In this episode of The Booker Prize Podcast, Jo and James are joined by journalist Alex Clark to discuss the books – many of them by Booker-nominated authors – that we should all keep an eye out for this year
Listen to more episodes from The Booker Prize Podcast here.
We’re back after our festive hiatus – and how better to start the year than with a rundown of some of the most-anticipated reads of 2024. This week, Jo and James are joined by journalist Alex Clark, so listen in as they discuss the books, by Booker Prize authors and beyond, that we should all keep an eye out for this year.
Interviewer Alex Clark on stage at Southbank Centre.
© David Sandison/Booker Prize Foundation
Alex Clark.
© Mark Vessey
Other books mentioned:
Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.
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Jo Hamya:
Hello, and welcome to the first Booker Prize podcast of 2024, with me, Jo Hamya.
James Walton:
Today, not only with me, James Walton, but also with our special guest, Alex Clark, critic, book reviewer for pretty much every publication you can think of, former editor of Granter Magazine, and host of The TLS Podcast, as in Times Literary Supplement, which a lot of people think is the second-best books podcast around.
Jo Hamya:
You’re so rude, James.
James Walton:
God bless you. God bless you. God bless you, Alex. Only joking.
Alex Clark:
I’ll take it. I’m going to take that. I’m happy with that.
James Walton:
Oh, good. Alex is joining us today for a sneak preview of some of the big new novels coming out this year, particularly those by authors with some Booker form in the past. So, welcome, Alex. Lovely to have you with us. Where are you joining us from?
Alex Clark:
I’m joining you from the hills of Southeast Ireland, of County Kilkenny.
James Walton:
Oh, how very lovely.
Jo Hamya:
We’ll get onto our upcoming list of books for 2024 soon. But first Alex, I believe you were a Booker judge in 2008, when chair of the judges was Michael Portillo. What was that like?
Alex Clark:
Well, I was so excited to be asked. I mean, it seemed like just the most extraordinary honour to be asked, and I can still remember being taken for a drink by Ion Trewin, and him popping the question and I couldn’t really believe it was true. So, I was very, very excited. Then of course the piles and piles of books arrive, and I don’t know if this is still the system, but I know certainly on my library shelves I still have books with marker pen numbers on. I don’t know if that’s still how it’s done. It’s quite old school, but we had one to 128 or whatever it was, Magic Markered onto the spines of our books, and I still find them now and then. I’ve kept every single book.
James Walton:
Okay. Well, thanks Alex. Let me tell you the plan for today, and indeed our listeners, which is that we’re going to take turns introducing a 2024 book by an author that we like, saying a bit about that author’s past record and generally setting the scene for what should be some of the biggest new fiction of the year. Alex, seeing as you are the guest and we’re a very well brought up podcast, why don’t you go first?
Alex Clark:
Well, my first novel is Colm Toibin’s, Long Island, which is out in May, and which is a sequel to Brooklyn, which was shortlisted for the prize in 2009. This poor man, he’s becoming the Beryl Bainbridge, he’s had four short listings. So, we never try to influence judges in any way, but I am saying if you’re going to shortlist this again, you need to be quite sure. Don’t put him through a fifth winner ceremony. But this is us meeting Eilis Fiorello, Eilis Lacey as was 20 years after the events of Brooklyn, when she’s married and she is living in Long Island. We see what has happened to her, and whether of course she made the right decision in staying in New York or not going home to Enniscorthy.
James Walton:
Enniscorthy, which is not far from where you live apparently.
Alex Clark:
It’s very near where I live. It’s in Wexford, but I live near a lot of county borders. I have to say, if you drive into Enniscorthy, which you might do because you might go and visit the castle for example, you will be greeted by a big sign with Colm Toibin’s lovely face on it saying, “Welcome to Enniscorthy, home of Colm Toibin.”
James Walton:
It’s amazing, isn’t it? I don’t think there would be a British equivalent. It does seem as if Irish literature’s woven into Irish life more than into British life. Have you discovered that since you moved there?
