The Booker longlist, announced just over a month ago, was greeted with a strange mixture of delighted surprise and disdain. The response suggested that the Booker Prize had been calcified into another form of celebrity endorsement, of already famous writers enjoying another round of industry backslaps. But the Booker has often shortlisted and awarded unanticipated writers, including the likes of Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, to name the most recent Indian winners. Not to forget Arundhati Roy in 1997.
Still, this year’s longlist is especially rich in new names and largely ignored points of view. Those who criticise this diversity as a nod to political correctness and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement are rehashing an old and stupid argument that dogs affirmative action and reservation policies around the world. When the shortlist is announced, on September 15, four novels by Black writers, from Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and the US, could deservedly take their place alongside more established names like Hilary Mantel and Colum McCann.
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body, the sequel to her 1988 novel Nervous Conditions, ought to make the shortlist. It’s a horror story, an almost-allegory about the betrayal of a promise, about a woman traumatised by what has become of her country and her own life, “… you were not this person you have become. When and how did it happen?” Maaza Mengiste, too, writes about the African woman in The Shadow King, in her case a maid who becomes a warrior in the second Italo-Ethiopian war, a fantastic story about the women who fight both alongside men and against their control. Male sexual violence and control are also major themes in Brandon Taylor’s lambent debut Real Life, about a gay, black postgraduate scientist in an anonymous Midwestern college town. The casual racism the protagonist must endure from his liberal, enlightened White colleagues is a source of both comedy and despair and, as with Dangarembga’s overeducated protagonist, violent tragedy. Liberal racism is employed to lighter, more acerbic ends in Kiley Reid’s debut Such a Fun Age.
This is a Booker longlist that has been described in the British press as tendentious, but it is, mostly, a superb selection of profound, ‘provocative explorations of sex, violence, class, race, colonialism and anthropocene dystopia’. If Mantel must win an unprecedented hat-trick of Bookers for her Cromwell trilogy, perhaps, like last year, the award will be shared.
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