This year is the first in a few years that I’ve got any excitement up about the Booker Prize, and I’ve now read four titles with a fifth just published (Switzy by Emma Cline) arriving immentently, but I won’t necessarily get that one read before the shortlist announcement on Sept 22. Here are my thoughts on two I’ve read….
The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
I read this earlier this year, reviewed here. Although I appreciated the fine prose and superb dialogue, at the time of reading, the lack of much plot and the decades previous flashback jarring a little, coloured my opinion of this novel. However, in the ensuing months, it has really stayed with me and the London sections feel more and more like a really good snapshot of the vicissitudes of London life, in which big dramas rarely happen, but little ones are regular occurrences.
What was never in doubt though is Riley’s ability with words from the evocative opening I quoted in my review to the sparkling dialogue. The fact that it has stayed with me so well reflects that quality throughout. As a result, I’d be very happy for this novel to win.
Picador hardback, 210 pages. BUY at Waterstones or Amazon UK via my affiliate links.
The End of Everything by M John Harrison
Sadly, I think this will be just too weird for the shortlist, but I enjoyed it a lot, although I can’t claim to understand what was going on half the time. That is deliberate on Harrison’s part, as he wants the reader to be in the same boat as his protagonists. Harrison is eighty now, and despite the title of this book, is still working. I saw him in conversation with Ben Pester at Blackwell’s a few months ago – a fascinating man.
The End of Everything is set in on the north shores of Kent, an unspecified time in the near future. England has been taken over by the iGhetti alien invaders, forcing life for little Englanders to change devolve a bit, certainly becoming more dystopian with very little governance remaining. We never actually meet the iGhetti, they are only described vaguely, and we’re not even sure if they recognise humans as sentient beings, as one of the characters, Hampson, says in his diaries:
Our perspectives on this monster have been shadowy, parallactic, indeterminate. All the crimes – and there have been so man–have taken place in the face of –under the auspices of–the confusion caused by the iGhetti: but none of it is ever treated as their crime. It is, at its most explicable, human activity caught up and whirled about by the turbulence of activity at another level; the only direct link between the iGhetti and us is the damage they have caused to First World infrastructures. We know nothing about their actual intentions, or about any traceable line of causality between our actions and theirs. They may not even know we are here.
So everyone goes about their business under the new normality, with periods of change in local reality described as ‘bad patches’, particularly prevalent in the City of London, what’s left of it.
We follow two main characters, Phillip Tennent and his seventy-year-old aunt, Marnie. Phillip is a beachcomber, collecting objects washed up by the sea, and today he makes his best find yet. He needs to get it off the beach and to someone who’ll pay him handsomely for it. The thing – always described by Harrison as an ‘artefact’ – feels alive, and Phillip knows he must shift it to avoid it giving him a bad patch. He makes his way to Marnie’s house where his vehicle is garaged to drive inland to see Hampson. After Phillip goes on his way from Marnie’s, we stay with her for a bit. She is being terrorised by local tearaways. She’s the kind of old woman that carries an old revolver in her shopping bag, and she’ll shoot one of the children dead when he was larking about on her roof, Hounded out of her home by the prospect of a lynch-mob coming for her, she’ll retreat to Phillip’s beach hut.
Meanwhile, the artefact is changing, growing, evolving, and Phillip is unsure whether Hampson, a collector and experimenter, is the right home for it. it’s very strange.
Marnie is succumbing to lapses of memory, whether it is incipient Alzheimers’s or a bad patch, we don’t know, and as she’s coming to terms with her changed perspective there is one lovely descriptive scene, where she’s out and about at sunset:
Too soon it was the hour of soft warm light just before dinner, when the tourists take their drinks on the balcony so they can sit and watch the ghosts of old men drawn out to sea, released from the mysterious dawn-to-dusk confinement of their coomemorative benches along the north shore, to rise until they face out towards the lost continent. They arrive in ones and twos at first, unsteady looking, balancing infirmly in the air, then suddenly there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of them rising from the warped, mouldy slats and mysteriously folded ironwork of all the other benches in the other towns of the Henry the Eighth Heritiage Trail, and they’re driving out to sea until they’ve lost all inidividuality and they go wheeling through the characteristic yet unpredictable swings, the sudden folds and recursive figures of the murmuration; driven less like dead leaves on an offshore wind than – what? Marnie couldn’t imagine the necessary set of rules. Instead she stood and waved them off.
I loved that imagery. It’s passages like that that make the challenge of trying to comprehend, or just accepting, all the mind-bending concepts elsewhere. It’s a step further on the weirdness scale from his 2020 Goldsmith Prize winning novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again which I really enjoyed. Despite being more SF and dystopian, there was something indefinably Dickensian about this novel related to its sense of place – Dickens was of course, associated with Broadstairs in Kent. The Kent coastline itself in particular, is exemplified in David Seabrook’s wonderful book about Kentish seaside culture and literary lives All the Devils are Here. I also found myself musing if maybe Harrison took his setting from Russell Hoban’s wonderful Riddley Walker which is set further into the future of a devolved Kent. Could Harrison be imagining the events that started the journey to where Hoban begins?
I’d be very surprised if Harrison makes the Booker shortlist, but this fine novel could be a shoe-in for the Goldsmiths Prize once again.
Source: Own copy – signed Blackwell’s special edition. Serpent’s Tail hardback, 218 pages. BUY at Waterstones or Amazon UK via my affiliate links.
