieve, how narrative linearity can be bent and played with, made pliant to her demands.

The thing about Ali Smith’s writing is that it’s always very clever, but never at the expense of the work itself. You don’t pick up the book and think Christ what a smart-arse. And, frankly, you might be forgiven for anticipating such a reaction. I mean, what if you just want to read an enjoyable novel but instead find yourself landed with some extraordinarily clever modernist work which grapples with huge questions of form and gender and linearity, striving for a unique and wonderful ‘bothness’ which has never before been achieved. You could be forgiven for feeling somewhat put out by having bitten off more than you’d bargained for.

But Smith’s prose is so alive, vivid, enthusiastic, energetic and engrossing, dancing with possibilities, that within a page or two you forget that you’re reading a great modernist challenge, and are every bit as caught up in the pleasure of the story as you might be in a more straightforward novel. There are moments when the bright ideas leap out at you, but they never pull the fabric of the story too far out of shape.

She has it both ways.

So, back to Forster’s assertion and Smith’s tackling of it. How then can a novelist deny time and its linearity? Aside from publishing two different versions at once.

Memory. In both halves of How to be Both Smith weaves memories through current events so that they occur simultaneously. George, grieving for her mother’s death, is in her bedroom on New Year’s Eve:

She sits down on the floor, leans back against her own bed and eats the toast.

It’s so boring, she says in Italy in the palazzo in the mock-child voice they always use for this game.

Just like that, from one sentence to the next, we are transported back in time to when George and her mother are in Ferrara.

There are photographs – moments captured outside of time. George has stuck photos of her mother above her bed; the photograph on the cover of the book surfaces a few times within it. And, by extension, there are films. George starts obsessively watching a porn film of a drugged girl and an older man. As she explains to her father:

This really happened, George said. To this girl. And anyone can just watch it just, like, happening, any time he or she likes. And it happens for the first time, over and over again, every time someone who hasn’t seen it before clicks on it and watches it. So I want to watch it for a completely different reason. Because my completely different watching of it goes some way to acknowledging all of that to this girl.

And there are works of art, including Francesco del Cossa’s frescos. Surviving through time, beyond death, inspiring people over centuries. And even these paintings have different, troubling, layerings of time. We are with George and her mother in Italy again:

But which came first? her mother says. The chicken or the egg? The picture underneath or the picture on the surface?

The picture below came first, George says. Because it was done first.

But the first thing we see, her mother said, and most times the only thing we see, is the one on the surface. So does that mean it comes first after all? And does that mean that the other picture, if we don’t know about it, may as well not exist?

Again and again, we are asked to question which came first, what keeps coming, looking at the limits of time, and how they might be overcome.

George and her friend have to do a project on empathy for school. They decide to do it about Francesco del Cossa. Trying to imagine what the artist would be like, her friend says:

He’d speak like from another time … He’d say things like ho, or gadzooks, or egad … He’d be like an exchange student, not just from another country but from another time.

Then George:

He’d be all alas I am being made up really badly by a sixteen-year-old girl who knows fuck all about art and nothing at all about me except that I did some paintings and seem to have died of the plague…

George thinks:

She thinks how typical it’d be. You’d need your own dead person to come back from the dead. You’d be waiting and waiting for that person to come back. But instead of the person you needed you’d get some dead renaissance painter going on and on about himself and his work and it’d be someone you knew nothing about and that’d be meant to teach you empathy, would it?

It’s exactly the kind of stunt her mother would pull.

For alongside this preoccupation with cheating time and its insistent linearity, comes cheating death – the ending of someone’s time. Perhaps above all How to be Both probes the way that the dead and living exist alongside each other, overcoming their obvious beginnings and endings and times.

In the other part of the novel, Francesco del Cossa comes back from the dead. The artist has a peculiar invisible connection with George, watching over her, involuntarily following her about as though attached by a rope. Looking back at George’s musings above, one wonders, is this indeed the kind of stunt her mother would pull from the dead?

