The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 18: Exploring the Booker Prize 2023 shortlist (part 1)

We’re a month away from finding out which title will take home the trophy for the Booker Prize 2023, so what better time to take a deep dive into this year’s final six? This week, in the first of two parts, we’re exploring half of the shortlisted books. Listen in to hear what Jo Hamya and James Walton make of If I Survive You, This Other Eden and Study for Obedience, and what the shortlist says about the state of fiction today.

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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Jo Hamya: 

Hello and welcome to The Booker Prize Podcast with me, Jo Hamya. 

James Walton: 

And me, James Walton. 

Jo Hamya: 

And today, rather excitingly with the Booker Prize winner ceremony fast approaching, we’ve got the first of a two-part close-up look at all of this year’s six shortlisted novels. 

James Walton: 

Now, we should say, and not just because we’ve been told to, that this is an independent podcast, which though obviously backed and indeed funded by the Booker Prize, isn’t required to take any kind of party line. And if you don’t believe us, please do listen on. But bearing in mind that these are just our opinions on the books, and we already know that, weirdly enough, there are some people who disagree with us. 

Jo Hamya: 

No, never. But James, before we get down to the six big runners and writers, shall we just have a quick overview of the shortlist and, if this doesn’t sound too grandiose, what it says about the state of fiction in 2023? 

James Walton: 

Yeah, let’s. Well, I’ve got a theory that I’m sure you’ve heard me suggest many times down the pub, Jo, which is that we are seeing, I think, at the moment, a sort of return to something I thought disappeared in the 19th century, really, which is the idea that novels should be virtuous things, that they should make us think the right things, that they should say the right things. And clearly, we live in a time when causing offence is very, very bad. Either you could argue because of cancel culture or because causing offence is- 

Jo Hamya: 

Just bad. 

James Walton: 

It’s bad, yeah. Why would you want to cause offence? But either way, I think that means by definition, fiction is going to tend to the inoffensive. Now, I sort of cut my reading teeth and my adult reading teeth on people are now considered, I think, the word is probably problematic. 

People like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, John Updike, who wrote about not what men, particularly in their case, should be like or should think, but what men secretly do think and some of the awful things. And they are books that I can see why they now cause offence, but there was something sort of unruly and great about that. And I do miss that. I mean, I do appreciate the world change that the world changes and that maybe it’s a better thing that the books are kinder now and judged on their kindness and on their virtuousness. But I do wonder if something’s been lost. And I see some of that reflected in this year’s shortlist, I must say. So if these books were guests at your house, or some of these books were guests at your house, they’d turn up, they’d wipe their feet, they certainly wouldn’t smoke, they wouldn’t drink too much. 

You’d have a nice conversation about things you all agree about, and then they go off not too late, and you’d have had a perfectly nice evening. But a slight, as I say, a lack of unruliness and boisterousness. Do you think that’s … I mean, that’s fiction in general, and as I say, slightly reflected in this year’s list. What do you reckon? 

Jo Hamya: 

I sort of half agree. I think perhaps it’s too broad to say that all of fiction in general is missing a sense of unruliness. I think that’s something that’s probably more applicable to the state of contemporary publishing, especially with big five publishers. And I think there are a lot of indies that take more of a moral risk and which celebrate unruliness. I think this is a shortlist which seems to prioritise a kind of virtuousness. But that being said, there are a few exceptions. I think if The Bee Sting came into your house, it would be at least three people who end up having a screaming row ignoring their hosts. I think if Study for Obedience came into your house, you’d gradually find your house being taken over by forces that you can’t quite control and you don’t know where they come from. 

James Walton: 

[inaudible 00:03:31]. So The Bee Sting by Paul Murray and Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein that we’ll be discussing over the course of these two episodes. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, but I think I think generally, I see what you mean, because the shortlist as a whole to me is, I mean, on an individual basis, most of these books are, okay, they’re good, but taken as a whole as a cohort, they’re incredibly sad. And I kind of just want to go to each of the judges’ houses and give them a hug and ask if everything’s okay in their lives. I made this kind of tally chart thing as I was going through the shortlist. And all the headings are just really morbid. So number of books containing some form of terrible death central to the plot, there’s three, potentially, you could say four of them on the shortlist. A main character who feels ostracised or is targeted by forces within their community. I think there’s four again. A parent losing the ability to positively impact their child’s life, again, most of the shortlist. Money troubles due to some form of civil unrest or natural disaster, at least half this shortlist, it’s bleak. It’s really bleak. 

