I am very
pleased that Julian Barnes, one of my favourite writers, has won this year’s Booker. He was the only one
amongst the short-listed whom I had read, and one of only two I had heard of
before the short-list was announced (the other being Carol Birch).
I always
feel somewhat cheated when the Booker short-list is announced, as most of the
short-listed novels have come out only in hard-back editions which I don’t buy
(can’t afford and no space to keep them). The occasional novel which is
available in paperback is usually by a less well-known author and I think to
myself that I’d buy the novel only if it wins the Booker (it usually doesn’t).
It is not a
problem per se. There are so many books which I’d like to read but haven’t that
waiting for several months—as in case of The Finkler’s Question, last
year’s Booker winner, which I read this year, after it came out in
paperback—for the papaerback edition to come out is not a catastrophe. I am a
patient person.
At 150
pages, The Sense of an Ending is a slight book (by volume); but there
are occasions when slim novels have won the award, for example, Penelope
Fitzgerald’s Offshore which may well be the shortest novel to win the Booker
(not her best, though) and Ian McEwen’s Amsterdam (weak story with flawed
ending).
It was
fourth time lucky for Julian Barnes in 2011. For the third time in a row the
Booker has been awarded to an established British writer, and,
like Hilary Mantel (2009 winner) and Howard Jacobson (2010 winner) before him,
Barnes is a worthy winner. (I hope the
next year’s Booker judges will take note of this trend; Martin Amis’s new novel
is coming out next year.)
Below are
five of my favourite Julian Barnes books.
Published
in 1984, this was Barnes's first novel to be shortlisted for the Booker. This is one
of my favourite novels. Its Flaubert obsessed narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite,
is tracking down a stuffed parrot that once sat atop the writing desk of the
great French novelist. Flaubert’s
Parrot is not a tightly plotted novel in that there are many chapters
where Braithwaite (who strikes you as an amusing pedant) pontificates on
Flaubert’s life that has no direct relation to the quest of the stuffed parrot.
Braithwaite has an animus against literary critics whom he dismisses as
professional misinterpreters; yet he remains unaware that what he is doing is
literary criticism. I do not think that Flaubert’s Parrot is a post-modern
novel, but it certainly has metafictional elements. The fictional element is
Braithwaite’s quest for the eponymous parrot, but Barnes uses Flaubert’s life
as a springboard to launch into a treatise on art and reality that is embedded
within the novel. It is a clever novel, without being self-conscious about it (unlike many of Iris Murdoch’s novels, which I don’t find clever at all despite their pretensions) and carries its intellectual weight, as it
were, effortlessly.
This novel
came out in 1991. It is a black comedy involving a love triangle involving, as
love triangles do, two men and a woman. The novel is painstakingly schematised
and the shifting angles of the love triangles are very deliberate; but the
story is told with great brio and it sucks you in. The novel bursts with witty
remarks and observations. I think I first came across the term nicklef**ker in
this novel: it describe a person who is reluctant to spend money.
This novel
came out in 2001 and tells the story of Stuart, Oliver and Gillian whom we
first meet in Talking It Over ten years on. You can call it a sequel. I read
the two books in the reverse order. Barnes’s essayist inclinations (very
evident in Flaubert’s Parrot) are reined in here, and the novel is much
darker, sourer, than Talking It Over. The psychological
evolutions of its characters (i.e. if you have read the two books in the order
in which they came out, and in quick succession, so that you remembered the
first novel) is a bit shaky; but the novel is like a breeze, and even funnier
than its predecessor.
This novel
has some superficial similarities to Flaubert’s Parrot, but is very
different in many other respects. Like Flaubert’s Parrot, the novel has a
real-life person at its centre: Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock
Holmes (the Arthur in the title). However (unlike Flaubert’s Parrot) there
was no metafictional element. Barnes employs historical realism as he tells the
story—without any deviation from the plot and does not meander into post-modern
narrative—of a relatively less known episode in the life of the great writer
when he took up cudgels on behalf of George Edalji (the George in the title)
and successfully reversed a miscarriage of justice. The novel suffered at times
(especially in the second half) from information overload about Edwardian
England, but on the whole it worked for me. Arthur and George was
shortlisted for the Booker in 2005, but lost out to John Banville’s The Sea, which I have reviewed on this blog.
This is the
only non-fiction book of Barnes, his musing on mortality, I have read. I read it last year and enjoyed it
a lot. I have reviewed it on this blog.
I shall
read The Sense of an Ending—I’d have read it even if it hadn’t won the Booker.
Will I read any of the other short-listed novels? Two seem interesting. A.D.
Miller’s Snowdrops which is publicised as a riveting psychological drama
that unfolds over the course of one Moscow winter’. I heard A.D. Miller
(Snowdrops is his first novel) speak about it on Radio 4 last week. Snowdrops
apparently is English translation of the Russian slang for corpses buried under
snow. From what I heard, Snowdrops probably does not project the Russian
society in favourable light. The other novel that seems interesting is Canadian
author Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues which is about
black Jazz musicians in Berlin at the outbreak of the Second World War. That
sounds promising. (The poor lady came all the way from the Canadian Prairie,
with her eight-weeks-old child for the award ceremony, only to be disappointed.
Surely she deserves a consolation prize of some sort for her efforts.)
I do not
expect The Sense of an Ending to come out before next year. While I wait for the the paperback edition to come out I shall read England England, the
third of Barnes’s novels to have been short-listed for the Booker (before he won it with his fourth) and which I
have in my collection for a while but haven’t got round to read it.
