The Wrong Paul

Reflections on the Booker Prize

The Wrong Paul

Talking about books you haven't read is an art, one at which a literary critic discovers she or he must excel. When the 2023 Booker Prize shortlist was announced, I found, for once, that I hadn't read a single title. This was grave news, as I'd been invited to the Penguin Random House party on the night of the awards ceremony. The novel PRH had on the shortlist was The Bee Sting, a contemporary family tragicomedy by the Irish writer Paul Murray; the sure favourite to win, and described in the Observer as 'a 650-page slab of compulsive high-grade entertainment'. I might, I realised, have to fake some knowledge of the book in order to get through the evening intact.

            To complicate matters, I'd also been invited to the joint Oneworld/Granta Books party, which, when I scanned the invite, I discovered was to be held in a venue directly next door to the PRH event on Dover Street. The book Oneworld had in the running was also by an Irishman, Paul Lynch's Prophet Song, which (the blurb informed me) was 'exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive... a devastating vision of societal collapse and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together'.

            I would have to take their word for it.

            But which Paul to choose? I didn't want to make the error of spending the evening at the wrong bash, watching the defeated author and tearful editor walk through the door after their drubbing at the Guildhall; or, in this case, the opulent new Billingsgate venue, chosen to make the traditional black-tie event seem somehow less stuffy.

            The only other time I'd been invited to a Booker party was for Oneworld's The Sellout; a militant, darkly comic anatomisation of racist America by Paul Beatty. I had at least read the novel, having just covered it for the Literary Review. At the time, in 2016, Beatty had been nobody's favourite to win, so it was thrilling to find myself in the right place at the right time. I'll never forget the room exploding into joyous cheers as the announcement was made on the wall-mounted plasma screen. The champagne flowed like a broken water main. Revellers from all the other publishers' parties poured in to guzzle it. As the triumphant author himself arrived after midnight - his black-tie askance like Bond leaving a casino; shy, softly spoken, and surprised as much as anyone that he'd won - there was the hushed acknowledgment that his status has undergone a radical, almost religious conversion over the past hour. He'd transformed from jobbing novelist to Booker Winner.

            Another Paul.

            Maybe it was a lucky name. But there were two Pauls to choose from now. In actual fact, there were three male novelists in the running who happened to share the Christian name Paul, a coincidence many of the broadsheets had made much of; along with the fact that the previous three Booker winners had all been men. The third Paul was Paul Harding with This Other Eden: hotly tipped, though no one, I gathered, thought it would be the eventual winner.

            In the end, I opted for Paul Murray and the Penguin party. After all, as the bookies' favourite, he was bound to win.

            Wasn't he?

The PRH party was a night to remember.

            And I very nearly didn't go at all. Wavering on the Dover Street pavement in the November rain, I changed my mind and opted for the Oneworld/ Granta party next door. Looking through the window, I could see it was packed, warm and inviting; full of people I knew and with whom I could actually have a conversation. Did they know something I didn't? Booker gossip was always rife with whispers that the winner had been leaked before the announcement.

            But then I changed my mind again and decided to hold to my original plan.

            Once inside, I was relieved to find there were two other (male) literary critics I knew at the PRH bash. We settled down, like the three judges of Hades, to get enthusiastically hammered on the copious fizz and watch the spectacle of the Booker Prize announcement on another big plasma screen at the end of the room. It was gratifying to know that only one of us had read anything from the shortlist. At least I wouldn't have to practice The Art all evening.

            As the time crept closer towards the big moment, a palpable buzz filled the room. It was a dead cert. It was in the bag. Paul Murray would be the clear victor. No argument.

            We all held our breath as the chair of the judges, Esi Edugyan, stood at the lectern, holding the card bearing Paul Murray's name.

            ‘... And now I'm delighted to announce... that the winner of the Booker Prize 2023 is... Prophet Song by Paul Lynch!’

            Tumbleweeds.

            Clearly, everyone had expected Murray to win and shift bucketloads of The Bee Sting, with its striking yellow hardback cover. They had all been convinced he would make a witty and emotional speech thanking his literary agent, mother, and his old English teacher, and then spend the next year going around the world as an ambassador for Penguin Random House and the glory that is contemporary Irish fiction.

            Instead, the wrong Paul - in everyone's eyes - had prevailed. Catastrophe.

            At that moment, I realised I would have to go home, open both books and make up my own mind as to their relative merits.

So did the wrong Paul win?

            Yes and no. To decide on that, ultimately, is a matter of taste. Which is, of course, maddeningly subjective.  

            After reading both novels, I can see now that what was in contention was not which was 'better', but two completely different approaches to literary fiction. After finishing The Bee Sting, I realised it had been years since I read such a fiercely sustained and richly enjoyable long novel. The book follows the implosion of the Barnes family - car dealer Dickie, working-class wife Imelda, teenage daughter Cassie, and twelve-years old son PJ - over a few catastrophic months in the wake of Ireland’s financial crash. Ridiculously well-plotted, humane, terminally funny and affectingly sad, it's destined, as they say, to become a future classic. Prophet Song is also set in Ireland the early 21st-century and focuses on a single family, but there the similarities end. Set in a dystopian Dublin under totalitarian control, the book begins as trade unionist father-of-four Larry is disappeared by agents of the State, leaving his wife, Eilish, to raise their children under increasingly nightmarish conditions while attempting to secure his release. I finished the novel exhausted, relieved it was over and paralysed by its relentless urgency. I was also very surprised it had won the Booker instead of The Bee Sting.