James Walton: 

I suppose you could argue these are not cheerful times. But at the same time, I could have done with a few more jokes, I think, and a few more laughs. Paul Lynch’s book on the shortlist we’ll be discussing, I think, in the next episode, Prophet Song, there’s a child who gets into trouble at school for “inappropriately directed laughter”. And I could have done with a bit more inappropriately directed laughter, really. And the other thing that is really striking, which has nothing to do with our content, particularly, is a taste for enormously long paragraphs. Well, I mean, we’ll discuss that when we discuss individual books, but I can’t … There seems a fashion for punishingly long paragraphs that I don’t quite see why. 

Jo Hamya: 

Again, I couldn’t really say that that’s generalised to fiction as a whole. I’ve certainly read a lot of quite staccato novels this year that aren’t Booker novels. That is maybe more down to the judges’ taste as a body of readers. And I think what’s really interesting is it’s clear in this shortlist where that kind of form serves the novel and has real direction and purpose and is genuinely affecting, as in, I think, Prophet Song or in The Bee Sting in Imelda’s parts and then novels where I think it just really doesn’t work as in Paul Harding’s This Other Eden, but we’ll come on to that. 

James Walton: 

We will when we discuss the individual books. I’d also just drop in also, long sentences seem to be in often by just putting commas instead of full stops, which seems a bit of a cheat as far as long sentences are concerned. 

Jo Hamya: 

I think possibly you could look to some of the judges to explain that particular taste. So Mary Jean Chan is a poet and we have Adjoa Andoh who is an actress and perhaps kind of takes a more humanistic approach to experience washing over the reader. And that might explain a taste for longer paragraphs. 

James Walton: 

Okay, Jo, should we crack on with the big six then, and we want to just remind listeners what they are. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. So the six shortlist novels this year are If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein, and Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. 

James Walton: 

And today we’re doing This Other Eden, If I Survive You, and Study for Obedience. So let’s start off with Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You, one of the two debut books on this year’s book of shortlist, along with Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. And this is a collection of interlinked stories about a Jamaican family where the parents moved to Miami in the late 1970s to escape the kind of political violence that we explored when we interviewed Marlon James with A Brief History of Seven Killings. Anyway, we get the perspective of several family members, but the main focus is on the younger son Trelawny, who’s born in America, as he struggles to work out his identity. So the book begins with him being asked, what are you? Which he says he’s asked repeatedly because he’s light skinned, but he’s Black, but he’s not a Black American, but he’s born in America. 

So he’s not sure he feels Jamaican either. In the first quite long story, he wrestles with all of that, even though he knows he shouldn’t have to really, he shouldn’t have to ask himself, what are you? But he seems to have no choice in there where he finds himself. The second chapter, we get his father’s story about coming to America, which sees Trelawny from a different perspective and think his father suggests that actually his son’s too hung up on race. We then get the further adventures of Trelawny working various dead end jobs after leaving college, of his brother Delano. And one story that sticks out a bit, we might discuss as well, because it’s got a big twist at the end, his cousin Cukie, who also has father issues. Now, Jo, you lived for a while as a mixed-race person in Miami, so did this book strike a particular chord with you? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes and no. I have very mixed and complicated feelings about this book, which is maybe quite apropos. I think the first two stories, which are titled Influx and Under the Ackee Tree, set the tone for the book’s difficulties. But I felt that they made brilliant observations too straightforwardly. And I think I spent a lot of the first story wishing that Escoffery had just written … that he’d just gone for the jugular and maybe written non-fiction or written a philosophical tract. Because I think a lot of what he says about the absurdity of American race politics is so on the money, but the form of these stories means that what he says is quite stunted. 

James Walton: 

Yes, he thinks American race politics is absurd, but at the same time, because there’s no escaping it, he sort of endorses it as well at the same time. Do you think that’s fair? 

Jo Hamya: 

I didn’t read it as that. I mean, I think a lot of what is tragic about Trelawny’s stories in this book is the fact that perhaps … You want to talk about father issues, if he’d spent less time wondering about what his identity was at school or in America and just more time engaging with the people around him, talking to them, not second-guessing everything that they thought of him, maybe he would have had a better relationship with his dad. Delano doesn’t really seem to question this. 

James Walton: 

Older readers might see something of the almost classic grammar school story that used to be in the 50s and 60s, although some kitchen sink dramas where basically a bloke goes off and becomes far more educated than his own parents, goes to grammar school, possibly goes to Oxford, comes back and finds his parents rather limited. And the best of those, it seems quite sad from both sides. I think there is an element of that in this book as well, isn’t there? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. And I think the thing is, as I say, I think Escoffery is so on the money with handing you these facts. But the problem is, to me, they sound a bit too much like straightforward exposition. I wish basically that there had been a bit more showing and less telling. So there’s this paragraph quite early on in the first story where Trelawny has gone on holiday to Jamaica in a kind of to reclaim his roots and see where he belongs. And it goes, “Where else are people like me mass-produced, you ask yourself and how can I ever go back? On drunken nights you try your best to make an accent which might pass under the thumping subwoofer space or when everyone in your proximity is wasted. But having spent the last few years sequestered in the mid west away from the music and food and people so easily located in Miami, you’ve already lost a large percentage of your parents’ tongue. Yet hearing your attempt, your companions crack smiles, then look away, pretend not to be embarrassed for you. 

