Reading Notes: The Booker Prize and Doris Lessing

• I know you will all have seen the Booker Prize shortlist by now. Although I haven't seen too much heated debate about it in the blogosphere, I know its probably because I'm not looking very hard.  However, there was a very interesting discussion about the merits and demerits of honouring historical fiction over on the Guardian blog.  What do I think?  I think its a wonderful list.  True, I've only read four of the longlisted books in all and so am not entirely qualified to judge the competition.  But three of those books - Byatt, Mantel and Waters - are on the shortlist and have to be amongst the best I've read this year.  I can't imagine there being many contenders to better them.   Who will win?  The commenters opinion over at the Guardian blog seems firmly divided between Mantel's Wolf Hall and Coetzee's Summertime.  I can't comment on the latter, because not only have I not read it, I've never read *any* Coetzee.   For me, Mantel is the one to beat.  I finished Wolf Hall over a month ago, and I still have that twinge of excitement in my stomach when I think about it.  I note that the media is couching it more in terms of a clash between Byatt and Coetzee, which is inevitable given that they have both won previously.  Personally I don't think The Children's Book is a winner - its excellent, but perhaps not vivacious enough in light of the competition.  Pit it against Wolf Hall, which is its equal in length and learning, and it looks positively languid.  Then again, I have a sneaky suspiscion we should keep an eye on the outsiders.  Simon Mawer might be the one to watch - The Glass Room has been less of a headline grabber, but everywhere I see it reviewed the praise is ecstatic. 

• I finished Doris Lessing's second novel, Martha Quest, last week.  Overall, I didn't admire it quite so unreservedly as The Grass is Singing.  First, it is not so neat and whole - it is the first book in a series of five written between 1952 and 1969, known collectively as The Children of Violence, and consequently feels incomplete by itself.  Second, it is raggy and poetic with only bursts of the bony grace that made the first novel so extroadinary.  Third, it isn't as subtle psychologically - its emotional range, or at least the way it articulates emotional range, is wide but lacking in depth.  Finally, it is clearly born out of Doris Lessing's own biography. The eponymous heroine, Martha Quest, is Lessing by another name and it was difficult not to read the book as an early fictionalisation of Under my Skin (the first volume of her autobiography, which I read last year).  Saying all that, I still enjoyed it immensely, and it still provoked me to think and feel strongly about her all over again.  I've said before that my interest in Lessing, which began when I read The Cleft and hated it, is part morbid fascination, part disgust and part idolisation.  When I read her I feel in extremis, flung back and forward between admiration and distaste, intense enjoyment and intense frustration. Martha Quest both hardened and softened these feelings.  Hardened them because this book is the epitomisation of everything I find discomforting about Lessing - her bruising, brutal and unquestioning honesty! - and everything I find thrilling about her - her self-deprecation, her acute social observations and her descriptions of Africa.  Softened them, because it is obviously the work of a powerfully human young writer.  I folded down so many corners of the book, wanting to come back to specific quotes, that it would be criminal not to write a full post about it.  Next weekend, perhaps.

• Lessing is a puzzle to me because I don't understand my urge to read her.  It is quite rare that I read one book by an author and then dash headlong into another; usually it is because I am giddy with excitement.  Not so with Lessing. I want to read another Lessing book immediately in the same way that you want to look closer at something that makes you sqeuamish.  I feel it is necessary.  So, knowing I would finish Martha Quest, I tootled off to the third floor of the university library and came home with a copy of her first collection of short stories, This Was the Old Chief's Country (1951).   So far I'm enjoying them, although they're less literary and more overtly political than her long-form work (although that is political too, of course).  I particularly relish her descriptions of the African veld. More on that another time.

~~Victoria~~