Extracts from the work of 20 novelists under 40 - about 5 men. I know of Eleanor Catton, Saba Sams and Eley Williams. The introduction by Sigrid Rausing (a judge) roughly categorizes the writers -
- affection for the local - Thomas Morris, Saba Sams
- make meaning of hard lives - Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Natasha Brown
- displacement and alienation - Olivia Sudjic, Lauren Aimee Curtis, Jennifer Atkins, Anna Metcalfe, Eliza Clark
- experimental - Eley Williams, Derek Owusu, Sara Baume, Graeme Armstrong, Sarah Bernstein
- defying categorisation - Eleanor Catton
- what is love - K Patrick
- historical - Isabella Hammad, Tom Crewe
- speculative - Sophie Mackintosh
- deadpan, experimental, alienation - Camilla Grudova
Re the judges -
- Rachel Cusk "talked about writers' ability (or failure) to control and transcend their own material"
- Tash Aw "questioned how far we should privilege a text's internal sense or logic"
- Brian Dillon "noted the slightly caressing, watery feel of many of the novels on the shortlist, and the hard singularity of others"
- Helen Oyeyemi "(the judge among us perhaps most committed to fiction testing the boundaries of convention) was also interested in whether the writer succeeded in evoking curiosity in the reader"
Armstrong's piece about gangland activity (drugs, blades) is written "in dialect" without restricting itself to one register - "The internal revealed itself in the level ae substance abuse, isolation n suicide"; "we got ready fur T in the Park the-gither n bounced on a bus wae aw the GYT wans"; "Drug-inspired delusion or Christmas epiphany, A cannae say fur sure but everyhin changed fae that night on"
Jennifer Atkins' extract has this - "I found a taxi without trouble - Annie had promised there wouldn't be trouble. Earlier that month she'd invited me to come for dinner, the last weekend of the summer, for reunion of sorts at her and Edward's bungalow. She had spoken, drolly, about the meadows and the fields in their part of the country, and the drollness with which she'd spoken didn't match the sight of the late-flourishing land I saw from the taxi window. The sight from the window didn't match anything". Note the chaining together of sentences, the linking by repetition of "trouble", "droll", and "window".
Sara Baume writes "She has been ten for a month and she does not like it. She carries the weight of her extra digit like a chain-mail vest. She hunches her shoulders as if recoiling from the cold metal."
Eliza Clark's piece has atmosphere. It's a mermaid piece with stronger than usual SF/alien/coming-of-age overtones.
Tom Crewe's piece, unlike several of the others, is a self-contained story. I like it, especially the plot. Charles and another man in his 60s are invited to an exhibition of recently-dead Soutine's paintings. They were both his models, both working for a time at the same hotel. They compare how they've changed (Charles only a little). Neither recalls the other, though the other one recalls Charles's wife-to-be, a room-maid. Charles and the room-maid had opened a shop together, then divorced childless. They haven't met for 20 years. Home from the exhibition's opening he writes her an invitation to the show.
Saba Sams' "Gunk" is maybe my favourite piece.