Or perhaps this is George’s empathy project for school writ large. For How to be Both is a startling exercise in empathy – a rendering of this silent strange connection between two people separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles.

Another George – George Eliot – thought that the function of art was empathy:

to amplify experience and extend our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

Well then, How to be Both is a giddy, dizzying, mesmerising piece of art. Read it and I dare you to disagree.

The Luminaries

The Friday before last, I had my thirtieth birthday party; last Friday I finished The Luminaries. I’m not sure which Friday was more triumphant. While the first was a glorious yellow celebration of friendship and happiness and fun, the second saw the end of a colossal book which has taken up a whole month of my reading life.

It was a very enjoyable month. Well, at least the first fortnight was, then, as you might have gathered from my last post, the pleasure was tinged with impatience. And I read quickly – I can’t imagine what it would be like to read The Luminaries at a more sedate pace … just think, you’d still be reading it well into next year!

In case you have been on a different planet (see what I’m doing there, with the astrological pun), The Luminaries is New Zealander Eleanor Catton’s second novel. She is only twenty-eight. It won the Booker Prize. It is over 800 pages. All facts awe-inspiring enough to pique a curious reader’s interest.

The novel opens with two of the oldest clichés: a combination of ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ and ‘A man walks into a bar’. Walter Moody walks into the smoking room of the Crown Hotel in Hokitika, New Zealand, on 27 January, 1866, which happens to be a dark and stormy night. He soon senses that something fishy is going on. It transpires that the twelve men gathered there have come together to discuss the strange happenings of the last fortnight: a recluse has been murdered, a whore has attempted suicide, a young man has gone missing, and a fortune of gold has been found in the murdered man’s house.

It is an exciting beginning, and the pages whizz past as Catton takes us from one protagonist to another, telling us the story from all sides, letting us – alongside Walter Moody – gradually piece together what exactly has happened. At one point, Moody is asked, what it means for him ‘to know something’ and he replies:

I suppose that to know a thing is to see it from all sides.

We do indeed see this story from all sides, and never do we feel that Catton has lost control of the many sides of her narrative. In a way, it is an extension of Virginia Woolf’s seven-sided carnation in The Waves, or Penelope Lively’s disconcertingly wonderful jolts in perspective in Moon Tiger (see this post for more on this). Here the thing is initially twelve-sided, but expands, as more and more characters come into play.

I enjoyed getting to know Hokitika in 1866, at the height of the New Zealand gold rush, of which, until The Luminaries, I’d never heard. Here are men and women on the make, seeking their fortunes, making their futures and, more often than not, running away from their past. These are first class ingredients for a piece of high Victorian drama, and that is what we get, complete with the slightly kitsch chapter-opening epigrams, such as:

In which the merits of asylum are discussed; a family name comes into question; Alistair Lauderback is discomforted; and the shipping agent tells a lie.

Everyone has his secrets and motives, and the web of intrigue is complex and entangling. It reminded me a little of Dickens’ Bleak House.

Except, of course, we’re in the twenty-first century and Catton is too clever to spin us just a shaggy dog story. We know she must have employed that double-cliché beginning as a kind of bluff. There are indeed many moments where our attention is drawn to the many layers of storytelling, such as:

We shall therefore intervene, and render Sook Yongsheng’s story in a way that is accurate to the events he wished to disclose, rather than to the style of his narration.

All the while, the reader is made aware of the astrological patterning, with chapter titles like ‘Venus in Aquarius’, or ‘Mercury Sets’, and charts drawn out at the beginning of each of the novle’s twelve parts. I have to confess that the astrological side of things flew right over my head (appropriately enough), although I did like this moment when Moody first looked at the Southern Hemisphere sky:

The skies were inverted, the patterns unfamiliar, the Pole Star beneath his feet, quite swallowed … He found Orion – upended, his quiver beneath him, his sword hanging upward from his belt; Canis Major – hanging like a dead dog from a butcher’s hook … It was as if the ancient patterns had no meaning here.

