Tag: 2016 Giller Prize

2016 Giller Prize

The 2016 Shadow Giller winner

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Shadow Giller Prize As most of you will know, I’ve spent the past eight weeks shadowing Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize literary award — along with Canadian journalist Alison Gzowski and Canadian blogger Naomi MacKinnon — as part of the Shadow Giller. That has meant reading and reviewing the six titles on the shortlist.

Yesterday we named our winner. To find out which book we thought was deserving of the prize, do visit KevinfromCanada’s blog, where we have been posting reviews fairly regularly during this process.

Tomorrow evening (Canadian time), the winner of the official Giller Prize will be announced. It will be interesting to see whether the official jury chooses the same book as the Shadow jury… stranger things have happened.

UPDATE — TUESDAY 8 NOVEMBER 2016:  Do Not Say We Have Nothing has been awarded this year’s Giller Prize. You can find out more via the official announcement on the Giller Prize website.

2016 Giller Prize, Author, Book review, Canada, China, Fiction, Granta, literary fiction, Madeleine Thien, Publisher, Setting

‘Do Not Say We Have Nothing’ by Madeleine Thien

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Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeliene Thien
UK edition

Fiction – paperback; Granta; 480 pages; 2016. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

It’s not often I struggle to say something about a book, but trying to review Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing has proved a challenge.

So much has been written about this novel in the past six months, mainly because of its shortlisting on both the 2016 Man Booker Prize and the 2016 Giller Prize, that I didn’t feel I could add anything new. Then, when I sat down to commit my thoughts to this blog last week, it was named winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and the internet was awash, once again, with praise and reviews.

On that basis I’m going to keep this short.

Life under Communism

Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a careful blur of fiction and history that follows the interlinked lives of two Chinese families and their struggle to survive under China’s Communist rule. It spans the time of Chairman Mao and his Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s right through until the student protests in 1989.

The narrative comprises two threads. The first, written in the first person in 1991, is told from the perspective of Marie, a 10-year-old girl living in Canada with her Chinese mother. Their lives are interrupted with the arrival of a young Chinese woman, Ai-Ming, who is fleeing the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. It is Ai-Ming’s story, told in the third person, of her family’s life in revolutionary China, which forms the second narrative thread.

And it is this thread that makes Do Not Say We Have Nothing such a powerful read, because it follows the topsy-turvy lives of three young classically trained musicians and their struggle to create music at a time when creative expression was forbidden except in the strictest of terms. The simple act of playing a violin, or just the “wrong” kind of music, for instance, could result in internment at best or death at worst.

An ambitious and epic novel

This book is best described as an “epic”. It’s not only ambitious in scope, its complex, interleaved narrative, which jumps backwards and forwards in time, is meticulous in its detail. Yet the story never gets bogged down, perhaps because of its wonderfully drawn trio of musicians — composer Sparrow, violinist Zhuli and the pianist Kai  — whose joys, sorrows and struggles we get to follow so intimately.

The novel’s strength is the way it so eloquently reveals how the hand of history leaves a long-lasting legacy, stretching across generations. Like several other books I’ve read recently (Magda Szubanksi’s Reckoning and Cal Flyn’s Thicker Than Water immediately come to mind) it explores intergenerational guilt, survivor’s guilt and moral ambiguity. It shines a light on how political regimes can mark the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary, often devastating, ways.

Funnily enough, for all of that, I must admit that this book did not pack the emotional punch one might expect. It’s not that I did not care about these characters — I did — but somehow I felt as if I was always kept at a distance from them (this is also how I felt when I read Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter several years ago). It wasn’t until I came to Ai-Ming’s involvement in the student protests in the late 1980s that I began to feel the true weight of this story, of how history somehow has an uncanny knack of repeating itself and that it is often the young, with so much to lose, who get trammelled by it.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Canadian edition

I could point to many dozens of reviews more eloquent and detailed than mine, but let me just point to Naomi’s, who blogs at Consumed by Ink, for the two of us have read this book for the Shadow Giller.

In the meantime, if you loved this novel, I do highly recommend Chinese Whispers: A Journey into Betrayal by Jan Wong, a non-fiction book about the long-lasting impact of the Cultural Revolution on two students, and Beijing Coma by Ma Jian, an epic novel about the 1989 student pro-democracy movement. I have reviewed other books set in China or by Chinese writers here.

This is my 6th and final book for the #ShadowGiller2016

UPDATE — TUESDAY 8 NOVEMBER 2016:  Do Not Say We Have Nothing has been awarded this year’s Giller Prize. You can find out more via the official announcement on the Giller Prize website.

