The Final Six
The 2021 Booker Prize shortlist tells of the persistence of grief, the deceptions of online prattle, the call of the wild, racial inequality and the triumph of the human spirit
Nandini Nair | 29 Oct, 2021
THE WINNER of the 2021 Booker Prize winner will be announced on November 3rd. The six shortlisted authors—Anuk Arudpragasam, Patricia Lockwood, Richard Powers, Damon Galgut, Maggie Shipstead and Nadifa Mohamed—will gather in person for the ceremony.
This year’s jury included historian Maya Jasanoff, theological writer Rowan Williams, film and theatre actor Natascha McElhone, author Chigozie Obioma, and critic and editor Horatia Harrod. The judges read 158 books and engaged in passionate online discussions before deciding on the final six.
The winner of the 2021 Booker Prize will receive £50,000 and will see a tremendous increase in the sale of their winning novel. Authors who have won the Booker over the last 50 years say it has been “transformative” to their careers.
AnukArudpragasam’s novel is a favourite, amongst South Asian readers, to win this year’s Booker Prize, and for valid reasons. With his debut The Story of a Brief Marriage published in 2016, the Sri Lankan Tamil author had already gained the attention of critics and readers alike. The 33-year-old’s second novel proves that The Story of a Brief Marriage was no beginner’s luck, instead it was the foundation stone of Arudpragasam’s own canon. The Tamil cause informs his work, but his novels rise far above the political and are remarkable for their philosophical acuity.
In A Passage North the character Krishnan travels from Colombo to the Northern Province to attend his grandmother’s nurse’s funeral. Through the course of the novel, the reader journeys from the south of Krishnan’s mind to its own distant northern reaches. We come to know his grandmother’s life, from one of independence to a fraying of the self, which is the essence of old age. We learn of Rani the nurse and the tragedies that have assaulted her, and through her witness the aftermath of grief. We see Anjum the activist, Krishnan’s love interest who he befriends in Delhi and who will complete him and leave him bereft like no other.
This novel is remarkable for the number of things it gets precisely right; the landscape of the mind, the contours of grief, the fractures of relationships, the pitfalls of memory. And for ultimately being a novel that holds a reader’s attention and finds a place in the reader’s heart.
It is little surprise that No One Is Talking about This has a verse like quality to it. That is because 39-year-old Patricia Lockwood is best known as a poet. In July 2013, Lockwood’s prose poem “Rape Joke”, published on the website The Awl, became an online sensation. It tells of the rape of a 19-year-old girl by a man seven years older. Its honesty is hard-hitting. The American poet writes, “The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.”
With 104.5K Twitter followers, Lockwood is clearly a master of the pithy and dynamic line. Her book is very much about and aimed at the social media user and the compulsive scroller—essentially all of us.
The protagonist is an unnamed woman who Lockwood-like is known for her tweets, who lives her life in the “portal” (ie the World Wide Web) and is called upon to lecture about this universe. Lockwood’s own immersion in social media ensures that the book is packed with sharp insights on the machinations of the online world, such as, “A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.” The first half of the book is driven by such observations on millennial life and times. Its fragmented nature feels like a newsfeed.
Patricia Lockwood is a master of the pithy and dynamic line. Her book is very much about, and aimed at, the social media user and the compulsive scroller—essentially all of us
The second half suddenly takes a turn toward the serious and tells of the protagonist’s sister’s pregnancy, which does not go as planned. The protagonist and sister go through a tide of emotions, as they learn that the baby might not live, and if she does, “she would live in her senses.”
In “Acknowledgements”, Lockwood writes of a rare genetic disorder Proteus Syndrome (think Elephant Man) and about her niece Lena: “you were not here to teach us, but we did learn.” For a reader, the book is thus a choppy ride, where in the first half one feels like one is sharing drinks with a witty and raucous friend and in the second half one is privy to a friend’s devastating loss.
With 13 novels to his credit, Richard Powers is one of the most recognisable names on this shortlist. The Overstory won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Bewilderment, like The Overstory, deals with the natural world and our place in it. Bewilderment, as the title suggests, takes the reader into the wild, and also asks whether we as humans have the capacity to treat it right.
The novel tells of a father dealing single-handedly with his neuro-atypical son after the sudden death of his wife in a car crash. Theo Byrne, an astrobiologist teaching at a university, grapples with professional demands while attending to Robin, who is prone to fits of rage. Robin not only deals with the natural world with curiosity and care, but is nearly obsessive in his inclinations. The father-narrator recounts a scene where the car he is driving accidentally hits a squirrel. “My son screamed. In the closed car, the sound turned wild, long and bloodcurdling, and it converged on the word Dad. He undid his seat belt and opened the passenger door.”
