Has anyone read any of the shortlist, or the winner. I forgot all about it this year, right until yesterday - and then a few hours later it comes on the news.

Might pop to the library later.

I've read The Night Watch and thought the backwards-moving plot was great, although of all Sarah Waters's books, I still love Affinity the best.

Looking forward very much to reading Kiran Desai's 'The Inheritance of Loss'. It took me ages to get round to reading On Beauty after it won the Orange Prize - I won't make that mistake again, a fantastic book.

Frances

I'm halfway through Kate Grenville's The Secret River and really enjoying it. Her writing style is quite special - it's sort of contemporary language written in the style of the period, if that makes any sense. Anyway, it certainly helps conjure up the atmosphere of the time.

Haven't read any of the others though. The Night Watch is next on my list I reckon.

Sarah Waters is first on the list when I can end my current fiction-starvation. I love her courage with structure. I loved Fingersmith, in an exasperated way so I must read Affinity, which everyone says is her best. I rather fancied The Secret River until I heard an Australian historian being incredibly rude about it.

But I don't think one should feel obliged to read anything - I never read Booker or any other prize winner, or any new fiction, just because I 'should' or it's new. I read what I need to feed me and my writing.

Emma

I find that literary awards have a similar effect to that I would expect from bio-hazard labels on baby food.

I'm sure that the book is very good, and more patient minds than mine will derive great pleasure from indulging in them, but it does look to me like a book written with the express intention of finding the attention of literary awards. I'm possibly being a little judgemental.

I went the library. Nothing there. Just old books.

Last year they had a big display of lovely NEW books - all from the Booker Shortlist.

Ah well, back to my brainless sci-fi novel (Contest, by Matthew Reilly - lots of fun but as shallow as a puddle)

Colin M

Since writers are (usually) intelligent, I think they're capable of calculating that writing a novel's too hard, and the odds of winning are way too long, for winning a prize to enter into their decision of whether to write one or not.

And don't forget that it's publishers who enter these prizes, not the author, though a big name author would no doubt feel a big enough shot at their publishers to expect it.

Emma

Ah, but I am not a usual writer. Umm...

I enjoyed The Secret River too, complete dislocation on a grand scale. Am I allowed to ask which historian was being rude about it?

/removes historian's hat and hides it behind his back

I was on a panel with him - pause for a bit of googling - John Hirst


From the Brisbane Festival website:
Doctor John Hirst is a historian and participant in the Australian Republican movement. He is also Associate Professor at La Trobe University. He earned his doctorate from the University of Adelaide. His published works include Australia’s Democracy: a short history, The Sentimental Nation: the making of the Australian Commonwealth, The World of Albert Facey, and The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales 1848-1884. His most recent book is SENSE AND NONSENSE IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY.

Judging by his bio, his opinion is one one should take seriously. His opinion - very temperately and reasonably expressed - was that the main character's attitude to the aboriginals (is that still an okay term, or shall we say traditional owners of the land?) was wholly anachronistic, and therefore completely undermined the entire premise and working out of the story.

I haven't read The Secret River and am woefully ignorant of Aussie history, but if it's true, then that is a pretty serious charge. It's not as if he's whinging about the author rigging a sloop or lighting a fire the wrong way.

Those questions of moral attitudes are some of the hardest to get right in hist. fic, I think. Partly because they're implicit not explicit in much that you might read about the period. And partly because it's often where we find ourselves most 'other' from our characters. It's a narrow balancing act between making your 19th cent. hero sympathetic to your female characters and therefore to your modern readers, and making him a most unlikely and unconvincing feminist-avant-la-lettre.

But getting my reader to understand how my MC, a lovely man, (clever, honest, upright, honourable) could feel his highest duty was gutting Moors on crusade in Portugal is the kind of technical challenge I can't resist.

Emma

Thanks for that! Aye, Hirst does have a reputation to be envious of - his book from a while back, Convict Society and its Enemies caused a bit of a fuss in its time. He does have a point about attitudes to Aborigines and that's still a very intense debate in Australia. If you're interested, googling for 'History Wars' and 'Windschuttle' will pull up a lot of stuff.

With you on the moral values thing. That's part of the trouble with history, trying to think like a nineteenth century person without being judgemental, even when you think some of the people you're reading about are total bastards...

thanks again!

wasn't Hisham Matar on the shortlist? he's coming to the literary festival I've been employed to organise in Coventry, and I really want to read his book, since I used to live in Libya (where it's set). anyone else read it? (In The Country of Men).

Iain, I more and more think that we historical fictioneers have to write with one foot in then and the other in now, and the further apart those feet are the harder it is. Particularly when it comes to voice, but in other ways too, making it convincing is actually a matter of the-quickness-of-the-hand-deceives-the-eye, not true authenticity. Perhaps we should borrow from the musicians, and stop calling our work 'authentic' and say 'historically informed' instead.

And yes, it's a challenge to make some attitudes work for the reader. The only reader who found my 19th cent. woman in TMOL just slightly too liberated, though he liked her, was my godfather, who's a historian of 16th-17th century Spain. I did give my nice, good, lovable 19th century bloke the reflex anti-catholic prejudices of his time, just by way of a bit of grit. And I do enjoy, say, making a Ukrainian refugee in 1920s London - who we automatically feel sorry for - casually and deeply anti-semitic.

Emma

No, 'fraid not - yet. I need to read Joseph Andrews first, and then there's A Scots Quair, and then ...

I was amused to see a letter from Margaret Drabble in, I think, the Guardian, saying that E. St Aubyn ("Mothers Milk") is constantly described as a 'newcomer' when he's in fact on his sixth (or seventh?) novel.

Oh, by the by, this week's TLS is an interesting issue focusing on history (researching, writing of, links with other disciplines etc). It's invaluable even if you don't think of yourself as a historical novelist.

Jim

I'm reading Peter Carey, Theft: A Love Story Made the longlist, but not the shortlist. Narrated by the MC and his brother. Cuts backwards and forwards between the two voices. The first person sections narrated by the MC's brother dispense with conventional punctuation, and I believe this device is something Carey used in his novel about Ned Kelly. TLS also reviewed Paul Auster's new novel, not sure the reviewer liked it...