Man Booker 2015: Longlist Challenge is afoot!

The longlist for this year's Man Booker prize was announced yesterday. It's a 13-book list, about which I will write at greater length at Global Comment in the next few days. The titles are:

Bill Clegg (US) - Did You Ever Have a Family (Jonathan Cape)           
Anne Enright (Ireland) - The Green Road (Jonathan Cape)
Marlon James (Jamaica) - A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications)
Laila Lalami (US) - The Moor's Account (Periscope, Garnet Publishing)
Tom McCarthy (UK) - Satin Island (Jonathan Cape)
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) - The Fishermen (ONE, Pushkin Press)
Andrew O’Hagan (UK) - The Illuminations (Faber & Faber)
Marilynne Robinson (US) - Lila (Virago)           
Anuradha Roy (India) - Sleeping on Jupiter (MacLehose Press, Quercus)
Sunjeev Sahota (UK) - The Year of the Runaways (Picador)
Anna Smaill (New Zealand) - The Chimes (Sceptre)
Anne Tyler (US) - A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus)
Hanya Yanagihara (US) - A Little Life (Picador)

I'm going to try to read as many as possible, and review them, before the 15 September shortlist announcement. I've already read Anne Tyler's book (review next week, but small spoiler - it's lovely). That leaves a round dozen to be getting on with, so it's a fair challenge!

As usual, I've divided the task in half, with the First Six being the books I would probably want to read anyway (so I'll start with them) and the Back Six being the ones with less immediate appeal that I might not get to. My First Six are:

Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings
Chigozie Obioma's The Fishermen
Anuradha Roy's Sleeping on Jupiter
Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways
Marilyne Robinson's Lila
Tom McCarthy's Satin Island 

The first four of these have been ordered from a bookshop using a handy voucher I had ready, so should arrive early next week. I'm kicking off, therefore, with Lila, which I have bought on Kindle and is therefore ready to start immediately. 

As  usual, my reviews will be divided between here and Global Comment, but I'll always link out to them wherever they are.

So with that ... let the games begin! 

Reading Notes: Up the Faraway Tree again

When my two older daughters were quite young, we read a lot of picture books. And by "a lot", I mean "the sort of numbers that would set a librarian back on their heels" kind of numbers. Being read to was one of their favourite activities, which worked out super well because reading aloud was (and is) one of mine. It's great when a plan comes together!

By the time my eldest was 4, though, picture books were starting to pall a little. She wanted something a bit more sustained, in terms of story. We moved on to the classic extended picture books - The Velveteen Rabbit and co, as I dubbed them - but she wanted episodic storytelling. And for that, who is better than Enid Blyton?

Now, I have all the usual reservations about Blyton. Her stories are moralistic, prescriptive and frequently cruel. She's intolerant of difference, horribly sexist (it's always the boys in the lead) and very classist.

However, and this is important - my kids LOVED her fairyland canon (The Magic Faraway Tree, Wishing Chair and Tales of Fairyland books). They loved it deeply, sincerely and devotedly. Not ALL kids do, of course; the old-fashioned language and themes doesn't have universal appeal. But my two elder daughters were both, in their turn, utterly captivated by the Enchanted Wood and its denizens, and I must've read the three Faraway Tree books a dozen times over to each of them in the preschool and early school years. (Interestingly, while they also both took to the Famous Five books, only one of them converted this enjoyment into an appreciation of Blyton's other main ouevre, the school story series. My eldest never liked the school stories at all).

My youngest girl is now 6, and it has been a constant uneasy awareness of mine that because of how different our lives are now, I have spent less slow-molasses hours reading to and with her in her preschool and first school years than I did with the older two. (On my bad days, I use this as a stick to beat myself with, given that she is not as advanced a reader as the other two were at 6 - not that she's behind, she's just not a lot ahead either). One of the omissions, I realised with a shock recently, was that I had *never read* her an Enid Blyton story. Never!

At bedtime a few weeks back, therefore, I proposed to her that we try out a book called The Magic Faraway Tree.

"What's it about?" she asked cautiously.

"Fairies, magic, three children, a special tree," I said. "I think you'll like it..."

The 12 year old chimed in. "Oh, the Faraway Tree! C, you'll love it. It is really good!"

The 10 year old added, "Can we listen in, too?"

The 6 year old was sold, and we set off that very night on our journey up the faraway tree.

And she LOVES it. Truly, madly, deeply. As much, if not more, than her sisters did in their time. She laughs huge belly-laughs at the antics of the Saucepan Man; she is in love with gentle little Silky; she adores Moon-Face and Mr Watziname and Dame Washalot and all the others. For book dress-up day next week at school, she wants to go as Silky, so we are on the look-out for long golden hair facsimiles.

