The announcement of this year's Orange Prize winner grows nigh - tomorrow evening all will be revealed - and now seems the right time to reflect back over my reading of the longlist. This is in spite of the fact that I now know I won't be able finish all 20 books by the end of Wednesday. I'm going to be three, maybe two, short of the total, although I still count it as a win that I've at least made good progress into the last few books. I'll finish just a few days after the deadline. As of today I have a hundred pages of The Long Song to go, and am just at the half way mark with The Still Point; plus I'm eleven hours through the audio version of The Help, with seven to go, and no desire whatsoever to rush what has turned out to be the most pleasurable reading experience of the whole challenge for me (discounting the magisterial Wolf Hall, which I read last year).
Despite following the Orange with enormous enthusiasm for the last four years, this is the first time I have managed to read all the longlisted books. In previous years I have only tackled the shortlist, and a handful of others. It has been an exhausting but entirely satisfying experience. I have often stood in front of my bookshelves over the past few months, eyeing the ever-growing TBR pile, like a kid in a sweet shop, and felt a yearning to read anything, everything, instead of the next Orange prize longlister. But in the end there is not a single book that I regret having to pick up. True, there have been books I did not like: The Very Thought of You by Rosie Allison, The Wilding by Maria McCann, Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed amongst them. But the occasional slog has been far outweighed by the joy of discovering books that I loved or admired and would not otherwise have tried: The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey, The Help by Kathryn Stockett and Black Water Rising by Attica Locke spring immediately to mind. I only wish I had found the energy and the time to write about them all at Eve's Alexandria, although I intend to cover the outstanding ones over the coming weeks.
Inevitably my thoughts have now turned to the judging, and whether or not I would have made the same shortlisting decisions as Daisy Goodwin and her panel. The resounding answer is 'no', of course, because this kind of thing is always going to be highly subjective. And if I have learnt anything from reading the longlist, it is how hard it it to whittle 20 books down to six. There will always be books that absolutely have to be on your personal shortlist, but how to fill the remaining spaces? How to choose between the books you like but don't love? When I sat down to draw up my personal shortlist, I found myself momentarily stumped. I ended up drawing a line down a piece of paper, with one side marked 'shortlist' and the other side marked 'no'. I could enter some titles decisively and immediately on each side.
Wolf Hall, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, The Little Stranger and The Help went straight onto my shortlist. These are the novels that I would happily and eagerly read again, and again, and again. (I know I haven't finished The Help yet, but I'm utterly convinced of its staying power already.) The Very Thought of You, The Wilding, Black Mamba Boy, The Twisted Heart, The Way Things Look To Me, Small Wars, Hearts and Minds, Secret Son and The Long Song went, with one or two hesitations, into the 'no' column. Not necessarily because I didn't enjoy them or think them worthy novels, but because they didn't measure well against the already-shortlisted four. That left me with The Rehearal, This is How, The Lacuna, The Gate at the Stairs, The Still Point, Savage Lands and Black Water Rising. How to choose two from this grouping? All the remaining books had things in their favour. After a few minutes I moved both the The Rehearsal and The Gate of Stairs into 'no' because, in both cases, the elements that I admired were equally weighted against elements I did not. Then The Still Point had to go - it's a compelling read so far, but occasionally verging on the whimsical and the narrative structure already feels over-stretched. After that it became very, very difficult.
I thought This is How was a powerful, beautiful, toned novel, but also bitter, and disturbing, and difficult for me to warm to. From a purely intellectual point of view its a sure-thing for my shortlist - the talent comes off it in waves - but I'm struck by how much my emotions are brought into play. Especially because there are two books left - The Lacuna and Savage Lands - which I feel closer to. The latter utterly won me over in the course of reading, and that alone makes me want to shortlist it. Clare Clark may not be the most accessible of historical novelists, but I'm impressed by her unerring eye for detail, and the way she constructs character through time and place. I think to myself that Savage Lands would make a good contrast with Wolf Hall. But what about The Lacuna? There were parts of that book, particularly in the first half, that I could eat. The last quarter, perhaps, lets it down, and the ending is almost sentimental, but my admiration for it is honest and strong. And then there is Black Water Rising. Not usually my kind of novel, but it converted me, and now it's on the actual shortlist I feel terrible, just terrible, at the thought of excluding it from my own.
Shortlisting is a harsh process. It makes me feel positively mean. But, but. It is no good. A decision must be made. So I hold my breath, close my eyes and put two books in one column and two in the other: The Lacuna and Savage Lands go into the 'yay' column; This is How and Black Water Rising into the 'no'. Finally, there it is: my shortlist. I feel momentarily guilty just looking at it, which is ridiculous because this is just a game. Still, I wish I could send a message to M.J. Hyland and Attica Locke to say that they nearly, nearly, nearly made it.
So here it is, my very own Orange 2010 shortlist:
- Savage Lands by Clare Clark
- The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
- The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett
- The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
I'm quite pleased with it after all, despite the nagging guilt. There is still one major omission though, a book I can't shortlist because it wasn't even on the longlist: Sarah Hall's How to Paint a Dead Man. But who knows how I would have chosen between The Lacuna and Savage Lands if it had been in the running! Perhaps all is for the best.
Now, of course, I have to choose a winner, which I will do tomorrow to coincide with the actual announcement. It will be interesting to see if the real judges and I choose the same novel - we have a three-book overlap and I hope the winner is in there somewhere. I know that it is going to be very hard for me to make my decision - I'm already torn several ways. Who would you choose? Who would be on your shortlists?
~~Victoria~~