The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 19: Exploring the 2023 shortlist, plus winner predictions (part 2)

As we hurtle towards the Booker Prize 2023 announcement later this month, we’re continuing our deep dive into this year’s shortlist: The Bee Sting, Western Lane and Prophet Song. This week, in the second of two parts, Jo and James take a closer look at the remaining three books. Listen in to hear what they make of them and which book they think will take home the prize this year.

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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James Walton:

Hello and welcome to the Booker Prize Podcast with me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

Me Jo Hamya.

James Walton:

And this week is the second part of our review of this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. Last week we tackled, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. This Other Eden by Paul Harding and Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein. So if you want to know what we made of those, make sure you give it a listen. Jo, we have a bit of a kicking to this other reading. We quite… Oh, well you loved Study for Obedience and we both quite liked it. If I Survive you, any second thoughts on any of them?

Jo Hamya:

Gosh, no. I think on reflection I do stand by everything we said.

James Walton:

Fair enough. Well, let’s move on to the remaining three then. So what books are we left with, Jo?

Jo Hamya:

Okay, so this week we are going to be tackling the remaining 2023 Booker Price shortlist, Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. We’re going to be starting with Western Lane.

James Walton:

Tell me about Western Lane then Jo.

Jo Hamya:

With pleasure, it’s one of many family sagas on the shortlist and it’s narrated by Gopi who along with her older sisters, Mona and Kush has recently lost her mother. Western Lane is actually the name of a sports community centre. The sister’s visit often in the novel. All three of the girls have been playing squash since early childhood, but after the loss of their mother, the sport takes on a new resonance for Gopi and her father who trains her. And as she begins to show a particular aptitude for it, preparations for a tournament in Durham become a channel for the family’s grief. The prose is really sparse, but it’s littered with jewels which take the form of really gorgeous details, sometimes drawn from the sister’s Gujarat heritage and sometimes from descriptions of squash matches being played out. In particular via recordings of real life Pakistani player Jahangir Khan who Gopi watches on a loop to strengthen her own game. And it’s Maroo’s debut novel. So there’s a certain etiquette in discussing those. But James, I believe you actually genuinely did quite like this one.

James Walton:

Oh no, I really like this one. As you say, there is a lot of squash in it, but it’s not just squash. On the opening page she’s playing squash as she will do. And she hears the noise from the court next door, which she describes as a steady melancholy rhythm of someone she can’t see. And that sort of seems to

me to be her mother’s absence being present, which it is throughout the book. Also on the opening page, she talks about the echo, which is the ball striking the wall of the court is louder than the shot itself. Which in a way is how the novel itself works, I think. Which the prose, it’s very quiet, very gentle, very understated, and yet there’s a deep pain beneath it and it has a strong resonance and the deep pain that the prose both reveals and tries so hard to conceal.

And I think that is really brilliantly done. So here’s just a fairly typical bit, she’s at home and it says, “Air had been trapped inside our radiators for more than a month, which meant the big sections were cold and the house never got properly warm. My sisters and I dressed in long sleeves and hooded tops and said nothing to Pa. In the past, Pa would’ve fixed the problem right away, but now he ignored it. Mona came and stood next to me. It wasn’t just the warmth we were seeking. We wanted to feel the knocking as we stood against the radiator, we understood the knocking was only the air trapped inside. We wanted to feel it.” Again, there’s just enormous amounts of pain somehow behind that. And I think I would suggest in a psychologically realistic way, this isn’t a book where dad’s going to say, “I love you Gopi.” And she’s going to say, “I love you, dad.” But we just little scenes like this.

There’s one bit where about the only time really breaks down and sobs grandmother, and then she develops a fever shortly after that and she’s in bed and we have this. And I think this means that I love you, Gopi I love you, but this is all we get. “Paul never came into our bedroom, but he did then. Maybe it was only once. It was just me and him. He sat on the child’s stool in front of the dressing table for a while, not saying anything. But as he was leaving, he came by my bed and rested his hand lightly on my chest and then took my blanket in such a way that for the whole night I didn’t dare move in case I undid what he had done, my lamp load orange and I could hear my own heart beating softly.”

