This will be the third year in a row that I have read the Orange Prize shortlists, both for the main prize and for the New Writer's Award. I think it would be true to say that of the two lists, I have found the latter the most challenging, the most consistent in quality and the most satisfying. Of course, the main lists have had their highlights, but the New Writer's Award has proved itself far more interesting in pushing boundaries and extending the traditional remit of women's writing. Last year's winner - The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly, set in a Burmese prison - was one of my favourite books of 2007; and regular readers will know how much I admired Naomi Alderman's Disobedience, which scooped the prize in 2006. I conjecture a number of reasons for this, the main being that the award is somewhat below the radar of the mainstream press. It is easier to nominate books with sharp edges, stylistic quirks and thematic teeth if everyone is looking somewhere else. At the same time, the choice of judges is edgier - this year they include Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, and Clare Allen, author of Poppy Shakespeare. And there isn't the same pressure to 'sell' the books to a particular audience - and lets be honest, the Orange Prize is as much a marketing excercise as it is a literary award - or to court the attention-catching controversies. There is much more of a sense of the books *as* worthwhile books, rather than as statements about the world of women's fiction, at the centre of it all.
This year's list sounds as diverse as ever*:
The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
Willie Cooper arrives on the doorstep of her ancestral home in Templeton, New York, in the wake of a disastrous affair with her much older, married archaeology professor. That same day, the discovery of a prehistoric monster in the lake brings a media frenzy to the quiet, picture-perfect town her ancestors founded. Smarting from a broken heart, Willie then learns that the story her mother had always told her about her father is a lie. He wasn't the one-night stand Vi had led her to imagine, but someone else entirely. Someone from Templeton.
Now, despite my lack of enthusiasm for small-town tales of familial revelation and the fact that I think calling your heroine 'Willie' is an error of collosal proportions, I'm actually looking forward to this with some anticipation. I've heard that the narrative is largely magical-realist, and that Groff's novel is the Orange New Writer's equivalent of an X-Files episode, complete with immortals, ghosts and an actual monster. Which only goes to show that a blurb can be misleading in the extreme...
The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam by Lauren Liebenberg
Nyree and Cia O’Callohan live on a remote farm in the east of what was Rhodesia in the late 1970s. Beneath the dripping vines of the Vumba rainforest, and under the tutelage of their heretical grandfather, theirs is a seductive childhood laced with African paganism, mangled Catholicism and the lore of the Brothers Grimm. Their world extends as far as the big fence, erected to keep out the ‘Terrs’ whom their father is off fighting. The two girls know little beyond that until the arrival, from the outside world, of ‘the bastard’, their orphaned cousin Ronin, who is set to poison their idyll for ever.
Zimbabwe, which used to be known as Rhodesia, is a hot topic these days, and of the three shortlisted books Liebenberg's is the one I would have been most likely to read anyway. Born in Rhodesia in the 1970s, and resident in South Africa since the 1980s, she is in a good position to write a timely, insightful novel about the state of the region. The hardback is small, and perfectly formed, and has a delightful first sentence: 'Cia is my sister and I am her leader.' Which is just about as incisive a statement about sibling relations as I have some across. Also, it wins the prize for most pleasing cover. Dare I predict a winner so early in the game?
Inglorious by Joanna Kavenna
Rosa Lane is a dynamic journalist in her thirties, already the picture of London achievement. Her handsome boyfriend is something in politics and her other friends are confident, prosperous and ambitious. But one afternoon soon after the death of her mother, staring at her computer screen at work, she fails to see the point, walks out of her job – and begins her long fall from modern grace.
This is the least enticing of the synopsis, I think. As soon as I read the words 'thirties' and 'handsome boyfriend' my brain lurched to a stumbling halt. Immediately steroetypes sprang to mind - I imagine the heroine ala Bridget Jones, slightly plump and ineffectual and desperate to be loved - but the cover of my paperback edition went some way to dispelling them. No publisher in their right minds would market a sugary chick-lit confection with a picture of a (horribly ugly) ceramic dog. I live in hope. It is also worth mentioning that while Inglorious is Kavenna's debut novel, it is not her first book. That honour goes to her myth-inspired travel narrative, The Ice Museum: In Search of the Lost Land of Thule, which sounds truly fascinating and which I have added to my wishlist.
Given the range of talent on offer it's a shame that the award's remit is confusing, for both the media and it's potential readership. Why is the shortlist limited to three contenders, when clearly there is the scope for more? Last year the chair of the panel, Jackie Kay, made bold to declare during her speech that the judges had requested permission to expand the shortlist to four, but had been denied. Why are some debut novels on the New Writer's list, while others are on the main shortlist? Does this suggest that there is a hierarchy of quality? It is inevitable that unfair qualitative assumptions will be made in the circumstances. Could one book win both awards, I wonder? Why is short fiction eligible for the New Writer's award but not for the main prize? None of these questions have ever been properly addressed by the Orange committee. I'm sure such confusion is at the bottom of its relative obscurity.
If nothing else I would love to see it raised on to a par with the main prize and the shortlist expanded to six books. After that it would good to see a clearer definition of eligibility - perhaps debut novels should *only* be eligible for the New Writer's prize?
~~Victoria~~
* This is the point at which I am obliged to mention that I have been sent copies of all the New Writer's Award shortlist by their publishers. I tried my hardest to come by library copies, but to no avail - York City library budget simply doesn't stretch to debut women novelists.