Booker Longlist #5: The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

Continuing the Booker journey, it is becoming clearer to me that this is one of the strongest longlists in years. Each new book confirms that the chosen thirteen for the most part are stellar examples of literary fiction, works that explore the unexplored or tell similar stories that delve into different themes. And while most don't seem to over experiments in form or structure, the writing itself has been breathtaking at times.

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste is no exception. Taking place during the Italian invasion and occupation of Ethiopia in the 1930s, Mengiste crafts a beautifully written story that recentres the forces of Ethiopian resistance to include the role and voices of women soldiers, who played a vital role in pushing back against and eventually defeating the Italian invasion. Although the Shadow King gives important voice to the Ethopian emperor, Haile Selassie, and his loyal officer, Kidane, the most significant protagonists are the women, Aster (Kidane's wife) and Hirut (their maid), who are eager to take up arms and support the anti-Italian forces beyond traditional roles of nursing the wounded men. It is Hirut who comes up with the ingenious plan of disguising a peasant as the Emperor (the real one exiled in England) to help mobilize Ethiopian forces against the occupying army, whose willingness to commit war crimes had worked to demoralize resistance. 

On a purely sentence level, The Shadow King may be the most beautifully crafted work on the longlist (so far) and that is saying a lot, especially with the weight of Hilary Mantel's prose right there. There were moments were I was left breathless with the power of the imagery and feeling expressed in Mengiste's words. Plotted elegantly, The Shadow King does not linger in its prose, even though it could. Instead, it moves quickly, back and forth between the protagonists, each plotting key strategic decisions in the battle between Italian imperial forces and the resistance to its colonial intentions. If there was one fault in this book, however, it is the number of perspectives. Besides Aster and Hirut, significant amount of time is spent with Kidane, Selassie, the Italian commander Carlo Fucelli and his Jewish photographer (Ettore, whose backstory in itself could have been a novel). This broadened the scope of the events, but also lost some focus for the larger goals Mengiste is trying to accomplish.

Despite this, however, this is one of the more important novels on the longlist. It provides a unique perspective to historic events we don't know enough about. Add to this the incredible level of writing, I feel that The Shadow King may very well be one of the favourites to take the prize. 

Booker Longlist #4: The New Wilderness by Diane Cook

I am not the only avid reader that has become somewhat exhausted with the genre of dystopian fiction. There are still really thoughtful and unique contributions to that kind of literature, but the prospect of climate catastrophe and inchoate fascism at the doorstep makes reading about the end game of our trajectory less appealing. 

Yet with the Booker Prize longlisting the debut novel of Diane Cook, The New Wilderness, I was compelled to throw myself into the thick of a world, not that different than ours, imperiled and expiring. It was a bit of a rough start, a slow introduction to a group of pioneers of sorts choosing to leave the growing poisonous cities to fine requiem in the midst of a wild, unpopulated small tract of land. Modern amenities useless, the small community quickly adapted to past ways of survival, resorting to hunting without guns, foraging without agriculture, nomadic instead of stable. Although we had not arrived here by way of natural disaster or plague, the setting still felt somewhat derivative to the likes of Station Eleven, with Emily St. John Mandel ironically blurbing the book. 

But there is a shift at some point. Without giving away spoilers, Cook decides to dive deeply into the idea of motherhood and its significance in a world where familial relations are loose or crumbling. The two central characters, Bea and Agnes, mother and daughter, are the perspectives that shape our understanding in this world, and while survival is an ever present constant, it is the relationship they have with one another and their feelings about being mother and daughter that shape their desires and actions. 

There are bumpy moments at the beginning, I was not immediately captured by the voice of Bea, who provides the initial eyes into this world. But as I slowly grew accustomed to the pacing and plotting and the prose that felt accessible but definitely not sparse or pedestrian, I became entranced by the questions Cook is trying to grapple with. How would familial bonds, that appear so universal as motherhood, react to a world where the threads of those bonds grew weak and challenged by other loyalities, other relationships that became more important. How would those still placing meaning to familial bonds react to the changes to these social relationships that no longer carry the same importance? How would ideas and concepts of motherhood transform as the basic structures of society broke down?

I truly appreciate when fiction becomes a tool to explore larger questions of the human experience and although it doesn't always work in other books, The New Wilderness manages to pull it off. It is an engrossing read, beautifully written, well plotted, and with this huge injection of thematic considerations that don't feel forced. 

