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!