Man Booker Special The Review Show

On The Review Show tonight, home and abroad with the Man Booker short list,

featuring love and loss in gold-rush era New Zealand,

a mother's grief for her murdered son,

xenophobia in rural England...

the children of Zimbabwe's lost decade,

a tale of family and exile in India and Rhode Island,

and a Tokyo teen captivates a novelist in rural Canada.

Plus music from Steve Mason.

Hello and welcome to The Review Show.

Tonight I'm joined by an extremely literary panel

as we discuss the Man Booker short list.

Professor John Mullan from University College, London,

Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature at the University of East Anglia,

and the writer Paul Morley.

The nominees this year come from a very diverse range of nationalities

and backgrounds,

including a Zen Buddhist priest, the first Zimbabwean,

and the youngest author ever to be short-listed.

Their novels are equally broad, covering subjects from immigration to xenophobia,

political uprisings to the conflict between man and the natural world.

But before we actually discuss them, how did you approach the short list?

I mean, you only had six books. Imagine what it was like when it began.

Was it daunting even to have the six? Well, it was, but I kind of arranged it

as an entertainment show

in the order I'd like to see them appear,

because it is kind of an entertainment show.

It's X Factor, it's the Eurovision Song Contest.

So I figured out in what order I'd want to do it,

and luckily enough it worked out just correct in terms of the pacing.

So I started out with one or two that I might have read anyway,

then into a middle-ground area,

and then the huge one at the end that I did consider hiring a few interns to make their way through,

but in the end I did do it, and that was the right order,

because I think if I'd begun with the big one, I might not have got to the others.

Did you jump around?

I didn't jump around,

I'm actually quite a methodical reader,

because I want that sense of... it is a daunting task for anyone...

and I want that sense of accomplishment, so I want to know I'm working my way through it.

So I did begin with the longest,

but also, I have to say, because it did look the most appealing to me, actually.

I love 19th-century novels and it's based on that,

and so I really liked the idea of really jumping into something that does a lot of storytelling.

And then I moved...I made sure that I didn't keep the one I was least looking forward to to the last,

because that's always a mistake. Did you do it differently?

No...well, I was methodical, but I was also sort of more escapist

than Sarah. I mean, I left the daunting task till last,

II left the 832-page Eleanor Catton novel till last.

Just I felt it would sort of elbow the others aside, I might spend too long on it almost.

You might get fatigued? And I did start...

Actually, that's not quite true, because there's one I've read before and I left that to the very last,

so that I would reread it.

But I started with the Jim Crace because I suppose he was a novelist I knew a bit

and I felt it was familiar ground. And it was nice and short!

Well, let's start with that daunting task, the longest book of this year's short list,

and long-listed before it was even available to the public, Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries

is an epic literary page-turner set during the Gold Rush era of mid-1860s New Zealand.

Using astrological charts as a plotting device,

the story unfolds as a Scottish fortune hunter Walter Moody

unintentionally interrupts 12 men who've gathered in a hotel smoking room

to discuss mysterious and murderous events in which their lives are intricately entwined.

"Some kind of heist was in the offing, he guessed,

"or maybe they were forming an alliance against another man. Mr Carver, perhaps.

"They numbered twelve, which puts Moody in mind of a jury,

"but the presence of the Chinese men and Maori native made that impossible."

I had this idea of, you know, a stranger coming into a bar

which feels like a very...

archetypal situation in a literary sense.

And I knew already that I wanted to play with the zodiac as an idea,

as a kind of structuring idea for the novel,

and wrote that first sentence, you know...it took me quite a while to kind of put that on the page,

and kind of went from there.

I know that that seems like a very vague answer,

especially because the book ends up being so intricately plotted later, but really it wasn't.

Standing at a colossal 832 pages, the story recounts a series of unsolved crimes

involving a missing wealthy man, a near-dead prostitute

and an enormous amount of money found in the home of a luckless recluse.

However, as the reader works through each layer of the story,

the layout of the very novel itself takes centre stage.

My main ambition for the book, really, was that I wanted to create an experience

that was very like looking at the night sky.

You can see the constellation of Leo, for example, or the constellation of Aries,

and you can trace the pattern in it and it's a picture.

But if you really want to know more about the kind of harmonies and correspondences and patterns at work,

they're there to be excavated, they're there to be studied,

but not necessarily immediately visible.

"What does it prophesy, a month without a moon?" The widow gazed at him impenetrably.

"'I'm not mistaken,' she said. 'I have an almanac and I'm very skilled at reading it.

"'The moon is waxing now above the cloud. It will be full by Monday night

"'and on Tuesday it will begin to wane. Next month will be a month without a moon.'"

Sarah, is this about the story or about the way the story's told, the mechanics of it?

It's a good question. I actually think it's about both.

And what happens is for the first half of the book, she tells the story of one extraordinary day

through the point of view of 12 characters who are the kind of constellations

around whom...who orbit around the two luminaries of the story, the sun and the moon,

who turn out to be these lovers.

And that's all very clever and it's very engaging

and it's a really bravura opening and it feels like it's building and building and building,

and as you get to each character, you learn something more about the story

and about these two mysterious individuals who are going to come together.

And then she makes the decision, as she says there,

as the moon is waning, the story's going to start to unravel,

and the chapters are going to get smaller and smaller and smaller...

I think... So there are two problems...

the first is that you put in this... and I did love the book, actually...

You put in this massive investment and she starts to deliberately pull it away from you,

and you start to feel like she doesn't...she's not going to give you the pay-off that you want...

Let me just ask, did you feel cheated?

