Baroness Emmuska Orczy - "I Will Repay"

T.S. Arthur - "The Wedding Guest"

E. Nesbit - "The Incomplete Amorist"

Upton Sinclair - "Love's Pilgrimage"

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Dream Tales and Prose Poems by Ivan Turgenev

I >> Ivan Turgenev >> Dream Tales and Prose Poems




'I have come!' I cried at last with an effort. My voice sounded muffled and
strange to me.

'I love you,' I heard her whisper.

'You love me!' I repeated in amazement.

'Give yourself up to me, 'was whispered me again in reply.

'Give myself up to you! But you are a phantom; you have no body even.' A
strange animation came upon me. 'What are you--smoke, air, vapour? Give
myself up to you! Answer me first, Who are you? Have you lived upon the
earth? Whence have you come?'

'Give yourself up to me. I will do you no harm. Only say two words: "Take
me."'

I looked at her. 'What is she saying?' I thought. 'What does it all mean?
And how can she take me? Shall I try?'

'Very well,' I said, and unexpectedly loudly, as though some one had given
me a push from behind; 'take me!'

I had hardly uttered these words when the mysterious figure, with a sort of
inward laugh, which set her face quivering for an instant, bent forward,
and stretched out her arms wide apart.... I tried to dart away, but I was
already in her power. She seized me, my body rose a foot from the ground,
and we both floated smoothly and not too swiftly over the wet, still grass.


V

At first I felt giddy, and instinctively I closed my eyes.... A minute
later I opened them again. We were floating as before; but the forest was
now nowhere to be seen. Under us stretched a plain, spotted here and there
with dark patches. With horror I felt that we had risen to a fearful
height.

'I am lost; I am in the power of Satan,' flashed through me like lightning.
Till that instant the idea of a temptation of the evil one, of the
possibility of perdition, had never entered my head. We still whirled on,
and seemed to be mounting higher and higher.

'Where will you take me?' I moaned at last.

'Where you like,' my companion answered. She clung close to me; her face
was almost resting upon my face. But I was scarcely conscious of her touch.

'Let me sink down to the earth, I am giddy at this height.'

'Very well; only shut your eyes and hold your breath.'

I obeyed, and at once felt that I was falling like a stone flung from the
hand ... the air whistled in my ears. When I could think again, we were
floating smoothly once more just above the earth, so that we caught our
feet in the tops of the tall grass.

'Put me on my feet,' I began. 'What pleasure is there in flying? I'm not a
bird.'

'I thought you would like it. We have no other pastime.'

'You? Then what are you?'

There was no answer.

'You don't dare to tell me that?'

The plaintive sound which had awakened me the first night quivered in my
ears. Meanwhile we were still, scarcely perceptibly, moving in the damp
night air.

'Let me go!' I said. My companion moved slowly away, and I found myself
on my feet. She stopped before me and again folded her hands. I grew more
composed and looked into her face; as before it expressed submissive
sadness.

'Where are we?' I asked. I did not recognise the country about me.

'Far from your home, but you can be there in an instant.'

'How can that be done? by trusting myself to you again?'

'I have done you no harm and will do you none. Let us fly till dawn, that
is all. I can bear you away wherever you fancy--to the ends of the earth.
Give yourself up to me! Say only: "Take me!"'

'Well ... take me!'

She again pressed close to me, again my feet left the earth--and we were
flying.


VI

'Which way?' she asked me.

'Straight on, keep straight on.'

'But here is a forest.'

'Lift us over the forest, only slower.'

We darted upwards like a wild snipe flying up into a birch-tree, and
again flew on in a straight line. Instead of grass, we caught glimpses
of tree-tops just under our feet. It was strange to see the forest from
above, its bristling back lighted up by the moon. It looked like some huge
slumbering wild beast, and accompanied us with a vast unceasing murmur,
like some inarticulate roar. In one place we crossed a small glade;
intensely black was the jagged streak of shadow along one side of it. Now
and then there was the plaintive cry of a hare below us; above us the owl
hooted, plaintively too; there was a scent in the air of mushrooms, buds,
and dawn-flowers; the moon fairly flooded everything on all sides with
its cold, hard light; the Pleiades gleamed just over our heads. And now
the forest was left behind; a streak of fog stretched out across the open
country; it was the river. We flew along one of its banks, above the
bushes, still and weighed down with moisture. The river's waters at one
moment glimmered with a flash of blue, at another flowed on in darkness, as
it were, in wrath. Here and there a delicate mist moved strangely over the
water, and the water-lilies' cups shone white in maiden pomp with every
petal open to its full, as though they knew their safety out of reach.
I longed to pick one of them, and behold, I found myself at once on the
river's surface.... The damp air struck me an angry blow in the face, just
as I broke the thick stalk of a great flower. We began to fly across from
bank to bank, like the water-fowl we were continually waking up and chasing
before us. More than once we chanced to swoop down on a family of wild
ducks, settled in a circle on an open spot among the reeds, but they did
not stir; at most one of them would thrust out its neck from under its
wing, stare at us, and anxiously poke its beak away again in its fluffy
feathers, and another faintly quacked, while its body twitched a little all
over. We startled one heron; it flew up out of a willow bush, brandishing
its legs and fluttering its wings with clumsy eagerness: it struck me as
remarkably like a German. There was not the splash of a fish to be heard,
they too were asleep. I began to get used to the sensation of flying,
and even to find a pleasure in it; any one will understand me, who has
experienced flying in dreams. I proceeded to scrutinise with close
attention the strange being, by whose good offices such unlikely adventures
had befallen me.