2016 Giller Prize, Author, Book review, Fiction, House of Anansi Press, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, USA, Zoe Whittall

‘The Best Kind of People’ by Zoe Whittall

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The Best Kind of People

Fiction – Kindle edition; House of Anansi Press; 424 pages; 2016. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Imagine if someone close to you was accused of a sexual crime. Would you stick by them? Throw them to the wolves? Bury your head in the sand? Be perplexed and question just how well you really know them?

This is the premise behind Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People, a fast-paced and timely novel about rape culture that has been shortlisted for the 2016 Giller Prize.

Accused of a crime

The story kicks off with the arrest of George Woodbury, a popular science teacher who has been accused of sexual misconduct with three female students under his charge on a school ski trip. The allegations are particularly shocking because Woodbury is something of a local hero and has won Teacher of the Year year after year.

When he is detained by police, his family —  his 17-year-old over-achieving daughter; his adult son, who is a lawyer; and his beloved wife, a dedicated and much-loved emergency room nurse — are immediately thrown into disarray. The novel focuses on the outfall on these three characters (their stories are told in alternate chapters), which makes for a gripping and thought-provoking read.

Interestingly, we never hear George’s side of the story, nor do we hear from his accusers. This means the reader is cast in exactly the same position as George’s family, never quite sure of his guilt or innocence, and never finding out the specific details of the allegations.

The outfall

As the story unfolds it’s interesting to see the effect on George’s loved ones as doubts about his innocence begin to creep in. From the outset his wife, Joan, is steadfast in her belief, telling her not-always-supportive sister: “You don’t stop loving someone in an instant because somebody accuses them of something despicable. Nothing is that black and white.” But later, when she entertains the idea that maybe, just maybe, he might have done something wrong, she tries to find excuses for such abhorrent behaviour:

If George was guilty, and she was far from convinced, then he could be sick. She took a sip of black coffee and contemplated this. She understood sick. Everyone is generally pleased to reduce a complicated situation to the notion of evil. Or a typical sleazeball man. He’s just evil. Evil is a word that’s lost its meaning recently, like bully. Overused, and weakened. She dissolved an antacid tablet in a glass of water. If it’s a sickness, it would not be his fault. There could be an undiagnosed tumour in his orbitofrontal lobe, causing him to have no control over his impulses.

Later still, she asks herself whether it’s “possible to be an intelligent human being — perceptive, intuitive — and also be married to someone who fools you so intensely, who is entirely a fraud, and you have no idea?”

His daughter Sadie is less sure from the start. She knows the girls involved — she goes to school with them — and isn’t sure why they’d make something like this up. She’s afraid that if he’s guilty, she is guilty by association. Whatever the case, the damage is irreparable.

If only she could have the privilege of believing him entirely. What kind of person, what kind of ungrateful daughter, doesn’t believe her own father? She had never doubted him before. She never thought he was anything but moral and civilized. She wasn’t even sure what those words meant. But if someone puts the possibility of something terrible in your head — and people around you believe it — you can’t go back to thinking it completely inconceivable. The possibility is there whether or not you choose to believe it, and you can’t go back to not knowing that the possibility exists.

His son Andrew is slightly more sympathetic to the situation, not least because as a gay teenager he has firsthand experience at being cast as a social pariah. He’s also very much aware that his first sexual relationship — with a man much older than himself and in a position of power — could so easily have been misunderstood by other people had they been aware of it. But even so, he also goes through moments of doubt, never quite sure of his father’s guilt or innocence, preferring instead to be practical about things and using his legal know-how to help George’s case.

A story ripe for discussion and debate

Despite The Best Kind of People being an issues-based novel — it embraces everything from teenage romance to feminism, gay rights to white privilege — this story is nothing short of a page turner. It’s a compelling read for so many reasons — will George be convicted? Will he go to prison? Will the family stay together, or fall apart? Will the local community ever accept the Woodbury family ever again or cast them out into the wilderness forever?

Admittedly, I thought some of the view points and characters presented here were well-worn tropes — the wronged wife, the loyal son, the busy-body interfering sister-in-law — and that some of the writing fell into cliché. But then Whittall would  include a sentence that would make me sit up and take notice. Here’s just two examples:

By his second glass he felt the balm of his arrogance returning, like a sly old lover slipping him a hotel key card.

And:

Improbable as it seemed, they settled into a new routine during this holding pattern — like when you’ve put gauze on a wound, and you’re waiting it out, hoping no infections seep in.

By the end of the book I realised it was nothing short of a stunning character study, for Whittall takes three seemingly normal and ordinary people — albeit white, privileged and living distinctly upper middle class lives  — and shows what happens to them when their worlds are turned upside down through no fault of their own.