Cheated? Well, I felt it was more technique than content ultimately,

and after the first 400 pages which is almost the opening chapter,

then she halves each chapter going through,

I felt, like, "Well, that's interesting. You've just spent 400 pages explaining something

"that in an episode of Deadwood would have taken 45 minutes!"

It does feel like Deadwood. Which is interesting

because there is a post-box set world that she's inhabiting,

which is also fascinating, the idea that the box set... It fascinates her.

It fascinates her, which...the novel was influential on these long HBO sophisticated programmes

that allow characters to develop... And now it's feeding back into the novel. And now it's feeding back in.

And so for me in the end what ultimately took over was the technique.

A lot of information, a lot of description, a lot of explication...

but ultimately at the end of it, I felt that what I'd been through was very clever,

ferociously, brilliantly... an extraordinary achievement, but for very little.

Ultimately, I felt like I'd been in more of a soapy area of box sets

which seemed to contradict the immense effort.

I think there's only one thing that it's very little of... it's very little...

it's quite like a kind of a 19th-century novel in some ways,

it's kind of quite like a Wilkie Collins novel in the elaboration of its plot and deeds and gold

and who's married to who, but...

it doesn't deliver that sense of sort of psychological richness that you get...

and psychological identification that you get...

and when you hear her talking, she's talking about structure and harmony and pattern...

but in terms of that it's brilliant and I think that...

Do you care that you don't actually get to know and follow her characters that well?

I think you have to not care. I mean, I think you have to sign up to that.

And it's not that the detail in it, the thickness of it, is just sort of larded on for its own sake.

Everything matters, everything matters to the elaborate relationships... It's epic,

but it's incredibly twee. It's bold, but incredibly conservative.

It's really safe and tidy ultimately, so you're going through an immense amount of material for very little...

I think that's right. For me, actually,

I don't mind that the characters don't have that psychology,

because at the beginning it feels like they do actually.

The problem for me is that I'm left holding very little. I'm not sure what all of this was in aid of.

What I do think though is her descriptions...you get this feeling of the Wild West,

the jail not quite built... but to me it's like she's creating an elaborate stage set.

Very cold. I don't agree actually with that at all.

As a page-turning story, especially for the first half of it, she had me gripped!

I want to know what was going to happen... You have to go back to retrieve her characters, don't you?

No, I don't... Because she does that herself. No, you don't have to. You do!

But then the organisational principles...

I mean she talks a bit about the stars,

and we should say there's a kind of great astrological organisational principle in this,

and I was reading this, and I'm thinking, "God, this is a bit random!

"She obviously probably doesn't believe in astrology,"

and yet it's...then you think, "I know Chaucer did this and Edmund Spenser did this..."

It's a beautiful, mathematical sort of pattern and that's what you've got to enjoy,

her sense of pattern and connection in the way you make a narrative.

People have said we should talk, not the programme, but just generally,

this is the youngest person ever to have been on the Booker short list...

do you think it is quite a kind of virtuoso performance for someone as young? Oh, completely!

I think it's a virtuoso performance for anybody!

I disagree with John a little bit, because I think that the pattern is wonderful,

but she actually doesn't give us enough information to decode the pattern.

We need to know a little bit more about astrology, you know,

assuming that we don't all know as much as she does... how do we read the charts?

She's pulled all of this stuff into it and we can't quite pull it all back out again.

There's also like this sense of the achievement and the youngster...

it started to happen with the X Factor, actually, that just because you open your mouth and have a voice,

that you're immediately adored, and it seems to be the instant creation of a star,

so the very nature that she can do it seems to be what's overwhelming,

rather than what's actually happening. It's very...

We need to move on now, because we're going from the longest book to the shortest book

on this year's list,

and, indeed, at just 101 pages, the slimmest ever to be short-listed for the Booker prize.

Twice nominated in previous years, Colm Toibin's latest takes us back 2,000 years

and retells the greatest story ever told from a new and controversial angle.

In The Testament Of Mary, he re-imagines the crucifixion of Jesus

from the perspective of his mother Mary.

I suppose that in the images we have of Mary she's meek, she's humble,

she's the meek mother or she's the grieving woman,

but in the New Testament she doesn't speak very much,

so I suppose just simply the idea of having her speak

and also having her speak after the event,

so it's not a commentary on the event, it is somebody traumatised.

We find Mary living out the last years of her life

under the unwelcome supervision of two of her son's followers,

unrelenting in their pursuit of a Gospel-worthy account of the death of her son.

Mary gives to us what she denies her oppressors,

an unflinching testament

of the events leading up to one of the world's most notorious acts of violence.

"I sensed a thirst for blood among the crowds.

"I could see it in people's faces how their jaws were set and their eyes were bright with excitement.

"There was a dark vacancy in the faces of some,

"and they wanted this vacancy filled with cruelty, with pain, and with the sound of someone crying out.

"Only something vicious would satisfy them now once they had been given permission to want it."

I understood that I was playing with fire.

And I think that gave me a sort of energy which I could put into the sentences,

so that in her ways of speaking in the book, in her voice,

there's a tone which is heightened, which is strung out.

"And then time created the man who sat beside me at the wedding feast of Cana,

"the man not heeding me, hearing no-one,

"the man filled with power, a power that seemed to have no memory of years before

"when he needed my breasts for milk,

"my hands to help steady him as he learned to walk,

"or my voice to soothe him to sleep."

Paul, I think even hearing Colm Toibin speak it is utterly shocking, isn't it?

It's fabulous as well, because it has that thing that the longer one we've just talked about doesn't have,

whereas at the end of it I still feel it's resonating and it's carrying on

and I still feel like I'm remembering the dream that's getting more vivid,

whereas, oddly, with the longer one, I'm forgetting the dream.