A bit of an update of my Booker quest. I have finished (or abandoned) two others: How Much of These Hills is Gold (very good) and The Mournable Body (less good), so I have read 7 in total. It's a very strong list and I have managed to really like a couple of books others appear to have mixed feelings about (this one and Such a Fun Age). I am on schedule to finish the list before the shortlist is announced, which is pretty awesome!

Booker Longlist #3: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Sometimes it is best to have low expectations for a book so that when you get to it you can be

pleasantly surprised. That was definitely the case with my experience reading Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, a book that has been, in my opinion, unfairly maligned for daring to be longlisted for the Booker Prize. A more commercial and straightforward novel, championed by the likes of Reese Witherspoon, many were gobsmacked why a book with such pedestrian prose, a beach read of sorts, could supplant the likes of Hamnet or Utopian Avenue and compete for an award known for embracing experimental and edgy works of fiction.

Such A Fun Age begins with an upsetting encounter. Our central protagonist, a twenty-five-year-old African American woman, Emira, has taken a child she babysits to a local grocery store. While there, she is accused by another customer and security guard of kidnapping the child and is forced to call the parents to recuse herself from the situation. So begins a captivating story that jumps back and forth between Emira and the child’s white mother, Alix. The latter is eager to make things right after the encounter, embracing Emira in often cringy, protective and patronizing ways. Emira, on the other hand, focuses on navigating the various white-spaces that make up her life, always figuring out how to respond to the white characters in those spaces who make assumptions about who she is and what she wants. Although Alix’s awkward attempts to befriend Emira beyond the employment relationship remain uncomfortable, they are totally thrown off when a common person in their lives means that past secrets of Alix’s past threaten to undermine the image she has created as a progressive liberal professional.

Although Such a Fun Age is an unlikely choice to be longlisted for the Booker and is unlikely to win, it nonetheless impressed me, both with how it dealt with timely and relevant issues (maybe the most zeitgisty book of the longlist) and how captivating it was to read (or in this case I listened to the excellent audiobook). It certainly is a more accessible commercial novel. The prose is breezy in a summer beach read kind of way, but it does not stop Reid from taking on important themes about the African American experience.

The book was released on the last day of 2019, before George Floyd, before the term “Karen” became ubiquitous, and before American society and beyond began the American self-reflection about how white privilege and racism play themselves out in the experiences of ordinary people. In this sense, Such A Fun Age accidently feels incredibly on the nose for what’s going on in the United States right now, but it also speaks to the reality of African American experiences navigating “white spaces” that is more than just a 2020 phenomena.

Reid’s debut novel may not do everything perfectly, but for me it has captured this experience in profound ways, giving us a relatively banal, ordinary, likeable protagonist who must every day perform her acceptable “Blackness” in these white spaces, who must internally process but externally ignore minor and major mircoraggressions that her white employer and boyfriend don’t even recognize as problematic, who must choose whether to affirm her agency or not, knowing that doing so carries risks and repercussions that the white characters will never understand.

Whether this book is everyone’s cup of tea (clearly it’s not), I’m personally happy it made the longlist. It is a book of the moment, an important book, a book that has been and will be widely read. Looking forward to having deeper conversations in the next two months about the merits of the pages Reid has created.

Booker Prize Longlist: #2: Apeirogon by Colum McCann

So I will once again try to read the entire Booker Prize longlist that was released last year. I had already read Hilary Mantel's massive tome THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT, and have followed this up with Colum McCann's novel APEIROGON, which provides an intimate account of two real life protagonists, an Israeli and Palestinian, who both have lost their daugthers to the conflict and have taken their sadness into the peace movement. Here are my thoughts.

Despite offering a formally balanced account of the Middle East conflict, focusing on the tragic stories of two fathers, one Palestinian (Bassam) and one Israeli (Rami), each having lost a daughter in the conflict, Colum McCann’s celebrated APEIROGON minces no words that the ultimate culprit, the ultimate villain in his story, is the Occupation of Palestinian lands by Israeli forces. McCann doesn’t hammer us over the head with this point, but rather lets his protagonists get us there, who repeatedly recall every detail that surrounded the deaths of their children, to the point of forensic precision, a way for them to understand what mechanically has happened to their child so that they can begin to grapple with the why. Bassam and Rami, who could easily have descended into unfettered anger and desire for vengeance, instead become voices for peace, working together to tell their stories both inside their borders and internationally, exposing the humiliation and brutality associated with occupation and that in the end there is no peace and security that comes out of this, only victimhood across both peoples.

