International range … longlisted authors (from left) Arundhati Roy, Paul Auster and Zadie Smith. Composite: Chandni Ghosh / Getty / Dominique Nabokov

Man Booker prize 2017 longlist led by Arundhati Roy's return to fiction

Twenty years after her first novel took the same award, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness leads a field of 13, ranging from established stars to newcomers

Alison Flood

Thu 27 July 2017

Twenty years after Arundhati Roy won the Man Booker prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things, the Indian author has been longlisted for the £50,000 award for her second, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

On a longlist thronged with literary titans, whose combined trophy cabinet would include the Pulitzer, the Costa, the Baileys, the Folio, the Impac and the Goldsmiths prizes, Roy – the only author to have won the Booker before – is listed for her novel about an Indian transgender woman, which judges called a “rich and vital book”. Speaking about why it took her two decades to produce a second novel, Roy told the Guardian earlier this year that “fiction just takes its time. It’s no hurry. I can’t write it faster or slower than I have; it’s like you’re a sedimentary rock that’s just gathering all these layers, and swimming around.”

The Man Booker judging panel, picking from more than 150 titles, also went for four writers who have been shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious literary prize before but not won it. Ali Smith was chosen for the “humane, zany, delightful, optimistic” post-EU referendum novel Autumn; Zadie Smith was picked for her story of the friendship and rivalry between two London girls who meet at a dance class, Swing Time; Sebastian Barry is in the running with Days Without End, about an Irish man who migrates to the US in the lead-up to the civil war; and Mohsin Hamid for Exit West, a love story set in a world where refugees use wormholes to travel from city to city.

The Booker was opened up to US authors in 2014, with Paul Beatty the first American author to win, for The Sellout last year. This year, three of the biggest names in US letters are competing for the prize: Paul Auster with 4321, which explores one man’s four simultaneous lives and was deemed “magisterial” by the judges; George Saunders, a short-story writer whose first novel Lincoln in the Bardo follows Abraham Lincoln’s visits to the graveyard where his 11-year-old son has been laid to rest in a crypt; and Colson Whitehead for his fantastical novel The Underground Railroad, about a female slave escaping from a Georgia cotton plantation, which has already won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for fiction in the US.

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 Yet another accolade ... Colson Whitehead. Photograph: Dorothy Hong/Koboy

“Obviously it has been very controversial, opening it up to the US,” said chair of judges Baroness Lola Young. “Before the Americans were included, I personally felt it did seem quite strange, to say it was for any book written in English from the UK, or the Commonwealth, and Ireland, and Zimbabwe – it was a slightly odd configuration. So [including America] seemed like a logical step and I don’t think readers, writers and publishers should feel too nervous.” This year, added Young, around a third of submissions were by American writers – slightly down on last year.

Saunders, Whitehead and Auster will be competing with two new names: 29-year-old Fiona Mozley, from the UK, and 38-year-old American Emily Fridlund, both picked for their debut novels, Elmet and History of Wolves respectively. They are joined by the Impac Dublin award-winning author Jon McGregor and his novel Reservoir 13, about the life of a Peak District village after a 13-year-old girl goes missing on holiday, and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, a modern retelling of Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone that opens in an interrogation room in Heathrow airport.

The longlist is completed with Irish writer Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, a single-sentence novel that won him the Goldsmiths prize last year. First published in 2016 by tiny Irish publisher Tramp Press, McCormack’s novel was ineligible for last year’s Booker because Tramp is not based in the UK. After being picked up by Canongate, Solar Bones was made eligible for the award.

With a split of four UK, four US, two Irish, two UK-Pakistani and one Indian writer; seven men to six women; three debuts; and three novels from independent presses, chair of judges Baroness Lola Young insisted that only when the judges surveyed the 13 remaining contenders that they realised the diversity of their list.

“The longlist showcases a diverse spectrum – not only of voices and literary styles but of protagonists too, in their culture, age and gender. Nevertheless we found there was a spirit common to all these novels: though their subject matter might be turbulent, their power and range were life-affirming – a tonic for our times,” said Young. “Together their authors – both recognised and new – explore an array of literary forms and techniques, from those working in a traditional vein to those who aim to move the walls of fiction.”

