HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Booker Prize is back on track with one standout winner, Cal Revely-calder writes.
This year's Booker Prize was unusual — we approached it with suspicion. Last time, it was a shambles. All the judges have to do is pick one outstanding novel. It was thus historic, and tedious, when they failed in 2019. Of their two “joint winners,” one was Margaret Atwood's The Testaments — a lifetime-achievement award in disguise — and the other was Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, which was merely, if complexly, bad.
Thirteen months on, you might have feared the worst. ( Would they let everyone win, as with the much-maligned 2019 Turner Prize?) So what a relief that, this year, the Booker regained its ruthlessness, and sense. Douglas Stuart deserves the £50,000 (C$86,990). His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, was the standout book of the year.
Only his second published work, it drew on Stuart's own 1980s youth. A little boy in Glasgow's filthy tenements, he's beset by his mother, an alcoholic, and his burgeoning sexuality.
It's a searing story of Special Brew and vomit at dawn, and the steadfastness of a child's love. Few novelists can write a woman like Agnes — wretched enough to break your heart, but with a drunk's grim selfishness. Built on this harrowing portrait, Shuggie Bain has excoriating power.
Of the six novels on the shortlist, four were debuts, and none of the novelists was a “household name.” Good — the purpose of the Booker is to broaden the public's taste.
This year's group had a psychological bent, with narrators tussling with their own dreams, and their societies' and families' demands. There were, as usual, superficial complaints — Stuart was the only Briton shortlisted, and one of only two white shortlistees. But the list was the strongest for years: this time, quality has won out.
The absent giant, if you believe the headlines, was Hilary Mantel: with The Mirror & the Light, her Cromwell trilogy might have won three prizes from three.
But that decision was right — the novel was prolix, and Mantel doesn't need publicity. (Atwood said the same of herself last year; Evaristo, she argued, might have won for that reason alone.)
There were doubts about the longlist, admittedly. It left out Actress by Anne Enright, a haunted, heartbroken work — if not quite as rich as The Gathering, for which she won the Booker Prize in 2007. Strange, too, was the lack of Ali Smith's Summer, the end of her “seasonal” quartet; one of Britain's most playful novelists has been overlooked again.
But these are trivial gripes. With the exception, perhaps, of Diane Cook — The New Wilderness is a poorly plotted dystopian tale — I'd recommend any of the final six. Stuart's victory is a just reward, but all of them will benefit as book sales were flying already, with a public confined by police to the couch. There'll be no champagne flowing in Bloomsbury, but festivities or not, this marks the Booker's return to form.
Shuggie Bain is an extraordinary novel, which will scramble your heart and expand your mind. Buy it, read it, and weep.