The annual announcement of the Booker Prize Longlist is one of the highlights of the publishing calendar for readers of new fiction in English. The remit of the Booker is now so geographically wide, and its judging panel changes from year to year, so that the shape and tone of the “Booker Dozen” also varies widely.
In some recent years we have seen longlists shaped by political themes or the pandemic. In some years, the panel chooses to privilege new authors or authors from marginalised communities or experimental modernist fiction.
This time around, the list heavily favours American authors, including the first Native American author to be selected. Each year, I read the Booker longlist and take it on its own terms: a partial and curated list that forces me to read fiction and authors that I might not otherwise come across.
The first of the thirteen books I read this year is “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey. Coming in at a slight and highly “readable-while-standing-in the-tube” 130 pages, it’s arguably a novella rather than long-form fiction.
The book takes place in a near-future where lunar travel is, once again, a thing and the earth is ravaged by extreme weather events. Harvey’s characters are six astronauts working on an international space station and each chapter marks one of the sixteen orbits she will describe.
Apparently, the British author was inspired to write the book when she started watching NASA live footage during the pandemic. Maybe that’s why the novels themes of loneliness, isolation, detachment and melancholy resonate.
As a formal work of art and a feat of both imagination and deep research, Harvey’s novel is superb. It will naturally appeal to those of us who as children imagined what it might be like to be an astronaut, and for those of us who, like one of the characters, were obsessed with the space shuttle Challenger disaster.
But its themes are broader; in particular, I loved the character of Chie, a Japanese astronaut whose mother has just died and who struggles to comprehend grief at such a remove. There’s also a particular beautiful and lyrical exchange between Roman, a Russian cosmonaut, and a woman who he randomly contacts by radio. She asks if he is crestfallen by the reality of being in space, and in response, he describes the beauty of how his sleeping bag billows like a sail as he sleeps untethered.
I also love how the author hints at the problems of Earth: a new Cold War that has resulted in the astronauts being instructed not to share bathrooms or food; the typhoon about to ravage the Philippines; or the impact of Hiroshima on Chie’s family. But the focus is firmly on events in our orbital space station. It’s a novel that stays with you—its impact belies its size.
It would also pair well with the new hardback non-fiction book, “Challenger” by Adam Higginbotham which I previously reviewed on my LinkedIn.
Sadly, the second Booker longlist novel that I read was not a success, at least not for me.
A slight book with a formal structure and eight characters locked in a carefully delineated world, “Headshot” is the debut novel from American author Rita Bullwinkel and takes place over two days during a boxing tournament in a shabby gym in Reno.
Each chapter covers a boxing bout between the eight teenage girls who are contesting the title. We see them size each other up, go through the bout, and then flash forward into their futures to see what impact this contest will have on them.
On the one hand this novel did exactly what I love novels to do: it took me into a world that I knew nothing about and inside the minds of people doing something I would never dream of doing. But I found the style of the author absolutely infuriating. Bullwinkel writes in short blunt sentences and with a circumscribed vocabulary.
She eschews using pronouns, so every sentence reads like “Sabina Reeves sits typing a book review. Sabina Reeves wonders if anyone will agree with her. Sabina Reeves thinks that maybe it’s mean to be so harsh about a debut novelist”. This becomes really wearying after a few pages. And what does it achieve? Other than distancing us from the inner lives of our characters…
This book would pair well with the recently released film “Love Lies Bleeding” by British director Rose Glass. It stars Twilight’s Kristen Stewart as the owner of a shabby gym who falls in love with Jackie, a competitive body-builder.
Reader! Do not despair. For Sabina Reeves did indeed find a gem within the first three Booker longlist novels, and that gem is “The Safekeep” by Dutch author Yael Van Der Wouden.
The novel is set in a post-war Dutch village where uptight, isolated, houseproud Isabel has her peace disrupted when her brother’s girlfriend Eva comes to stay. The result is a beautiful, melancholy, erotic and ultimately hopeful novel.
Its subject is how we trick ourselves into not seeing: not seeing our own prejudices, others’ humanity, and the crimes of the past. It reads as part love story, part indictment of historic antisemitism. And it provokes us to wonder if we would act differently now. I won’t say more to ruin the twist, other than that I think Part Three is genuinely some of the best writing I have read this year.
The book would pair well with Oscar-winning film-director and artist Steve McQueen’s 2023 documentary Occupied City. McQueen and wife Bianca Stigter live in Amsterdam and this film is based on her book which contrasts events during the Holocaust and the contemporary city. Both Van Der Wouden’s book and this film ask us what we choose to see and not to see in everyday life.
Books mentioned in this article:
“Orbital” by Samantha Harvey
“Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” by Adam Higginbotham
“Headshot” by Rita Bullwinkel
“The Safekeep” by Yael Van Der Wouden
