The longlist for the 2009 Guardian first book award, announced today, is as eclectic as ever: this year’s list includes a novel about a child-prodigy cartographer, a collection of short stories set in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and the no-holds-barred memoir of a surgeon, among others. The Guardian’s books team talks through the titles on the list, and discuss the importance of celebrating debut authors.
The row over James Kelman’s broadside against the commercialisation of Scotland’s literary culture at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival stretches way beyond the country’s borders
There is an unspoken rule among Scottish writers that we don’t slag each other off in public. The rule runs thus: coming, as we do, from a small, colonised nation, we automatically find ourselves marginalised by literary London and must fight doubly hard to gain the recognition abroad that is granted to English writers. While we may express private reservations about the work of another writer, we don’t scupper their chances by saying this publicly. After all, each of us takes enough of that from critics.
That changed over the weekend. Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Scotland’s only Man Booker prize winner, James Kelman, lambasted his country’s literary establishment for praising the “mediocrity” of “writers of detective fiction or books about some upper middle-class young magician or some crap”. Attention paid to the twin commercial giants of (presumably) Ian Rankin and JK Rowling had served, Kelman argued, to obscure Scotland’s more radical tradition.
This has split the nation’s literature in two. In a debate in the Sunday Herald headed ‘Is Pulp Fiction Taking Over Scotland’s Bookshelves?’ daggers were drawn over the crime-ification of Scottish letters. The novelist Rodge Glass said that Kelman had been “very brave” in his remarks, while playwright John Byrne, spoke of “the danger of Scotland becoming known as the home of genre fiction, a factory churning out these things”. And the response was ferocious. Professor Michael Schmidt of the University of Glasgow, defended the common reader against Kelman’s “Stalinist” and “parochial” approach. Crime writer, Denise Mina, derided “this awful schtick about pushing the boundaries of literary technique”, comparing it to “asking people to appreciate the welding on their plumbing”.
As a manifestation of the old ‘genre v real literature’ chestnut, the debate should be just as interesting to those outside of Scotland. Kelman, committed to experimental form and language, sees genre fiction as redundant, compromised by commerciality. Mina, while still calling Kelman a “beautiful writer”, regards his stance as a mere “play for status”; a failure of the writer’s duty to entertain.
There is another to level to this, however, about the ways in which any country’s indigenous literature – especially those of smaller or post-colonial nations – is threatened by the commercial imperative to produce page-turning, airport-friendly thrillers. A third level concerns the collusion of the literary establishment in this. It’s certainly the case that the books editors of broadsheet newspapers will bemoan the fact that we’re not all reading Tolstoy, while providing acres of coverage to crime writers. Genre fiction doesn’t need highbrow attention in order to sell by the bucketload, yet editors must cover it precisely because it is so visible. This crowds out more risk-taking writers, for whom a single review from a perceptive critic can provide a career breakthrough.
It is galling, then, that a country like Scotland, home to an enormous, bristling, experimental tradition which includes James Hogg, Alexander Trocchi, Hugh McDiarmid, Muriel Spark, Edwin Morgan, Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, James Robertson and Kelman himself, is marketed to tourists as the home of Rebus and Potter.
One doesn’t wants to decry authors who are certainly outstanding in their field (constructing a page-turner requires narrative skill); neither does one want to sneer at the tastes of book-buyers, for whom reading at all in this age of distraction is an increasingly fought-for pleasure. And it’s not as though writers such as Mina, Val McDermid or Christopher Brookmyre aren’t working a left-wing agenda into their books; they are. But genre fiction is, by definition, generic. Mina’s disdain, in her comments, for pushing boundaries of form is palpable. The genre writer’s first responsibility is to the genre itself: they must fulfil readers’ expectations for convention, or they have failed. It’s easy to see how this becomes part of a capitalist enterprise, which requires market ‘product’ and fears innovation as a ‘risky sell’. At a time when capitalism is scouring livelihoods, however, we must empower writers such as Kelman to speak out against it, and put forth new ways of expressing and thinking about ourselves. This is far from being just a Scottish issue.
My daughter Milly has asked me to say that these stories by Rupert Kingfisher are great for bright 7- 11 year olds. The Author recently came to her school to talk to them all about the books and his own writing history (via cartoon books).
