Impac prizeWith the winner of the 2007 International Impac Dublin Literary Award to be announced next Thursday, Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent, weighs up the contenders on the all-male shortlist and places her bets
Decision day approaches for the 2007 International Impac Dublin Literary Award. Never before in its 12-year history has this prize, the world's richest purse for a single work, offered such a gathering of high-profile established novels, two of which are dazzlingly beautiful (and of that pair, one of which is a debut possessed of gentle and unnerving vigour).
To date, Impac has proved its worth by alerting readers to outstanding foreign fiction in translation. This year, only one of the eight novels in the all-male shortlist is in translation. Admittedly, that exception, Norwegian Per Petterson's evocative, boyhood-revisited Out Stealing Horses, with its echoes of the great US literary mentor, William Maxwell, is a seductive, melancholic and persuasive narrative. Winner of the British Independent Foreign Fiction prize, and translated by Anne Born, it is the contender most capable, and deserving, of wresting the Impac from South African master JM Coetzee.
The 2003 Nobel literature laureate is the first writer to achieve a Booker double and is one of the world's finest exponents of the art of fiction. He has a vast international readership. Slow Man is his eleventh novel and his first since leaving his homeland to settle in Australia.
This year's shortlist is attractive by any standards, and unique, as instead of readers asking "who?", they are more likely to say "I've read that already". It contains two Britons, as well as the Bombay-born Salman Rushdie, at this stage almost an honorary Englishman. Ireland is represented by Sebastian Barry, and there are two Americans, including the veteran, Cormac McCarthy. Coetzee and Petterson are the token exotics for a prize which has in the past introduced exciting African, Vietnamese and eastern European newcomers. This is intended as an observation, not a criticism, and it could be said to reflect an increased universality in library tastes as nominations from this prize come from an international panel of libraries. It is also a surprise to note the absence of Australian and Canadian writers.
THE ONLY FIRST novel on the shortlist is Peter Hobbs's elegiac period piece, The Short Day Dying. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Best First Novel Award in 2005, it is a beautiful, beguiling and profound work shaped by the influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins, in which many of the descriptions of nature possess a lyric intensity worthy of verse. This novel was unusually well-reviewed and generated an awed gratitude in most critics on publication. Its narrator, Charles Wenmoth, apprentice blacksmith and Methodist lay preacher, lives in the shadow of impending mortality. His every observation is fired by his sense of death's inevitability: "Another Sabbath is gone in to eternity borne from us swiftly as though the angels gathered it in their arms flung wide to harvest the days . . . The days flicker with light and are quickly past."
Set in 1870, it is the story of one man's faith but it is also a portrait of a rural England as seen in the pages of Thomas Hardy's fatalistic fictions.
Poverty, suffering and the grinding meanness of life are juxtaposed with Wenmoth's response to the beauty of nature. There is, above all, his determined religious belief in the face of all disappointment. His greatest consolation is a young blind girl in whom his trust is rooted. Her death leaves him struggling. It is an extraordinary book, part odyssey, part parable. If at times Wenmoth's meditations appear overly intellectualised, and his poetic sensibility too heightened, these are but slight inconsistencies. The dramatic grandeur of this book, particularly a near-drowning episode and a subsequent illness, will linger long in the memory, as will the candour and courage of its narrator.
Hobbs, whose short story collection, I Could Ride All Day in My Cool Blue Train, was published last year, is, along with US writer Jonathan Safran Foer, one of the two youngsters on the shortlist.
The other British contender, Julian Barnes, has a large body of work, including novels, fiction and journalism, as well as a major reputation for being clever, even too clever, and is something of an expert on all things French. He has been shortlisted for Arthur & George, which was also shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. Even should the cool, sophisticated Barnes not happen to be one of your favourite authors, you will be won over by this warm, big-hearted, good- natured book (can we really be referring to a Julian Barnes novel?). Based on the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, doctor, larger-than-life all-round individual and reluctant creator of Sherlock Holmes, the narrative looks at a specific incident, a racially fuelled miscarriage of justice that preoccupied Conan Doyle.
It is a most untypical book for Barnes. Set in Edwardian England, it has a convincing period feel and rattles along at a great pace. It is a human, almost Dickensian novel that is simply impossible to dislike and has won Barnes legions of new admirers as well as causing some of his critics to eat humble pie.
Much the same applies to Salman Rushdie's contender, his ninth novel, Shalimar the Clown. Long established as one of the world's most famous writers, Rushdie, for all his anger and energy, has never again quite scaled the heights of his one great novel, Midnight's Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981.
Since then, he has been looking at the same big themes and has at times appeared to be writing variations of the same, always big, book. Shalimar the Clown is a characteristically sprawling burlesque extravaganza in which an underlying theme of terrorism undercuts the tale of a heaving passion gone badly wrong. Rushdie's fans will love it; the more wary may simply brace themselves for the journey and read on, confident that, at worst with Rushdie, there are always some saving gags along the way. Still, it is his best book since The Moor's Last Sigh.(1995).
Cormac McCarthy, never a writer known to crack jokes, is at his most deadly, death-wish serious with No Country for Old Men. Don't be misled by the Yeatsian title. This is a violent chase thriller in which the anti-hero (who happens to discover and make off with stolen money at the scene of a bloody shoot-out) is relentlessly pursued by an insane hired killer. It is a stagy narrative lumpy with the tone-deaf, leaden dialogue for which McCarthy is famous. There are moments of excruciating excitement, yet ultimately it is a case of exactly how drawn a reader is to McCarthy's monotous variations on a theme, that theme being the death of the old West. It is difficult to believe that the same apocalyptic imagination that created Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992) and a mid- trilogy masterpiece, The Crossing (1994), penned this heavy-handed piece of theatre.
NEW YORK LITERARY boy wonder Jonathan Safran Foer exploded on the scene with Everything is Illuminated in 2002. So far, so good. Then in 2005, along came the hugely hyped Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, billed as the first 9/11 novel. Not only was it struggling under the burden of a second novel following a thunderously successful first one, it was being offered as the first literary response to the air attacks that changed America - and the world. It follows the story of nine-year-old Oskar (note the name, shades of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum) as he sets out to solve a mystery after his father has died in the World Trade Centre.
There is an inventive frenzy about Safran Foer's novel, but somehow it never convinces. For all the bluster and striking flashes of history revisited, it is a big book that merely gets smaller with time. The recent publication of Don DeLillo's superb 9/11 lament, Falling Man, has virtually obliterated it.
Shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, Sebastian Barry's first World War tale, A Long Long Way, is enjoying continued success. Young Willie Dunne, eager to please a stern father, goes to fight for the king and experiences the hell that was the trenches. Meanwhile, back home, the Easter Rising is being played out. One year after Colm Tóibín became the first home Impac winner, Barry can't hope for the double.
JM Coetzee is always the man to beat, because his grasp of life and human nature is so exact, his prose so graceful and his humour so subtle. He is the complete novelist.
Paul Rayment, his central character in Slow Man, who is recovering from a freak cycling accident in which he loses his leg , is intent on learning to live - and love - before it is too late. Slow Man is a life within a changing world.
Per Petterson steps even closer to the reader through his likable narrator, Trond, a solitary older man who returns to a place he knew as a boy and recalls the summer when he was 15. All the power and emotional force of memory is summoned up in this unforgettable book. An authoritative panel of judges will select Coetzee, an inspired one will go for Petterson.