Eventually you’ll admit to yourself that you are tired, tired of trying to convince anyone of anything, especially yourself.” Now that is accurate. I can say personally that happens. The problem is it’s so straightforwardly put that you don’t really feel the tragedy of it. At least to me. I wouldn’t have minded if Escoffery just chose one character, maybe Trelawny or maybe his father Topper or Delano, the older brother, and just stuck with them for the duration of a much longer novel so that we could see these anecdotes unfolding in real time and perhaps be more affected by them. Although that being said, I think the book does succeed in moments at doing that when it’s funny. And there are moments that really reminded me of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. They expose the absurdity of American race politics simply by making you laugh at them, and it works so much better. 

James Walton: 

That’s a book winner of 2016 that we discussed our podcast on. That’s definitely not a virtuous book. That’s a book that is not pious in the slightest, lashes out in all directions. And there are bits of that here. This is an awkward one for me to say, Jo, being a white guy and all that. Are you suggesting, because I felt this a bit, that if you’re going to write a book about identity at this stage of history to say, “I felt torn between two cultures and I don’t feel I really belong in either of them,” has been said and done so often now that in a way there’s got to be a bit more? 

Jo Hamya: 

No, I feel the opposite. I don’t think it’s been done enough, and I think it hasn’t been done in fiction enough. It’s been done at a certain point in non-fiction. I think actually Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, does it really well. What I’m saying is, given that this is fiction, I wish that question had been more persuasively explored and more consistently explored by simply plunging you into the experience of mixed race people. To be fair, it happens at times, just not with mixed race characters. I found Topper’s part, Trelawny’s dad’s parts of this book, really affecting. 

James Walton: 

My favourite was the second chapter. It was his story actually. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. I think because that’s partly linguistic because we are hearing his very strong Jamaican accent, his dialect on the page, and I think maybe because that’s a side effect of the character who is much less troubled by these questions and perhaps it’s easier to get into his viewpoint rather than, this sounds a bit cruel, but creating a TedTalk around his viewpoints. I felt that the balance of this novel was slightly off for me because it was either a fantastic amount, a very right on exposition of how complex matters of identity are when it comes to race in America, or it was ripping good yarn about a family, but the two didn’t meet persuasively for me. 

James Walton: 

You used the word novel there, which obviously the book [inaudible 00:15:18] for a novel. But this was definitely published in America as a collection of short stories, but the book, I think, technically is for a work of fiction, that sort of coherence and hangs together as a whole. The first chapter is his struggle for identity. Then we get his father looking at his son and thinking, “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t make such a fuss. Don’t be so full of self-pity.” That seemed a really brilliant pair, but then there’s just a series of different stories. Do you think it does hang together as a coherent work of fiction? 

Jo Hamya: 

I think it definitely hangs together coherently as a family saga. In a way, it did make me think of The Bee Sting, you’re being handed these different points of view characters. 

James Walton: 

We’ll be getting on to that. That’s the Paul Murray book. 

Jo Hamya: 

And the more you find out about their motivations and emotions … For example, Delano, the older brother, at first seems quite callous and quite cruel to his brother, is quite happy to have the upper hand and to be their father’s favourite. In so doing, inflicts quite a lot of emotional pain on Trelawny. When we finally get to his section in these stories, there’s this incredible part where Trelawny and Delano are now living together. Trelawny is teaching and he’s left a book behind that he needs to teach, and Delano thinks, “Oh, I’ll drop it off to him.” And the passage goes, “Delano remembers that his brother’s book, which he’d intended to drop at Palmetto Prep, is still in Nordic’s truck. He feels certain that Trelawny needed to teach it today. It occurs to him that his brother may have planned to pick it up on his lunch break and now it will have gone missing. 

And isn’t that the way of things? You try and make a situation better, only to make it worse. Better to do nothing.” And all of a sudden, these layers of understanding come upon you. So I think as a family story, it works really, really well. 

James Walton: 

And as you say, a bit like in The Bee Sting, where the family just keep missing each other. You feel like saying, “No, no, no, you really could get along.” 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, you could get along. 