Apparently Rupert Kingfisher is related to a favourite author of mine, Salley Vickers, of ‘Miss Garnett’s Angel’ fame. Her latest ‘Dancing Backwards’ a bittersweet account of a poet’s life while crossing the Atlantic, is very good too. Talented family!
Rachel
This post was submitted by Racahel Mogen.
The longlist for the 2009 Guardian first book award, announced today, is as eclectic as ever: this year’s list includes a novel about a child-prodigy cartographer, a collection of short stories set in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and the no-holds-barred memoir of a surgeon, among others. The Guardian’s books team talks through the titles on the list, and discuss the importance of celebrating debut authors.
Douglas Coupland might so easily have written his latest novel as an airport thriller, says Toby Litt
Ever since his first book, Generation X, Douglas Coupland has done the best epigraphs. They cutely encapsulate what’s to follow. For Generation A, he’s picked two zingers. The first, from Malcolm McClaren in The Great Rock’n'Roll Swindle, seems to be archly self-referential. “Terrorize, threaten and insult your own useless generation. Suddenly you’ve become a novel idea and you’ve got people wanting to join in … Develop this as a story you can sell.” This is on a par with the writing-while-checking-hairline-in-the-mirror tone of JPod, which was the last time I vacationed in Coupland.
The second epigraph comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s Syracuse university commencement address of 1994, and is in quite a different register. The media call you Generation X, Vonnegut says. “I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.” This, in other words, is going to be a novel about the journey from knowledge-of-good-and-evil cynicism to prelapsarian hope. It’s going to stick pretty much to the Coupland template: a small group of plugged-in characters drawn together by a sense of bewilderment at how badly the world is treating them. But it’s going to try to leap out of that endgame and redeem the time.
It’s clear from the novel’s opening pages that this time is a few short years into the future. In between now and then, one major thing has happened - bees have become extinct. Coupland is very good on the minor ramifications of this. When one character spots a group of meth-heads, they observe, “In the old days they’d have been heroin addicts, but poppies require bees.”
The action starts when Iowa farmboy Zack, midway through combine-harvesting a vast cock and balls corn circle into one of his cornfields, is stung by a bee. Four further people are also, over the next few months, stung. But despite the surrounding areas being closed down and minutely examined by government scientists, no active hives are found. Zack and the other “Wonka children”, as they think of themselves, are all renditioned off to isolation units, where they are subjected to sensory deprivation (no brands, no novels), fed on a strange beefy jelly and have massive amounts of blood taken. Eventually they are released and, bewildered, find themselves drawn together.
Or rather, Coupland begins gradually to draw them together until, impatient to get on with things, he simply has them renditioned once more - to Canada’s most remote archipelago, Haida Gwaii. Up until this point, the novel has been a weird but intoxicating cocktail of literary influences: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, generic biotechno-thrillers, Stephen King’s apocalyptic vein, the complete works of Douglas Coupland. Now, though, it explicitly declares its wish to be a modern Decameron. The Wonka kids have escaped the plague, so they will sit around telling one another stories.
Most readers know pretty much what to expect from Douglas Coupland. Sentence by sentence, he’ll be a joy to read. He’ll be great on food and technology (and especially great on food technology), good on language, bad on character and abysmal on plot. Generation A, while a globally ambitious novel, and all the better for it, does nothing to upset these preconceptions. Whenever there’s a threat of suspense, Coupland nixes it: “In a Hollywood way, one would expect Zack and Sam to become a glamorous power couple, but that was not to happen.”
This is particularly odd, as Generation A contains all the elements necessary for a 500-page airport thriller. If only Coupland could bring himself to have Zack and Sam fall in love. If only he could commit to making the point of his action-sequences action, rather than an occasion for more pop-cultural aperçus. If only he didn’t dissipate his climax in 15 pages of notes-to-self exposition.
The book’s most successful character, Harj, voices contemporary fiction’s dilemma: “In the old days, it was much easier, but our modern fame-driven culture, with its real-time 24-7 marinade of electronic information, demands a lot from modern citizens, and poses great obstacles to narrative.” Coupland is one of the few writers to admit these obstacles, and to try, as best he can, to incorporate them into his books. He’s never going to retreat into historical novels, or historical novels carefully disguised as contemporary novels. But Generation A feels like a slow-motion demonstration of the ways in which technology is destroying story, and not the enacted triumph of story over technology that Coupland so clearly wishes it to be.
• Toby Litt’s Journey into Space is published by Penguin.