Again and again, there’s just that we get glimpses of how badly the father’s suffering there. I think even just in the way he tucks in rather obviously rather clumsily the blanket. And this makes it all the more shocking and powerful when things do burst out. There’s one bit where at a fun fare where Mona likes this boy who starts sort of flirting with someone else, skateboard wielding, hussy.

Jo Hamya:

I think we call her a manic pixie dream girl.

James Walton:

Okay, manic, pixie dream girl. And Mona sort of says, “look, you realise none of this would be happening if Mark was still alive” and Cush just absolutely goes for a then get up and carry on. But just those little moments, there’s one bit most dramatically of all really, one bit where Gopi overhears her dad, talking to a woman who works at the centre. There’s also the mother of a boy that got quite fancy is called Jed. And Jed’s mom and Gopi’s father are often going out to have cigarettes together.

She overhears her dad saying to Jed’s Mum, the girls, sometimes I look at them and I think they will eat me. And she reflects, this is probably the saddest thing he said out loud in his whole life. And that out loud is quite good. So she knows again how much he’s hurting, but actually she then goes onto the court with her dad and absolutely wallops the ball into his jaw. It seems deliberately, but again, that’s left. So she’s angry with him, she’s sorry for him. And all of these feelings are unexpressed. And I think a book that can do the unsaid so brilliantly, it’s quite an achievement given that by definition you can’t say it. So I think it’s extremely good.

Jo Hamya:

I agree. I think I would add to that possibly, I read this in a very personal way, but it’s also a book that’s extremely adept at tracking the evolution of gull to womanhood. And the sisters in this novel are kind of forced to mature a lot faster than they otherwise would have had their mother still been alive. And you see that most clearly with Mona, who kind of becomes the matriarch of the family, gets a job, but a hair salon sweeping cuttings and

James Walton:

Yeah, she’s the oldest one and she stopped cooking, doing all the cooking and so on but also starts slightly throwing her weight around as well.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, you can’t help but feel for these girls and what the absence of their mother has done to them. It’s not only transformed them but the way that they’re perceived by their father. So one of the predicaments copy has is that she actually resembles her mother quite closely. It makes her relationship with her father that much more slightly painful. There’s this bit that really got to me that reads, “When finally I came in, Paul would look up from his papers and he would just stare as if he was startled. It’s Ma, Kush would tell me later, you look like Ma. If we arrived at home to find that Mona hadn’t cooked, Paul would wait for me to come in and he’d send me and Kush to the VG store. We’d come home with tins of baked beans and mini frozen pizzas, which would make Mona angry with the three of us. What visitors we had were very interested in what we ate every day. And this too made Mona angry. Her moods did not seem to trouble Pa. He didn’t seem to notice” so much underlying grief bound-

James Walton:

That’s right, well, they’re all sort of grieving separately, aren’t they really? And it isn’t going to be a family of group hugs or anything. So Mona does it by tackling their domestic duties, Kush withdraws into herself more, Gopi takes up squash, moderately obsessively. And again, it never quite comes together in, as I say, what seems to me an authentic way.

Jo Hamya:

Do you think?

James Walton:

Yeah, I do think the idea that they don’t all sit around and say, how are you feeling? How are you feeling? Let’s all discuss more. And yet they all know it and we know it too. Any reservations about this at all really?

Jo Hamya:

I think the only other thing that gave me slight pause, but I did sort of towards the end once the tournament is over, found myself going, I wonder why squash of all things as a narrative device in this book.

James Walton:

It’s too much squash?

Jo Hamya:

Well, maybe not too much squash, but I understand the whole significance of a Pakistani squash player and representation and maybe that’s why, but still, I just kind of found myself thinking a novel about grief and sisterhood and maturation and squash.

James Walton:

The squash does kind of work for those metaphorical reasons that I mentioned right at the beginning almost.

Jo Hamya:

I suppose. I mean I guess it works in terms of the kind of discipline that this novel is very engaged in as a practise for the sisters and also the prose.