The world is upside-down, life here is of a new order. Now we’re further back than the Victorians and are with John Donne and Shakespeare and their ‘brave new world’ and ‘new-foundland’, except that New Zealand is even farther away than America, the old order even more inverted. It is refreshing and fascinating to read about a different frontier people.

So far so good, albeit so long… then, as the weight of the book shifts from the right hand to the left, the narrative takes a different turn. The mysteries are unravelled and understood, and a love story is revealed between a man and a woman (I won’t reveal their identities) who are spiritual twins. It is a strange sort of love story that feels peculiarly unsatisfactory, just as the resolution of the novel’s mysteries don’t leave one particularly fulfilled. The novel becomes increasingly post-modern as the end draws near; the chapter epigrams start to contain more narrative than the rapidly shrinking chapters, which become snippets of conversation, glimpses, moments. They are reminiscent of the cover design – the moon revealing just part of a face as it waxes and wanes, while the whole is hidden by all the white space of the night sky.

The Luminaries begins as tight as a coil, sprung with tension – you could cut the atmosphere in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel with a knife. As the narrative plays out, the coil slackens and everything spaces out. It is entropic. Soon we are left with more gaps than writing.

This may be a ridiculous comparison, but indulge me please, given the appropriate astrological context. The Luminaries is not dissimilar to George Clooney in Gravity. It begins doing one thing – fixing a space station or solving a mystery – then segues into an almost-but-not-quite love story, and then drifts out, ever outwards, into the vast nothingness of space.

The Luminaries is a genre-defying novel that makes its reader question what a novel is. What do we desire from a novel, and what can we demand from it? What is a mystery all about? What is a love story all about? It’s a shape-shifting book. You think you’re reading one thing and then find you’re reading something else. It happens on the small-scale as you are passed between the different protagonists, getting to know things ‘from all sides’, and then in a brilliant post-modern stroke, Catton makes us question not just the fictional events but the very nature of fiction itself.

Eleanor Catton is very clever to have got us all puzzling over these big questions, while situating her puzzle in such an engrossing world. The Luminaries is a great book that works on many levels, and I can completely see why it won the Booker Prize. But for all the beautiful language and the narrative dexterity and the big post-modern questions, it left me feeling unsatisfied. By the end I no longer cared much about the murder, the gold, the whore or the love story. Perhaps that’s the point, but I found it a somewhat frustrating point to make. And if that is the point, then couldn’t she have made it rather more quickly?

As I said, The Luminaries took up a month of my reading life. I can’t remember when I last spent such a long time reading the same book. I would have read five or six normal-sized novels in that time. You might quip that bringing time into it is pointless but, put it this way, in the time it took me to read and puzzle over The Luminaries, I could have read all of E.M. Forster’s novels, or two-thirds of Penelope Fitzgerald’s. I expect I could have read a third of all Shakespeare’s plays. As was brutally pointed out to me a few months ago – we can only read so many books before we die. Our reading lives are limited more than we might care to think. For a novel to be six times as long as another novel, hence take up six times as much of one’s time, then surely it must be six times as good? While The Luminaries was a thoroughly enjoyable book, clever in so many ways, imaginative, transporting, brilliant yes … I’m afraid I just don’t think it was better than all of Forster’s novels put together.

Perhaps I would feel less vexed about all the time that it demands of its reader if I’d read it on holiday, when one suddenly gets a glut of unexpected reading time. I would heartily recommend it for a flight to New Zealand, for instance. Or, perhaps if I’d had an unlucky patch of reading and had read a few short not-particularly-good novels, then I would have rejoiced at finding such a big brilliant novel that comes pretty close to  fulfilling the reader’s desire of never wanting it to end. I read The Luminaries during my everyday reading life, however, and, although I enjoyed the trip, I slightly wish I could get a fortnight of that time back.

These things pray on one’s mind as one begins a new decade.

Perhaps you have read The Luminaries and think differently of it? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Swimming Home

I expect that many of you know the happy success story behind Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home, but here it is for those who don’t.

