I’ve been back and forth about reading this book. My initial impression was like yours: this book is clearly won the Booker prize riding the residual waves of Trump Derangement Syndrome (I don’t believe it only exists on the US side of the pond and even if it does, the publishers knew what they were doing and how to sell units) and it’s doing so with a YA dystopian type premise.
But people whose opinions I respect (who hate woke identitarianism in contemporary fiction as much as I do) really sung its praises. Then I read a few passages from the book and the prose really is at a level higher than that of your typical NPR-core “literary” novel.
No performative “woke” person writes that glowing, gushing of an essay about Faulkner, Melville, Conrad and Cormac McCarthy without some droll snarky apologetics about “dead white men.” Not only that, but he’s heaping praise on literature that reaches for the universal and metaphysical states of being as opposed to literature that speaks of issues “of the moment.”
Idk, maybe there’s more to this book than meets the blurbs. If anyone were to write about the threat of progressive authoritarianism, it would have to be buried deep in the subtext to ever be published, let alone win a Booker Prize. Sort of like how Spaghetti Western directors made movies about America to criticize the politics of Italy.
Or maybe this is just cope in a literary desert under the tight grip of a woke upper middle class monoculture.
Either way, this book deserves a close read from a critical eye.
I’ve been back and forth about reading this book. My initial impression was like yours: this book is clearly won the Booker prize riding the residual waves of Trump Derangement Syndrome (I don’t believe it only exists on the US side of the pond and even if it does, the publishers knew what they were doing and how to sell units) and it’s doing so with a YA dystopian type premise.
But people whose opinions I respect (who hate woke identitarianism in contemporary fiction as much as I do) really sung its praises. Then I read a few passages from the book and the prose really is at a level higher than that of your typical NPR-core “literary” novel.
Then I read this article he wrote:
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/paul-lynch-on-cosmic-realism#:~:text=There%20are%20many%20supreme%20writers,an%20echoing%20conversation%20across%20time.
No performative “woke” person writes that glowing, gushing of an essay about Faulkner, Melville, Conrad and Cormac McCarthy without some droll snarky apologetics about “dead white men.” Not only that, but he’s heaping praise on literature that reaches for the universal and metaphysical states of being as opposed to literature that speaks of issues “of the moment.”
Idk, maybe there’s more to this book than meets the blurbs. If anyone were to write about the threat of progressive authoritarianism, it would have to be buried deep in the subtext to ever be published, let alone win a Booker Prize. Sort of like how Spaghetti Western directors made movies about America to criticize the politics of Italy.
Or maybe this is just cope in a literary desert under the tight grip of a woke upper middle class monoculture.
Either way, this book deserves a close read from a critical eye.
My mother loved it and was urging me to read it. I may give it a go and see if my first impressions were misguided.