Booker Night in the City of Culture

So, it was announced last night that Julian Barnes won the 2011 Man Booker Award. Not a huge surprise to the bookies who had him pegged as the favourite. For the first time this year, I read all six of the shortlisted books and if it were up to me (stranger things have happened) I'd have gone for Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch with Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan and The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt coming in at joint second place. I know that Garbhan Downey, Kate Newmann and Kevin Quinn would disagree with me, but hey, they disagreed with each other as well.

As per the previous CSNI post, I attended the Derry Central Library annual Booker event having blagged my way onto a spot on the panel. Another great learning experience that allowed me to witness how something like this should be done and then try to imitate and hope nobody sent me home under a hail of No Alibis-supplied Booker tomes. It was all right on the night, though, and I realised that I can be politely disagreeable without resorting to name-calling. Should be a given to most decent people but it's an achievement for me.

Thanks to Kevin Quinn who organised and moderated the event and seeya later to the panelists, novelist, Garbhan Downey and poet, Kate Newmann.

If time allows, I'll post some thoughts on each of the shortlisted novels over the next few weeks.

Guest Spot -- Adrian McKinty on Arthur & George

Adrian McKinty, a favoured writer here at CSNI, has been blogging away merrily both on his own 'The Physchopathology of Every Day Life' blog and on frequent guest spots at Crime Always Pays. I felt a wee bit left out, so I begged him for an article to post here. And it goes a little something like this...

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
A Wee Review by Adrian McKinty

Holmes: What is that you have there, Watson?

Watson: A novel, Holmes. Have you read Arthur & George by Julian Barnes?

Holmes: I have not, nor have I read a review of the book, however from the title alone I can deduce many things.

Watson: You astound me Holmes, go on.

Holmes: It was written by an Englishman, a postmodern fiction writer, someone confident of their own ability to tell a story, but someone who might be taken as pretentious and even a little condescending by others. The prose style is no doubt of the careful Flaubertian mode: dry, slow, at times witty, but like so much of today’s prose, perhaps a little lacking in passion. Perhaps a little dull.

Watson: How did you deduce that Holmes?

Holmes: The use of the ampersand in the title when ‘and’ would have done just as well. It is the sort of trick that impresses a certain set of readers in Hampstead and Islington, subscribers to the Times Literary Supplement no doubt. But you did not let me finish, my dear Watson, I have reached other conclusions about the book as well.

Watson: Go on.

Holmes: It is the story of two men, Englishmen, almost certainly (‘Arthur’ is not common in the colonies) who are linked somehow, they lead parallel but separate lives and one assists or does mischief to the other. Since it is written in the modern style, I would venture that neither man is the “hero” of the story, and their lives intersect in complex rather than neat ways. Am I correct?

Watson: Indeed. It is the story of a young Indian solicitor who is accused of killing horses, is subsequently sent to prison and the attempt by Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous novelist, to get his conviction overturned. It is a true life case, imagined by English writer Julian Barnes. A detective story of sorts, but also a biography of two very different men and their families.

Holmes: Yes I should have mentioned families. That unseemly modern urge to pry beneath the surface of even the most respectable households. . .And how does this book of yours turn out?

Watson: That you won’t get from me, Holmes. I never reveal details of a patient or a plot.

Holmes: Indeed? Well, I am patient man, Watson, I will wait until your Afghan wounds are playing up again and you are crying out for the laudanum, then I will make my attempt to get the synopsis from you.

Watson: You fiend, Holmes.

Holmes: I have been called worse. Now, pass me The Times, Watson, let me see what those infernal, beggarly Irishmen have been getting up to…