And so the idea that it might be a short book, it still seemed to have an awful lot of information.

And I loved the approach that was taken. For me this list this year lacked sort of ideas as such,

and at least this was a great idea. This is a great idea, incredibly subversive.

Yes. I mean, it really... you say it resonates,

that's partly, I think, a product of its length or its shortness.

I mean, you can read this comfortably in two hours, and I think that's the way to read it.

And afterwards it's as if you've been steeped in something.

And I think that the length means that it is in some ways not like any other novel,

in that he hasn't... he's taken one thing, one idea and absolutely saturated it.

I mean, I think he's a masterful writer,

but also in a way because of its shortness he hasn't had to confront creating the larger world

that a novel has to create. But he's done what he's done amazingly.

I mean, there are so many different aspects to this book,

but particularly what he deals with was motherhood,

and also the idea that the true Mary is not the Madonna,

the true Mary is the one whose son has moved away from her and that she's got a bit of a problem with.

Absolutely! It is subversive in so many ways,

and I think not enough attention has been paid, in my opinion,

to the fact that this is an absolutely brilliant imagining of a mother's grief

and a mother's suffering... And aloneness. And, you know, from a man.

And we're always giving people a hard time

about whether they can imagine enough from a different person's point of view,

and Toibin does a beautiful job of that here. We've heard about mothers so many times.

Absolutely, absolutely. But what is so great about his vision of Mary

is that this testament is a testament of doubt,

and she's saying, "I don't know why he let his friends convince him he was the Son of God,"

all these misfits who came along, and he got too big, you know, he got bigheaded.

I love that, you know, the idea, I'm just trying to think in the same way,

the idea that the disciples are kind of malingerers, misfits, problematic, you know,

and clearly she's very annoyed presumably with John who's trying to get her

to sign on the dotted line, "These things happened."

I love the fact that she doubts herself the most about her son,

that this myth that will expand over time... She's appalled by it, she's embarrassed by it.

And that's interesting, because I was wondering how I would feel about reading it

if I was more obviously a Catholic or a lapsed Catholic, or if I was invested in it.

The disturbing thing if you're a believer is not the disciples,

but the evangelists who are different

and they're quite sort of minatory characters, they're there,

and they are forging a new... they know what they're doing,

and they are forging a creed and they want to use her.

It's extreme. It could be seen as extremism as well, I read it like that. Absolutely.

But there's also a tremendous bit which really made me think when Lazarus rises from the dead,

"My God! Is he ill!" He's a zombie! He's a zombie! Yeah, it's totally horrifying.

But also the wedding at Cana. She says it was so chaotic with all of the people so excited,

who could tell what was water and what was wine?

So she's doubting all of the miracles, she's saying it's just people getting hysterical,

you know, who are surrounding him.

And you were talking about the idea that he's pulling out one idea, but the command of the language... Yeah!

Well, I agree. I think, you know, of all the writers on the list he is the best writer.

Or he's a writer at a stage in his career when he can really do it.

This comes after two or three really terrific novels.

And I think he's a really great writer.

And therefore it's about content as well in a way that the first one wasn't.

You're coming away with every page being different, whereas in the first one 400 pages tend to be the same.

I don't want to compare them, but it is interesting that there seems to be more in this, more richness

than in all those other hundreds of pages.

Out of this, out of every sentence comes another layer, another revelation.

But I think for the judges to choose this just shows that in their view they believe this to be a novel,

not a novella, not a prose poem... No... It started out as a stage monologue. You have your doubts.

I mean, obviously, the judges chose it because of the quality of the writing,

but I do think the length is a kind of problem for this prize,

because it is as if he has got this fantastic, intense, one, concentrated idea and he's done it,

but I think that a novella, something as short as this is different from a novel,

and hasn't had to make that kind of larger world that a novel has to make.

But I think it's interesting what you say...because we're so aware of this story that's been told so many times,

it comes with itself so much around it, that you feel that it's embedded in such a big thing.

Yes, but he's relying on that. I actually agree with John to a certain extent.

I do think it's perfect as far as it goes, but he could have done 60,000 words instead of 30.

And I wanted more, so why not do more? So what are we talking about, though?

Are we talking about laziness or are we talking about...?

In a sense its intensity is perfect. It started as a monologue.

Well, let's move on, then, from the harrowing testimony of the mother of Jesus

to a teenage diary and a Hello Kitty lunchbox

which finds its way from one side of the Pacific to the other.

The novel by Zen Buddhist priest, writer and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki

crosses continents, straddles decades and tackles themes

from quantum physics to the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction.

A Tale For The Time Being opens with the discovery of a diary

which is washed up on a British Columbia shoreline

after apparently drifting across the Pacific following the 2011 tsunami.

Its author is a mysterious teenager in Tokyo, Nao Yasutani.

"My name is Nao and I'm a time being.

"Do you know what a time being is?

"Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.

"A time being is someone who lives in time and that means you and me

"and every one of us who is or was or ever will be.

"As for me, right now, I'm sitting in a French maid cafe in Akiba Electricity Town,

"listening to a sad chanson that's playing sometime in your past, which is also my present,

"writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future."

The diary is found by Ruth, a novelist, who becomes preoccupied with Nao and what has become of her.

You know, if there's one theme in the book,

it's the theme of interconnectedness.

The characters are connected geographically

by the great oceanic gyres that connect Japan and the Pacific Northwest of Canada,

but the characters are also connected through time as well.

"She inhaled again, steeply this time,

"and then put the book - no, not a schoolgirl's nice pure diary - back on the bedside table,

"still pondering how best to read this improbable text.