In a bid to help his son without the use of psychoactive drugs, the father volunteers to sign him up for a medical experiment wherein his environmentalist wife’s brain can be mapped onto the nine-year-old’s. The reprieve they find through this experiment is immense but short-lived.
Powers is a fine writer and the book has some gem-like lines such as, “That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.” But the purpose of the book—an ode to the wild—often overwhelms the story. The novel would have benefitted from a little less didacticism.
Damon Galgut, a South African writer, has been shortlisted twice before for the Booker. For The Good Doctor in 2003 and In a Strange Room in 2010. Apartheid and the socio-political conditions of South Africa have inked his novels.
His latest, The Promise, spans the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s in South Africa, as it details the events following the death of a white matriarch whose wish is to give a humble house on the property to her black servant Salome. This is a time when “Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It’s just the living part we still have to work out.” Can this “promise” of a house to the servant be fulfilled in a country riven by strife?
Set in Pretoria, it tells of the lives (and the deaths) of the Swart family consisting of Ma, Pa and the children, Anton, Astrid and Amor. The novel uses multiple points of view, and at times the reader is even addressed directly. For example, “If Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked.”
In an interview to The Guardian Galgut said, “The personality of the narrator moves around—it’s one element that I hope slightly wrong-foots the reader into asking the question: who is telling the story? And the fact that that question is raised might be its only point.”
When Ma (Rachel) dies, both sides of the family the Jewish and non-Jewish, English-speaking and Afrikaans all come together. Creating the novel around funerals, it lays bare family resentments, bristling egos, accusations and allegations. The only certainty it reminds readers is death: “By tomorrow morning already this will have changed, the body will be long gone and its permanent absence covered over with plans, arrangements, reminiscences and time. Yes, already. The disappearance begins immediately and in a certain sense never ends.”
The final entry from the logbook of Marian Graves reads, “I thought I would believe I’d seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life… No one should ever read this. My life is my one possession. And yet, and yet, and yet.”
The American novelist Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle draws an arc between a fictional woman aviator Marian Graves and Hadley Baxter, an actress, playing Marian in a biopic titled Peregrine. Hadley is drawn to Marian because both had lost their parents, and were raised by their uncle. The novel is cinematic in scope as it recreates shipwrecks, and plane crashes, film stunts and feral childhoods. It is both about the history of aviation and the workings of Hollywood today.
At close to 600 pages, the book spans a century and traverses the globe. It is a big book with a big ambition. It opens with a map of a little plane circumnavigating the globe. Marian vanished in 1950, while attempting a north-south circumnavigation of the earth. Written as historical fiction, Marian is a composite character created from many “forgotten brave ladies of the sky”. While Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, may be the best known, she is remembered today more for her disappearance than her achievements. The history of women in aviation inspired Shipstead to write this book. Shipstead, a travel writer, travelled far and wide to flesh out these early feats of navigation, from Hawaii to Cook Islands and even Antarctica.
Telling the story of an aviator and an actress in different centuries, the book is ultimately one about female ambition and passion. It is about the triumph of an iron will against all odds, as a Rainer Maria Rilke verse in the book reminds one; “I live my life in widening circles / that reach out across the world. / I may not complete this last one / but I give myself to it.”
Forty-year-old Nadifa Mohamed is the first British Somali novelist to be shortlisted for the Booker.
Booker Prize judge Maya Jasanoff says of the book, “The Fortune Men demonstrates what historical fiction can achieve at its best—to get inside the head of the past—while implicitly yet urgently underscoring the present-day persistence of racism and injustice.”
Nadifa Mohamed’s third novel The Fortune Men is based on the true story of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor, and father of three young boys, who is hanged in Cardiff, wrongfully convicted of murder in 1952. In 1998 (45 years too late) his conviction and hanging was overturned.
Mahmood is a “quiet man, always appearing and disappearing silently, at the fringes of the sailors or the gamblers or the thieves” who “cares nothing for politics”. A cruel system is blind to who Mahmood truly is: “the tireless stoker, the poker shark, the elegant wanderer, the love-starved husband, the soft-hearted father.”
He is accused of killing a shopkeeper, Lily Volpert, here renamed Violet Volacki. He is at the movies at the time of the murder, but is still seen as guilty. Mahmood initially believes that the English justice system will stand by him. He tries to hold onto hope while in jail. But he slowly realises that it is just his word (and the truth) against false evidence, fake witness testimonies and institutionalised racial policing.
While telling a story of deep injustice, Mohamed also recreates the history of Somali ship workers in Wales who struggle for employment and dignity. At a time when the racial bias of police forces in the US and UK are being exposed this book has special significance. As Mahmood thinks to himself, “No end to the lies they tell to make a black man’s life hard.”
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