Alex Clark:
I do feel like that, and I have to be completely truthful. I moved here nearly six years ago and got a lot of family here, and I am very aware of my rose-tinted spectacles. It’s obviously not a perfect society. However, I enjoy being a person who works with books and language more in Ireland than I did in the UK, if that makes sense. I mean, in the way that the entire culture responds to books and to writers, I think there’s less obsession with hierarchy and genre. There’s just a much more inclusive feel to things like live events, to prizes. So, could be rose-tinted spectacles, but yeah. That is what I find.
James Walton:
Okay. Well, thanks Alex, and I see you are much-loved Irish writer returning to one of his best-loved female characters, and I raise you Roddy Doyle, whose book, The Women Behind the Door is out in September and it’s the third of his books about Paula Spencer. So, she first appeared in The Woman Who Walked into Doors, and then a book just called, Paula Spencer, and now we rejoin her. So, had a pretty grim life because… Well, she was the wife of an alcoholic drunk who beat the living daylights out of her for 17 years. Just to put that into context. Roddy Doyle started off as a rather jolly writer, with The Commitments, 1987, hit the jackpot straight away, about Dubliners who form a soul band, becomes a film directed by Alan Parker, West End musical, and a best-selling soundtrack album.
He follows that with books about the same Rabbitte family, Snapper and The Van, The Van shortlisted for the Booker Prize, then wins the Booker Prize, with Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha in 1993, narrated by a 10-year-old boy whose parents we realise more than he does are splitting up, leading to the tragic playground chant, “Paddy Clarke has no da, Paddy Clarke, ha ha ha.” Anyway, that book topped the Irish Bestsellers list for more than a year. He became a bona fide national hero in Ireland, and later recalled photo opportunities with the horse that won the Melbourne Gold Cup, because we both brought glory to our country. But then, May the 6th, 1994, all that comes to an end when Irish television broadcast the first episode of his drama series, Family. Once again, setting was the housing estates of north Dublin. But this time the father wasn’t twinkling and lovable as he had been more or less in the first three books.
But Charlo Spencer, this wife beating drunk who terrorised his family over four episodes of virtually unrelieved grimness. Then as Doyle recalled, this is 17 years later, it caused a storm. “The celebrity status that attached to me when I won the Booker, invitations to open supermarkets and all that shite, it all stopped that day Family was broadcast.” Meanwhile, his books, I think have got grimmer and grimmer as he’s just ripped into de Villier’s version of Ireland as a trilogy that sort of took apart the IRA past and present. Smile, which ripped into the Catholic church. He’s much an angrier and blacker writer than people think, but he’s still popular in Ireland, presumably.
Alex Clark:
Oh, very much so. Also, because of course another strand of his writing is something that appears in newspapers and in books also, which is his versions of conversations in pubs basically. Blokes in pubs talking. They are not actually, to your point really, as sentimental as just that little one line might make them sound. But they care about the Ireland that he is familiar with. They understand why it has an important place in people’s emotions. But I think you are right. He does not turn away from the dark side of Irish society.
Jo Hamya:
Going to move us away from Ireland now. I’m going to go chronologically. So, the next book that I’m excited for comes out in March in the US, by Doubleday, and in April from Picador, it’s Percival Everett’s, James, which is a retelling of Mark Twain’s, Huckleberry Finn, from Jim’s perspective. So, whilst certain set pieces from that classic remain the same, the narrative emphasis I expect will be fundamentally changed. So, for anyone who hasn’t read Huckleberry Finn, it’s a two-hander. In Twain’s version, Huck Finn is definitively the main character, but he essentially fakes, this is Huck Finn, fakes his own death to escape his violent father who’s recently returned to town, and begins a very dangerous journey by raft down the Mississippi River towards the free states. Along the way, he acquires a companion in the form of enslaved man called Jim.
This sort of does make me think, this idea of Percival Everett retelling Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, of that line from Paul Bearty’s, The Sellout, in which one character, who’s the member of an intellectual group, rewrites a version of Huck Finn where he replaces, quote, ‘The repugnant N-word,’ unquote, with warrior, and replaces the word slave with dark-skinned volunteer. The retitled book is called, The Prerogative Free Adventures in Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African American Jim, and His Young Protégé, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit. I think Everett has always been an uncompromisingly lacerating and fiercely intelligent writer. Booker fans will know him by his 2022 short-listed book, The Trees. Which quite brutally and maybe a bit improbably, although it seems entirely probable in the book, takes the story of Emmett Till’s lynched body and makes it into a quasi-detective novel.