"Nao claimed to have written it just for her,

"and while Ruth knew this was absurd, she decided she would go along with the conceit.

"As the girl's reader it was the least she could do."

It's a story about the relationship between a writer and a reader

and the way in which, in a sense, they kind of co-create each other.

As a writer I do my role and then I sort of cast the book out into the world

and hopefully there's be a reader there to pick up the book and read the book.

But of course the book that I write is very different than the book that, for example, you read.

It's a co-creation, it's a collaboration that you and I do together,

even if I don't know who you are.

So this is a book which crosses continents, it's got lots of narratives, it's got dreams,

it's got magic realism, it's got everything. Is it a book that you enjoyed reading?

It's a book I intermittently enjoyed and intermittently I was exasperated by it, I confess.

It's got two main narratives,

and the narrative of Nao the 15-year-old Japanese schoolgirl...

I sort of was a bit suspicious at first, 15-year-old narrator, so a lot of those...

it's a character who's conveniently innocent but almost adult, they're always 15,

but actually I thought that kind of quite well done.

It was the other narrative, the narrative about Ruth and her partner or husband Oliver,

and it's about the novelist, the novelist is called Ruth and she has a partner called Oliver...

It's the antithesis of this idea that writers are always asked, is it autobiographical?

Not only is it autobiographical, same place... Same place... Same job.

I just found it smug, actually. I found that narrative smug.

I mean, they're insufferably right-thinking.

The husband is the biggest know-all I've encountered in fiction recently.

Well, maybe so's her real husband. Well, he probably thinks it's very unfair to him, I don't know.

What did you make of the intertwining of it?

The fact that she's on this mission to find out what's behind what's in this Hello Kitty box.

Well, I find it... This one is a weird combination of the experimental and the whimsical.

And I'm wondering if it would have been better if it had just been Nao, if had just been the Japanese girl.

Yeah. She captured her voice really well, I thought.

I thought there was a better story appearing

than this familiar story that we've heard so many times before,

and ultimately is about a kind of writer's block, I think could have disappeared very easily

without harming the book.

That's actually the thing. There is a kind of sub-genre of books about writer's block

where writers write themselves out of it,

John Barth has done it really well, Philip Roth does it really well,

and she's playing the same kind of metafictional games

where the writer puts themselves front and centre and says, "I've got writer's block. What do I do?"

I think the problem is that what she did was she did write herself into a very good novel

about this girl in Japan and she should have jettisoned the parts

that were actually getting her into it, and not tried to tie them together

which is what she actually tries to do.

In order to bring them together, she actually has recourse to a dream

which I think is a very cheap cop-out.

And if she had done something cleverer in order to bring those stories together,

I might have bought it more. I didn't find those sections as irritating as you did,

I just didn't think she brought them together successfully.

Interestingly, she says that she started to rewrite this after the earthquake and the tsunami,

because she was concentrating on Nao before, the Nao story, sorry,

and then suddenly she felt she had to being herself into it.

And I think you do feel these different parts of it.

It's a book that also has a problem with form in the way we were talking about with the Catton as well.

It's a book that keeps wanting to explode its own form. It uses footnotes, it has appendices,

it can't figure out... What I find interesting about this

is that it's the middle of the road book-club type book that tries to incorporate post-modern techniques

but isn't transcendent enough to really pull them off,

so you're aware almost that they'd like the idea of making these books a little bit more literary

than just good reads, so they go into an area that actually they're not very successful at, for me.

It's kind of literary fiction in a slightly pejorative sense, don't you think?

We were just talking about the idea that you've got to have all these footnotes and appendices

which are meant to sort of... Are they meant to take you away from the story?

Are they meant to make you feel cleverer, or the fact that she's trying to educate you?

Well, I think there is a bit of that,

and under the sort of pretext of kind of post-modern playfulness,

and it's not playful at all, I don't think,

she tells you things, the author's in there telling you things,

and I think a lot of the narrative of Ruth has information in it,

and when it's not conveyed by the irritating husband

it feels as though it's being conveyed by the novelist.

So it's like an academic exercise? Well, no, I think that's not fair.

I think she's trying to make it playful

and I think that she's trying to actually make it...

she's trying to ask questions about the relationship between the author and the character.

How does the author pull up their own character? Where does it come from?

And then what happens when there's this interchange between the reader and the author?

I just don't think she handles it very successfully. It's not natural to her.

If often get the feeling that she was just putting her arm round me, and almost patronising me,

and trying to take me through the book and, "Look what's happening now and this is how clever I'm being!"

rather than itself being something that you disappear into. OK.

Well, we're going to take a break from the Booker for a moment

with the man behind the critically acclaimed Beta Band and the cult King Biscuit Time.

Here's Steve Mason with his new single Fire.

# Won't you let me in your heart?

# Are you in here on your own?

# What can we do just the two?

# Something here from us to you

# We don't like the way you live

# Did you forget how to give?

# All that beauty that you stole

# I know how we find your soul

# Fire!

# Hands up!

# Fire!

# I wouldn't go from here, it's clear!

# Fire!

# I wouldn't go from here, it's clear!

# Yeah, stick him in the fire!

# Is this your first day starts cryin'?

# Carve you up and down with blood

# So much blood in foreign lands

# We scrub the state upon your hand

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Fire!

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Fire!

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Fire!

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Yeah, stick him in the fire!

# Fire!

# Yeah, stick him in the fire!

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Fire!

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Fire!

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Fire!

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Fire!

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Fire!