James Walton:

And also there’s a thing in ghosting, apparently in squash, which is you basically do everything except the ball’s not there.

Jo Hamya:

Oh, yes, that’s so true, yes.

James Walton:

And that’s like… I think.

Jo Hamya:

All right, you’ve convinced me.

James Walton:

Okay, is the absent mother that they’re doing everything except what really matters is not there.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, that’s a really good theory, love that. That’s probably actually just a very valid reading of the book that I miss.

James Walton:

Okay, so let’s move on to our next book, which is Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. This is the fifth novel by the Irish writer Paul Lynch, whose previous four have been somewhere between well-received and prize winning, all of them, I think. Of those three were historical novels of various kinds. But Prophet Song by contrast is set in a near future version of Ireland where a totalitarian government has come to power and the novel begins with something that’s never a good sign in such circumstances, a knock on the door late one night by the secret police. And from there the book is seen almost completely through the eyes of Ailish Stack, suburban microbiologist, wife and mother whose husband Larry is taken away by those same secret police and from then on twice heroically really to keep our family together and to take care of as seen our father too, as the political situation in Ireland gets worse and worse and more and more oppressive. Jo, what did you make of this one?

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, it was the most surprising. One on this list for me I’d expected to feel ambivalent about it and in fact, I was really deeply, deeply affected by it. I think to be completely honest, I’m not very [foreign language 00:11:15] with my Irish political history, and so had only really a glancing understanding of the political background or how accurate Prophet Song may be as a dystopia. But in a way I kind of didn’t care because it’s so firmly rooted through Ailish’s perspective as a mother trying to keep her family together. And I think the core question of this book really is, why do you stay?

James Walton:

Yes, that’s right. One of the recurring things in… Because she’s got this sister in Canada who says, “just God sake get out and come to join us.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

She says, “well, what about dad?” Who’s the senior guy? What if he falls?” And has a fall as all people do, or what about the children? I’ve got plans for them. And there’s this idea that an important factor in history is people who leave it too late to leave.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I think near the end there is this… It’s sort of like civil freedom and unfreedom and how excruciatingly slowly you lose your basic human rights and you only realise when it’s too late. So there is this bit that Ailish is speaking and she says, “I suppose other people seem to know, but I never understood how they were so certain. What I mean is you could have never imagined it not in a million years all that was to happen and I could never understand those that left, how they could just leave that, leave everything behind, all that life, all that living. It was absolutely impossible for us to do so at the time. And the more I look at it, the more it seems there was nothing we could do anyhow. What I mean is there was never any real room for action, that time with the visas, how we were supposed to go when we had so many commitments, so many responsibilities, and when things got worse, there was just no room for manoeuvre.”

“I think what I’m trying to say is that I used to believe in free will. If you had asked me before all this, I would’ve told you I was free as a bird, but now I’m not so sure. Now I don’t see how free will is possible when you are caught up within such a monstrosity, one thing leads to another thing until a damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do. I can see now that what I thought of as freedom was really just struggle and that there was no freedom all along.”

James Walton:

And I think it’s brilliant on why people find it hard to leave places where you think for God’s sake just get out. It’s not that easy for sure.

Jo Hamya:

It is. And I think something that Lynch does in a really affecting way that feels personal to each of these characters, rather than as something that’s just simply told to you or given an exposition as why you may feel it really, really important to stay. So for example, Ailish’s father has dementia, and at a certain

point her sister is trying to convince Ailish that he should be smuggled out to Canada and Ailish says, “what my father needs is to remain at home, to be surrounded by his memories, to tell the past within reach and time there will be nothing left to him but shadows. A strange dream of the world to send him into exile now would be to condemn him to a kind of non-existence.” And she’s talking about her father, but in a way she’s also talking about herself because quite recently her oldest son, Mark has been sent for conscription and she’s been thinking he could return at any moment, he’ll slide open the patio door and slouch into the kitchen as though he had never gone.