But he’s probably best known for Erasure, which is a novel in which an African American professor called Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, decides to leave intellectual things behind and he decides to satirise Americans love for fetishizing Blackness into essentially what you might call hood culture, by writing a novel called, My Pathology, which is later simply retitled, Fuck, under the pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh. That becomes a surprise bestseller, which leads to all sorts of philosophical conundrums on Monk’s part. Its recently actually been made into a film with Issa Rae that’s come out. It came out late in 2023, and I think will get a wider release.
James Walton:
It’s called American Fiction, which is a great title for it.
Jo Hamya:
I’m really excited for James, because I think Everett has never really been short of awards, but he has been short of a public attention that he’s recently been getting. His debut novel called Souda, was released in 1983, and I feel like I only really began to hear of Everett as a person maybe around the time that he got his Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. But, yeah. The last few years have been a rise to public prominence for him that’s way overdue, and particularly in the UK. He used to be published by a great indie, I think now on hiatus called Influx Press.
But part of his backlist has just been bought by Picador, and James sold for half a million dollars, which for people who are not au fait with the process of acquisitions for literary fiction, most literary novels sell for between £1,000 and if you are lucky, £10,000, unless you happen to have the last name Atwood or Rushdie. So, I feel like he’s really coming into a golden period that I’m quite happy to see. I would say if for that reason you haven’t yet read a Percival Everett novel, but you are a fan of Paul Beatty or Zadie Smith, or NoViolet Bulawayo, then you could definitely pick up James and give it a go. Also Erasure, which I just think is one of the most genius books I’ve ever read in my life.
James Walton:
Interesting. Particularly he is a fan of Mark Twain, so it doesn’t sound as if it’s going to be a take down.
Jo Hamya:
No, I don’t think… The thing about him is he’s always so surprising with his comedy, you never know exactly in which direction it’s going to hit out. So, I make no predictions for the book except for the fact that it’s probably going to be genius.
James Walton:
That’s a fair prediction. Okay. Alex, do you want to add anything else or do you want to move on to your next one?
Alex Clark:
Well, I mean I love The Trees, and the thing about it, obviously such a horrific story that he was telling, it was so funny.
Jo Hamya:
Yeah. That’s the thing about him.
Alex Clark:
It was so incredibly pacey. I mean, you were just utterly sucked in. You were laughing, you didn’t think you should be laughing. Of course, it was a retelling with all sorts of weird bits of genre fiction melded into this retelling of an actual historical event. A retelling of this literary icon I suppose, absolute classic, is fascinating. You’re right, you never really know what he’s going to do, do you, Jo?
Jo Hamya:
No.
Alex Clark:
Yeah. Pretty excited by that too.
Jo Hamya:
All right. Alex, what is your next pick?
Alex Clark:
Well, I’m going to go with Neil Mukherjee’s, Choice. He was shortlisted in 2014 for a really chunky, impressive novel called, The Lives of Others, which was a family saga. It was about a family and all that that entailed, all the jockeying for position and the who loves who most and who’s a disappointment and who’s not, the intermarriage of the younger generations of family with other families. But it also had the radical politics. It was set in the late sixties, early seventies, in India. This book, Choice, is three stories that are interwoven with one another. I suppose we’ve seen that in the book. We’ve seen it this year with Jonathan Escoffery’s novel, which novel, stories I loved.
But Mukherjee is such an interesting and brilliant writer. He was a great favourite slash protege of the late A.S. Byatt, and he just has a fantastic engagement with different literary traditions. He works wonderfully at a sentence level, and he’s very interested in plotting. This collection of three pieces, which all talk to one another, as I understand it, it is about a publisher, an academic, and a family in rural India. So, we wait to see what happens. Of course, four books in now, so he’s a very talented writer. So, I’m excited by that.
James Walton:
That’s out in April, isn’t it, I believe?
Alex Clark:
Yes, it is. Yes.
