1969 Something to Answer For

By the time I’d struggled to the last page ofSomething to Answer For  there was little I felt sure about any longer.  Nothing in the novel seems quite certain other than it’s set in Port Said, a city in the throes of the Suez Crisis and where the lead character Townrow, has travelled to see the widow of a recently deceased friend.

But who exactly is Townrow? Even he doesn’t seem to be exactly certain – at one point he remembers he was married; another time that he is Irish. But by then he has told so many different versions of his life that we can’t be sure where truth ends and the lies take over.  Early on in the tale he is hit on the head and from then on, he operates in a dream like state in which he seems to recall events like his friend’s burial that have yet to happen.  The borders between truth and reality become ever more distinct as the novel progresses. For the reader it’s a baffling experience.

Baffling, but not rewarding. P.H. Newby won the inaugural Booker Prize with this novel that one critic described as beautifully written and a tour de force of comic writing. There were certainly some passages that gave me a glimmer of hope that the book would improve. But they were simply transitory experiences before I was propelled into yet another labyrinth. By the end I suspected Newby had experienced more fun writing his book than I did in reading it.

This review is also posted on my blog where you can find some bibliographical references for Newby. 

Tony Messenger - 1969 Winner - Something to Answer For - P.H. Newby

I had been trying to purchase a copy of the inaugural Booker Winner for a number of years, with not a lot of success. First editions, mint condition etc. were available for hugely inflated prices and it wasn’t until Faber and Faber recently re-released it in paperback that I was able to obtain a copy.

Let’s flashback to 1969 – a cursory glance at the internet will show you it was a time when man first walked on the moon, massive public rallies against the Vietnam War were being held, 300,000 people turn up to witness Woodstock etc etc. A period where the USA was dominating world headlines. So what about the British “Empire”? They managed to set up this quaint Literature prize for “any full-length novel, written by a citizen of the Commonwealth, the Republic of Ireland or Zimbabwe” with only living authors, who have written their novel in English being eligible. I must admit, since that time, they’ve done a wonderful job of promoting the Prize, creating controversy, pushing for headlines, attracting grand statements like “The prize has established itself as a British institution rather like Derby Day”.

Was 1969 a time when the British were attempting to assert their fading influence? Voila, let me pull a rabbit out of my hat, let’s create a literary institution!

How ironic that then that the first ever Booker Prize winner is a novel that through pathos, black comedy and farce questions the relevance of the Commonwealth. This ridiculous concept of “self”, of being “British”, of still maintaining an influence in world affairs is questioned throughout P.H. Newby’s hard to source and until recent times a forgotten novel.

In 1969 the immediacy of the 1956 Suez Canal conflict would still have been understood by a vast majority of the British public. Whilst the enjoyment of this tale does not require you to research the events of the crisis, assistance, in 2011, to understand a few more of the idiosyncrasies of the story is probably recommended.

In 1951 the British had 80,000 troops stationed along the Suez Canal, making it the largest military base in the world. According to historylearningsite.co.uk “to many in Britain the Suez Canal was a sign of Britain’s overseas power – to many Egyptians it was an emblem of an empire that harkened back to former times that many believed should have gone when World War Two ended.” What a magnificent setting for a novel that was eligible for a Commonwealth Writers Prize!

Onto “For Something to Answer For” itself, in a nut-shell, the narrative presented is about Townrow, a defrauding employee of a Trustee Company who is asked to go to Port Said by a widow, “Mrs K”, to help her deal with the recent death of her husband and Townrow’s friend Elie. On his journey Townrow comes across an enraged Jew who blames the British Government for not warning them of the dangers of the Nazi death trains

At no time did the BBC warn us about those trains. It is useless to deny it. Why was there no warning? We Jews did not know. We were told the men went to Germany to work in factories and on the land. Why did the British not say, ‘Stay away from those trains. Do not go on those trains. They are death trains. They will take you to extermination camps’?

this event becomes a recurring theme. Early on Townrow is mysteriously hit on the head and the whole novel becomes a haze of events. Is Townrow dreaming, are the events occurring, is he British or Irish, has he imagined a funeral for his friend at sea, did he meet his friend in the Arab part of town, did his love interest really disappear at the Greek Sailing Club, the themes are endless and recur with different results throughout.

You couldn’t answer for anything outside your own personal experience. And if you remembered your own experiences wrongly you didn’t count at all. You weren’t human.

Throughout the Booker Prize history a large number of winners and shortlisted novels have dealt with the theme of displacement, Naipaul, Rushdie, Zadie Smith, even this year’s “Pigeon English”, and the 1969 winner “Something to Answer For” also has the theme (somewhat in reverse with a Commonwealth subject being out of place in Egypt).

Scarcely knowing what he was doing or where he was walking he must have been looking straight into the sun because he was so dazzled enormous patches of black shadow seemed to hang across the brilliant morning. They were so black there might have been annihilation behind what they covered. The city hung in strips and patches. That was how he saw his own life.