He’ll go to the fridge and give out that there is no ham and pull a chair asking if there’s any news of his dad Larry Stack, who has also disappeared. I suppose it’s this idea of what is there to make of us if we don’t have our home, our memories, our material possessions. I think there’s one actually I found quite affecting passage where Ailish is looking at her mother’s wedding ring, an engagement ring, and she thinks, well, I used to treasure these, but now they’re just objects that I could sell for the cash that I need to buy basic necessities like food, batteries, water, and that’s another kind of stripping away her humanity as a result of war. I think as well, one of the really compelling things about this book to me is how clear-eyed Lynch is on portrayals of war. There’s a point at which media is being essentially just censored by the GNSB, no one’s-

James Walton:

They secretly on there yet.

Jo Hamya:

Yes and no one’s completely, totally sure of what’s happening outside their own houses. They have to rely on international news. And so one of Ailish’s children, Bailey takes a drink of milk and asks if the country is now at war and Ailish studies the milk moustache and the question in his eyes, “They’re calling it an insurgency on the international news, Molly says. Molly is Ailish’s daughter. “But if you want to give war its proper name, call it entertainment, we are now TV for the rest of the world.” I think Lynch is really attuned to the fact that a lot of the cruelty of war is that if you don’t have proximity to the pain that it inflicts, you just don’t care. And I think one of the things about Ailish is that she’s only able to delude herself up to the point that her house is literally bombed and then she is firmly in proximity to pain.

James Walton:

Yeah, no agree with all of that. I really like the fact… There’s a great phrase in this, happiness hides in the humdrum. So there’s one bit before it all falls to bits where they’re just all watching telly together and that’s all you want really. And it’s also quite exciting when it becomes quite a thriller as they try to escape. But I do have one problem with this book, and it is quite a big one I’m afraid, which is that I just don’t believe the premise of a totalitarian island, especially as Paul Lynch, doesn’t really explain anything about how it came to be.

All we get is one secret policeman saying on page 10, “Mr. Stack note, you’ll be aware, no doubt of the Emergency Powers Act that came into effect this September in response to the ongoing crisis facing the state.” That’s it. Now, in an interview on the Booker Prize website, Paul Lynch has asked, why has Ireland done so well in this year’s Booker Prize as usual? And he says, “Because the government’s so nice to writers really. We don’t pay any income tax. We get plenty of grants and so on.”

Jo Hamya:

They don’t pay any income tax?

James Walton:

No artists in Ireland, they don’t pay any income tax.

Jo Hamya:

Do you have to be born in Ireland for that to work?

James Walton:

No, I think people have moved there for that reason.

Jo Hamya:

I’m moving to Ireland.

James Walton:

Just before you do, Jay, let’s hold those thoughts because we’re going to take a short break now after which we’ll be back with part two.

Jo Hamya:

Welcome back to part two of this episode of the Book of Prize podcast. So James, you were saying?

James Walton:

So the question is how did Ireland get from that place to this place here? And he just doesn’t imagine that enough for me at all. There’s an interesting puff from Colin McCann who’s an Irish writer and he says about this book about totalitarianism, if it can happen in the most impossible place, it can happen everywhere is what’s great about this book, but there’s a clue in the word impossible. It can’t happen in the most impossible. It couldn’t happen in Ireland. I don’t think, or at least if an author is going to base an entire novel on the fact that it has happened in Ireland, it needs to imagine everything more thoroughly. I don’t think you can just buy this. So there’s the BBC still going, the Irish Times is still going. Presumably the EU social media, Northern Ireland is still British.

The Catholic church is still a thing. Yet what they’re up to doesn’t just go unexplained, doesn’t get mentioned. So I would suggest it’s not so much a liberal dystopia. It’s almost a liberal fantasy really, the idea that all us nice people are believe it on every side by the right. It actually says in Bee Sting by Paul Murray, “Fantasies of disaster can actually be an attempt to find relief.” I think the signs in the book also that Lynch kind of knows the problem. So when the national service’s introduced to fill the repressive army of one lawyer says, “can you imagine that in this country?’ No, you can’t.