James Walton:
Okay. Well, in that case back to me, and I seem to have cornered the marketing people who have actually won the Booker, because… No, no, your books are all fine, don’t get me wrong. Which is Howard Jacobson with, What Will Survive of Us, out in February. He’s got pretty good book of form, long listed for Who’s Sorry Now? And Kalooki Nights, shortlisted for J. in 2014, and was a hugely popular winner in 2010 with, The Finkler Question. This seems to be about a female TV documentary maker and a male writer who fall in love in midlife after working together. It sounds as if the book follows them through to old age, which suggests, I don’t know how perceptive I’m being here, that this may have its autobiographical elements. Given that Jacobson’s third wife, Jenny, he married in 2005, worked with him on TV documentaries before that, and they’ve been happily together ever since with Jacobson now 81.
It also suggests that he’s going to give us one of his later more tender works, after a career mostly dedicated to the belief that a novel should be, “An empire’s disturbance that refuses ever to bow to the great God nice,” as he said. So, his early books, in fact, most of his books up to about The Finkler Question, pretty ferocious. I mean, I know I bang on about Philip Roth a lot, but he’s actually known as the English Philip Roth by the press. As press labels go, that’s not entirely inaccurate, I don’t think. Both in their biography, but also in their belief as to what books should do, which is basically to cause offence. He says, a novel hasn’t just got the right, it’s got the duty to cause offence because, quote, “Giving offence is sacred,” his italics. He’s also savaged universities for being scared of offending students, suggesting that everybody starting at one should be greeted with the words, “Good morning students. Welcome to a liberal education where you will encounter, if we are doing our job right, much that will distress and infuriate you.”
But the thing is, since The Finkler Question, there’s been no doubt that history is not rolling in the direction of writers like him. In fact, since then his books have become nicer. His last one, which was, Live a Little, about love in old age, was positively sweet. I don’t know if anybody read it. It’s really, really lovely. So, the question is, what’s happened to old Howard? I think there’s three possible reasons. One is that, he suggested all of these at various points, is that he’s accepted, if not in massively good grace, that the new rules aren’t going to go away, or just be a fad as he’d hoped. So, that’s that. “The swordsman hero flushing his prose around, writing with a pen dipped in hot semen was dead in the water,” he writes. So, that’s one possibility.
Another one is that maybe it’s just time for a change. One of the minor characters in Live a Little is a novelist who sounds quite Jacobson like, and it said of him, “He’s been going around in the same dreary emotional garb all his life.” As the older woman tells the old man in the book, after they’ve fallen in love, “You’ve told the same unvarying story to yourself 1,000 times. Risk another story.” Or, third theory as to why Jacobson’s gone nice. It might just be autobiographical. He said in an interview a few years ago, “I’ve enjoyed the whole experience of ageing. Having been querulous, bitter, miserable, sometimes envious, mean, certainly a very bad husband, I’ve become at my age, quite a nice guy.” So, anyway, I think this will be quite a sweet book about love from middle age to old age, of the kind that I’m looking forward to reading. But that would’ve been unimaginable from him 20 years ago.
Alex Clark:
He’s always been really interested in sentimentality.
James Walton:
Yes. There is that.
Alex Clark:
There are heroes, protagonists in his novels, who themselves get absolutely kiboshed by their own sentimentality, by their own, in moderation, in loving, in jealousy and all that kind of thing. I mean, I think he has combined the two. I can’t imagine a book by him that would be entirely sweet. His memoir, Mother’s Boy, was amazingly brilliant at combining these two aspects of, I suppose, his temperament, his sensibility we might say. So, I would read anything by Howard Jacobson. I mean, that piece that he wrote, that became I think the title of a collection of his non-fiction of his journalism, about seeing a dog who was about to die. I mean, I can’t read it now without weeping.
James Walton:
But I do think he’s come to this new sweetness. As he says himself, I think maybe he has just become a nice guy. We shall see when that book is out in February.
Alex Clark:
The love of a good woman will do that to so many people.
James Walton:
That seems to be possible.
