Man Booker Prize 2017

A ‘baffling’ shortlist

The Booker judges have one job – to choose the year’s best novels – but this bewildering shortlist from the class of 2017 has contrived to lose the strongest titles from a longlist that had already overlooked some of the year’s most exciting releases (Gwendoline Riley’s First Love, Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends ) in favour of subprime output from famous names.

One of those longlisted stars, the US writer Paul Auster, finds himself inexplicably still in the running for the £50,000 award with 4321, a comingof-age narrative that replays the life of a conspicuously Auster-like hero four times over. It’s brick-thick and stodgy with it. The point is ostensibly to show that small differences of upbringing can have chain reactions, but Auster doesn’t distinguish enough between the various versions and it’s full of unintentional hilarity: “It was clear that the central actor in this drama was his groin.”

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, who was shortlisted in 2007 for

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, also made the cut. It’s infinitely better than Auster’s turkey, but it too fails to deliver on an intriguing set-up – which makes you think that the judges have indulged a taste for gimmicks without much regard for whether they actually work. It has a sciencefictional premise: lovers trying to flee the sectarian conflict in an unnamed

city (which looks a lot like Hamid’s native Lahore) find black doorways in thin air, which take them to far-off countries. But the excitement soon drains away, leaving one to wonder whether Hamid’s thought experiment – “What if migration were easy?” – might have made a better essay.

Then there are three debut novels. Emily Fridlund’s History of Wolves captures the pitfalls of consuming,

indiscriminate teenage desire in its story of a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota who falls in with two Christian Scientists and their small son. But, while hints about the boy’s later death and the “trial” keep you snared, you feel Fridlund padding the space between revelations with high-flown description, such as a room “bathed in sunlight. The uriney kind, pale and thin and hot.”

Overwriting is more of a problem in another first novel on the shortlist,

Elmet by 29-year-old Fiona Mozley, who wrote this violent elegy for the loss of rural community while working in a bookshop in York. Sixyear-old Daniel recalls how his father got caught up in a feud with a local landowner, thuddingly named “Mr Price”. But the florid narration is hard to digest – a voice that “resonated against the cool air like a ball bouncing on wet grass” isn’t the worst of it – as are the speechifying minor characters venting frustration about Tory policy.

These books were mysteriously preferred ahead of Mike Mccormack’s longlisted Solar Bones – a monologue by a dead Irish engineer – which has already won the Goldsmiths Prize. Maybe the “voices from the graveyard” slot had been bagsied by George Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a tale woven around the death of Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie, and voiced by hundreds of narrators. It’s stylish but mawkish.

And why didn’t Sebastian Barry’s Costa-winning Days Without End, a Wild West romance about a cross-dressing refugee, or Colson Whitehead’s alternate-history take on slavery, The Underground Railroad, already a Pulitzer winner, make it on to the shortlist? Was it reckoned that they had won their prizes already?

Perhaps the problem – as ever with the Booker – was that the judges had an agenda that was not purely literary. The politely balanced shortlist of three Britons, three Americans, three men and three women, supports that.

And there’s also a Brexit tinge to the British novels on the list, an attempt to look beyond the capital. Neither Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, a nostalgic evocation of Eighties north London, or Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, about a young British Muslim from west London joining Isil, made it off the longlist. Instead, we find Ali Smith’s Autumn, written on the fly last year in response to the EU referendum.

In a free-associating stream of puns and rug-pulling (“That moment of dialogue? Imagined”, one section begins), the tender relationship between an art lecturer and a dying elderly immigrant is unfurled. The trouble is, if Smith wins, it will be a case of right writer, wrong book. Autumn might be the pick of this shortlist, but it isn’t a patch on her 2014 novel, How to Be Both.

So what were the judges thinking? Clearly they’ve tried to favour novels that take a narrative gamble, that have been overlooked by other prizes, and that examine Britain beyond the metropolis. In which case, it’s all the more bizarre that they’ve shunned Jon Mcgregor’s longlisted Reservoir 13 – a hypnotic time-lapse view of village life in the Peak District after a girl disappears – which ticks all their own boxes.

It was never going to be a vintage year, but this shortlist is just baffling.