It also seems when the government’s about to win an election, so people are actually voting for it, somebody else says this is unthinkable for a country like ours, which it is. There’s then a ban on reading foreign news with news channels blocked, a total internet blackout. And Bailey, this kid says, “That’s ridiculous. How can they just turn it off like that?”

And I think I’ve got a theory of what’s going on here, which is the giveaway is when Ailish looks at the Dublin Street and says she’s watching the street as though it belongs to some other city. And I reckon in the end it kind of does because we know from interviews that this book was inspired by Syria. So Paul Lynch has said “He looked at Syria and he saw the implosion of an entire nation, the scale of its refugee

crisis and the West’s indifference.” And he wanted to write about this. And then he goes on to say, “I couldn’t write directly about Syria, so I brought the problem to Ireland as a simulation.” Now, two questions there. Why couldn’t he write about Syria directly? And secondly, what does he mean by a simulation? Does he mean that, what if Ireland was Syria? But it really isn’t and it can’t suddenly just be without everything about Ireland.

It’s history, it’s geography, it’s people, it’s political system being completely different and they’re not completely different in Prophet Zone. So I don’t think you end the book thinking this must be what it’s like in Syria, but just this is unbelievable in Ireland. And I think there’s almost signs here and there of little fossils of the fact that it was once a book about Syria. So Mark watches Isis beheadings on video too, which inspires him to join the rebels. But again, that seems to belong to a Syrian.

Novel. And I think even that bit you read, we are now TV for the rest of the world I think is what Syria had become or has become. But I can’t imagine that happening in Ireland. What would any… It would be all right if it was put just as a sort of mythical thing, but it’s not. It’s put as something that could happen in Ireland. Now, if it did happen in Ireland, everything else in the book is fantastic and all that stuff you talk about is fantastic. The family stuff is great, but do you think I’m being too literal minded? I just cannot get over the fact that it wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen. And it’s not imagined thoroughly enough.

Jo Hamya:

In a way, I think Lynch does sort of address the points you’re making head on quite close to the end of the novel. And he writes, “The prophet sings not of the end of the world, but of what has been done and what will be done and what has being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another. And that the end of the world is always a local event. It comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others. But some distant warning, a brief report on the news and echo of events that has passed into folklore.”

And I think the point of the book perhaps is to turn an improbability into a reality. And that’s why it really does spend all of its time focusing on Ailish and focusing on family matters and expanding on the horrors of war through the loss of patriarchs and children and meat in a shop and the availability of batteries, the price of paracetamol being tripled, quadrupled. But to be really honest with you, James, and this might sound a bit inane, I just really didn’t care whether it was possible for it to happen or not-

James Walton:

That’s got to be the only way of enjoying this book. I think it’s not to mind, and I just did.

Jo Hamya:

It works for me emotionally and because I think actually it’s all the better, that it is a bit fuzzy on the kind of logistics of Irish politics because you can transpose it more easily onto… Sounds corny, but your soul, you can feel for these characters a bit more-

James Walton:

As I say, I think it’s more a liberal fantasy than the liberal dystopia. I think we love the idea.

Jo Hamya:

I think it’s an effective one at the very least.

James Walton:

But I think it’s a weirdly thrilling idea that, oh yeah, this could happen to us. The far easy take of an island. No, they couldn’t.

Jo Hamya:

I hope you’re right.

James Walton:

I’ll put some money on it. As I say, lots of good things about it. Also, I’m not dead keen on the fact that every section is a single paragraph. We talked at the beginning of the first episode of this two parter about the weird fashion now for extremely long paragraphs,

Jo Hamya:

Oh, I think we should actually talk about this. You might be unconvinced but to me this was actually one of the most compelling things about this book because it tripped me up a lot for the first 50 pages. And then I realised that we were about to read a war novel and war is chaotic and messy and it’s incoherent and you miss things and they fly past you before you can make sense of them. And so does this prose, and I think actually it’s another book that bears rereading, as we said last episode of Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience. I think if you were able to cogently pick everything up from every sentence in this book, it would not be as affecting. You are sort of reading it in this really emotional blur, and that works for me. The prose really sustains the atmosphere of chaos and tragedy.