With 144 novels submitted for the prize, and 10 books called in by the judges, the selection of Young and her fellow judges literary critic Lila Azam Zanganeh, author Sarah Hall, artist Tom Phillips and travel writer Colin Thubron overlooked new novels by names including former Booker winners Salman Rushdie and Roddy Doyle.

“It’s always a struggle [rejecting titles] because one is very aware of the energy and commitment it takes to produce something. You have to bear that in mind,” said Young. “Having said that, I wouldn’t say we found it incredibly difficult, in terms of having lots of arguments – there was a fair amount of consensus.”

Young and her fellow judges will now reread the longlist of 13 titles to come up with a shortlist of six, which will be announced on 13 September. The winner will be unveiled on 17 October, to join a roster of winners dating back to 1969, including Hilary Mantel, Iris Murdoch and Ian McEwan. Last year’s winner, The Sellout, has now sold more than 360,000 physical copies, with sales in the week after the prize announcement jumping by 658%.

The 2017 Man Booker prize longlist

4321 by Paul Auster (Faber & Faber)

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Books)

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Canongate)

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (4th Estate, HarperCollins)

Elmet by Fiona Mozley (JM Originals, John Murray)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Bloomsbury)

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury)

Autumn by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Fleet, Little, Brown)

THE GUARDIAN

Daniel Craig signs up for Bond 25 as Christopher Nolan admits to talks with producers

Daniel Craig in Spectre

Daniel Craig signs up for Bond 25 as Christopher Nolan admits to talks with producers

Daniel Craig in Spectre

•  Telegraph Reporters 

10 JULY 2017 • 8:48AM

While Daniel Craig still has one Bond film left of his five-movie contract, the question of whether he will return to the role ever since the actor voiced his disdain for playing 007 during a wearying run of press junkets around the release of Spectre in 2015. 

But the latest is that Craig will return, according to The Mirror. Reportedly, the actor, who famously said he would "rather slash [his] wrists" than return to the role has agreed to don the spy suit once more, after hearing about the galaxy of stars who were ready to replace him.

Idris Elba, James Norton, Aidan Turner and Tom Hardy are among those who have been tipped for the role, although nearly all of them have denied any genuine involvement with the forthcoming Bond film. 

Bookies suspended betting on Taboo star Tom Hardy being the next Bond CREDIT:  ROBERT VIGLASKY

Craig has been at the centre of the franchise's most lucrative films to date: Skyfall grossed $1.1 billion at the international box office, making it the highest-ever grossing film for Sony Pictures and the second highest-earning of 2012. Spectre, the 2015 follow-up, is the fourth biggest earner in the franchise's 53-year-history after Thunderball (1965) and Goldfinger (1964) with inflation. 

The Mirror also reports that producer Barbara Broccoli is attempting to secure Adele, who won the franchise its first Oscar with her theme for Skyfall, to return for the 25th film. Broccoli is said to be "talking the singer round".

But the Broccolis are also looking for new talent to bring a new twist to the formula. Academy Award-nominated director Christopher Nolanhas said that he's been speaking to producers, but would want to wait until the franchise "needed" him before stepping into Skyfall and Spectre director's Sam Mendes' shoes. 

Nolan told Playboy:

I've spoken to the producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson over the years. I deeply love the character, and I'm always excited to see what they do with it. Maybe one day that would work out. You'd have to be needed, if you know what I mean. It has to need reinvention; it has to need you. And they're getting along very well.

Reports suggest that Bond 25 will start filming next year, with a potential release at the end of 2018.

THE TELEGRAPH

John Gardner’s killer sentence

April 22, 2012 | 5 Comments

I was reading the late novelist’s short story “Redemption,” based on the accidental death of his younger brother in a horrifying farming accident, and found its sentences beautifully crafted. John Gardner, at eleven, was driving a tractor when his brother fell under its towed cultipacker, a pair of giant rolling pins for mashing the clods in harrowed soil that weighed two tons. In the story, grief almost destroys the father, like Gardner’s father a dairyman, orator, and lay preacher; the surviving brother is tortured almost to madness by guilt.