            Stylistically, it's hard to imagine two more different contemporary novels. While The Bee Sting works broadly within the limits of psychological-realist fiction, with its easy charm, bonhomie and gentle irony which gives way to authentic darkness 600 pages later, Prophet Song is one long savage, alienated, Beckettian howl from the first page. While the former is a family saga in the straightforward English comic tradition of Dickens and Jonathan Coe, put through the Franzenian mincer of modern family breakdown, the latter is hysterically Faulknerian in tone; its sentences held together by comma splices, its clauses backed up together in a giddy, grave, improbable rush.

            Here is a sample sentence from The Bee Sting, from the scene where Cass's toxically competitive best friend Elaine assesses her:

‘She zipped up her make-up bag and regarded Cass with dissatisfaction, like a baker confronted with a not wholly successful cake’.

The concision. The clarity. The insight into teenage lives. The effortless humour. It's all pleasingly present in a single line.

            Contrast this with a representative sentence from Prophet Song:

‘She is suddened into the dark room, the awareness cold and quick in the blood that something has struck the glass door downstairs, hearing the sound carry in hollow      shock through the house, the slow weight of the body as she runs from the bed’.

            Suddened? The dead adjectives in 'dark room', 'hollow shock' and 'slow weight'? And the syntax? Don't get me started on the syntax. Some semi-colons might have helped the reader negotiate this car crash of a sentence, with its shifting subjects (one in every new clause), but even they wouldn't save it from outright adolescent incompetence. Prophet Song is in thrall to the impressionistic syntactic freedom of All the Pretty Horses, but unlike that novel, its sentences keep missing their targets and losing the reader. Which is not to say Lynch is a terrible writer. Far from it. He possesses the twin virtues of energy and confidence; qualities often lacking in much contemporary fiction. But then so does the other Paul; only he uses them to different ends.

            The Bee Sting pins us to the page with its small-town claustrophobia, its arias of sex and death in its final act, its twisted web of family dynamics, unravelling irrevocably and inevitably. Prophet Song, by contrast, roots us to the spot with ever-more-shocking shocks, one after another, until it beats us into submission. It peaks on page 20 and then rails on at the same pitch for another 200. Murray's novel helps the reader, with such conventional, bourgeoise devices as character development and clearly set-out dialogue (albeit without speech marks). Lynch's book gives us blocks of Bernhardian prose, the dialogue fiendishly embedded, its voices critically lost in the clamour. One novel operates on the pleasure principle, the other on the pain principle. The pleasure principle, where fiction is concerned, rewards the reader with an experience that provides aesthetic, intellectual and emotional enjoyment throughout the course of a book. Naturally, these books are rare. Pain-principle novels are too numerous to mention. They are every bad book ever published.  In these, there is very little aesthetic, intellectual or emotional engagement. Instead, the writer makes you undertake a linguistic assault course during which you're frequently plunged into the darkness of syntactical confusion or the cold bath of cliché. Often, you have no idea of where you are in the terrain, or why you read at all, or why words strung together in sentences could ever give rise to enjoyment. You finish these books - if you finish them at all - only after you've read every sentence twice, when you didn't want to read most of them once.

            So, yes, in my opinion the wrong Paul won. But that only reflects my taste and literary values. Some people enjoy pain and pay good money for it. Go figure, as neither Paul would say.

This year's Booker Prize was won by Samantha Harvey's novella Orbital. A good result, for a number of reasons. On a shortlist of five women and one man, Harvey was the only Brit; a reassuring outcome for homegrown novelists since the Booker longlist was opened up to accept English language writers worldwide in 2014. In addition, she was the first woman to win in five years. Personally, I was delighted for Harvey (and as hers was the only shortlisted book I'd read, I knew I wouldn't have to practice The Art). Her win will bring her the recognition she's long deserved. A defiantly literary, genre-hopping writer in the mould of Hilary Mantel, she's produced something unexpected with each subsequent book.

            Harvey's fifth novel is a compact wonder. Following six astronauts over the course of a single day as they observe planet Earth from the International Space Station, Orbital is written in prose as effortlessly weightless as its characters. It's emphatically a pleasure-principle novel. In the book's circadian span, the astronauts witness sixteen sunrises. Here's a collective description of them (worth quoting in full):

‘With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a           momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day          from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them’.

The novel pulls off the miracle of being both sweepingly universal and tenderly intimate; simultaneously large and small. There's beauty and terror in equal measure. It might be short, but it holds a potent charge. The book is, as prize judge Justine Jordan commented, 'as long as it needs to be'. It is also, according to fellow judge Sara Collins, 'a book we need now, and maybe one we'll need forever'. In Harvey's compelling acceptance speech, she dedicated the book to 'those who speak for and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, and all the people who speak for, and call for, and work for peace.'

            It's hard to argue with that, given the current state of the world. Anyway, I couldn’t if I'd wanted to. This year, I wasn't invited to any of the Booker parties. Maybe it was for the best, all things considered.