On the 2019 Booker Prize Merritt Moseley

On the 2019 Booker Prize Merritt Moseley Sewanee Review, Volume 128, Number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 151-164 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sew.2020.0013 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745516 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] ON THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE MERRITT MOSELEY he 2019 Booker Prize season was for women authors. At every stage of the selection, books by women domi- T nated; and when, on October 14, the final decision was announced, the judges had chosen Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo to share the prize for their novels The Testaments and Girl, Woman, Other respectively. The last shared Booker was awarded in 1992, after which split decisions were forbidden by rule. The 2019 jury flouted the regulations and did it anyway. This year’s other change was a new sponsor. Originally the Booker McConnell Prize, for eighteen years the Man Booker Prize, it is now simply the Booker Prize, which is what it has always been called anyway. With the Man Group withdrawing in summer of 2019, its new sponsor is the Crankstart Foundation, created by a billionaire venture capitalist, Sir Michael Moritz, and his wife. That the prize was not renamed the Crankstart Booker Prize must have relieved everyone. The first step in the process of awarding the 2019 Booker took place on July 23. It carried some pleasant surprises for those still Review 152 on the 2019 booker prize vexed by the inclusion of Americans (two of whom have won the prize since their admission in 2014), for devotees of experimental and difficult fiction, and for second chances given to former win- ners. In the latter category were Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie. Rushdie took the prize in 1981 and was shortlisted in 1983, 1988, and 1995; Atwood won in 2000 and had been shortlisted in 1986 — for The Handmaid’s Tale, to which this year’s The Testaments is a sequel — as well as 1989, 1996, and 2003. Oyinkan Braithwaite, author of My Sister, the Serial Killer, was the only debut novelist to make the cut. Lucy Ellmann was America’s sole representative, and perhaps barely qualifies; US-born, she has lived in England her entire adult life. The criteria for eligibility were loosened beginning in 2014, from the historic “the best novel in the English language, written by a Commonwealth or Irish citizen, and published in the UK” to any long-form work in English published in the UK or Ireland. This change was usually taken as a concession to Americans; but the longlist this year included a work by Valeria Luiselli, from Mexico, and Elif Shafak, from Turkey, now eligible under the new rules. If any non-UK literature dominated, it was that of Nigeria, with two Nigerian authors on the longlist in addition to Bernardine Evaristo, who is a British-born Anglo-Nigerian. There were eight women and five men on the longlist. On September 13, the thirteen-title longlist was pared to six which, along with Atwood and Evaristo, included Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport; Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities; Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte; and Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. Obioma’s novel is his sophomore effort, while Ellmann, Evaristo, and Shafak have large bodies of work. For the first time, the list contained no white men. This winnowing, like the earlier one that began with 151 nomi- merritt moseley 153 nated books, was the work of a panel of judges consisting of Liz Calder, a former publisher; Xiaolu Guo, a novelist and filmmaker; Afua Hirsch, a writer and broadcaster; Joanna MacGregor, a musi- cian and composer; and, chairing, Peter Florence, who directs the Hay Festival, Britain’s major literary event outside London. As usual, Britain’s bookmakers announced odds on the shortlist. According to William Hill, Rushdie’s Quichotte was the favorite at 11/12, followed by Obioma, Evaristo, Atwood, Shafak, and Ellmann, the outsider, at 10/1. Of the novels from the three most established authors, Atwood’s The Testaments was the most eagerly awaited; Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport is the most extraordinary; and Rushdie’s Quichotte is the most exasperating. Obioma is a young novelist, whose promising first book,The Fisherman, made the Booker shortlist in 2015. An Orchestra of Minorities tells the dark story of a poultry farmer, Chinonso, whose life is changed when, driving at night, he saves a young woman, Ndali, who is preparing to jump off a bridge. This act leads to a love affair. Ndali is rich, educated, and sophisticated; she plans to study in the UK to become a pharmacist; and the misalliance between the two drives the plot. Ndali may be using Chinonso as part of a rebellion against her family; on one occasion, she over- comes Chinonso’s reluctance to attend a grand party thrown by her father, a chief, where her brother humiliates him by making him change clothes and help with the catering and cleanup. Desperate to make something of himself so he can marry Ndali, Chinonso sells his property to go to Cyprus for university. Arriving there he finds himself the victim of a heartless fraud by one of his own old school friends. It is not long before he is falsely accused of attempted rape and imprisoned. Finally his accuser recants her testimony and he returns home, though the result is disastrous. Reviewers describe it as a retelling of The Odyssey, but the Review 154 on the 2019 booker prize similarities are actually slight. Chinonso travels abroad and returns after many ordeals, but Ndali is no Penelope, Chinonso is no hero or king, and his motivations have nothing to do with homecoming. Perhaps the importance of the mythical realm suggests the analogy with Homer. As Obioma explains in his author’s note, the novel “is firmly rooted in Igbo cosmology,” and the book begins with a short guide to it. Helpful, since the novel is also narrated by a chi, or guardian spirit, who is timeless and all-seeing but can do very little to affect the course of events. The chi ’s account is addressed to the high god as a form of explanation for the fate of Chinonso, to whom he was assigned. This is an unusual authorial decision that does not justify itself and entails extensive machinery, including the many, many names of the creator god as well as some clumsy exposition: “As you know, you created us as creatures for whom sleep does not exist.” To Obioma’s credit, the chi has a colorful, aphoristic style, describing Chinonso’s return home on one occasion as like “a water- filled calabash sent off with an emissary to the land of a provoked enemy.” Unfortunately, the epic machinery does less to deepen the story Obioma has to tell than to inflate it. Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a feminist exploration of women’s lives in modern Turkey. Its title, and governing conceit, are explained this way: “Researchers at var- ious world-renowned institutions had observed persistent brain activity in people who had just died; in some cases this had lasted for only a few minutes. In others, for as much as ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds.” The novel begins with a section called “The Mind,” in which a woman called Tequila Leila realizes that she is stuffed in a rubbish container in a bad part of Istanbul and that, in fact, her heart has stopped. The chapters that follow tell the story of how she reached this place and this condition, each one as a part of Leila’s ten and a half minutes of posthumous retrospection. merritt moseley 155 The second chapter, “One Minute,” goes back to her birth into a working-class family in the city of Van. Leila’s youth is a story of parental intolerance and mental ill- ness, early sexual initiation by an uncle, rebellion against wearing a headscarf and an arranged marriage, and finally escape to Istan- bul and a hard life as a prostitute. To her family, she has become nothing, and she is nothing to her clients or to the authorities; after death she thinks of those who do care for her, her five friends Sabotage Sinan, Nostalgia Nalan, Jameelah, Zaynab122, and Hol- lywood Humeyra, whose stories are interpolated into Leila’s. With them she forms an alternative society; as one of them thinks, in the second section called “The Body” where they are working together to give Leila a respectful burial, “maybe the five of them, just like the people in a miniature painting, were stronger and brighter, and far more alive, when they complemented each other.” Shafak’s novel gives a powerful account of powerlessness and the struggle to survive in a hostile world. Its picture of Istanbul is rich, to a western reader, exotic, and fairly depressing. The Guard- ian reviewer, who found it “a novel with a powerful premise, good intentions, and an ingenious framing device,” while also deploring it as gimmicky, reveals that because of Shafak’s concern for Turkish religious intolerance, violence against women, and persecution of minorities, she has been threatened with imprisonment and cannot return to Turkey. Much of the discussion of Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport is about its length: it comes in right at one thousand pages, not counting its twenty-page supplementary glossary of acronyms and an appendix of important quotations. After length, comment focuses on its nar- rative technique.

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