Jo Hamya:
Okay. Well, my next choice is someone who would robustly disagree with that statement. It’s Rachel Cusk, whose Parade is coming out from Faber and Faber, and from FSG in the US, in June. Now, I think since the advent of the Outline trilogy, Cusk’s novels are quite enigmatic, when you try to sum them up. I’m a massive Rachel Cusk fan. She’s one of the most influential writers in my life. But on this occasion, I am going to cheat and just read Faber’s summary of it, and listeners can see what they make of it, because I don’t think I could make anything cogent out of this. This definitely feels like a teaser.
So, “Midway through his life, the artist G. begins to paint upside down. Eventually he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of 22, the painter G. leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of a man she later marries. When her mother dies, her children confront her legacy. The stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love, her death is a kind of freedom.”
Then you’ve got from Faber copy that says, “Parade sets loose the carousel of lives and surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot, to tell the story of G. an artist whose life contains many lives.” It does sound incredibly Cuskian, although a lot more complex than her last four novels, which I’m a massive fan of. So, Cusk, as a bit of background is… Well, people who are up-to-date on their Booker facts will know that she has been twice longlisted so far. First for, Into the Fold, in 2005, which is a novel about a man whose illusions of family life and country wealth and free living falls steadily apart. Then second place, which is the relationship between M. who is a writer and L. who is a painter. M. invites L. to stay in her marshland home. I don’t think I can say much more about it without spoiling everything for everyone. But I think Cusk is best known for her Outline trilogy, none of which, incredibly enough, have been even longlisted for the Booker Prize.
James Walton:
She hasn’t got a fantastic Booker record.
Jo Hamya:
Which I think is a tragedy. Anyway, if you can’t tell, I really, really love Rachel Cusk, and Parade sounds like an advance, a new stage of all the things that have made her last four books so special amped up to another level. I’m going to do my usual thing and do some comp writers. But if you are a fan of Celia Paul’s recent writing, a biography of her time at The Slade, and as an older artist, or if you’re a fan of Sheila Heti or of Annie Ernaux or of Deborah Levy, then I think Parade is going to be right up your alley. Rachel Cusk is someone that you should be checking up more generally.
James Walton:
She’s a massive hate figure on Mumsnet, is one thing I know about her. Because she wrote a book called The Life’s Work About Being a Mother, and how absolutely terrible-
Jo Hamya:
Yeah, she did.
James Walton:
She’s completely unsparing. Where do you stand on Rachel Cusk, Alex?
Alex Clark:
Well, I agree. I love those books. I love the Outline trilogy. I also like quite a lot of her earlier books, which did the same thing in very different kind of narrative. She had very different narrative strategies. But exactly that kind of unflinchingness that this very boring story, conversation about whether characters should be likeable. I mean, doesn’t even go there. I mean, they’re all horrible. Everyone’s horrible and mad in all her books, and you can’t say fairer than that, can you?
Jo Hamya:
Yeah.
James Walton:
No. Alex, go on.
Alex Clark:
So, my final pick is, The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota, shortlisted in 2015 for, The Year of The Runaways, and longlisted in 2021. Some would say I might be one of them that perhaps should have been shortlisted for China Room. This is a book that’s set in the Peak District, and it’s about a man and a woman who have possibly known each other or been acquainted in some kind of way in a previous life. But it’s basically about coming back. The female character, Helen, comes back, a child in tow, and then she meets this man, Nyan, who is a union leader. I was intrigued by this because union leaders, very big in Paul Lynch’s, Prophet Song. Maybe it’s a new… I need another one and then I could write a trend piece about why unions are cropping up.
James Walton:
Three things make a trend, old rule of journalism.
Alex Clark:
Exactly so. Exactly. But I enormously, I really, really like Sunjeev Sahota’s work, and I’m very much looking forward to it.
James Walton:
Okay. Well, my next one is another Irish writer from the generation below Roddy Doyle and Colm Toibin, I think. This is Kevin Barry. It’s different from them in another way too. Their prose, I mean, Toibin’s prose is so quiet, so subtle, so gentle. Roddy Doyle’s is fairly straightforward. This is Kevin Barry on his own prose. “I knew from an early age,” this is when he first started out. “I knew that I would never have a quiet unshowy prose style. Sometimes I yearned for one, but my prose behaved like an hysterical step dancing ginger haired child, laping up and down on the page looking for attention.” That has been the case in his three books so far. There’s one called, City of Bohane, which was brilliant. It was his first book set in an island in the 2050s, a cyberpunky wild west, a really hard book to summarise so I won’t try it, except to say it was extraordinarily good and funny and thrilling.
