Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall
Fourth Estate, 2009
256 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-0007230181

…

…

…

One can tell at first glance that this is a serious book.  Not by its volume—no one writes short novels nowadays—but rather by the starkly simple design of its cover: a Tudor rose on the background of a Tudor red door, with the author’s name and title superimposed in identical lettering. The inside flaps confirm this message: in the front, three paragraphs on the plot followed by one of publisher’s praise; in the back, a few lines on Mantel’s previous books. Even with the breathless encomia added to the back cover after Wolf Hall’s nomination (and subsequent win) for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, it is not the author’s personality which is expected to sell, but her words.

The Tudor rose labels Wolf Hall as an historical novel, set in the most glamorous period of English civilisation. The blurb’s focus, too, is on England, the “half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.” Mantel is one of “our” best writers and her latest is, the blurb proclaims in an earnest mixture of humility and hyperbole, “that very rare thing: a truly great English novel”. The book is to be compared, naturally, with Middlemarch, England’s answer to Tolstoy and Proust. Indeed, Stephen Greenblatt goes so far as to link Mantel with Shakespeare in his full-length review for The New York Review of Books.

Wolf Hall not only reaffirms the national spirit, but also presents an attractively dark hero in Thomas Cromwell, who, to an English audience’s satisfaction, breaks “all the rules of a rigid society”, fights against both “the political establishment and the papacy”, and suffers from his share of “personal disaster”. The Telegraph is among many to recognise that Mantel’s Cromwell represents a significant departure from his traditional villainousness (as seen, for instance, in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons), while the Observer sees Cromwell as “the true author of England’s independence.”

Reminding its readers not to confuse Thomas with Oliver, the Mail Online retells the former’s story in terms of class warfare, confounding history with Mantel’s fiction and lingering upon “totalitarian dictator” Henry’s lust for a “feisty, sexy and much younger” mistress.  While USA Today advises those less familiar with English history to “think Tudor gangster”, the New Yorker sees Cromwell as a precursor of the American “self-made” man. Everyone, it seems, wants to make Mantel his own.

Winning the Booker has, as its founders intended, boosted the novel’s sales.  The prize has also drawn limited attention to Wolf Hall on the continent–Der Spiegel approvingly quotes Mantel on Wolf Hall’s combination of “sex, melodrama, treason, seduction and violent death.” To gain a lasting reputation beyond the Anglo-Saxon world, however, is a mark of greatness which only time, and exceptional literary value, can bestow.  Meanwhile, Mantel will carry on, prize or no prize, as a “working writer”, fully aware that “you’re really only as good as the last sentence you wrote.”

Emma Park is reading for a DPhil in Classics at University College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

Allan Hollinghurst
The Line of Beauty
Picador, 2004
320 pages
ISBN 033048320X

‘What would Henry James have made of us?’, wonders an ambitious secretary to Gerald Fedden, the Tory MP whose house and family lies at the centre of The Line of Beauty. Hollinghurst’s protagonist Nick Guest, an ardent follower of ‘the Master’, provides an answer that, one feels, the author’s own work modestly strives for:

He’d have been very kind to us, he’d have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he’d have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn’t have realized until just before the end that he’d seen right through us.

Henry James’ shade was a much-noted presence when the Booker shortlist was announced earlier this year—as Hollinghurst’s hero’s hero, the eponymous subject of Colm Toíbín’s The Master, and the subject of a notably absent longlister, David Lodge’s Author Author. While the latter two use James’ biography for their material, The Line of Beauty makes his influence felt in the texture of the prose itself: the third-person voice, filtered through Nick’s mind, is languid, at times complex, and beautiful. Hollinghurst avoids mere pastiche but is not ashamed to acknowledge the debt. Nick’s summary of The Spoils of Poynton which, late in the book, he is attempting rather non-committally to adapt for the screen, could serve Hollinghurst’s tale just as well. It is a ‘bleak’ comedy ‘about someone who loves things more than people’, and Nick is surrounded by characters who fit that description. Equally, Nick’s thesis on ‘style that hides things and reveals things at the same time’ informs the structure of the society and the novel in which he exists.