This sentence is about the wife and mother—Gardner’s was an English teacher:

Because she had, at thirty-four, considerable strength of character—except that, these days, she was always eating—and because, also, she was a woman of strong religious faith, a woman who, in her years of church work and teaching at the high school, had made scores of close, for the most part equally religious, friends, with whom she regularly corresponded, her letters, then theirs, half filling the mailbox at the foot of the hill and cluttering every table, desk, and niche in the large old house—friends who now frequently visited or phoned—she was able to move step by step past disaster and in the end keep her family from wreck.

That’s 112 words. Virginia Woolf wrote longer ones, 140 words and more, but what Gardener kept aloft—the construction of his sentence and its clarity and beauty—and those double parenthetical dashes—amaze me. ‘‘Redemption” was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1977, and Gardner later included it in his collection The Art of Living in 1981; the complete story is available on line.

There’s a famous quote by Gardner that seems to apply to this story:

By the time you’ve run your mind through it a hundred times, relentlessly worked out every tic of terror, it’s lost its power over you . . . [Soon it’s] a story on a page or, more precisely, everybody’s story on a page.

In the 1970s his novel The Sunlight Dialogues was everywhere I looked, but I didn’t read it, nor have I read what’s considered his masterpiece, the novel Grendel. I did enjoy as they appeared his books on writing—On Moral Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist, and The Art of Fiction—and later read two novels I much admired, October Light and Mickelsson’s Ghosts.

RICHARD GILBERT

Richard Ford / The long & short of sentences

The long & short of sentences

June 28, 2017 

[Richard Ford stands between his loving parents.]

Ford’s spare, rhythmic style; Doyle’s long, aural ramblers.

Between Them: Remembering My Parents by Richard Ford. Harper, 173 pp. 

Richard Ford’s new memoir, a short book made of two long essays, is a vocal performance. And he’s in good voice. Forget scenes: he’s telling. The New York Times Book Review said Ford’s prose style in his novel Canada (which I reviewed here) is “so accomplished it is tempting to read each sentence two or three times before being pulled to the next.” The same applies in Between Them: Remembering My Parents, though it’s Ford’s rhythms—how his sentences work together—rather than lone sentences that please you and lure you onward.

Here’s an early characterization of his father that slides into his mother:

His large malleable, fleshy face was given to smiling. His first face was always the smiling one. The long Irish lip. The transparent blue eyes—my eyes. My mother must’ve noticed this when she met him—wherever she did. In Hot Springs or Little Rock, sometime before 1928. Noticed this and liked what she saw. A man who liked to be happy. She had never been exactly happy—only inexactly, with the nuns who taught her at St. Anne’s in Fort Smith, where her mother had put her to keep her out of the way.

What various vocal rhythms here. Take just the first four sentences: a passive sentence—Daddy didn’t smile: his face itself was “given to” that act—followed by a great turn of phrase about that quality, his smiling nature; then a fragment; then another fragment—with a dash! More fragments follow. Their colloquial snap. Then, this passage about his father, in the essay about his father, pivots into his mother’s dire childhood. That’s a much longer sentence, with a kick at the end, though it relies on what’s come before. Relies on how Ford has set us up.

Ford seems ambivalent about the semicolon, using only a few in his new memoir, but plenty of dashes, short sentences, and sentence fragments. His style is undergirded by and reflects his forthrightly imaginative approach to his parents. Like they’re two of his fictional characters he’s made up. So he writes confidently, almost over-confidently. As in that great, cheeky (borderline smarmy) “only inexactly” line about his mother’s happiness. But we see in his judgments and generalizations the same confidence (and speculation and limits) we possess in musing upon our own ordinary yet mysterious parents.

[Richard Ford]

He’s skating beautifully for us, in the southern Scots-Irish rhetorical tradition, on thin ice. Take his parents’ early days together. Sprung from loose-limbed, garrulous, backwoods clans—with stomping grounds and boon companions, and surely also with fresh collards and raw elbows—they drank companionably, and sometimes to excess, and in those sepia honeymoon years they “roistered.” His father settled into a bland career as a traveling starch salesman, and his mother accompanied his excursions across the South, until Richard came along.

You keep opening Between Them for their boy’s vocal performance. You can feel Ford’s implicit wink at us as he conjures his parents. His manifest love is how he escapes sentimentality in asking us to share simple affection for them. These ordinary forgettable people from Arkansas, who landed in Jackson, Mississippi, left no trace aside from their gifted only child. And as he talks them to life, rather than dramatizes their narrative arc—well, he does, inexactly—they melt away when you shut the book.