Actually won the International Dublin Impact Award, which is worth 100,000 euros, which is, I’m sad to say, twice as much as the Booker. The second one was about John Lennon visiting an island off the Slago Coast, that the real Lennon had brought in 1967, but long abandoned. The portrait of Lennon adrift, but still again, a book with sentences absolutely lapping up and down, looking for attention. But in that case, I felt slightly as a substitute for forward momentum rather than an aid to it. His third book, Boat to Tangier, which was longlisted for the 2019 Booker, it was the same really. In that case, it wasn’t really until about halfway through that it ran out of steam, I felt. But it’s about two ageing Irish gangsters who like John Lennon actually, their glory days are behind them by the time we join them. But it’s still a great book.
I still think he’s an amazing writer and that he’ll write plenty of really, really great books in the future. Obviously I’m hoping that one of them will be his new one, which is The Heart of Winter, out in June. It sounds as if it’s playing to his strengths. It’s set in Butte, Montana in 1891, “Hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains.” I’m quoting from the blurb a bit here. “City is rich in copper miners and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of Irish immigrant workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker and a fearsome degenerate.” I think I’ll leave it there, but that sounds like what’s not to like, to me. I do think Kevin Barry, I don’t know he’s quite broken through to the British. Is he a big deal in Ireland again, like my-
Alex Clark:
He is, yes.
James Walton:
He’s great, isn’t he?
Alex Clark:
Very much in that generation.
James Walton:
Yeah.
Alex Clark:
Yeah, absolutely.
James Walton:
So, I look forward to that very much, Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry, out in June. Jo, I think you’ve got non-fiction for us now, eh?
Jo Hamya:
Yes. I’ve got a whistle-stop tour through all the non-fiction that I’m interested in that’s coming out, and it is really eclectic and fascinating. So, I’m really invested in this month’s collected essays from John Berger’s archive called, The Underground Sea, which is a compilation of his writings on the miners strike. I was really, really lucky, and I’m going to do a massive shout-out to a piece of work that I and our producer for this podcast, John, did a while ago, to work on a John Berger’s documentary for Booker. I spent quite a lot of time in the British Library in his archives, which are just so rich and beautifully written and illustrated as well. I just think that is an incredible thing to look out for, especially in the throes of our current Conservative government, and an upcoming general election.
The next thing that’s really intriguing, and I did say that this would be eclectic, is that Kazuo Ishiguro has an upcoming book of song lyrics written for the jazz singer, Stacy Kent, he’s been collaborating with since 2007.
James Walton:
He’s a classic frustrated musician among many Booker writers, isn’t he?
Jo Hamya:
Yes. It’s called, The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, which is very Cohen, isn’t it?
James Walton:
Yes. Possibly not that frustrated anymore.
Jo Hamya:
That’s going to be out in March. Then finally, the one that probably everyone is going to be most intrigued by is, Knife, by Salman Rushdie. Now, for those of you not aware, in August of 2022, Rushdie was stabbed several times whilst giving a talk in upstate New York. The stabbing did occur in connection with the fatwa that he’s had placed upon him since the publication of his book, The Satanic Verses. It’s pretty much, with the exception of an interview given to The New York Times in 2023, going to be the first thing we hear about his recollections and musings on the incident. So, that is anticipated, sounds like a really glib word to use for something that’s resulted in him losing sight in one eye.
James Walton:
But it is anticipated there’ll be a big deal. The subtitle is, Meditations After an Attempted Murder, that will make a splash. As I suspected would happen, we’re running out of time a bit now with several books to go. So, one of these, the most eagerly awaited or possibly feared must be, My Heavenly Favourites, by Lucas Rijneveld, translated by Michele Hutchison, who together won the International Booker in 2020, with, The Discomfort of Evening, a novel that in the traditional formulation, was not for the faint-hearted. But as Publishers Weekly said, “The macabre material is loaded with sexual transgressions, paedophilia, animal torture and abuse. The onslaught can be numbing.”