The exposure of privacy is at the heart of the novel, in two parallel and socially opposed worlds: the corruption of Thatcher’s revolution, figured in the ‘Tory sleaze’ which lurks in the background from the beginning of the book and finally explodes in Gerald Fedden’s face and Nick’s discovery of the hidden yet public gay scene of the 1980s, which leads him to a transition from chaste adoration of unattainable straight men to active sexual encounter. The latter has been something of a media fixation (culminating perhaps in the Daily Express’ bizarre headline ‘Booker Won by Gay Sex’), but in fact, Hollinghurst himself has admitted that in comparison to his previous works (including The Folding Star, nominated for the Booker in 1994), the sex scenes themselves are comparatively chaste. When Nick loses his virginity—perhaps the most explicit sexual description in the novel—he thinks to himself how he has ‘never seen it described in a book’, a tacit acknowledgement that a young man twenty years later could not say the same. Certainly there is, as Hollinghurst has acknowledged in interviews, less political and literary urgency in writing about gay sex in 2004. Instead, the interest lies in the context, the actual social and physical space, in which these encounters occur.

The first sexual experience takes place in a West London private garden, to which, as the Feddens’ guest, Nick holds a key. The line between private and public is blurred again and again over the course of the novel and is central to the map Hollinghurst outlines of gay London in the 1980s—a city where a tube station toilet is famous for having been cruised by Rudolf Nureyev. It is that same combination of promiscuity and enforced silence which leads to another masked presence in the text. Early on we hear of ‘illness’ but even when a friend of the Feddens’ dies of AIDS, the subject is quietly absorbed into that realm of the ‘vulgar and unsafe,’ a subject which the upper classes efface. Privacy, as a key Conservative ideal since the Victorian era from which Rachel Fedden’s wealth originates, is revealed to be both a privilege and a prison. Nick is allowed to remain in the house only on the unspoken assumption that his sexuality will remain closeted. The political disaster that strikes Fedden at the climax of the novel similarly turns upon the revelation of hidden transactions. A scandal involving insider trading is followed swiftly by the discovery of his affair with his secretary, but it is the gay Guest, the lover of a millionaire’s dying son, who becomes a scapegoat, sacrificed in order to allow the Fedden family to retreat back into the security of their unvoiced alliances.

The Feddens circle remains an impenetrably exclusive environment throughout. Hollinghurst’s satire of the 1980s cult of money cunningly positions (and helpfully labels) its hero as only a ‘Guest’ in the world of the fabulously wealthy. As such, he is at once fascinated by and excluded from that world and its mores. Nick’s first association with his hero Henry James is that he too can ‘stand a great deal of gilt’ (a clever play on words)—he loves ‘beautiful things’—but for much of the novel, and for the Feddens’ strata in general, this beauty is confined by possessions and wealth. As Hollinghurst has publicly explained, Nick is ‘not just looking on in horror, but is actually susceptible to the glamour of it all’. All of this—the brilliance and sparkle, a veneer for corruption and emptiness, the social whirl, and the gaze of the outsider-inside fascinated with the society he observes in one rather oblique young man (first Toby Fedden, then the young millionaire Wani Ouradi)—recalls another American novelist and another Nick, as if the narrator of The Great Gatsby has at last emerged from the closet. Hollinghurst’s novel, like Fitzgerald’s, traces the transition from old to new money, and similarly observes that behind the apparent difference between schooled, refined elegance and brash showiness is the same hollow love of ‘things more than people’. While in the earlier novel it is Gatsby who owns shelves of unread, uncut books, here it is an English lord who keeps uncut ‘classics’ in a ‘gilded cage’—he, of course, has read them elsewhere; his library is precious for the objects, not the words, it contains. Nick notes that the ‘new’ Lebanese millionaire Bertrand Ouradi’s art collection, which he regards with distaste, is a part of the ‘necessary trappings of his position’, sensing vulgarity in the disparity between class and money; however, the same might equally be said of the Feddens’ and their extended family’s possessions, from the gift of a Gauguin to a performance of classical music in their drawing room (one of several brilliant satirical set-pieces).

Nick’s social and sexual emergence—and subsequently his dramatic fall from grace—is foregrounded against and parallels directly the boom and bust, the promise and the disillusion of 1980s Thatcherite Britain. The satire hinges, like much of Henry James’ work, upon issues of class, which is ultimately at the root of Nick’s outsider status. As the son of an antiques dealer, whose intimacy with the interiors of stately homes has in the past been that of the clock-winder, not the guest, he is ‘a puzzle […] in many contexts – he was often being interviewed obliquely, to see how he fitted in’. The subject of money or class origin itself is occluded by the ‘upper-class economy’ of speech that Nick admires and imitates. Hollinghurst, like James, has a keen ear for the inflections and elisions of upper class social chatter, and an equally keen eye for the proprieties of the semi-rural middle class (again drawing parallels between 1890s and 1980s social convention). Pages of dialogue are sustained with the merest hint of intervention from the author. At other times, he throws out an off-the-cuff portrait in perfect miniature: witness the lady who wins ‘a half-bottle of Mira Mart gin’ at a village fête, ‘and laughed, and blushed violently, as if she’d already drunk it and disgraced herself’.

In this brittle and thrilling new world, the ‘line of beauty’—which might be variously figured in the novel as a bloodline, an aesthetic ideal, or a literary style—appropriately recalls the ritual of cocaine addiction as well. The drug becomes an integral part of Nick’s sex life, social life, and sense of self; that ritual, ‘all done with money’, as Wani observes, is linked explicitly to the enabling power of wealth, inducing the feeling that ‘everything had become possible’. Like the gilt-laden possessions of the first half of the novel, coke exerts a fascination for Nick that injects a certain glamour into his life. His intoxicated vision is handled with finesse by Hollinghurst, whose style takes on a hard quickness and boldness, narrowing his adjectival range to all that glitters, capturing the ‘gleaming’, ‘brilliant’, ‘bright’ surfaces which Nick fails to see beyond so that we too are caught up in a trick of the light… until it is all deflated by a characteristically piercing observation, the realisation that the drug is ‘pure compulsion, though it gave them the delusion of choice, and of wit in making it’.

As the second half of the novel progresses, Nick’s experience of ‘come-down’ increasingly dominates, and elegant, remote Wani Ouradi’s ‘love of corruption’ gradually erodes his glamour. The description of his flaccid, coke-fuelled porn marathons must surely rank among the most uncomfortable reading of recent years. Hollinghurst has a gift for observing those states of being which lack purity or grandeur. His range of emotional nuance, worthy of James himself, reveals an unrelenting honesty in the face of the pettiness, sordidness, meanness and self-absorption which accompany emotions of a supposedly grander scale. Later, when Wani is dying of AIDS, Nick feels himself somehow in possession of that story, so that it becomes ‘his own drama’; the notion of our responses as a performance which we watch ourselves enacting recurs throughout the novel and is, I think, among Hollinghurst’s most acute observations about human behaviour.

The novel as a whole, tracing the middle years of the decade, has a refined balance of structure that reflects Nick’s myriad invocations of the ‘line of beauty’ itself. Taking Hogarth’s sweeping curve and finding its most perfect example in the dip of a man’s spine, Nick mirrors the figure to make an ‘ogee’, the double curve of a window, door or angel’s wings, also paralleling the high and subsequent come-down of cocaine use and the classic rise-and-fall narrative in miniature. The two parts of the novel each accelerate towards a politically-charged party (first Toby’s twenty-first birthday, then the Feddens’ wedding anniversary) and then fall away; the novel begins and ends with Nick entering and leaving the empty Notting Hill house, in very different circumstances, but both entering and departing with nothing. On the level of syntax, for all the bite and sharpness of Hollinghurst’s prose, there is as much that is genuinely lovely, as when Nick, looking out over London from the privileged vantage point of a Notting Hill balcony, feels that ‘he had been swept to the brink of some new promise, a scented vista or vision of the night, and then held there’. Like the thrill of Fitzgerald’s Long Island evenings, this description succeeds in transcending the world of property so that we read on poised with Nick at the start of a new decade, full of promise. Hollinghurst’s achievement, at the last, mirrors Nick’s own: he retains a sense of the beautiful, and asserts its possibility, against and within a world of deceptively brilliant surfaces.

Amy Sackville has just completed an MPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford. Her thesis focused on James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. She has recently published work in the James Joyce Broadsheet.

Damon Galgut
The Good Doctor
Atlantic Books, 2003
215 pages

Damon Galgut’s latest novel, The Good Doctor , was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker prize last September. Robert McCrum tipped it for the prize in the Observer , and bookmakers William Hill had it at third favourite (9/2 odds), but it was always the competitor least likely to benefit from the accompanying publicity. It was weeks before Borders and Blackwells stocked more than a handful of copies, let alone displayed it with its five rivals.¹ This may have had more to do with Galgut’s publishers than the bookstores, but it also reflects the novel’s marginal subject matter and its author’s marginal status: The Good Doctor is set in a barely functioning hospital in a remote former homeland in northern South Africa, and Damon Galgut is a resident South African writer who isn’t a Nobel laureate, like Gordimer or Coetzee (who now lives in Australia).

At the beginning of the novel we are introduced to the hospital’s dysfunctional staff. Frank Eloff is a morose, thirty-something, white South African doctor who has waited years to succeed the director of the hospital, Ruth Ngema, a returned exile whose promised promotion to a government position is repeatedly postponed.² The hospital is unable to treat patients with any serious ailment, and the rest of its staff ‘a quarrelsome Cuban couple, two kitchen workers and a male nurse who appears to be systematically stripping and selling the hospital’s meagre fixtures’ languish in a state of provisionally arrested decline, with political tensions between black and white precariously balanced.

Enter Laurence Waters, a naively enthusiastic and newly qualified doctor who has come to the hospital to serve his year of compulsory medical community service. His surname, not accidentally, announces him as bringing new life to the place, as he sets about initiating new outreach programmes and unsettling Frank’s narcissistic emotional stagnation. Despite lack of encouragement from the cautious Ngema, Laurence achieves small successes. But this is not to be a story of development and progress. A military detachment arrives in the nearest town, the decaying planned capital of the former homeland, to police the permeable border close by. There have long been rumours that the homeland’s shadowy leader, the Brigadier, is engaged in illegal cross-border trafficking and is plotting insurgency. The nurse departs after Laurence accuses him of theft, and the denouement involves a raid on the hospital which leaves Laurence missing, presumed dead. At the novel’s end, Frank is about to assume control of the even more depleted hospital, Ngema’s appointment finally, it seems, having materialised.

This précis does not do justice to what is a compellingly readable novel. Sub-plots involve Frank’s failed and loveless relationships and encounters (with a local black woman, with his estranged wife who is about to emigrate with his erstwhile best friend, and with Laurence’s supposed girlfriend, an African-American aid worker), tension with his father (once a poster-boy of the apartheid government), and his memories of having to make an impossible decision while serving in the army during the Angolan war. With echoes of Camus, Coetzee (especially Waiting for the Barbarians and Disgrace ), and early, untranslated Etienne van Heerden (Om te Awol), The Good Doctor is chilling in its portrayal of political tensions and existential torpor, and unnervingly acute in its observations on the failures of the new dispensation. The unreliability of Frank’s narration is handled masterfully: he is unable to interpret events, and his tautologies and clichés perfectly convey the role that language plays in his lack of comprehension.

But there are some frustrating elements in this deliberately frustrated narrative. The clearly homoerotic relationship between Frank and Laurence is awkwardly marginalised. They share a room ’somewhat improbably, there being countless empty rooms in the hospital’ and Frank feels both attracted to and threatened by Laurence in equal measure. Laurence’s girlfriend tells Frank: ‘The two of you are obviously in love with each other’. Frank’s response is not to deny it, but to be left ’speechless’. Is Frank, a man brutalised by the ‘old’ South Africa, unable to verbalise unsettling feelings, or is The Good Doctor an awkward attempt on Galgut’s part to write a ’straight’ novel? His earlier work, particularly The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), figured homosexuality as a reaction against what Galgut regarded in the 1980s as the hyper-masculine mythology of apartheid.³ Like earlier protagonists, Frank rejects his father ‘but this father is less the heterosexual patriarch disowned in previous novels, and more a symbol of the comfortable, complicit, white lifestyle from which Frank has attempted to exile himself. Galgut seems unsure of how to wring post-apartheid significance from the residual (but uncomfortably suppressed) gay sub-plot, but he also seems reluctant to relinquish it. It is a pity he does not address it more directly.

The novel’s metafictional musings about a deeper, vaguely delineated allegory also threaten to undermine its acuity. Frank’s narrative is peppered with exclamations about the frustrating elusiveness of its own significance: ‘If this was an allegory [...] but it was only real life’; ‘like a cryptic symbol’; ‘I had found my grand defining moment, but what it revealed I didn’t want to know’. Obvious parallels only deepen the obscurity: Laurence tries to tame the overgrown grounds of the hospital, for example, and the Brigadier returns to his vacant mansion at night to mow the lawns. Are we to infer a significant connection, or is the suggestion of an indeterminate link an aspect of Frank’s deepening confusion?

The graphic on the cover of this beautifully produced book is supposed to be an x-ray of Laurence Waters. But, of course, the personal being political, the x-ray is also the country laid bare. In his infrequent displays of insight, Frank tells Laurence: ‘The past has only just happened. It’s not past yet’; ‘Everything is politics’. By the end of the novel the political has become intensely personal, although no one knows quite who holds the advantage. It is as a vignette of the dysfunctions of a post-apartheid society still unsure of its future that the novel succeeds. Galgut’s political barometer is sensitive, and worthy of attention, even if his allegories are sometimes unclear. Perhaps that is part of the point.

Andrew van der Vlies is about to complete a DPhil  at Lincoln College, Oxford, on the publication and reception histories of South African literatures in Britain. He has an MA from Rhodes University in South Africa, and an MPhil from Oxford. He has published essays on Olive Schreiner, Alan Paton, Alex La Guma, and Roy Campbell, and teaches twentieth-century British, American and Colonial/Postcolonial literatures, and Theory.

Notes

1. Robert McCrum, ‘Professor Carey has come up trumps’, The Observer , 21 September 2003; see also http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookerprize2003/0,13819,1019602,00.html
2. One wonders if Galgut intends a reference to Mbongeni Ngema, whose play Sarafina! was at the centre of a row about the squandering of AIDS funding several years ago.
3. See Michiel Heyns, ‘A man’s world: white South African gay writing and the State of Emergency’, in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970-1995 , ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 108-22, p.113.

]]> http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/everything-is-politics-but-is-everything-allegory/feed/ 0 http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/tigers-and-tall-tales/ http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/tigers-and-tall-tales/#comments Sat, 01 Mar 2003 12:00:40 +0000 Joshua Billings http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/?p=55 Jennifer Dunn

Yann Martel
Life of Pi
Canongate, 2002
319 pages

How much can you believe—that a sixteen-year-old boy spends 227 days adrift in the Pacific? What if he’s with a 450-pound tiger? Strained credulity is the order of the day in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, and deliberately so: the question of belief is central to Life of Pi, the Canadian author’s third book and this year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize.

The main story of Life of Pi is framed by Martel’s own preface, which describes the winding path that led him to write the book. Martel thanks our protagonist, ‘Mr. Patel’, for sharing his story through interviews. Martel, it seems, wants us to believe that the story we are about to read is true, even though we know that Life of Pi is a novel. When Pi himself takes over the narrative in the first chapter, he captivates us with a very different, instantly appealing voice. The novel continues to oscillate back and forth between Pi’s narration of his long-ago survival at sea and Martel’s italicised interjections. Because Pi’s perceptive, reverent, and practical view of the world draws us in, though, we’re willing to suspend our disbelief of this elaborate framing device and immerse ourselves in the story.

Pi Patel grows up, we are told in the first third of the novel, on his family’s zoo in India. The Patels then decide to sell their animals to American buyers and settle in Canada. But in the middle of their journey across the Pacific, their hopes meet with an abrupt end. As Pi tells us, with characteristic candor:

The ship sank. It made a sound like a giant metallic burp. Things bubbled at the surface and then vanished. Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.

The ship sinks suddenly and for no known reason. Pi finds himself thrown aboard a lifeboat by the ship’s crew (who vanish into the sea), accompanied by animals (who have been inexplicably liberated from their cages). His family is gone. He is left in a well-stocked lifeboat with a hyena, an injured zebra, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

If the events narrated are, in principle, possible, they become increasingly improbable. This is magical realism in the original sense of the phrase: there is no actual magic, but events and images are juxtaposed so as to create a sense of the magical. Pi’s fascination with the details of life imbues everything he explores with simplicity and subtle beauty. Pi’s wonder and descriptive talents lend the story a fantastical aura:

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it, you would be amazed at the animals that would fall out. It would pour more than cats and dogs, I tell you. Boa constrictors, Komodo dragons, crocodiles, piranhas, ostriches, wolves, lynx, wallabies, manatees, porcupines, orangutans, wild boar—that’s the sort of rainfall you could expect on your umbrella.

A constant stream of strange imagery prepares us for what happens after the ship sinks: we are so spellbound by the perceptive enchantment of Pi’s world that we are eager to believe anything he tells us. So when he finds himself on the animal-loaded lifeboat, we believe it and keep reading. It is no surprise that the hyena attacks and eats the zebra and orangutan: Pi has explained the rules of animal hunger in detail.

And when Richard Parker emerges from his hiding place on the boat and kills the hyena, this, too, makes sense. It is the tiger’s failure to turn on Pi that defies all expectation. Even Pi is surprised, as, shaken with fear, he assesses the food supply and builds a small raft of lifejackets and paddles just in case.

The situation’s implausibility pleases rather than frustrates, and, anyway, we want to know how the situation will turn out, so on we go. With one exception, the narrative of those 227 days at sea flows smoothly as an account of a day-to-day existence where wonder is joined with acceptance and belief:

With just one glance I discovered that the sea is a city. Just below me, all around, unsuspected by me, were highways, boulevards, streets and roundabouts bustling with submarine traffic. In water that was dense, glassy and flecked by millions of lit-up specks of plankton, fish like trucks and buses and cars and bicycles and pedestrians were madly racing about… I gazed upon this urban hurly-burly like someone observing a city from a hot-air balloon. It was a spectacle wondrous and awe-inspiring. This is surely what Tokyo must look like at rush hour.

The only time the narrative overstretches itself is when Pi encounters an island made of algae, inhabited solely by meerkats. Pi begins the tale with a warning: ‘there will be many who disbelieve the following episode. Still, I give it to you now because it’s part of the story and it happened to me’.

The event presages Pi’s landfall on the Mexican shore. There, we are again forced into disbelief, this time by two events that are entirely plausible, even predictable.

First, Richard Parker abandons Pi. Considering all we’ve been told about animals and their desire for comfort, it only makes sense that a tiger would quickly abandon seasickness and scarcity of food for the nearby jungle. But after 227 days of relationship building, we hope for a different, miraculous outcome (perhaps Pi will keep the tiger, or they will remain lifelong friends?). The second event is more jarring: the authorities refuse to believe Pi’s story. Their skepticism prompts Pi to retort:

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn’t love hard to believe?… Love is hard to believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard to believe, ask any believer.

To prove his point, Pi offers a different, more ‘believable’ account, substituting the animals on the lifeboat for people from the ship. The authorities have trouble accepting this story as well—and the reader’s faith in Pi, so long maintained, is also in danger. Is he mad? Is Richard Parker a hallucination? Will our author return once more and explain? And what did happen to the ship, that accident that started all of this in motion? To the end, Pi insists on his original version, but the reader’s faith in narratives, and in this narrative in particular, has been shaken.

It is this direct relationship between storytelling and belief that makes Life of Pi more than just a well-told magical realist fable. In its questioning of other kinds of faith—faith in God, faith in nature’s complexities, faith in the will to live when faced with enormous loss—the book addresses the sort of philosophical themes often used to separate ‘literary’ from ‘popular’ fiction. Further, the novel frames its questions with an aching sincerity and eloquence that distinguish it as the sort of touching and accomplished ‘literary’ work Booker Prize judges historically privilege. It also boasts strong characterization and an original, compelling plot. In retrospect, it has obvious Booker potential (although no less than five publishers, including Penguin and Chatto & Windus, turned down the manuscript before Canongate picked it up). In addition to its highbrow ‘literariness,’ however, as one of the judges noted, Life of Pi ‘is a book with enormous and wide appeal,’ fitting nicely with the ‘new’ Booker Prize’s agenda to include more popular books. Perhaps the novel’s double appeal is best understood through another judge’s comments:

Unlike popular or genre novels, literary novels cannot be prescribed by publishers… They create their own enclosed world, are inventive in terms of narrative and character, and have an inimitable voice, the personal signature of the author.

Part spiritual fable, part metafictional reflection, and part adventure story, Life of Pi transcends the boundaries of stuffy literary intellectualism and becomes a uniquely enjoyable story in both content and structure. A smart choice for a Booker committee seeking to redefine itself, and just recognition for an author who has come into his own.

Jennifer Dunn is a DPhil student at Balliol College, Oxford, writing on the tropes of magic and the supernatural in twentieth century women’s writing.