•

[Brian Doyle on his home turf at the University of Portland.]

Rhetorical & other reasons for Brian Doyle’s long sentences.

You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

—Brian Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras,” The American Scholar

Brian Doyle was a prolific writer, of novels and narrative nonfiction, and a master of the short, tight essay made of long, loose sentences. His shortest essays verge on, or become, poetry. A devout Catholic, he saw life suffused by love. He took rapture in the ordinary, which he showed is extraordinary. He wrote the best essay about the 9/11 attacks, “Leap,” only 572 words. He died at the end of May of a brain tumor, aged 60. Early last week, I came across his essay “His Last Game,” reprinted by Notre Dame Magazine, and bookmarked it. Only 1,184 words, it’s about an outing with his older brother, who was dying of cancer, in 2012.

It feels almost wrong to analyze some of his essays rhetorically, since they’re about what’s sacred. But such study leads to imitation, and that’s what makes writers, even before they know they’re doing that lowly, necessary act, so that, when the greatest joy blesses them or the hardest fate befalls them, they can sing truthfully in their own voices. Craft is the necessary portal to make what’s called art from experience.

In the case of “His Last Game,” Doyle makes long, loose, plain, rambling sentences that put hard emphasis on conjunctions, which further imparts movement. He and his brother are in a single unfolding scene, driving around during an ordinary day. Which we see isn’t ordinary at all—the brother is sick. Very sick. Maybe he’s not going to make it. And Doyle’s looking at that, with his brother looking at it—their conversation and what they see is all about that, sometimes overtly but mostly between the lines. Enough for us to get and to feel all the implications.

Here’s the opening in paragraph in which Doyle plants his brother’s refrain: mock concern over remembering to pick up his medication, at this point pointless:

We were supposed to be driving to the pharmacy for his prescriptions, but he said just drive around for a while, my prescriptions aren’t going anywhere without me, so we just drove around. We drove around the edges of the college where he had worked and we saw a blue heron in a field of stubble, which is not something you see every day, and we stopped for a while to see if the heron was fishing for mice or snakes, on which we bet a dollar, me taking mice and him taking snakes, but the heron glared at us and refused to work under scrutiny, so we drove on. We drove through the arboretum checking on the groves of ash and oak and willow trees, which were still where they were last time we looked, and then we checked on the wood duck boxes in the pond, which still seemed sturdy and did not feature ravenous weasels that we noticed, and then we saw a kestrel hanging in the crisp air like a tiny helicopter, but as soon as we bet mouse or snake the kestrel vanished, probably for religious reasons, said my brother, probably a lot of kestrels are adamant that gambling is immoral, but we are just not as informed as we should be about kestrels.

[One of his many books.]

When an “unapologetic Catholic” blasted Portland, the magazine Doyle edited for Catholic Portland University, for covering the marriage of two men, Doyle replied that Catholics are “called to compassion, not to judgment.” Doyle’s spiritual outlook seemed inextricable from his stance as a writer—one who sees and weighs—and his response to life urged him to make his sentences in the first place. In other words, his inner vision determined what he looked at, and hence wrote about, and that ethos also fueled his need for expression. You can’t easily imitate such aware mental or emotional states, but you can aspire to them. You can earn them. And, as a bonus, that artist’s job is simply a human task.

Doyle also advised the University of Portland’s student journalists at The Beacon, their newspaper, and, upon his passing, its editor Rachel Rippetoe used a run-on sentence to make her own point about his animus toward periods—an existential and spiritual one: “Brian had a contentious relationship with punctuation. He had a special distaste for periods and the way they interrupt thoughts needlessly and arbitrarily, he said they give a sense of absolutism to an indefinite world.” Doyle told Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2015, “I get teased a lot for my style. People are saying, ‘Wow, a sentence will start on Tuesday and it doesn’t end ’til Friday.’ But I want to write like people talk. I want to write like I’m speaking to you.”

And so he did.

I resisted reading “His Last Game” until this past Saturday, fearing it might be sentimental, that he couldn’t earn from us his desired response, that it couldn’t be that good, but it is.

RICHARD GILBERT