VII

She was a woman with a small un-Russian face. Greyish-white,
half-transparent, with scarcely marked shades, she reminded one of the
alabaster figures on a vase lighted up within, and again her face seemed
familiar to me.

'Can I speak with you?' I asked.

'Speak.'

'I see a ring on your finger; you have lived then on the earth, you have
been married?'

I waited ... There was no answer.

'What is your name, or, at least, what was it?'

'Call me Alice.'

'Alice! That's an English name! Are you an Englishwoman? Did you know me in
former days?'

'No.'

'Why is it then you have come to me?'

'I love you.'

'And are you content?'

'Yes; we float, we whirl together in the fresh air.'

'Alice!' I said all at once, 'you are perhaps a sinful, condemned soul?'

My companion's head bent towards me. 'I don't understand you,' she
murmured.

'I adjure you in God's name....' I was beginning.

'What are you saying?' she put in in perplexity. 'I don't understand.'

I fancied that the arm that lay like a chilly girdle about my waist softly
trembled....

'Don't be afraid,' said Alice, 'don't be afraid, my dear one!' Her face
turned and moved towards my face.... I felt on my lips a strange sensation,
like the faintest prick of a soft and delicate sting.... Leeches might
prick so in mild and drowsy mood.


VIII

I glanced downwards. We had now risen again to a considerable height. We
were flying over some provincial town I did not know, situated on the
side of a wide slope. Churches rose up high among the dark mass of wooden
roofs and orchards; a long bridge stood out black at the bend of a river;
everything was hushed, buried in slumber. The very crosses and cupolas
seemed to gleam with a silent brilliance; silently stood the tall posts
of the wells beside the round tops of the willows; silently the straight
whitish road darted arrow-like into one end of the town, and silently
it ran out again at the opposite end on to the dark waste of monotonous
fields.

'What town is this?' I asked.

'X....'

'X ... in Y ... province?'

'Yes.'

'I'm a long distance indeed from home!'

'Distance is not for us.'

'Really?' I was fired by a sudden recklessness. 'Then take me to South
America!

'To America I cannot. It's daylight there by now.' 'And we are night-birds.
Well, anywhere, where you can, only far, far away.'

'Shut your eyes and hold your breath,' answered Alice, and we flew along
with the speed of a whirlwind. With a deafening noise the air rushed into
my ears. We stopped, but the noise did not cease. On the contrary, it
changed into a sort of menacing roar, the roll of thunder...

'Now you can open your eyes,' said Alice.


IX

I obeyed ... Good God, where was I?

Overhead, ponderous, smoke-like storm-clouds; they huddled, they moved on
like a herd of furious monsters ... and there below, another monster; a
raging, yes, raging, sea ... The white foam gleamed with spasmodic fury,
and surged up in hillocks upon it, and hurling up shaggy billows, it beat
with a sullen roar against a huge cliff, black as pitch. The howling of the
tempest, the chilling gasp of the storm-rocked abyss, the weighty splash of
the breakers, in which from time to time one fancied something like a wail,
like distant cannon-shots, like a bell ringing--the tearing crunch and
grind of the shingle on the beach, the sudden shriek of an unseen gull, on
the murky horizon the disabled hulk of a ship--on every side death, death
and horror.... Giddiness overcame me, and I shut my eyes again with a
sinking heart....

'What is this? Where are we?'

'On the south coast of the Isle of Wight opposite the Blackgang cliff where
ships are so often wrecked,' said Alice, speaking this time with peculiar
distinctness, and as it seemed to me with a certain malignant pleasure....

'Take me away, away from here ... home! home!' I shrank up, hid my face in
my hands ... I felt that we were moving faster than before; the wind now
was not roaring or moaning, it whistled in my hair, in my clothes ... I
caught my breath ...

'Stand on your feet now,' I heard Alice's voice saying. I tried to master
myself, to regain consciousness ... I felt the earth under the soles of
my feet, and I heard nothing, as though everything had swooned away about
me ... only in my temples the blood throbbed irregularly, and my head was
still giddy with a faint ringing in my ears. I drew myself up and opened my
eyes.


