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. 

June Starr: 1969 short list review

Laura suggested that this sort of review might be useful to Complete Booker fans and participants. Maybe you have different ideas about what book should have won, if you've read the list. I think Laura was hoping this might generate some nice discussion. At any rate, let me know what you think. I'm reading all of the short lists in the coming year (or so). The links are to individual reviews at my Reading the Bookers site, where this wrap-up also appears.

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As I indicated in the post on Something to Answer For, that novel makes sense to me as the inaugural Booker Prize winner, though the field is certainly strong.

Mosley’s Impossible Object gives us a stylistic experiment, shifting angles of view and playing with chronology in his account of a love affair and its aftermath. Williams’s From Scenes Like These gives us a vision of lower-class Scottish life as the nation is transformed through increasing industrialism. Spark’s The Public Image gives us a cold, cinematic look into the lives behind movie-star glamour and public relations. England’s Figures in a Landscape gives us a deeply present account of contemporary war. Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good gives us a more traditional if philosophically sophisticated study of love and relationships.

All of the novels engage with if not the immediate present, then at least with the era in which their books are written—with attention to the morals and mores of the time—particularly in their attitudes toward love, relationships, and identity. All suggest a culture in flux, with old certainties—about national and personal identity, war, love, and ways of life--giving way to uncertainty and anxiety.

All of the works, with the exception of Murdoch’s, seem to me to be unsettled and unsettling in a variety of ways. And while I truly loved Figures in a Landscape, Something to Answer For tackles post-colonial themes through historically located action, tragic love, and experimentation. The main character’s cynicism and naivete speak to Britain’s place and identity in the world, while he deals with politics at the personal, national, and international level. The head injury he sustains gives the book the hallucinatory quality that underscores the uncertain present and future that the book's events describe while also making the past real and resonant. Plus—the novel is both readable and stylistically adventurous, not an easy combination to pull off.

Good inaugural choice, Booker committee. Let’s see if next year's committee can hold off the sophomore slump.