Mr Watts Pigs Out

This Jones boy has had more than a few books published in New Zealand on a disconcerting variety of themes but according to the flyleaf this seems to be the first to crack the UK publishing circuit. And - ka mate! ka mate! ka ora! ka ora! - straight to the Booker Long List!

Quite an enjoyable read – exotic location: Bougainville at the time of the troubles – and a familiar theme: how a good read can help you through tricky times. The character of Mr Watts (who is also Mr Dickens AND the eponymous Pip) is rather evanescent, perhaps on purpose, perhaps due to some untidy drift in the narrative flow. But clever young Matilda who tells the story, and her Godbothering momma, come through loud and clear.

Published, interestingly enough, with three vastly different cover designs in different markets - the one shown to the left is much the best. So the main quarrel is with the choice of Charles Dickens Great Expectations as the redemptive novel: such a dreary load of old rope – no, no, anything but that - bring out the machetes! Chop chop!

Booker 2007 Long List
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

Watery Eyes / Grave / Prose

Here’s a tortuous, tortured cry of the heart, an Irish epithalamium for a lost brother. Easy to put down, hard to read. Brutal, bawdy, bathetic and all too heart-felt.

But by giving her narrator a family of 20 odd members, Enright creates such a tangle of narrative complexity that the reader gets lost in the maze – which one was Kit again, which one Ada? Probably they are all quite distinct in her mind, but they aren’t in mine.

Booker 2007 Long List
The Gathering by Anne Enright

The Reluctant New Yorker

As you tackle the opening paragraph you sigh a little, because this novella is written entirely in the first and second person, rehearsing in real time just one half a conversation taking place over dinner in a market stall in Lahore. So often Booker judges seem to go for the oddball voice, which palls after a couple of chapters and then simply irritates.

But your sigh is misplaced, because in this case the undeniably severe boundaries of time/place/person to which Hamid has submitted create a narrow, pure form which he carves, a master sculptor, into a compelling cul-de-sac of a narrative.

Lahore, Princeton, Manhattan, Lahore. Warring cultures. Our own contemporary nightmare. And less convincingly, a rather sad little cross-cultural love story that goes all wrong. Take you an hour and a half to read these 190 brief pages, longer to try to decide whose side you're on.

Booker 2007 Long List
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

Booker, Tea & the MGs

For some odd reason the Man Booker mob have shortlisted 13 novels instead of last year's 19. Makes the task of the obsessive Booker completist slightly easier, at least, although Abbey's only had 5 of them on Sunday, not counting On Chesil Beach.

And natch, a nagging incentive to fire up the world's least read blog one more time. So I brought The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Gathering with me to Johannesburg, but can't really start them until I've finished John Gray's extraordinary Straw Dogs.


Long List
Nicola Barker: Darkmans (4th Estate)
Edward Docx: Self Help (Picador)
Tan Twan Eng: The Gift of Rain (Myrmidon)
Anne Enright: The Gathering (Jonathan Cape)
Mohsin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamish Hamilton)
Peter Ho Davies: The Welsh Girl (Sceptre)
Lloyd Jones: Mister Pip (John Murray)
Nikita Lalwani: Gifted (Viking)
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach (Jonathan Cape)
Catherine O'Flynn: What Was Lost (Tindal Street)
Michael Redhill: Consolation (William Heinemann)
Indra Sinha: Animal's People (Simon and Schuster)
AN Wilson: Winnie & Wolf (Hutchinson)