Women dominate Booker shortlist, but all bets are on Percival Everett

Five women, one man. Of course, it’s been noted, but less hammered than one might expect, given how much resentment there was in the days when most of the writers on the shortlists were men. Perhaps it’s because the books in question include one about astronauts and another about a secret agent, so there’s no sense that the literary world is being swamped with domestic drama. Or maybe – just maybe – it’s because the one book by a male author, Percival Everett’s James – which has been the favourite to win since the longlist was announced – is seen and feared as the “woke” option. It’s an unpleasant thought, but these are the times in which we live.

Percival Everett is black. He writes vividly and often witheringly about the way language and storytelling shape and fabulate black experience. In James, he addresses himself to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, in which a poor white boy and a slave on the run take a raft down the Mississippi. It is assumed (by his supporters as well as his detractors, unfortunately, since people see what they want to see) that Everett is taking Twain apart and throwing his inherently racist work on the bonfire of history.

What Everett actually does is get inside the framework of Twain’s classic, retelling it from the point of view of James, the slave Jim. We follow his thoughts; when they are separated, we go with him; when there are no white folks around, we hear him drop the folksy Southern patois Twain gave him and speak in the language of the classics he purloined from the master’s library. It is a clever corrective to that novel read by every American schoolchild: a corrective, certainly, but not a vitriolic one.

The five books by women on the list are strikingly varied. Edmund de Waal, the chairman of the judges’ committee, says the list includes “books that explore the gravitational pull of home and family; the contested nature of truth and history; and the extent to which we reveal our real selves to others”. What is more striking to me is actually the trend – and not just here – towards avoidance of a sense of a “real self”. People are at the centre of events. They do things. But the sense of them as rounded characters in the Dickensian sense, oven-ready to walk on stage, grows increasingly unimportant.

The Booker contender that questions the notion of self most literally (and modishly) is Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, in which someone who goes by the alias Sadie Smith is being paid a fortune to insinuate herself into a group of supposed eco-terrorists based in a French farming community. Her job is to stir up the kind of trouble for which everyone can be arrested or, still better, shot in action. In the process, she becomes fascinated by the group’s guru, Bruno, who writes them long emails about the superiority of Neanderthals. Bruno lives in a cave – a radical refusal of modern life has proved an unacceptable provocation. Couched in the terse, episodic language of a thriller, Creation Lake is certainly a compelling read, if less searching or profound than Kushner may want it to be.

If Sadie is disconnected and disaffected by inclination, the six astronauts in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital are distanced by time, space, weightlessness and the bizarrely dislocating experience of seeing the sun rise 16 times a day. Four space workers from the Free World and two from Russia – who are nervously aware their capsule has a crack in it – float around each other in chaste intimacy, defined for us by their tasks. Harvey’s prose is dense, exact and poetically transcendent, conveying the vastness of the experience the bonded team will never be able to share; mere personalities are immaterial to this story, too. After its slim but potent 131 pages, I felt as if the 19th-century humanist novel had disintegrated in front of me, to be replaced by something new, wonderful and alien.

In Anne Michaels’ Held, there is a rather different kind of dissolution of character, put to different ends. Her dramatis personae have names, but are otherwise diffused through pearlescent language, rich textural detail – often actual textures, as she tends to focus intently on items of clothing or the glint of jewellery – and fractured timelines, which require the attentive reader to join the dots between generations and the links between individuals within them.

The greatest challenge for this reader, however, is that all the characters read like manifestations of a single entity, most probably the author. They do different jobs, perhaps, but they have similar thoughts about the presence of the dead among the living, or the concerns of contemporary physics; they fall in love the same way (precipitously, unconditionally and forever) or grapple with similar emotional wounds left by unspeakable (and thus unspoken) violence; there is a sense they are all infused with the same vaporous spirit. The effect is strangely unworldly. Numerous reviews describe this book as a gem. It’s plenty precious, if that’s what they mean.

What a relief to turn to Stone Yard Devotional, by Australian author Charlotte Wood. Her calm prose flows like a river, bringing with it a ruminative account of grieving and its complications, including the shame of grieving too much. Like the neo-caveman in Kushner’s novel, the central character is pulling back from modern life, but her choice of refuge is a community of nuns.

She does not share their faith, but their routines, austerity and mutual tolerance become essential to her, even as they devote themselves largely to fighting a plague of mice. This wriggling, vicious horde has a human parallel in the unwelcome arrival of an activist nun who has brought the remains of one of their community from Thailand to be buried with her sisters. The visitor’s righteous fury at the world is another disruptor to these women’s insistent quiet.

Perhaps the most surprising choice on the list is Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep. It is 1961 in the Netherlands, years before the Age of Aquarius came to Amsterdam. Isabel is a sour, deeply repressed woman whose life is devoted to preserving the house where she grew up, actually her brother’s inheritance. When the brother insists she take in Eva, his latest girlfriend – all cheap glamour and mewling voice – for a month, she is bilious with resentment until, hey presto, they discover a frenzied mutual passion.

It is not this rather overwrought romance that is the author’s focus, however, but the coveted house: it turns out to be part of Eva’s past, too. Van der Wouden habitually writes in English, but her language has a spikiness and intermittent off-kilter turn of expression – the shadow of a mother tongue, perhaps – that, far from detracting from her novel’s fluency, give form to its increasingly jagged feeling. The Safekeep has splendid anger built into it. It won’t win, but it will get noticed, which is surely the point of prizes.

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It will come as a surprise if James does not win. Percival Everett has made the shortlist before with The Trees in 2022, but that was a self-consciously hard-boiled thriller involving mass murder, corpses with severed testicles and witchcraft; it was too outre to win, even in one of Booker’s crazier years.

James has the same energy, but it grapples with both history and literature with the confidence of a longstanding campaigner. Woke or not, this is its time. Get on down the Mississippi, Jim, and seize at last what’s yours.

The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize will be announced on November 12 in London.

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