James Walton: 

You people could just get along. And that story I mentioned about their cousin, Cukie, who goes to see his father, who’s a lobster fisherman with some sort of increasingly inter-death links to organised crime and a big twist in the tale to that story. What did you reckon to that? I mean, it’s a cracking story as a standalone. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. I think it’s a story that kind of most convincingly addresses the rewards and disappointments of seeking out your cultural heritage as a child of diaspora and the difficulties of bringing your so-called roots into a new reality and maybe even a new psychography. So Cukie goes and meets his father who kind of did a runner on his mom in childhood. Turns out that his dad has only been a few miles away in an area called Smuggler’s Bay, where he’s been lobster fishing and- 

James Walton: 

And possibly smuggling. 

Jo Hamya: 

And smuggling. And Cukie’s dropped off with his father and spends a summer with him and in the process kind of … Well, he’s a teenager, but kind of becomes a man. He learns how to lobster fish. He takes on his father’s work ethic. Physically he’s affected by it. He builds some muscle. He builds some discipline of mind as well. By the time he goes back home, it seems that he sort of put childish things behind him and his teachers and parents and the adults around him are suitably impressed. And it seems that this idea of going back to your parents’ values or heritage has done him a whole world of good until it doesn’t. 

James Walton: 

Until it really doesn’t. 

Jo Hamya: 

Until it really doesn’t. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, that’s true. 

Jo Hamya: 

It was a really compelling snapshot of the book’s ambitions as a whole. 

James Walton: 

And a really good, almost a mini thriller, isn’t it really? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. 

James Walton: 

So that sounds as if we quite like it. 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, yeah, I feel a sense of disappointment in it because I think it’s got such brilliant ambition and an incredible amount of intellectual promise and so much nuance. And as I say, I think these short stories just seem to kind of cut off at the moment where you’re just beginning to be affected by what’s happening to you in the flow of Escoffery’s prose. And yeah, I genuinely do wish that this had been more straightforwardly a novel and a longer one that more groundwork could have been done. But yeah, I would say it’s good. It’s like in the middle of the pile for me. 

James Walton: 

Okay. Do you want to tell us about book number two? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. So now This Other Eden by Paul Harding, which I think is an interesting compliment, I don’t know, maybe there’s a better word to use to If I Survive You. And it’s inspired by true events on Malaga Island in Maine, but fictionalised. So this book takes place on Apple Island at the start of the 20th century. Apple Island is inhabited by a very small community of mixed race settlers all descended from a freed enslaved man, Benjamin Honey, and his Irish wife, Patience. Broadly, the island comprises three families, the Honeys, the McDermott sisters, and the Larks, as well as a man named Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, who lives in an oak tree. 

James Walton: 

[inaudible 00:20:52] Zachary Hand to God Proverbs [inaudible 00:20:55]. 

Jo Hamya: 

Apple Island is self-contained and quite poverty-stricken in pretty much every way imaginable. It’s populated by shacks, it’s ridden by lice, natural disaster, at times famine. And in this mix, we also meet a former seminary man, Matthew Diamond, who, despite his latent racism, is bent on teaching the local children Latin, algebra, art, even the Bible. And his intentions go awry when government officials in Maine catch wind of the community’s existence through his efforts. And on the heels of the first International Congress on Eugenics, determine that the islanders should be evicted, and this is in quotes, “civilised, sterilised, or otherwise dealt with”. Midway through the book, Diamond attempts to save the one white passing child of the community by sending him away to a colonial estate on the mainland, which kind of results in further tragedy. But the novel as a whole is quite literally biblical in scope. It seeks to address questions of home, hereditary, race, representation, eugenics, and art. 

But James, do you think it measures up? 

James Walton: 

I must say this is the book that I had the most reservations about. Accentuating the positive, there’s a really good bit where you’re talking about the boy that he sends to a colonial home. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, Ethan Honey. 

James Walton: 

Ethan Honey first sees the world outside the island, and he’s sort of just realising what the world is like. That’s a great passage. But apart from that, I think this does fall into my opening things about just being way too virtuous. So on the whole, you’ve got the islanders. Esther is the sort of great matriarch who’s wise and great, and she talks about what’s on the island, “Love, pure love. Love, pure and simple. She watches some of the kids playing about. She followed their progress, and as they got closer, she found herself overjoyed by them. Each her own modest little person, each unselfconsciously taking care of one another, even as they teased and screeched and laughed and complained.” There’s a child who’s actually a product of incest, who is special needs, I think we’d say now. 

But anyway, “Even she knew and loved the island as any child knows and loves its mother. Some of the islanders put on their Shakespeare, know their Hamlet. Some of them speak well.” There’s one who says, “Can compose her own Latin verses in dactylic pentameter off the top of her head.” Now, okay, but I think there is a point at which if you romanticise people too much, you end up dehumanising them. So these islanders are so sort of, as I say, romanticised, idealised, as the clue in this other reading, I suppose, in the title, that they are in the end not actually human beings. And then another thing that could have been interesting … So they’re the goodies. The baddies, obviously, are the people coming over because of eugenics to wipe out the island. But actually, eugenics was a left-wing progressive cause at the time, which could have been interesting. 