What I liked most, however, was that it generates more questions than answers — book groups are going to have an absolute field day with it! — yet one thing is abundantly clear. Regardless of George’s guilt or innocence, the human toll — on his family, himself and his community — is irreparable. Once an accusation like this is out in the open, you can never make it disappear. That, I think, is the real message behind this exceedingly good novel.

For another take on The Best Kind of People, which has yet to be published in the UK, please see Naomi’s review at Consumed by Ink.

This is my 4th book for the #ShadowGiller2016

2016 Giller Prize, Author, Book review, Emma Donoghue, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, Picador, Publisher, Setting

‘The Wonder’ by Emma Donoghue

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the-wonder-emma-d

Fiction – hardcover; Picador; 292 pages; 2016. Review copy courtesy of the publisher

It seems rather uncanny that the first two books I’ve read from the 2016 Giller Prize shortlist both happen to revolve around food and fasting, albeit set centuries and continents apart.

In Mona Awad’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl we meet an unhappy woman obsessed with staying thin; in Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder we meet a pious and joyful 11 year old girl who appears to be surviving on nothing but air. Awad’s is a thoroughly contemporary novel set in urban Canada; Donoghue’s is an historical novel set in rural Ireland. But while both novels feature complicated females starving themselves, they are doing so for very different reasons…

Starving to get into heaven?

The Wonder takes place just seven years after the end of the Great Famine, which occurred between 1845 and 1852. The time period is important, because Anna O’Donnell, the girl at the heart of the story, was born into hunger, but now food is relatively plentiful again. This makes it almost sacrilegious for her to shun it. But that is what she does. Yet, in her refusal to eat, she has not become ill, nor withered away: she is supposedly fit and healthy and has attracted much attention from the Catholic community in which she lives. Anna is being billed as a saint, and people are prepared to travel for miles and miles, just to catch a glimpse of her.

Enter nurse Lib Wright, a young widow from England, who trained under Florence Nightingale on the frontline of the Crimean War. She’s a new breed of nurse: professional, ethical and thorough. But she’s also a non-believer — in God, in religion, in Anna’s ability to live without food — which immediately posits her as an outsider in a country that is deeply religious.

Lib’s job is to keep watch over Anna for two weeks to see whether she is sustaining herself on food acquired secretly. She’s been hired by a local quack, Dr McBrearty, who claims he wants to “bring the truth to light, whatever the truth may be”. A local nun, Sister Michael, is to share the shift work — eight hours at a time around the clock.

From the outset, Lib is suspicious of everyone’s motivations and believes the girl to be a faker. But how does she prove it? And if the girl, who is well-mannered and bright, is somehow eating on the sly, how is she doing it? And who is helping her?

A detective story

Essentially, The Wonder is a detective story, but it’s not a terribly clever one, for I had figured out the solution long before it was revealed. But as a slice of historical fiction it’s a superb snapshot of a time and place on the outer fringes of Western Europe, where dogma and religion are a way of life. (It is Lib’s constant inability to understand the rituals of Catholicism and to dismiss most of its beliefs as mere fairytale that makes me wonder if the author, presumably a lapsed Catholic, isn’t having a pop at the Church?)

The first third of this book really held me in its sway as I got to know and like the central characters: sweet pious Anna and stern and determined Lib, nursing troubles of her own. Everyone else is relatively subsidiary to them until the journalist William Byrne, from the Irish Times, enters the equation. But then the story seems to run out of steam — there’s only so much you can say about a girl fasting herself that you haven’t already said in earlier chapters — until momentum picks up again around 60 pages from the end when Donoghue drops a little bombshell that changes the course of the narrative.

Yet, when all’s said and done, The Wonder didn’t have enough meat on the bones for me (pun fully intended), because the storyline was simply too thin (sorry, can’t help myself) to sustain almost 300 pages of prose. And the ending was predictable and disappointing.

This might make it sound like I didn’t like the book. The funny thing is I liked it a lot — the writing is gorgeous, the characters are deftly drawn, the mood of the room in which Anna resides is evocative to the point of feeling claustrophobic (well, the author’s had some experience writing about that kind of space before, hasn’t she?) and her depiction of the outsider coming up against a culture she doesn’t understand is spot on. I also very much liked the interaction between the nurse and her patient, and the way this changed over time as the pair developed a genuine fondness for each other.

The Wonder is, indeed, a good read — but that’s all it is. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t wow me. I’d be very surprised if it won the Giller Prize.

This is my 2nd book for the #ShadowGiller2016

This is my 1st book for the 2017 Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award