# Where do we go from here? It's clear!

# Fire!

# Where do we go from here?

# Yeah, stick him in the fire!

# Fire!

# Fire!

# Hands up, yeah! Stick him in the fire! #

Fire from Steve Mason's latest album Monkey Minds In The Devil's Time.

It's released on 4 November and you can hear more from Steve later in the show.

Back to the Booker now.

NoViolet Bulawayo is the first Zimbabwean and the first Black African woman

to be nominated for the Booker Prize.

Her debut novel We Need New Names tells the story of one girl

whose harsh, vibrant childhood in Zimbabwe is interrupted by emigration to America.

"We all turn around and follow Bastard back into the bush,

"the dizzying smell of Lobels bread all around us now..."

We Need New Names is about a young girl named Darling

and her group of friends who are all growing up in a shantytown

named Paradise.

They are trying to be children at a time when the country's falling apart,

so their day-to-day experience is that of struggle,

just trying to survive.

"We are on our way to Budapest:

"Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me.

"We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road,

"even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction,

"even though Mother would kill me dead if she found out; we are just going.

"There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I'd rather die for guavas."

I decided to write from the perspective of a young girl

because I'm interested in giving voice to the voiceless,

and I feel like children are some of the most vulnerable citizens.

Darling and her friends are able in the face of all these difficult challenges to remember to play

and laugh and be hopeful.

When one writes you just hope that you get a reader, an open-minded reader

who will pick up your book and appreciate that they are reading

not always but sometimes about a real place with real people,

so I look at We Need New Names as a text that will help put a face to a story

that people may have heard before.

"Because we were not in our country, we could not use our own languages,

"and so when we spoke our voices came out bruised.

"When we talked our tongues thrashed madly in our mouths, staggered like drunken men.

"Because we were not using our languages,

"we said things we did not mean.

"What we really wanted to say remained folded inside, trapped."

NoViolet Bulawayo has this incredible band of children, a kind of weird and wacky Famous Five.

But these kids are struggling

because they're the children of the people that Mugabe has displaced from their homes. Yeah.

She creates an amazing energetic start to the book, doesn't she?

It's an incredibly bravura opening and it's very funny, it's very moving...

it manages to be charming without ever being twee or being condescending.

There are these children with these names, one is called Godknows as one word,

one is called Bastard, one is called Darling,

and there's this sense that English is being played with

in really...it creates this kind of frisson where the words don't mean quite what they're supposed to mean.

And we had Budapest in that VT, Budapest is a place in Zimbabwe that the children are going to,

and so you keep encountering words that you know in the wrong place,

and it makes it all very fresh and very vivid and brings it really to life.

I think we have another book for me where the first half was far, far better than the second half.

And when she comes to America it really all sort of falls apart. John?

Yeah, I think Sarah's completely right about that.

The first half was terrific, and often really funny. Yeah.

I mean, it's a ten-year-old narrator, and, you know, people try and pull that off quite often,

but she really does,

and it's got, oh, yes, the horrors of life

in the shantytown, but actually the absurdity of it too.

You get the sense these kids are incredibly strong. Incredibly,

and it's got a wonderful picture of...it's got a preacher in it

whose hypocrisy, I mean, Dickens would have been really pleased to have brought out as well as she has,

but then we go to America and things... Fall apart?

Well, they don't fall apart... Become a cliche. Exactly.

It's extraordinary how quickly that happens. But before we get to America,

because I think America is almost like a footnote, bizarrely, in this story,

you have a situation where she does create certain set pieces.

She's got a hilarious section in Zimbabwe where the kids are not stupid,

when the NGOs arrive.

Then she's got a really difficult one, of one of her friends, you know, who is pregnant,

who they try and remove the child... With a coat hanger, it's harrowing. With a coat hanger, it's harrowing.

But you understand that actually this is actually incredibly as it probably happened.

Absolutely. It's an 11-year-old girl who's been impregnated by her grandfather,

and the other children go along to try and solve the problem,

but they don't really understand where the baby came from, they don't know really how to get it out,

and you sit there thinking, are they really going to go through with this?

And they way that she moves back and forth between these scenes of comedy

and these scenes that are really, really terrifying, I think she does it with great delicacy and style.

Is it too episodic, do you think? No, it's not episodic,

but I think that the problems of the trip to America also come

because there's a structural problem about the novel.

She's got this voice, she's absolutely got it,

and then it's as if she's slightly ticking off the things that she wants to put in the novel.

When she goes to America, now we're in America, Paul,

nothing much happens... It's a difficult thing... ..Except she's in a kind of synthetic difficult area

with an aunt and an uncle, and nothing is really made of what happens,

it's a very cliched view in a way. It's a very interesting moment, actually.

You can't deny that there would be a development

and the writer wants to move on,

but it's almost like the development of the writer who's moved to America

to do a certain sort of thing in her life

is absolutely corrupting what it is about her that makes her a special writer.

There's something about America, it's over-familiar, we know those stories,

Darling seems to become someone completely different as well,

she becomes more of a spoiled brat...

There's a danger because in the West we have a sense of the exotic...

Well, I'm thinking at the front there's definitely a theme developing here,

we've seen in three of these books,

where at the beginning we're excited, maybe this is a certain sort of literary exoticism,

a tourism, if you like, we're cruising in something,

that we're very grateful to get this kind of information

and it seems to be beautifully told, as far as we know.

When it goes to the place we're familiar with we suddenly notice there's a lot of cliche,

and we're thinking, "Well, maybe we've been hoodwinked at the beginning,"

so it throws back an interesting shadow on the first thing,

you think, "Well, maybe that wasn't as original and beautiful as we thought."

Towards the end, you get a sense of...there's one really tense moment, I think...

we can't really give away the end, which is a relation backwards to Zimbabwe,

which I thought could have been developed a lot more. Absolutely.