Certainly in Britain, The Guardian, the New Statesman, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and I did look into it in America too, it was essentially a scientific and progressive left-wing cause. Obviously, once it reached Auschwitz, it wasn’t. But at this stage in the early 20th century, it sort of was, and that could have been interesting. But again, it’s just turned into baddie white supremacists. And that guy you mentioned who lives in the tree, at one point, he is … Well, towards the end, actually, when the authorities come to clear the island, and it does say all this at the start, so this is no spoiler alert. He says he’s accused of being queer. That’s the word they use, obviously, and then he says, “That’s right; I am queer, from queer folk, queer stock. The very queerest. You bet I’m queer. I’m no landlord, no lawyer, no duke, no lord of the looms. 

I’m no cap doffer, no knee-bender, no flattering stooge. I draw no wits; I pass no judgments. I set no seals. I tip no scales. No, not me. I’m queer,” in italics. I’m queer for my self, for my selfhood, queer for this queer self I find myself to be, with strange appetites, and a heart that throbs most queerly. I’m queer for other queers, queer for their shapes and colours and sizes, queer for their tastes. I’m queer for the ruthless sea.” And it goes on. It goes on at some length. There’s quite a lot of that. Now, that is not something, I don’t think, an islander would say at that time. So it is this 21st century liberal white guy. If you want to compare it to The Sellout, Paul Beatty, written by a Black guy, it just wouldn’t have that level of reverence and piety that is brought to bear on that. I think I’ve made my feelings clear. Do you share them at all? 

Jo Hamya: 

It really gives me no pleasure to say this, but I do. 

James Walton: 

Nothing wrong with sharing my feelings. 

Jo Hamya: 

I often share your feelings, but I think with this book in particular, it’s always a bit unpleasant to kind of pile on a novel. 

James Walton: 

No, but it is. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. But to be really honest, I felt distinctly uncomfortable reading a lot of This Other Eden. I agree with you that a lot of these characters feel more like caricatures or marionettes more than they do like people. They should have left a lasting impression on me. I think that so much of these characters, rather than being described via their relationships to one another or just by any sort of inner life, are instead described by physical attributes or by just sort of menial work that they do, which to an extent is fine, but that really seems to be all they’re comprised of. So, for example, early on the McDermott sisters are described, “Violet, have milky skin and tightly curled burnish-copper red hair that flared red beneath the sun and fuller moons, and had her parents’ broad nose across which dry freckles were speckled. 

Her mouth was full like her parents as well. Her lips pale. Her eyes were the colour of green and copper. Iris had her parents’ acorn dark skin, but the narrow nose and thin lips of her Irish ancestors persisted on her face as did their hair, which she inherited straight and black. She had only one brown eye, the colour of loam and the other eye winter morning sky blue, it being the watchful eye of their great aunt Sarah Proverbs herself that came back in an island daughter every now and then to see for herself that her kin were making do and behaving Christianly, according to Ginny, who told the twins that Iris was the third girl on the island since the Honeys settled it to have one brown and one blue eye.” And I know nothing about these people other than the fact that they do not look white. 

James Walton: 

[inaudible 00:27:34] just check how many sentences that was. 

Jo Hamya: 

That was one sentence. 

James Walton: 

One sentence. This is back to the long sentences. Also, again, on the piety side, this is the Black people and Irish being lovely together in their multicultural paradise. This is at a time when there was a lot of anti-Black violence by Irish people around America around this time, but obviously not in Eden where they all just get on. So everything’s just so great and lovely. I think it’s not just piety. It’s kind of a peculiar American piety, I think. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. To try and balance this out, I do quite genuinely love the midsection of this book section two, which is Ethan Honey travelling to a colonial estate in Maine on the mainland and falling in love with an Irish housekeeper at the Hale residence called Bridget Carney. Ethan is sent there after the islanders are made to be evicted from their homes by the government in Maine. And this is Matthew Diamond’s attempt to save this child, this white passing child who he believes has some sort of promise. And so Ethan is sent to paint essentially around the Hale estate. 

James Walton: 

Because he is an amazing painter as well, isn’t he? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. Which, do you know what, I also have kind of an issue with this idea of this white saviour guy turning these children into savants like their only value on this island is what this man has kind of trained them to be like intellectual geniuses somehow all of a sudden. But anyway, that aside, I really believe in the relationship between Ethan Honey and Bridget Carney. It’s tenderly and beautifully written. There’s a point where Bridget is giving Ethan some lemonade, and it’s the first time, to my mind, in this book that one of the islanders is portrayed in a really human and moving way. Because to Ethan, he’s never had lemonade before, much less seen lemons. It’s revelatory to him. It says, “He brought the glass to his lips and sipped the lemonade. The sour and sweet and cold exploded citrusy and pale on his tongue. 