• Ten debut works span poetry, history and fiction
• Judges begin process of choosing £10,000 winner
A brutally honest account of life as a surgeon, with eye-opening stories of panic and incompetence that some of us might, in truth, not like to know about, is today named as one of 10 books in contention for this year’s Guardian first book award.
Gabriel Weston’s well-received memoir, Direct Red, addresses some fascinating questions, such as what is it like to cut into someone else’s body? Or how do you tell a beautiful, seemingly fit young man that he will be dead in days?
The book is not an exposé, but it does shine a fascinating light on a hugely stressful profession full of big, mostly male, egos. Among the stories Weston tells is one of the time she panicked during a routine tonsillectomy, with so much blood filling the patient’s mouth that the nurse was unable to suck it out quickly enough. When she asked for help, the consultant told her to just get on with it, which proved to be the best way forward.
Weston, who took an unusual route to surgery in that she graduated in English before realising medicine was her vocation, now lives in London and works as a part-time ear, nose and throat surgeon.
Her book is one of 10 longlisted for what is the only prize to honour debut books of all genres. Aside from surgery, the list takes in architecture, oil, mapmaking, Alzheimer’s disease, high-school sex, and quantum mechanics. It includes four novels, four works of non-fiction, a short story collection, and a poetry collection.
Claire Armitstead, the Guardian’s literary editor, who chairs the judging panel, said: “This year the longlist reflects the way in which the divisions between genres are shifting and collapsing and shows the energy and imagination with which the best new writers are confronting a world in transition.”
Zimbabwean Petina Gappah, whose day job is in Geneva as an international trade lawyer, is nominated for An Elegy for Easterly, which tells the stories of real people living under Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe. Also telling an African story is A Swamp Full of Dollars, by Financial Times journalist Michael Peel, in which he travels to the oil-rich Niger delta.
Edward Hollis’s The Secret Lives of Buildings tells the distinct and surprising stories of 13 very different buildings from Gloucester Cathedral to a Las Vegas casino complex. The other non-fiction book is The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo, about one of the most brilliant scientific minds of the last century, Paul Dirac.
The fiction nominees include Samantha Harvey for her moving portrayal of an Alzheimer’s patient in The Wilderness, and The Girl With Glass Feet, by Ali Shaw, which tells the magical story of Ida Maclaird, who is turning into glass.
The only poetry on the longlist is The Missing by Siân Hughes, a collection that deals with parenting, illness, loss, regret and ill-fated love.
The judges are BBC presenter Martha Kearney, poet and novelist Tobias Hill, writer Nadeem Aslam, political philosopher John Gray, and the Guardian’s deputy editor, Katharine Viner. Stuart Broom of Waterstone’s will represent five reading groups who are also working through all the books. The £10,000 winner will be decided in December.
The Secret Lives of Buildings Edward Hollis
Direct Red Gabriel Weston
The Strangest Man Graham Farmelo
A Swamp Full of Dollars Michael Peel
The Rehearsal Eleanor Catton
The Wilderness Samantha Harvey
The Girl With Glass Feet Ali Shaw
The Selected Works of TS Spivet Reif Larsen
An Elegy for Easterly Petina Gappah
The Missing Siân Hughes
Up close and personal with festival authors Garrison Keillor, Neil Gaiman, Gerald Scarfe and Colm Tóibín
From Orhan Pamuk to names few English readers will have heard, the novelist picks out the jewels of a literature we should know better
Selçuk Altun was born in Artvin, Turkey in 1950 and graduated at Bosphorus University. Now retired, he was for many years executive chairman of one of Turkey’s largest and most influential literary publishing houses – YKY (Yapi Kredi Publications). His first novel was published in Turkey in 2001. Songs My Mother Never Taught Me, his fourth, and the first to be translated into English, was published in 2008. His latest novel, Many and Many a Year Ago, is just out.
Buy Selçuk Altun books from the Guardian bookshop
“There are many reasons for the limited number of Turkish authors and poets translated into English. Sadly Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk’s success hasn’t yet increased Anglo-American interest in Turkish authors and poets.”
Six engrossing short stories about the struggle of a handful of people in wartime London who embrace life with hope. The author, an eminent Turkish poet, respectfully witnesses their heroic resistance.
The modernist Oktay Rifat was the grand master of sophisticated simplicity. Many of his lines are as powerful as individual poems.
The only son of a poor widow, Memed has to fight for his love and life against an evil feudal lord in southern Turkey. A tour de force.