One of the things that happens, without giving away too much,

is that when the narrator moves to America, she leaves behind this little posse

that she's been travelling around with, and we've become invested in them,

we want to know what happens to them and we don't really learn very much about what happens to them.

I won't say more than that. But I think there's an emotional failure there as well.

But I don't think we have been hoodwinked in that first half.

I think it's... The real deal.

This was a winner, going by the first few pages.

Well, the immigrant experience in America, as Paul said,

is also the focus of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland.

Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 short story collection The Interpreter Of Maladies.

With this latest novel, the Bengali-American author

has written a family saga which spans four generations

and explores the tragic fallout of one of the brothers' involvement in revolutionary politics.

"In the papers there were photographs, taken from a distance,

"of those who gathered to hear Sanyal's speech, to give the Red Salute.

"A battle cry declared, a generation transfixed.

"A piece of Calcutta standing still.

"It was a portrait of a city Subhash no longer felt a part of.

"A city on the brink of something; a city he was preparing to leave behind.

"Subhash knew that Udayan had been there.

"He hadn't accompanied him to the rally, nor had Udayan asked him to come.

"In this sense they had already parted."

Inspired by a real-life Naxalite shooting, The Lowland hinges on Udayan's brutal political murder

and the immense upheaval the family must suffer in its wake.

I was interested in both what led to that moment

and what resulted from that moment

for each of the characters

and even beyond the obvious,

even through time in terms of the subsequent generations

and how something like this can have such force,

have such presence, and lives on in some way.

In the novel, we follow Subhash and his brother's young widow Gauri

as each breaks with tradition

and crosses continents to find a fragile sense of themselves elsewhere.

"He told her he knew she still loved Udayan.

"He told her not to think about what people might say, how his parents would react.

"If she went with him to America, he promised her, it would all cease to matter."

I think the book has to do with family, first and foremost,

it's about the effect of political violence on a particular family,

it's about a bond between brothers, it's about marriage,

it's about parenthood...

I think it's about independence in all sorts of ways.

I think this book is less about identity and more about independence

on a variety of levels.

John, do you think that she creates a family dynamic

that is powerful enough for the book to be credible?

She creates a kind of family inheritance which is of a kind of emotional numbness, really,

which I think will make some readers feel a bit let down,

because all the main characters are kind of cauterised in their feelings.

But she does it brilliantly well.

And it has the virtue, I think, of a lot of her short stories, she's a brilliant short-story writer,

where you have to infer what's not stated and which suits very well...

she writes in this incredibly, I think, this almost chaste way.

She doesn't like metaphors, she doesn't like to go lyrical on you,

she's not going to claim that something is more significant than what it is,

and that's how she does it.

And it produces a very kind of melancholy effect,

but I think it also leaves you to wonder whether anybody in this novel has ever had a laugh or whether...

The problem for me, and I think this is a brilliant novel,

but I do think there's a real problem, I feel there's no interior life of the characters.

No, because again it's interesting... technically, it's superb.

But it often seems like she's moving people around, it becomes very clinical,

and again when it started I thought this is interesting,

revolutionary politics, we're in Calcutta, this is exciting!

And the familiar again takes over, we move to America, we're in America, we know this so well in a way,

this kind of story, and for me, coincidentally or not, the book starts to leave behind

the revolutionary element, the Maoist element that I was exited by, and we're into a family saga

that gets weaker and weaker as the book progresses.

It's written with great integrity, unbelievable skill,

but ultimately seems mechanical.

I completely agree with Paul.

My feeling was of these puppets who were just being pushed around on a stage

in order to fulfil certain functions that she wanted them to fulfil.

And, yes, the ideas are there, but even the revolutionary stuff, she's kind of text-dumping,

I thought there was like a Google entry on the Naxalite revolution.

I don't think it's a novel of ideas at all. But there was a hint at the beginning it might be.

Just as a kind of counter example to what you're saying about the puppeteer aspect of it,

actually, I think, a test of her skill as a writer is that whenever there is a kind of crisis episode,

you can't give things away, but there are certain crisis episodes,

a certain confrontation between a mother and a daughter she hasn't seen for a long time,

which you know is going to happen,

an explanation a father has to give to a daughter of something that he's been dreading telling her...

I think they're handled brilliantly well.

Moving on to the other character in the novel which for me seems to be the Lowland, that atmosphere,

she does create the idea that there's more beyond where things happen.

Yeah, I mean, the Lowland is sort of the novel's one metaphor, I guess! Exactly.

She does create a sustaining atmosphere.

The problem was I found the atmosphere so totally suffocating

that I just really couldn't bear to be in it.

Even though I agree about the skill with which she does it,

she's creating an effect that I found so rebarbative that I just couldn't stay there.

The idea again of the immigrant experience, as you say, to Rhode Island...

this is what this Booker short list is about, isn't it? It's fascinating.

And it's always true... It's all about displacement, every book.

But consistently in a way the theme is to America all the time as well. Yeah.

And started really getting me down in a way,

because I'm thinking, you know... "Why don't they come to Britain?"

But in a way it's an imagined...

but it's kind of true in a way, because the America thing is over-familiar,

the Rhode Island thing, the university campus...

again you're representing autobiographically...

The writer's experience seems to be overcoming the imaginative state of the book and it is disappointing.

Well, finally, now the only British writer in the short list, Jim Crace,

has emerged as the bookies' favourite to pick up the Man Booker Prize this year

with what he has reportedly said will be his final novel, Harvest.

Old rural England and members of a small community at harvest time find their way of life under threat

with the arrival of a handful of outsiders.