It tasted so good he gasped a little. How does it keep the ice? How do you keep it? Ethan sipped at the drink again then swallowed the rest in a gulp. Bridget smiled and tasted her drink that although usually she quaffed the entire glass too when no one else was looking, even though it gave her a piercing headache that sometimes seemed like an icicle shooting through her brain afterwards, which she liked too in its way because the pain balanced the sweetness in a way she could never explain. ‘It’s ice from Ennan Lake,’ she said. ‘It’s famous. They send it to London. Mr. Hale has an interest in it. It’s called the Ennan Ice Company.’ ‘An interest,’ Ethan thought. ‘Mr. Hale has an interest in ice.’ He chewed a shaving of ice and the lemon and sugar-coating prickled at his tongue. 

He wanted both to drink the entire pitcher of lemonade at once and never to have so much as another sip of it again. Lemonade and ice through the summer, a house bigger than 20 houses, Dutchmen rolling huge rolling meadows, this girl from over the ocean so lovely, so kind to him, this dream, this strange dream, this huge adult dream of a kingdom so far from Apple Island.” That’s exquisite. 

James Walton: 

No, that is pretty good. 

Jo Hamya: 

That’s lovely. What happened to the rest of the book? 

James Walton: 

I’d say we’re an independent podcast and obviously that’s not a book that either is enjoyed greatly, but other people might. That’s Paul Harding’s This Other Eden. 

And from that we move on to Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein. The second novel by Sarah Bernstein, a Canadian who now lives in the Scottish Highlands and in 2023 was named as one of the 20 best young British novelists by Granta magazine in its 10-yearly traditionally quite influential list. I read a review of her first novel, The Coming Bad Days, which talked about this new tradition, if you can have such a thing, of slightly forbidding novels in a way. Books with long paragraphs that we’ve mentioned, not much dialogue, but also an almost complete absence of the usual signposts for the reader. And that happens in her second book too, Study for Obedience. There’s an unnamed narrator who goes to an unnamed northern country to look after her oldest brother, unnamed, who not necessarily to her benefit, she’s always looked up to since she was a girl. 

We don’t know the names of any of the other characters either, except the narrator’s dog actually and a doctor towards the end. The country where it’s taking place is pretty mysterious too. It’s a land of the midnight sun and yet it does seem to have been involved in some way in the Holocaust. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, it’s just referred to as the North. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, it is, but the sun doesn’t set there. When it’s taking place, it’s also slightly mysterious. It sometimes seems quite timeless in what’s going on in the countryside, except that there are references to Twitter and Microsoft Teams. And then this unknown narrator has to navigate, so no sooner does she arrive, her brother clears off on business and she has to navigate the weirdly suspicious locals. Weirdly suspicious partly because she doesn’t speak the language, but partly too, we gradually realise, because she’s Jewish and this is a place where Jews have been persecuted. But the narrator might not be all she seems either. Strange things start to happen after she gets there. Cows die, the local pigs litter all die, the chickens get avian flu. This is all blamed on her, but there’s a sort of suggestion, a growing suggestion that perhaps it’s not blamed on her wrongly necessarily. 

So Jo, this is not a book, I think it’s fair to say, that gives up its secrets easily. What did you think of it? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, I think having read it three times now, I can definitively say that it’s my favourite on this shortlist. I think it’s probably the richest novel on this shortlist. I think you’re right that its sentences don’t yield their meaning very easily, but I think that’s to a purpose. We have this rather obsequious narrator who places a lot of her identity on this idea of being servile and obedient. 

James Walton: 

This person putting people’s other needs first as she always she keeps saying. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. And I think actually what I find so compelling about this book is that, and maybe I can change your mind a little bit because I know that you’re a bit 50/50 on it. 

James Walton: 

I don’t disagree with much of what you said so far apart from it’s not my favourite book on the list. But yeah, keep going. 

Jo Hamya: 

I think if we’ve been discussing this idea of virtuous literature, we should also discuss the idea of virtuous readers. I think one of the really clever things that Sarah Bernstein does is play with what readers expect from their narrators, especially when they’re being handed what seems like a very docile and a good person at first, at least. There are so many things that I didn’t question on my first reading of this book, even seven pages in. So for example, this idea that the narrator is utterly subservient to the people around her. On first read, I thought, “Well, my God, that must be exhausting. That’s so terrible. I should really attend to her feelings and take extra care.” On second read, that illusion falls apart by page two. I noticed once the book had been kind of revealed to me a bit more that she says, “I was the youngest child, the youngest of many more than I care to remember, whom I tended from my earliest infancy before indeed I had the power of speech myself. 