Rejected by traditional publishers, on the grounds of it being ‘too literary to prosper in a tough economy’ (as Levy told the LRB), Swimming Home was taken up by And Other Stories, a fantastic new indie publisher which operates on a subscription basis. I have written about them at length for the Spectator here, but essentially, you pay them fifty pounds a year, which they pool together with everyone else’s fifty pounds to produce six brilliant books, which you receive as they’re published, with your name pleasingly printed in the back. (You can also pledge thirty-five pounds for four books, or twenty for two.) I urge you to subscribe!

Rescued from rejection, Swimming Home was longlisted, and then shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Faber helped And Other Stories publish a cheaper, mass-market edition, and so Swimming Home has became the book that everyone is reading and talking about. Even after Hilary Mantel’s historical second win of the Booker, we are still selling more copies of Swimming Home in my bookshop than Bring up the Bodies.

Swimming Home is an exceptional novel. Philip Womack in the Daily Telegraph called it ‘stealthily devastating’, which is spot on. So is Kate Kellaway, who called it in ‘a shining splinter, hard to dislodge’ in the Observer. I thought the atmosphere was similar to that of Michael Haneke’s film Hidden – the surface is smooth and normal, but underneath this veneer of calm lies gasping, destructive violence.

Joe Jacobs is a famous poet, who is on holiday in the South of France. With him is his wife Isobel, a war correspondent who wishes she could unsee all the terrible things she’s seen; his daughter Nina, on the cusp of puberty; and two friends Mitchell and Laura. Enter Kitty Finch, swimming naked in their pool, thin, ragged, beautiful, crazy, a botanist with wild red hair. There is also the elderly neighbour, doctor Madeleine Sheridan; the lazy caretaker Jurgen, infatuated with Kitty Finch; and Claude, ‘with his Mick Jagger looks’, who owns the café.

This set up reminds me of Ali Smith’s The Accidental (see this post about it) – which tells the story of another dysfunctional family on holiday, when their lives are disrupted by an exotic stranger. But whereas Ali Smith keeps the characters’ viewpoints resolutely separate, taking it in turns to move between them, chapter by chapter, Deborah Levy slides between them more fluidly (fitting, given the title), building up a tangled, intricate web of different characters’ thoughts, feelings and impressions.

It is a novel about poets, about poems – one poem in particular, Kitty’s poem, which she asks Joe to read, titled ‘Swimming Home’. Perhaps this sharing of a title is a clue, for the novel itself is not unlike a poem. The language is beautiful, images echo through the pages, and the slim volume is dense, heavy with meaning.

For instance, Kitty is furious that Jurgen has got the pool chemicals wrong and made the water ‘actually CLOUDY’. Madeleine Sheridan, the elderly doctor who prides herself on seeing through things, seeing a situation clearly, in actual fact has ‘cloudy, short-sighted eyes’. And, best of all, when she gives Joe some of her Andalucian almond soup and he finds a clump of her silver hair in it and pushes it away, spilling it all over his suit, she wishes he had said, ‘Your soup was like drinking a cloud.’ Of course the one place where there should be clouds, there aren’t any – in the searing hot blue cloudless sky.

But there is a point behind these neat, clever echoes of clouds. Clouds hide things, we long for them to disappear, and yet when we are exposed to the full heat of the sun (this is the South of France in July, not London in late October), it is too intense, too much, and we long for the cool relief of a cloud. Likewise, with the truth – so often we must resort to cloudy lies.

Levy writes about the necessary cloudiness of language when Joe reads Kitty’s poem:

The poem, ‘Swimming Home’, was mostly made up of etcs; he had counted seven of them in one half of the page alone. What kind of language was this?

My mother says I’m the only jewel in her crown

But I’ve made her tired with all my etc,

So now she walks with sticks

To accept her language was to accept that she held him, her reader, in great esteem. He was being asked to make something of it and what he made of it was that every etc concealed some thing that could not be said.