After centuries of toiling in ridge and furrow,

the village is changed for ever in just seven days.

The story is told from the perspective of one of the inhabitants.

My narrator Walter is very much an outsider.

I think he's an outsider is every respect.

He's moved to the village in order to work for his master but he falls in love with a local girl.

He discovers

this ancient relationship which makes so much sense for all of us,

not just owning fields, but owning a garden.

It's stitched into the English psyche more than anything.

"It did not take many working days before I understood that the land itself, from sod to meadow,

"is inflexible and stern.

"It is impatient, in fact. It cannot wait.

"There's not a season set aside for pondering and reveries.

"It will not let us hesitate or rest;

"it does not wish us to stand back and comment on its comeliness or devise a song for it.

"It has no time to listen to our song."

When things start to go wrong in the village, they start looking for scapegoats.

And even though Walter has been there for many years, he's still not of the soil.

He's still not made from local wood, and therefore they start to pick on him.

I'm not interested in getting the facts right,

I'm interested in telling lies so that I can investigate and look at 21st-century sensibilities.

This is not a novel about the Tudor times, this is not a novel about enclosures,

this is a novel about xenophobia,

and our strange ambivalent relationship towards property and the land.

"'We've ploughed these fields since Adam's time,' they say,

"counting back the granddads on their fingertips.

"They're ancient families, they'll not easily be driven out before the torrents of the law

"to disappear in towns or villages where their names and faces cannot ring a bell,

"robbed of their spirits and their futures, as well as of their fields.

"The people who have bounced between feast and famine all their lives

"are nothing if not tough-minded and hard-nosed.

"A sack of barley is not worth a life, they realise

"as they watch the afternoon sun dip into the latticework of trees."

Well, it's not anchored in time or place, it's anchored in the seasons certainly.

Did you feel a lack of not knowing where you were?

No, I adored that. That liberation was fantastic for me,

because in a list that kind of lacks a sense of not only nowness, really, but also the future,

one of the things I took from this was that it was so isolated from a specific time or place,

it could have been post-apocalyptic, you know, it could have been the future, everything stripped back,

everything was stripped back, so it took on a futuristic kind of quality to me

by being so lacking in specific time and place.

So I adored that and I adored the idea that effectively there were some ideas here.

You could feel something about where we are now that wasn't really just technique,

it was about something that resonated with who we are now,

and the community's breaking down and globalisation, it's like the sheep in the enclosures,

you could say that's Apple and Google, so it did have something about now.

Yes, but what I also thought was lovely was the way he portrayed the land. Yeah.

That language did seem to me to be set somewhere else. It's the language, isn't it?

I mean, I'm not as keen as ideas in novels as Paul is, I can take them or leave them,

but I think what Jim Crace does in this novel, and it's what he does, it's what he always does in a novel,

it's as if he invents a new language for each novel,

a language which...it has to be sort of adequate to a sense of pastness,

but it can't be antique or antiquarian,

and it's really extraordinary how he does it.

He did it brilliantly in a novel called Quarantine about Jesus in the wilderness.

And here he's doing it again. he's quite like William Golding, I think, in that sense...

And that would be his hero. Would it?

I think it would be. Well, I mean, I hope he's complimented by it,

because I think he's up to following Golding, because he does this extraordinary thing

of imagining the past not as understandable, but as strange, as weird,

it needs its own new kind of figurative words.

And weird in the way particularly that religion is dealt with, because there is no church.

I mean, there's a kind of pagan element and there's obviously the idea of witches as well...

And sorcery... ..Which kind of does kind set it apart from what we might think of as being the past

in that time of the Tudors. Absolutely! It is almost...

Without making it sound cute, which it isn't even remotely,

there's a kind of fairytale aspect to this in the proper sense of it,

in a Grimm's dark, gothic, wooded sense that's mythical and fabular...

he's creating a fable here that has great depth and great resonance.

I do think though that there is... I mean, he's making it... It's a seven-day allegory,

things will happen at the end of those seven days,

and I do think that although he thinks that he's not sentimentalising the village

that is going to fall apart because of enclosures, I think he effectively does.

It is a paradise that's going to be lost,

and I would have liked for it to be a little bit less of a paradise

in order for that fable to really gain its resonance,

but that's ultimately... that's a quarrel, but it's so powerful in its effect...

And it was a better than some of the others, the idea of the writer, of the narrator.

The narrator in this book is the lonely writer who is opposing fear and prejudice

through constructing an imaginative landscape.

And what I loved about this book is it really is, because we can't pin it down and say...

it's the imagination, it's what a novel should be, it's creating a whole new place. In Walter Thirsk,

he creates this wonderful character who in the end himself is actually quite a weak person.

I really liked that. He's a coward. He's a coward.

And actually what I thought about that was quite interesting, because that is human nature,

because so many of the villagers were cowards. Mmm. Yeah. Especially when it came to the woman.

But I mean, I think... Dealing with the woman. It's interesting that it's Tudor times, though.

I think, you know, some readers will flinch from the historical unspecificity of it,

because you think what village in any place could ever have been quite like this?

Untouched by Christianity, apparently? Would that have been possible?

Seemingly in a world where outside the village is sort of nothing, you know?

It's a kind of zone where... Nobody ever comes in and nobody ever goes out.

That's what's so wonderful. It's like outside of the book as well,

and it's so stripped back of any references,

we're forced to invent responses, that it's very exciting.

My other quarrel with the book, and I did hugely like it...

You're doing lots of quarrelling with it! I know, I'm sorry.

But there is a story here also about a character called Quill, who is known as Quill,

who comes in and is going to map it,

and Thirsk kind of creates a bond with him.