And although my motor skills were by then scarcely developed, these my siblings were in my charge. I attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience with the highest degree of devotion so that over time their desires became mine.” Somewhere in there, the length of these sentences, you kind of miss on first read the fact that she’s suggesting that she was taking care of her older siblings before she could even speak. 

James Walton: 

I agree with you. This is kind of almost deliciously sinister, even that bit about she got more siblings than she cares to remember. What the heck’s that all about? And then it says, “I provided my siblings with the greatest possible sucker, ministering their complex curative draughts prescribed to them by various doctors, serving their meals and snacks, their cigarettes and aperitifs, their nightcaps and bedside glasses of milk.” Yeah, it is sinister and increasingly sinister. 

Jo Hamya: 

She does a really good job of kind of questioning the complicity of the reader in how far they victimise this woman in a way, how far they see her as meek and mild and how far that is actually true. Because yes, this is a persona that she sort of takes on voluntarily in a way, but there are plenty of examples of her quite clearly abdicating a kind of moral responsibility for a lot of really questionable stuff that goes on around her. So for example, her work is transcribing cases for a law firm, which is levying a case against a whistleblower who’s speaking out against a client of theirs who has been found in some countries guilty of poisoning water, tax fraud. So when she’s transcribing these cases, where perhaps there is a quite clear cut example of who is morally in the right and who is not, she says, “I was at my best when I felt like a pure vehicle, a simple mechanism for the translation of sound into text organised neatly into paragraphs to be dated and signed. I typed and typed, trying not to listen too closely, balancing my attention on the fine point of understanding. 

If I could keep this balance, heeding the structure of what was said rather than passing its significance, I could just about compose myself. The act of rendering another’s words in this way evacuated the requirement listening. The attention necessary was to the words themselves rather than to their meaning. It had been suggested at a certain point that I would be better off the less I knew about the matter. And so I strove to understand as little as possible, even nothing of what was said by my colleagues involved in the case.” And it’s just sort of this idea of her being so servile, it’s actually what makes her quite a sinister person. 

James Walton: 

No, you’ve convinced me a bit. Just how much the long sentences, and I might come back to them, but how much they use to slide things by you and how carefully you have to pay attention to this book. 

Jo Hamya: 

It’s a book that withstands rereading many times over because you catch more and more. One of the things that it also does that we’ve been discussing for this episode in all of the books is this question of cultural mythologies around the homeland versus the realities of inhabiting it. And where do you pin the actual value? Is it in this idea of home or is it in what you actually do once you’re there? And of course, this is so complicated for the narrator in the book because she is ostracised by the home that she’s chosen or that her brother has chosen. Her brother, who is this quite forward-thinking progressive person who seems always to live in the future, wants to master the future and has purposefully moved back to a place where their ancestors were- 

James Walton: 

Certainly persecuted. 

Jo Hamya: 

Persecuted is a good word. 

James Walton: 

And possibly more, there’s one reference about being thrown into pits. And not only that, he moves into a house owned by what seems to have been one of the sort of richer ringleaders of all that stuff as well. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. And I think Bernstein is really attuned to the complications of seeking a home where you once have one, but no longer do, but want to make one. She writes, “Who was I? Why had I come? I was not from the town. That much was clear, not even from the surrounding areas. And unlike my brother, I lacked the essential quality that would have enabled me to overcome these basic failings. I was not from the place, and so I was not anything. I was a nothing, a stranger who was not wanted, but who nevertheless imposed herself continually day after day, a kind of spectral presence hovering at the edges of the life of the town whose intentions were obscure and who, for some reason, evinced a terrible fidelity to the idea of staying put.” Of course she wants to stay put. It’s where her- 

James Walton: 

Yes, but also she’s up to stuff, isn’t she? I mean, I think that becomes increasingly clear that she’s not innocent necessarily. She is up to things. We can’t give any spoilers, but if we could, we might suggest that this idea of her innocently hanging around, bathing her brother, dressing her brother, she’s, as they say, got her own agenda, an agenda that reveals itself very slowly on first reading and becomes more evident on rereading. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. I don’t know. In a way, I thought of this book more as a kind of psychological character study or case study than as a plot driven thing. And so I wasn’t really hugely invested in figuring out what she was up to so much as what the things she observed and did contributed to my very muddied understanding, I think intentionally by Bernstein, muddied understanding of this person and what that said about my particular reading habits. I think it’s in a way a book that really threw back to me the habits that I’ve accumulated as a reader in the contemporary era. 

James Walton: 

What do you mean? 