‘Etc’ is a kind of cloud, a means of concealing something else, ‘some thing that could not be said’.  Using ‘etc’ makes this explicit, jolts us into thinking about what it covers, but really as Iris Murdoch pointed out in Under the Net (see last week’s post), this is not so different from the rest of our language – it is all a cloud, veiling what is unsaid, what can’t be said, the unspeakable truth.

This idea echoes throughout the novel. Joe Jacobs has several different names – Joe, Jozef, JHJ, the English poet, the Jewish poet – the multiplicity of them pointing out how inadequate they all are to truly sum him up. Isabel thinks back to her time at school, where the motto was ‘Let Knowledge Serve the World’:

Now she thought she would change the school motto to something that warned the girls that knowledge would not necessarily serve them, nor would it make them happy. There was a chance it would instead throw light on visions they did not want to see.

Again there is that image of light being unwelcome, the suggestion that clear vision isn’t always good, that hiding behind a cloud can be a blessing.

Swimming Home is a remarkable novel. I raced through most of it in the bath one chilly autumnal morning. But like many slim novels, it begs to be reread, to let your thoughts meander their way around the allusive words and elusive truth again. It clings to you, embeds itself into your thoughts – indeed it is a ‘shining splinter’, one which I’ve found very hard to dislodge from my mind.

John le Carré vs. the Booker Panel

 

The usually somnolent book world has been shaken up a bit over the last few days with the news that John le Carré wants to withdraw from the shortlist for the Man Booker International Prize.

I am enormously flattered to be named as a finalist of 2011 Man Booker International Prize.  However I do not compete for literary prizes and have therefore asked for my name to be withdrawn.

This was his statement. Rather good-natured given how strongly he objects to being part of the literary establishment. In an interview for the Independent back in 1993, he said the following:

I have to tell you that I haven’t read a single English review. I never do. I cannot make it sufficiently clear that I have never been part of that world. I don’t know the people who review me, I don’t go to their parties – I never will. I don’t compete for literary prizes and I have the most profound contempt for the system – I mean, a total alienation from it. I wrote, not least in my early years, to escape institutional life and the last thing I was going to do was allow myself to become the pawn of a new institution.

In light of this notorious attitude of his, one can only wonder what the Man Booker International panel were thinking in putting him on the shortlist.

The thing about this particular prize is that it cannot be entered – there are no submissions from publishers, rather the panel just pick the list from thin air, as it were. The only rule is that the author has to have ‘published fiction either originally in English or whose work is generally available in translation in the English language’.

Perhaps the judges just wanted to see le Carré rewarded for a fantastic contribution to literature in English. Perhaps they wanted to give him the recognition that they feel he deserves. But I can’t help but wonder if they thought it might be a way to catch him out. If they knew – and how could they not – that he refuses to enter prizes, what could be more satisfying than giving him a prize for which he cannot enter? Gotcha. But le Carré so obviously feels strongly about not getting any awards, it seems mean to try and snare him like this. It seems so inappropriate, a bit like throwing a huge surprise party for the shyest kid in the class. At least le Carré didn’t burst into tears.

But when he, rather elegantly, asked to be taken off the shortlist, the Booker panel responded with a firm refusal:

John le Carré’s name will, of course, remain on the list.

What I particularly object to is the ‘of course’ in the middle of the sentence. Oh, of course, he’ll stay on the list. Why on earth did you think that his asking to be taken off it would hold any sway at all? Of course his wishes don’t matter. If an author expressly states that he doesn’t want to play the game, doesn’t it feel a bit like bullying to force him to take part? Doesn’t it show a huge amount of disrespect for le Carré? In completely ignoring his wishes, like this, the panel are essentially saying that they, as readers, have more right over his work than le Carré does himself.

Perhaps it has slipped your mind, but back in 2003 a list was leaked of people who refused honours from the Queen. Among the 300 names was John le Carré, who refused a CBE. Surely this makes the Booker panel’s decision to resolutely keep him on the shortlist even more ridiculous? If the Queen can graciously allow her subject to refuse an honour that she would like to bestow on him, then the Booker panel should be able to manage the same.