Something happens to Quill, which I won't give away,

but it raises a question about what happens to him and why it happens, and Crace refuses to answer that.

And I think that that question probably needed to be answered.

But just the other thing I think was wonderful... it's like an oral tradition,

this is the kind of story you could imagine being told round a fire late at night,

and changed with every telling, that it's not absolutely fixed...

And do you think it's really going to be his last novel? I hope not!

Hadn't he said he was going to stop before this one? Before this one. And then the spirit moved him!

I think the spirit might move him again.

It's like the Rolling Stones' farewell tour since 1981. Right. Here we go, then.

This is the point where I'm going to ask you a question.

Two different things...what you think should win and will that be the same as what you think will win?

John? Oh! Me first? Yeah.

Well, I think that the Jim Crace novel stands a very good chance of winning.

And I'd be very happy to... I mean, I don't think it's his best novel, I think he should have won it before,

and I think the other one that might be in the running just for the quality of the writing

is the Colm Toibin, but I think the fact that it is so short will stand in its way.

Sarah? I have to say I'm very close to agreeing, which is... I know you'd want more dissent here!

But no, I agree, I think Toibin has a really good chance of winning unless its brevity works against it,

in which case I think it's going to go to Crace.

For me, the Toibin should win probably.

Well, you know, I'm going to agree to an extent the Crace...

you know, because if these books are like dreams,

this is the one I'm remembering most and getting more and more vivid as time goes by.

I've got an anxious horrible feeling about The Luminaries, funnily enough,

I'm just slightly worried that somehow it's that moment when the book-club kind of book...

Come on! That's doing it a huge disservice! No, it's not! We can't leave it at this.

We should start again... It's a much better book than that! ..with The Luminaries.

I hope the Toibin wins, so there we go.

Next year's going to be all change, because we now know that the Americans are coming!

And we are going to have Americans.

Now, I mean, Philip Hensher, Jeanette Winterson, a lot of people have been writing about this,

but do you think it's a good idea or a bad idea, John?

I think it's a bad idea, basically.

I think the Booker, the Man Booker works really well at the moment.

I think it's done a lot of good.

And I think one of the good things it does is it brings on to the short list and under scrutiny

and to possible popularity, every year, usually, at least a couple of books,

which are never going to get on any more.

It's going to become so crowded the competition that those first-time books and those surprising books

aren't going to get their chance. Two things need to be said here.

Everybody's talking about it as the year the Americans will join,

but it is open now to anybody writing and publishing in English who's also published in the UK.

So Indians will be open for the first time, Israelis...

if you're writing in English and publishing in the UK.

And that's the second point. The Americans have to be published here as well.

It's not any American book. It's a hugely different thing now.

Does that mean there'll be more and more books and someone will do pre-sifting?

The whole thing is, the marathon... you've done it! ..The marathon the Booker judges go through...

No, what they've said is they've set up a kind of series of catch-alls

where they're saying that is not going to be the case,

that every judge will still read every book and that's still going to be the way that it's done,

and that's what they're saying. Different kinds of judges, do you think? American judges?

I would have slimmed it down, really.

One of the things that annoyed me about this particular list

was what we might call the Commonwealth element, to be honest,

because as much as it satisfies a certain sort of middle-brow liberal guilt

about the exile in these kind of books,

I started to miss the North, Scotland, Wales, Ireland... I started to miss things!

I'd go the other way! But the Booker is not just a British prize and never was.

But it was the Commonwealth that took us to America! They kept taking us to America.

It's a literary community that I really think there isn't between the Commonwealth and the United States,

at least not in the same way. We just might as well give it to Pynchon as well. It's ridiculous!

Well, it'll be interesting to see if the first winner is an American. Well, he's eligible!

What do you think will happen to the International Man Booker? Will that just stay the same as it is?

I find that difficult to imagine, actually.

I mean, it's been quite dominated by Americans recently... The last two. The last two.

And the thought now that the Americans aren't going to be on that,

so it really becomes literature in translation, I mean, it's a good...

Maybe the Pulitzer will come here as well! Oh, well... That's not looking likely.

Well, the 2013 Man Booker Prize will be announced on 15 October

and I'll have the first TV interview with the winner on Newsnight that night.

Also on the 15th you can see a Review Show special on BBC 4,

featuring my interview

with the American author Donna Tartt

ahead of her long-awaited third novel The Goldfinch.

Thanks to my guests, John Mullan, Sarah Churchwell and to Paul Morley.

Martha will be here next month

to review November's box of cultural delights,

but we leave you now with more music

from Steve Mason. This is Oh My Lord. Good night.

# Don't know what to feel, my sister

# My child walks, my sister

# Why do I wonder on old dreams

# Why do I mind the old sins?

# A sight for sorrow A mask you borrow

# When you're in, you're out for ever

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# The loss, the pause, my brother

# Should I know where to go, my brother?

# What should I cry for in your life

# Just a boy with a knife in his eye

# You don't see all the loss when he weeps

# I still reach for the sky with a tear in the eye

# And there's a passage through the black

# Is that sunlight through the crack?

# And if I pick up the speed

# I'll make a break for the trees

# A sight for sorrow A mask you borrow

# When you're in, you're out for ever

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# I still reach for the sky with a tear in the eye

# And there's a passage through the black

# Is that sunlight through the crack?

# And if I pick up the speed

# I'll make a break for the trees

# A sight for sorrow A mask you borrow

# When you're in, you're out for ever

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# Oh my Lord, forgive me!

# Oh my Lord, forgive me! #

# Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

Everything to look forward to, on BBC Four.