Seven months to read more than 150 novels... how do the Booker judges do it? It’s “impossible”, said Robert Webb, serving on last year’s panel: “You finish as many as you can and the other ones you put to one side after a respectable but undisclosed fraction has been read.” Well, maybe, but somehow I doubt this has been the approach of the novelist Yiyun Li, one of this year’s judges, who once led an 85-day lockdown book club online to read War and Peace, a novel she rereads each year.
Either way, the 2024 panel, chaired by the artist and memoirist Edmund de Waal (The Hare With Amber Eyes), have whittled their tottering book stacks down to an excellent six-strong shortlist, five of which would make a worthy winner on Tuesday 12 November.
The exception, for me, is The Safekeep (Viking), a twisty but basic debut from Israeli-born Dutch novelist Yael van der Wouden, who writes in English. Set in 1961, it’s concerned with plundered Jewish property – the subject of de Waal’s bestselling memoir – specifically the experience of Dutch Jews who survived the Holocaust, a subject the novel creeps up on slantwise with a plot involving same-sex lust.
Its protagonist, Isabel, 27, lives alone in the country house her family occupied when she was a child in 1944. Her older brother assumes she’ll marry herself off and leave, and is waiting to inherit the house. When he introduces her to his latest girlfriend, Eva, the instant tension between both women boils over after Isabel is left with no option but to share the house with Eva while her brother travels for work.
The early pages are pungent with paranoid dread as Isabel obsessively monitors her late mother’s possessions in case of theft, but the patient buildup of atmosphere is quickly spent once we guess what’s driving each woman, and the end puts too tidy a lid on the history the book unearths – the story stops just as it really gets going.
In a way, the same goes for the novel I’d be least surprised to see win, James (Mantle) by US writer Percival Everett, who was previously shortlisted in 2022 for The Trees and whose satirical novel Erasure was the basis of the Oscar-winning 2023 film American Fiction.
Set on the Mississippi, it’s a high-velocity, picaresque retelling of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this time narrated not by the titular runaway child but by his companion, Jim, fleeing his enslavement.
Gone – or or at least, almost – is the phonetic speech Twain gave Jim, portrayed by Everett as a wry, philosophically literate reader who, like every other black character in the book, carefully adjusts his language around white people to ensure he lives down to expectations – a survival strategy that leads, as any Everett fan may guess, to no little comedy, even in the most appalling circumstances.
As a between-the-lines study of a kind of willed ignorance of horror, James shares DNA with Small Things Like These and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, but it’s closer in tone to flight narratives such as A Little Life and Demon Copperhead. It culminates in a wish-fulfilling revenge fantasy, with climactic lines surely to be rousingly delivered in the Steven Spielberg-produced movie adaptation that is already in the works, although James always feels spikily sensitive to its own reception, quipping on the profitability of “white guilt”.
Is the ending a suavely cut corner? Either way, James is excellent, delivering a strong concept, page-turning excitement, genuine comedy, serious heft. Hard not to feel it’s Everett’s year – unless, perhaps, it’s of concern to the judges that the prize has gone only six times to women since 2008 (twice to one woman, Hilary Mantel, once to two, when Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood had to share).
For something completely different, see the fragmentary novel Held (Bloomsbury) by the Canadian poet Anne Michaels, whose high-literary style requires the reader to meet it halfway: even the judges’ praising citation explains that it “may seem forbidding” at first.
It follows a bloodline that zigzags through the 20th century, from a photographer wounded while fighting in France in 1917, to the son of a composer nabbed by secret police in Soviet Estonia. (there are also walk-on parts for Marie Curie and the physicist Ernest Rutherford). Yet you can’t call Held a multigenerational family saga, exactly – it’s more a frame for reflections on war, science, art, love, care – and its satisfactions aren’t those of old-school realism: it’s very much the kind of novel where you need to be patient before finding out who “he” and “she” are, or whether what’s being narrated is memory or something happening in the narrative present, and whose perspective it’s from and so on – even as the chapter intertitles are contrastingly specific (“Rue Gazan, Paris, 1908”).