James Walton:

No, clearly that’s a matter of taste. No, that question. What about the children? Mine is what about the readers? Wait, why not just give us a little paragraph break and also endlessly long sentences, which are only endlessly long sentences because the book commas instead of full stops. I mean maybe, obviously this again is taste for some that’ll be mesmeric and it became a bit of a tick.

Jo Hamya:

No, I mean I don’t think it was necessarily mesmeric. I just think there are bits of language that I found particularly ingenious. I think a couple of times, Ailish sleeves a Coton. He’s very poetic and I actually quite enjoyed it.

James Walton:

She coins a trolley supermarket from the… There’s quite a lot of where she likes to turns verbs-

Jo Hamya:

And that I kind of can understand and impatience towards that. But as far as those sentences that kind of gallop ahead in present tense, it’s not necessarily mesmeric. It’s just sort of like you’re being drowned in all of this detail. And I think it’s fitting, giving the context. I think it’s fitting that you are overwhelmed by a war novel.

James Walton:

Fair enough. Well, in fact, that’s interesting. I think this might be the book we most disagree on then probably, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. And that just leaves us with which book Jam.

Jo Hamya:

It leaves us with the Bee Sting by Paul Murray. It’s by far the longest novel on this shortlist. Most of these come up to more or less 300 pages and the Bee Sting clocks in at 642 of the first edition hardcover and again, another family saga. It’s narrated by various members of the Barnes family, which include Patriarch Dicky, who is running his father’s Volkswagen dealership into the ground. His beautiful and unmoored wife, Imelda, whose backstory is fairly traumatic and involves Dicky’s brother Frank, their teenage children, Cass and PJ who are variously affected by their once affluent family’s bankruptcy. Cass turns from star student to Party girl just in time for her final exams at school, while PJ is blackmailed and physically threatened by a local boy who’s convinced that Dicky has wronged his mother.

And through these four narratives, each of which has quite a distinct style, we come to understand the significance of several underlying characters and events such as the presence of a Polish mechanic named Richard or who kind of in Vagals his way into the Barnes’s lives, a piece of family law about Imelda being stung by a bee on her wedding day. The dynamic between the Barnes’s and a rich cattle farmer named Big Mike and his Brazilian housekeeper. But ultimately the novel rest principally on the secrets each character feels they cannot divulge and the actions their shame drives them towards. And I think just funny and tragic, and to me at least possibly the easiest novel on this shortlist to like, how do you feel about it, James?

James Walton:

I absolutely love this. A spoiler alert, it is my favourite by some distance. I read it last and I must say it was great to just have shapely sentences, proper paragraphs that last as long as a paragraph should be, and remind you of what a lovely thing a paragraph can be if it ends at just the right time. Also, even some jokes. Even jokes in slightly bad taste. I mean hurrah. So it starts with Cass, who’s the teenage daughter and a friend Elaine, and they’re looking at Miss Universe Island pictures and it says adversity they had overcome. One had been a refugee from a war in Africa, another had needed surgery when she was a small girl, a very thin contestant had once been very fat.

The adversity had to be something bad like a learning disability, but not something really bad like being chained up in a basement for 10 years by a paedophile. See, outlast some inappropriate laughter that we wanted. And in fact, a bit later they go to see the family photos. Elaine wants to see this is Cass’s sort of glamorous friend Elaine, who she rather looks up to and they’re in the good room where strictly speaking they shouldn’t have been. But Elaine wanted to look at Uncle Frank who she thought was hot even though he was dead. Now-

Jo Hamya:

That’s something quite tragic in that though.

James Walton:

No, exactly. Now this is how the book works. So that just seems a funny line there. But as the book goes on, and this is how the book works all the way through the fact that Uncle Frank was hot and is dead is crucial to the lives of everyone involved, and that happens all the time. Things that seem like jokes or passing s