But apparently it could have been worse, because according to The Guardian, the Dutch version also contained a joke deemed too offensive for British publication, which I’d love to know what that was. It sounds as if Lucas Rijneveld is sticking to the guns for the new book, which is like the first one, set on a Dutch dairy farm where it sounds as if all sorts of horrible things happen. Actually, it’s the first book I’ve ever seen with a trigger warning on Amazon actually, which is, “This novel is about an adult who’s sexually attracted to a minor and contains sexual violence.” Alex, did you read the first one?
Alex Clark:
I did. I mean, I can’t guess what the thing that was left out of the English translation was, but it certainly was a deeply unsettling book, even for someone like me who will always read a book about a dairy farm. I love books about farming because I live in the middle of lots of farms, but it was a very upsetting book, very striking, very individual. So, yeah. Interesting to see what they’re going to do next.
Jo Hamya:
So, we do have a few others, which really regrettably we don’t have time to do a full summary of, which I’m also really intrigued by. We’ve got Chigozie Obioma’s, The Road to The Country, Helen Oyeyemi’s, Parasol Against the Axe, Rachel Kushner’s, Creation Lake, and Tim Parks’s, Mr. Geography.
James Walton:
There’s also an interesting looking one, which is written by 14 writers actually, called, Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel. Various characters in an apartment building in New York with different famous writers doing each chapter. Among them, Margaret Atwood and Rachel Kushner again, and Emma Donahue, who have all got form.
Alex Clark:
I have absolutely no idea what Booker policy is on multi-authored books.
James Walton:
Yes. That’d be interesting, wouldn’t it?
Alex Clark:
Not a clue. I know there’s been so many, You Can’t be Dead, all this kind of thing. But can you… I put that more diplomatically. No posthumous publication. But multi-authored books, well, can you imagine what would happen to the prize money? The speeches would go on for hours. Who can tell?
James Walton:
14 writers going up on stage, they’d only get about three grand each, wouldn’t they?
Jo Hamya:
We should move away from boring on about Booker authors on a Booker podcast, and look at some people who are-
James Walton:
That’s our job, Jo.
Jo Hamya:
… just as worth reading, who do not, as James seems to keep saying, have Booker form.
Alex Clark:
Yeah. These people have just not got Booker form. I mean-
Jo Hamya:
How dare they?
Alex Clark:
How dare they? Actually, I must say, I focused slightly on these books because actually a book I’ve already read and one that I’m reading, Michael Cunningham’s, Day, which I’ve read, 25 years after, The Hours. This is not a sort of The Hours, but it does have a similarity. It’s called Day, and it has a similarity structurally speaking, because it is set on a single day, three years apart. It’s just as the pandemic is about to hit, the pandemic is never actually mentioned by name, in the midst of a lockdown and then in a sort of coming out of lockdown. I really, really enjoyed it. I thought it was very-
Jo Hamya:
Do you think it’s-
Alex Clark:
… very good.
Jo Hamya:
… on par with The Hours? I adore The Hours. I think it’s so formally inventive.
Alex Clark:
I think certainly you can see so many of the themes that really interested him, in the way that people make these extremely difficult accommodations in families, and so much is unspoken in the dynamic between people that I would read it, because I think you may very well like it. The other book I’m reading at the minute is Enlightenment by Sarah Perry. All I really know about this in an extra literary sense, is that she basically I think, taught herself physics.
Jo Hamya:
My God.
Alex Clark:
She’s done for the last few years, she’s been learning proper physics and there’s a lot of physics. I’m keeping up so far. I’m about 50 pages in, really enjoying it and I’m just about managing to keep up with the astrophysics, and I have hopes that I may actually learn something. I’m also just going to very quickly mention Joseph O’Neill’s, Godwin. That’s out in June, I think. Because it’s partly about football. As we know, Netherland, he wrote about cricket. I mean, this is a way of exploring particularly things like global migration, and the way that it is treated in different parts of the world. This recurs in this book, Godwin, but it is about the pursuit of a footballer who it says in the blurb, “Could be the next Mesi.” So, I’m obviously going to read that.