Sometimes, it’s off-puttingly swoony, to be sure (it starts with the fragment reading: “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”), and the mini scenarios can feel reverse engineered to generate questions of good and evil – terms Michaels isn’t shy to use – but after the early pages the judges warn us about, the novel’s fleeting interactions and shards of reminiscence repeatedly blindside the willing reader with vivid particularity. Still, I suspect booksellers will be weeping into their packing crates if it wins.
Novels that tussle with morality and mortality were clearly a draw for this year’s judges: another is Stone Yard Devotional (Sceptre), the seventh novel by Australian writer Charlotte Wood, who came to attention in the UK with The Weekend (2019), about septuagenarian women who gather to clear the house of a dead friend (one of this year’s panel, Sara Collins, was among many admiring reviewers).
Stone Yard Devotional takes the form of a private diary (“Nobody will read this but me”) written by a middle-aged woman who leaves her job and marriage during the pandemic to join a monastery amid an unprecedented drought that brings about a mouse plague.
It details the narrator’s daily tasks, dominated by the increasingly grisly job of pest control, while she sifts memories of her own life or people she’s known. These little vignettes are often casually devastating, whether they involve subjects such as suicide, euthanasia and murder, or merely drill down into her experience to gently but unflinchingly explore things she’s never uttered aloud, such as her shame about having bullied a schoolmate, or her jealousy when a dead friend made time to meet others but not her during her final illness.
The book’s steady directness has a cumulative force. As in The Weekend, Wood is tender but non-maudlin on the stuff that meets us all – illness, bereavement – as well as the knotty matter of guilt: here, the lofty question of how to live well is most often simply the difficulty of not messing up. Winningly no-nonsense stuff, highly recommended to anyone in a reading slump and 100% prizeworthy.
A cloistered environment prompting reflection is also to be found in Samantha Harvey’s fifth novel, Orbital (Jonathan Cape), which takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station, whose six-person crew experience 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets while circling Earth, remote from the turmoil of the planet and their lives.
We see the banter among the crew, their individual thoughts and daily rhythms as they check and maintain systems - the ship’s and their own. Their helpless view of a typhoon hitting the Philippines is the closest Harvey’s joyous novel gets to threat or even much by way of a story. Instead the attraction, line after riveting line, is her capacity simply to imagine her way persuasively into every part of life on the ISS, in all its nuts-and-bolts littleness as well as all its soaring majesty.
The book seems to make its own time – a sealed craft of its own for the reader, and one fuelled by an ever-present paradox, given that Harvey’s astronauts contemplate the impossibility of describing their experiences to the earthbound, a gulf she herself persuasively leaps.Orbital would be a fine winner, too, albeit short not only on plot but also irony, to some minds a vital bit of spice in a novel. Enter Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape), by some distance the thickest title on a shortlist full of slimline hits and a slow-burn spy caper that’s never quite what it seems. We’re in the south of France with a hard-drinking female ex-FBI agent turned honeytrapper-for-hire, infiltrating a radical French farming co-op that supposedly threatens big business interests. The story takes in the situationists, Nazis, Daft Punk and Michel Houellebecq, culminating in a tense assassination plot that tips satisfyingly into farce.
Like Everett’s James, this is a full-spectrum satisfaction, albeit a slower one, as Kushner, previously shortlisted in 2018, unhurriedly lays the groundwork for a literary striptease by which the narrator herself gradually becomes the story. When it was published earlier this year, reviewers were wowed as well as contemptuous – the latter group, I suspect, because they confused the novel with its distinctly sketchy protagonist, who a) being a spy, and b) secretly off her face much of the time, can’t exactly be trusted. Yet the novel’s unreliability goes deeper still, thanks to the part played by a cave-dwelling guru espousing wild theories about the fate of Neanderthals.
Of all the shortlisted novels, Creation Lake is the novel with the most slippery relationship to its own narrative truth. More than the rest, it challenges you to figure out what to think and where to stand, maintaining an amazingly stubborn poker face throughout, and it’s more layered than James, the one other novel here that is most alive to the value of making the reader laugh. Ultimately, I suspect it’s Everett’s novel that is the book every judge will be happiest standing behind, but when the choice is so open, you may say that whoever wins the 2024 Booker prize, it’s a year in which readers did, too.
• Explore the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize and, for a limited time, get all six books for only £70 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