There is no question that McCann is a wonderful writer and the story he tells in 1000 chapters (many just a sentence long, some a paragraph, some longer) is a glimpse into the conflict that may reach audiences McCann can access and others cannot. My issues with this book, however, are not in quality as much as what it represents. Despite the occasional flourishes of flowery prose, it reads like narrative non fiction, almost journalistic in quality, and as such as a work of fiction it worked less well for me, lacked the magic that fiction can create.

Before delving into that, I do want to grapple with some other issues that others have brought up. 

The first is the issue of cultural appropriation and others have sought to call McCann out for writing a story that is others to tell. This issue has been much debated in literary circles, especially as communities who have had their stories told to them have challenged who is constructing the narratives of their histories, who is exposing their intimacies. These concerns are legitimate and I don’t believe that dismissing it with the quip “people can write whatever they want” has merits, since having McCann write this story means that he does take a spot away from another author. A publisher could choose to publish a story of a less known Palestinian author or a well established commodity like McCann and they are likely to choose the latter for commercial reasons. That said, I’m not opposed to authors telling other’s stories, the question is always whether they do their homework, are sensitive to their perspective as an outsider, and don’t resort to stereotypes. APEIROGON is definitely no AMERICAN DIRT in this respect. McCann elevates the real voices of Bassam and Rami, he relies heavily on testimonies and researched texts. It’s a thoughtful and respectful telling of others stories and as such this would not be a criticism I have of the book. That said, we should not lose sight of the larger publishing implications of having McCann tell this story rather than someone who may have more intimate connection to the subject matter but will never find a publisher to tell their story.

The second issue, which is the huge elephant in the room, is the accusation of sexual misconduct that has bee levelled toward McCann. Roxanne Gay and others have brought this up on twitter and it’s a charge that should not be treated lightly. This is an accusation of course, not proven, and whether it should play any role in how we appreciate art is heavily debated. I’m personally done with the act of separating artists and art though. Fiction is supposed to, among other things, promote empathy and if you go out and behave in ways that are antithetical to empathy, then yes it will colour my view of the text as a reader. I found out of the accusations just as I began the book, and admittedly it did leave a sour taste in my mouth. That may not be fair to the novel, but it is what it is. 

Despite this, I did manage to appreciate the text and it was moving. However, I am still not convinced this is a work of fiction or if there are moments of fiction, those are considerably weaker and persuasive than the more fact based accounts of Bassam and Rami’s story. I admittedly listened to the audiobook (narrated very well by McCann), which meant that I could not see the text and this may have impacted how I interpreted it.  From the beginning McCann acknowledges that this story was largely based on accounts provided by Bassam and Rami and in fact the middle section are direct transcripts of their stories. McCann insists that this is the base but built upon it is his fiction. I found his fiction hard to find and when it emerged it was not the least compelling part of the book. Most of the text appears to be accounts of the protagonists’ life experiences and then the days and weeks surrounding the deaths of their daughters (which would have been directly from the protagonists accounts). Interspersed are factoids about various things (the history of explosives, the history of rubber bullets and tear gas, the history of Israel’s creation) that read as encyclopedic entries rather than accounts through McCann’s voice. There are occasional philosophical ruminations but again, is this fiction? McCann’s decision to structure his book in these very short chapters also means that he never lets his own prose get much momentum, and when it does it quickly comes to an end, cut off by another factoid or account of Bassam and Rami. In the end, I found the most compelling writing to be the non-fiction bits and was annoyed whenever McCann interrupted it with his own voice, his own efforts to insert his fiction. 

If this had sold itself as a work of narrative non-fiction the rating would have been higher (a 4 or 4.5) but it insists it is a work of fiction and as such I judge it as that and it frankly does not work as well as a novel. It never had the magic that we get from fiction, the poetry, the enveloping prose that lets us examine the truths of the human experience and not just facts. APEIROGON, unfortunately, is a greatly flawed novel because it failed to produce that magic.