At one stage reference is made to Victor Hugo’s “Toilers of the Sea” – a tale of displacement, sailors, unrequited love, desolation and ultimately shattered dreams. Is P.H. Newby throwing out bait here? Will the tale of Townrow end with a similar fate? No spoiler alerts here, so you’ll have to read “Something to Answer For” to see if there is a shared theme.

In summary this novel presented me with a number of challenges and to be honest it was a struggle to understand the dream like hazy state, the recurring themes with different twists each time, the relevance of characters and their fates. All up this was not one of my favourite reads from the Booker winners, and to be honest, sitting here in 2011, it is probably not even the one I would have chosen from the 1969 list to win the prize.

Enjoyable but no stand out – and, given this year’s “controversy”, one that would never have made the 2011 shortlist of “readable” works.

Laura's Review - Something to Answer For

Something to Answer For takes place during the 1956 Suez Crisis. This was one of those typically complicated political tangles, and one I knew little about. The crisis involved military action by the British and French, in response to Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal (which in itself was a response to American actions taken when Egypt recognized the People's Republic of China ... and on and on ...).

Jack Townrow walks into the middle of all this when his friend Elie Khoury's widow writes to him requesting help to investigate her husband's death and settle his affairs. Against his better judgment he travels to Egypt. En route he meets a Jewish man who accuses Townrow -- or, rather, the British -- of allowing the Holocaust to happen. Townrow is aghast, certain the British government would have prevented genocide if they had known about it. He is equally certain the British can only do good in Egypt.

Soon after his arrival, Townrow is attacked and forgets his identity, his nationality, and many other details. He still tries hard to help Mrs. Khoury, although he questions whether Elie is really dead and sometimes goes off in search of him. He falls for a young woman named Leah, but evil and suspicion lurk around every corner, and it's difficult for Townrow -- and the reader -- to tell who the "good guys" really are.

Townrow's character appears to be a metaphor for the British Empire losing its colonial power, and I'm sure the events were still fresh in readers' minds when this book was published in 1968. But the metaphor didn't work for me, I found the plot a bit surreal, and the book very difficult to follow. It just wasn't my thing.



My original review can be found here.

1969 - Something to Answer For, by P.H. Newby

Ok, I'm going to start by blogging Something to Answer For by P.H. Newby because it's the winner of the inaugural Booker, and the pride of my Booker Prize collection. This is what I wrote about it in my journal, back in December 2003....

I paid $225 AUD to read this book! It's the most expensive book I've ever read, like drinking a Penfold's Grange - except that one expects a Grange to be a finer wine than any other, whereas Newby's book is not better than all the other Bookers I've read. It's just a whole lot harder to acquire.

I was so excited when it finally came, all the way from the SA Book Exchange. (That's South Africa, not South Australia.) I was thrilled to hold it in my hands - a slim little hardback, with an orange and white cover in a mildly groovy design, a concession to the Swinging Sixties by Faber and Faber, but it still has a 1950s feel about it, as befits the book trade at that time.

Beware: spoilers

The story has a fifties feel about it too. It's baffling, because it has an unreliable narrator, but the gist of it is that the anti-hero, Townrow, has to skip London because he's been embezzling. His landlady, Mrs Khoury, is the catalyst for his flight, because she thinks her husband has been murdered over in Egypt, and so - both to help her out and also evade the law -Townrow departs, hoping to be richly recompensed for his trouble because Mrs K is rich.

Egypt, however, is in the throes of the Suez Crisis and in the chaos Townrow gets hit on the head in an attack - and thereafter nothing he says can be taken at face value. He says so himself: he mis-remembers things; changes things; gets confused; and deliberately lies. He says this partly depends on circumstances, and it's partly because of the nature of memory.

Newby, however, is interested in more than duplicitous memories. En route to Cairo, Townrow is accused by a Jew who blames Britain for its failure to warn the Jews about the trains to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His accuser says that the British authorities knew, and chose not to warn the Jews. Townrow reacts with indignation, arguing that one can always trust the British to act with honour, but his subsequent repudiation of this naive response is the main focus of the story...

As events unforld, Townrow encounters various examples of British duplicity, from the incompetence and deceit of their intelligence officers to the betrayal of its own citizens in Port Said. By the time Townrow faces interrogation himself, he tells his inquisitors that he will not answer any quetions about his Egyptian associates because he trusts them at face value but he doesn't trust the British at all.

He decides from this point onward to live life for the moment, taking things at face value. He manages to evacuate not only Mrs K husband's exhumed coffin, but also some nuns and his dubious girlfriend, and then sails off in a boat - to take what comes...

Or so he says. He doesn't really want to face up to three years in gaol for his crime, does he?

I finished reading and journalled this book on 12.12.2003.

Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers