According to the latest bookmakers’ odds, the New Statesman columnist Will Self is the favourite to win this year’s Man Booker Prize with his novel Umbrella. The book was reviewed in the NS earlier this year by Brian Dillon. Umbrella, Dillon wrote, “is a complexly textured, conceptually forbidding thesis about the modern, its art and their discontents”, with echoes of great modernists such as Joyce and Eliot, and also of Flaubert. “This being Self,” Dillon went on, “there is also a great deal of humour”.
Second favourite with the bookies is Hilary Mantel’s historical novel about Thomas Cromwell Bring Up The Bodies, the sequel to the Booker-winning Wolf Hall, and the second novel in a projected trilogy. Bring Up the Bodies was reviewed for the NS by novelist Amanda Craig, not a fan of Wolf Hall. “What makes Bring Up the Bodies so different from its predecessor?” Craig asked. “I think it’s the emotional intelligence with which Henry, Boleyn, Cromwell and the rest are depicted as characters we can feel for, as opposed to just know about.” Craig ended her review with a prediction: “Bring Up the Bodies should net its author another Booker Prize – deservedly, this time.”
Mantel was profiled in a recent issue of the New Statesman by Sophie Elmhirst. Elmhirst tells a story about the night in October 2009 when Mantel won the Man Booker Prize.
“I worry about people who can’t make their voices heard . . . People like me from working-class backgrounds could sort of weasel through and I’m not sure that applies any more.” On the night of 6 October 2009, when Mantel won the Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, she sat at the Fourth Estate table with [her editor Nicholas] Pearson and, minutes before the announcement of the winner was due, she told him about a young writer she thought he should read. They were both anxious, hyper-aware that this was the career-transforming moment, that she was on the cusp of industry recognition long overdue, but she thought she would use the time and the opportunity to recommend a new author to her publisher.
The other novels on this year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist are:
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
Swimming Home by Deborah Levy
The Lighthouse by Alison Moore
Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (reviewed for the NS by Anita Sethi)
The winner of the prize will be announced at a ceremony tonight at the Guildhall in London. The judges are Sir Peter Stothad (chair), Amanda Foreman, Dan Stevens, Bharat Tandon and Dinah Birch.
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