Every night, she curls up next to me in eager anticipation, waiting for the next installment. Every night she asks for "just one more chapter...!" Every night, she and I take joy together in this story and the feeling it brings.

I'm so very happy I've had a chance to go up the Faraway Tree one more time, hand in hand with a child of mine.

Reading Notes: Penric's Demon

One of my oldest friends introduced me to the amazing Lois McMaster Bujold a couple of years ago now - the year that Captain Vorpatril's Alliance was nominated for the Hugo, from memory. I have since read my way voraciously through her science fiction Vor canon, as well as her fantasy works.

Of all of these, although I recognise the greatness of Vor (who doesn't?), I have to say my heart belongs to the world of the Five Gods, heretofore delivered via only three too-brief novels (The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt).

I have written before about what an achievement and a delight these books are, especially in Bujold's complex, thoughtful and nuanced treatment of religion, faith and free will in a world where the gods are opaque but active, and where the survival of human souls, which are claimed by the gods at death, is more certain, although still not assured.

The characters in these books are, even by Bujold's considerable standards, exceptional - some of the deepest, best-rounded of all her people. (Well ... excepting Miles Vorkosigan, of course. But then, there is only one Miles). In particular, the Lady Ista, heroine of Paladin of Souls, is one of the best-developed women I have ever read - a 40-year-old widow who is given a full, rich plot arc, the complete range of human capacity and emotion, and a (somewhat) happy ending. It's sufficiently unusual in fantasy for women with adult children to be written as key actors, let alone objects of passion rather than merely affection, that this stood out to me. (Yes, I know there are such characters in Game of Thrones, but I don't read those, so bear with me. It is still unusual, anyway).

So it has always been something of a disappointment to me that the Five Gods canon was so brief. There were so many themes and areas of interest introduced that never had an adequate chance for development, and I've been hankering after more ever since I finished The Hallowed Hunt.

Penric's Demon, which is a perfectly balanced, wonderfully engaging, warm and gentle novella, has proved an eminently satisfactory sop to this particular hunger. (A sop, mind - it's not enough, more novels are required please Ms Bujold!)

In this short book, Bujold builds on an under-explored area in the three novels - sorcery, which in the Five Gods universe, means possession by a demon. This isn't nearly as horrific as it sounds; like everything in Bujold, it can be disturbing, off-key and dangerous, but the converse is that it can also be a source of not just power, but also regeneration, balance, and self-knowledge. Demons, the chaos-spirits belonging to the fifth god (the best of all the five, the Bastard), inhabit humans, but they don't possess them in the classical sense. Rather, they form a somewhat uneasy symbiosis with their human host - if the host understands how to control and use the demon, that is.

In previous Five God stories, the subject of demons has frequently arisen, but never from an intimate perspective. Penric, the protagonist of this tale, changes all that. A hapless minor lord on his way to a financially advantageous betrothal, Penric encounters a dying woman on the road; a woman, as luck would have it, who possesses a valuable, powerful demon. In her dying, she passes the demon on to Penric ... and this is the whole meat of the story.

Penric himself is an extremely likeable character; thoughtful, compassionate, intelligent, and kind. It is these qualities that give him the interest in, and the will to, seek to understand not just his demon's powers, but her essence. (The demon, who has previously inhabited 12 women in sequence, is most decidedly female). Pen learns more about what his demon is, and how she experiences the world, than all the learned divines and their esoteric knowledge. And it all begins when he bestows upon her a name - Desdemona.

This is a really warming, lovely story - entirely positive and upbeat in its affect, and that is not something often said about demon possession tales. It's probably not the ideal entry point into the Five Gods world - I think those who have read the novels will get much more out of it, and enjoy it more, than "cold" readers. Still, background or not, I think it would be hard not to be charmed by this gem of a novella.

Reading Notes: A God in Ruins

I have a review of A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson's companion piece to the wonderful Life After Life, up at Global Comment. See if you agree with my take!

We Were Completely Wrong About Pluto (A Sevenling)

Inspired by the images of Pluto that the New Horizons spaceship has been broadcasting back to earth.

Three things the wisest always swore:
The furthest out was dullest, least alive,
Ice-bound, inert, an impassive chunk of space debris.

Three things the wandering ship has shown:
An unfinished landscape; mountains, and valleys;
Volcanos rifting open to the void.

Perhaps proximity is not the only thing, after all?

- Kathy, 20/7/15