I’m a compulsive reader of autobiographies and biographies. This is the most powerful life story I’ve ever read. Master storyteller Kemal’s saga is brilliantly illuminated with questions from the influential French poet Alain Bosquet.
A grand literary thriller and historical journey set in the 16th century. Nobel prize-winner Pamuk delivers a perplexing blend of art, religion, power and love in the ever-mysterious Ottoman era.
A genre-defying jewel of literature, İstanbul and Pamuk time-travelling together. Captivatingly sorrowful, the book is enriched by photos, excerpts and anecdotes.
Delightful short stories by the Turkish Chekhov. Sait Faik (1906-1954) knows how to attract the reader’s utmost attention.
A small masterpiece. Karasu (1930-1995) and his four characters are duelling in this eloquent novella. A profound exploration of human inner worlds. Consider the first two lines “Night slowly comes on. Descends. Already it has begun filling the hollows. Once these are full and it empties onto the plain, everything will turn gray.”
Pamuk described this elegiac masterpiece, first published in 1949, as “the greatest novel ever written about Istanbul”. It is also a challenging love story between a fragile aesthete and a complex woman. For those who are not ambitious enough, will love always be punitive?
Influenced by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Russian Futurism, these are elegant poems of enduring significance.
MJ Hyland, Man Booker shortlisted in 2006 for Carry Me Down, talks about the pressure of writing in the spotlight, her love of tragedy and the politics beneath the surface of her latest novel, This Is How, which appears on the Guardian’s inaugural Not the Booker prize shortlist
Novelist whose new book features student drawn into Islamist terror cell, and who has been quoted attacking the Qur’an, apologises for any offence caused
Sebastian Faulks has moved quickly in an attempt to avert criticism over his comments about the Qur’an, which he was quoted describing as “just the rantings of a schizophrenic” with “no ethical dimension” in an interview with the Sunday Times yesterday.
“While I believe the voice-hearing of many Old Testament prophets and of John the Baptist in the New might well raise psychiatric eyebrows today, it is absurd to suggest that the Prophet, who achieved so much in military and political – quite apart from religious – terms, can have suffered from any acute illness. Only a fully cogent and healthy person could have done what he did,” Faulks told the Guardian today. He went on to offer “a simple but unqualified apology to my Muslim friends and readers for anything that has come out sounding crude or intolerant. Happily, there is more to the book than that.”
His interview with the Sunday Times also saw him call the Qur’an “a depressing book”, which is “one-dimensional”, with “no ethical dimension like the New Testament, no new plan for life”. The novelist, who has included the character of a student led astray by an Islamist terrorist cell in his forthcoming book, A Week in December, was also reported to have opined of the Qur’an: “It says ‘the Jews and the Christians were along the right tracks, but actually, they were wrong and I’m right, and if you don’t believe me, tough — you’ll burn for ever’.”
But today Faulks said that often during an interview the case is overstated “in order to make a point more clearly”. “If such an overstatement is taken out of its heavily nuanced context, then pulled out of the printed article and highlighted, it can have a badly distorting effect,” he said. “I blame myself more than the reporter – or whichever subeditor thought it was good idea to pull out the more undigested bits and try to make a silly season scandal … I unreservedly apologise to anyone who does feel offended by comments offered in another context.”
Last summer Ian McEwan found himself at the centre of a media storm after he told an Italian newspaper that he “despise[d] Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest”. Amis, meanwhile, was accused of Islamophobia after saying in a 2006 interview with the Times that “there’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’.”
Looking to explain his comments further, Faulks said today that while he believes “it is fair to say the New Testament is the most ethically sophisticated of the great scriptures, the proper comparison for the Qur’an is with the Old Testament – against which it holds its own. I accept that the ethics of Islam have been developed by scholars and thinkers over the centuries, and in the course of that time have become the equal of other religions in their sophistication.”
Faulks said that after reading the Qur’an and several histories of Islam as part of his research for A Week in December, which is published in September, he “ended with a high regard for Islam, which seems to me more spiritually demanding than Judaism or Christianity”. “The nicest characters in A Week in December are in fact Muslims – and their religious devotion is one of the things that defines them,” said Faulks.
The author is best known for his first world war novel Birdsong, which has sold more than two million copies. Last year he wrote an authorised sequel to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Devil May Care, to mark the centenary of Fleming’s birth.
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