James Walton:
Blimey. Sarah Perry, we should say, had that massive hit a few years ago with, The Essex Serpent.
Alex Clark:
Yes. This book is indeed set in Essex.
James Walton:
Was that not literary enough for the book of The Essex Serpent, or was it tragically overlooked?
Alex Clark:
What do you mean too many people liked it? I loved it, I must say.
James Walton:
Sort of.
Alex Clark:
I didn’t mean that. I love lots of books and so do other people that have won the Booker Prize and have, as James says, Booker form. But I really did love The Essex Serpent. I found it so enjoyable.
James Walton:
You invite people on from another podcast, they’re going to do that sort of thing to you. Absolutely lovely to have you, Alex. Thanks so much for your time.
Alex Clark:
Oh, my pleasure. My pleasure.
Jo Hamya:
That was lovely, wasn’t it?
James Walton:
Yeah. I really enjoyed that.
Jo Hamya:
So, James, without choosing any of your own books that you presented to us, what sounds most exciting to you for the year ahead?
James Walton:
You’d be pleased to know, Jo, it’s one of yours actually. Percival Everett’s, James.
Jo Hamya:
Yes.
James Walton:
Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view. I think that sounds terrific, and I haven’t read any of his books, but you made such a good case for him that I now need to read at least three, including James.
Jo Hamya:
He’s so funny, but also so brutal. You’re shocked at yourself for laughing. Kind of like with The Sellout, but kind of like… I love The Sellout, but I feel like Everett is on a different level. I’m going to be sacrilegious and I’m going to choose one of the non-Booker books.
James Walton:
What? You’re not choosing Howard Jacobson then?
Jo Hamya:
You know what? I somehow just can’t find it in me. I’m going to choose, Day by Michael Cunningham, that Alex said that she’s finished now and absolutely loved, because I am genuinely such a massive fan of The Hours, which was like a take on Mrs. Dalloway, which created three intertwined narratives between Mrs. Dalloway herself as a character, and Woolf, and then a modern-day housewife, and took them through a day, much like Woolf’s novel does.
James Walton:
Rather surprisingly became a hit movie, given that story.
Jo Hamya:
Yes. With Nicole Kidman in a prosthetic nose.
James Walton:
Oh, famously, Nicole Kidman’s nose was the star of the film, I would say.
Jo Hamya:
There’s a really great essay by former Booker judge, Hermione Lee, on the subject of that prosthetic nose, which I do encourage people to find. Maybe we can put it in the show notes. But, yeah. Day sounds like… I mean, it’s his first novel in 10 years and I’m just really excited because the form of his books are just… They seem to be exquisite.
James Walton:
So, Jo, what about the books we just didn’t have time for, and with apologies to all their authors.
Jo Hamya:
Yeah. It’s really unfortunate because there are some really great authors on here. Chigozie Obioma has a book coming out called, The Road to The Country. Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road. Andrew O’Hagan seems to have an incredible rate of production, I have to say. I’m always hearing that there’s something, although maybe it’s just The Mayflies kind of endlessly being appreciated and loved. Anyway, we’ve got Helen Oyeyemi, with Parasol Against the Axe, Rachel Kushner with Creation Lake, and Tim Parks with Mr. Geography.
James Walton:
So, plenty to look forward to in 2024, including of course lots of lovely Booker Prize podcasts. But that’s it for this week. Next week we’ll be taking a look at the 1990 Booker Prize winner, Possession by A.S. Byatt, January’s Booker Novel of the Month.
Jo Hamya:
Our book group on Facebook is still going strong. You can join at any time. Just search for the Booker Prizes.
James Walton:
Of course, as you probably know by now, you can follow us on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok and on Substack at the Booker Prizes.
Jo Hamya:
That was so punchy, James.
James Walton:
Thank you.
Jo Hamya:
Love that energy. Until next time, bye.
James Walton:
Bye. The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya, and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Muyolo, and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht Production for the Booker Prizes.