Jo Hamya: 

What I’ve kind of trained myself to look for or attach significance to is not at all what Bernstein is interested in pursuing in this book. And again- 

James Walton: 

Such things as? 

Jo Hamya: 

So this whole book is essentially a confession. It’s a confessional novel given by this narrator about what’s been happening in this town that she’s arrived at and her and her brother. And my first instinct was to kind of go for plot, go for, but what did happen? Who are you? Why is nothing being mentioned? And that’s why on my first reading, honestly, it fell a bit flat. I felt a bit ambivalent about this book, but it stuck with me, and I felt really, really compelled to go back to it. On my second reading, I realised that I’d been asking all the wrong questions. I should have been asking, why is she confessing? Who is she confessing to? Me. But what am I meant to notice in these long, very sinuous sentences that seem to go on and on, what is she purposefully making me miss? 

What do I pick up on? Morally what do I want out of a novel? I want to be on the side of the narrator. I want to believe in their coherent, stable identity as someone who’s going to guide me through the plot, or at least give me something to work in opposition to for the book. But she does neither. And I think there’s this really interesting bit in the middle of the book where the narrator watches a kite kill and eat a rabbit. And this is kind of presented as a moral conundrum for the narrator. Who should she feel sympathy for? The rabbit that’s been killed or the kite who is just performing a very simple act of Darwinism, of survival, I guess. That became a really focal lens for me to read the book through because there’s no answer to that question. And I think when I first read this book, I was reading with that mentality of I want questions answered. I don’t want to sort of linger over it. 

James Walton: 

I didn’t quite attain that level of purity of not wanting to know what was going on or quite what was going on. But that kite and rabbit thing is fantastic, isn’t it? So at this point, as far as we know, he’s not that far into the book. In fact, she sees this meek woman who’s just looking after her brother, sees this kite rip a rabbit to pieces, feels sorry for the rabbit, then thinks, “Hold on a minute, there’s loads of rabbits, this poor kite.” And then suddenly maybe she’s on the side of the kite and then there’s a bit about … she talks about the meek inheriting the earth and what ludicrousness that was. So is she in fact the kite rather than the rabbit in the book? 

Jo Hamya: 

I think why I find this book so compelling is what is going on is happening in the reader as much as in the text. So your interpretation depends on what you pay attention to in this novel and how closely you read it and how much you’re willing to absorb from it. And so whichever one you decide is sort of like a raw shark test for who you are as a reader or what you want the text to perform as. 

James Walton: 

I must say your archivism here, Jo, I had some quite long and boring sentences to read out to you to suggest that actually the experience of reading it wasn’t much fun, but actually those long and boring sentences become less boring if you- 

Jo Hamya: 

Pay attention to them. 

James Walton: 

If you really pay attention. 

Jo Hamya: 

In order to keep all of these books in my head to discuss them today, I kind of put down two songs each that encompass their vibe, and my Study for Obedience had the most diverging songs out of all of them. The first was My Heart is in the Highlands by Arvo Part, which is this beautiful choral based on a poem, sparse piece of music. But then the second one was Psycho Killer by the Talking Heads because she’s just such a messed up weird character. 

James Walton: 

Well, blimey, that’s interesting and very telling about the book. I’m glad we’ve ended this week’s first three on a positive note. Only gave a kicking to one of the books and ended with really, really liking Study for Obedience and you have sort of won me around to that. Okay, well, should we leave it there for the first three then? 

Jo Hamya: 

I think we should. 

James Walton: 

We’ll be back next week to discuss the other three. But just to remind you, the books we’ve been discussing today were Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein, we’ve just done. This Other Eden by Paul Harding, and we kicked off with If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. Okay, Jo, so do you think we’ve got our Booker winner in those first three? 

Jo Hamya: 

No, I don’t. I mean, I think we’ve got my personal Booker winner in these three, but I think the book that’s going to win, one of the books that might win, is in next week’s episode. 

James Walton: 

So that’s part one of our look at the 2023 Booker Prize Shortlist. 

Jo Hamya: 

You can find out more about all of this year’s shortlist at thebookerprizes.com, including interviews with all six authors, as well as extracts from each book performed by actors including Alfred Enoch, Bel Powley, and Paterson Joseph. 

James Walton: 

And where better to discuss this year’s shortlisted books than at the newish Booker Prize Book Club. Head to facebook.com/TheBookerPrizes to find out more. 

Jo Hamya: 

And remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack at The Booker Prizes. 

James Walton: 

And join us next week when we’ll be discussing the remaining three books on this year’s shortlist, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, and Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. 

Jo Hamya: 

Until next time, bye. 

James Walton: 

Bye. 

The Booker Prize podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Meolo, and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht Production for The Booker Prizes.