X

We were on the bank of my pond. Straight before me there were glimpses
through the pointed leaves of the willows of its broad surface with threads
of fluffy mist clinging here and there upon it. To the right a field of rye
shone dimly; on the left stood up my orchard trees, tall, rigid, drenched
it seemed in dew ... The breath of the morning was already upon them.
Across the pure grey sky stretched like streaks of smoke, two or three
slanting clouds; they had a yellowish tinge, the first faint glow of dawn
fell on them; one could not say whence it came; the eye could not detect
on the horizon, which was gradually growing lighter, the spot where the
sun was to rise. The stars had disappeared; nothing was astir yet, though
everything was already on the point of awakening in the enchanted stillness
of the morning twilight.

'Morning! see, it is morning!' cried Alice in my ear. 'Farewell till
to-morrow.'

I turned round ... Lightly rising from the earth, she floated by, and
suddenly she raised both hands above her head. The head and hands and
shoulders glowed for an instant with warm, corporeal light; living sparks
gleamed in the dark eyes; a smile of mysterious tenderness stirred the
reddening lips.... A lovely woman had suddenly arisen before me.... But as
though dropping into a swoon, she fell back instantly and melted away like
vapour.

I remained passive.

When I recovered myself and looked round me, it seemed to me that the
corporeal, pale-rosy colour that had flitted over the figure of my phantom
had not yet vanished, and was enfolding me, diffused in the air.... It
was the flush of dawn. All at once I was conscious of extreme fatigue and
turned homewards. As I passed the poultry-yard, I heard the first morning
cackling of the geese (no birds wake earlier than they do); along the roof
at the end of each beam sat a rook, and they were all busily and silently
pluming themselves, standing out in sharp outline against the milky sky.
From time to time they all rose at once, and after a short flight, settled
again in a row, without uttering a caw.... From the wood close by came
twice repeated the drowsy, fresh chuck-chuck of the black-cock, beginning
to fly into the dewy grass, overgrown by brambles.... With a faint tremor
all over me I made my way to my bed, and soon fell into a sound sleep.


XI

The next night, as I was approaching the old oak, Alice moved to meet me,
as if I were an old friend. I was not afraid of her as I had been the day
before, I was almost rejoiced at seeing her; I did not even attempt to
comprehend what was happening to me; I was simply longing to fly farther to
interesting places.

Alice's arm again twined about me, and we took flight again.

'Let us go to Italy,' I whispered in her ear.

'Wherever you wish, my dear one,' she answered solemnly and slowly, and
slowly and solemnly she turned her face towards me. It struck me as less
transparent than on the eve; more womanlike and more imposing; it recalled
to me the being I had had a glimpse of in the early dawn at parting.

'This night is a great night,' Alice went on. 'It comes rarely--when seven
times thirteen ...'

At this point I could not catch a few words.

'To-night we can see what is hidden at other times.'

'Alice!' I implored, 'but who are you, tell me at last?'

Silently she lifted her long white hand. In the dark sky, where her finger
was pointing, a comet flashed, a reddish streak among the tiny stars.

'How am I to understand you?' I began, 'Or, as that comet floats between
the planets and the sun, do you float among men ... or what?'

But Alice's hand was suddenly passed before my eyes.... It was as though a
white mist from the damp valley had fallen on me....

'To Italy! to Italy!' I heard her whisper. 'This night is a great night!'


XII

The mist cleared away from before my eyes, and I saw below me an immense
plain. But already, by the mere breath of the warm soft air upon my cheeks,
I could tell I was not in Russia; and the plain, too, was not like our
Russian plains. It was a vast dark expanse, apparently desert and not
overgrown with grass; here and there over its whole extent gleamed pools of
water, like broken pieces of looking-glass; in the distance could be dimly
descried a noiseless motionless sea. Great stars shone bright in the spaces
between the big beautiful clouds; the murmur of thousands, subdued but
never-ceasing, rose on all sides, and very strange was this shrill but
drowsy chorus, this voice of the darkness and the desert....

'The Pontine marshes,' said Alice. 'Do you hear the frogs? do you smell the
sulphur?'

'The Pontine marshes....' I repeated, and a sense of grandeur and of
desolation came upon me. 'But why have you brought me here, to this gloomy
forsaken place? Let us fly to Rome instead.'

'Rome is near,' answered Alice.... 'Prepare yourself!'

We sank lower, and flew along an ancient Roman road. A bullock slowly
lifted from the slimy mud its shaggy monstrous head, with short tufts of
bristles between its crooked backward-bent horns. It turned the whites of
its dull malignant eyes askance, and sniffed a heavy snorting breath into
its wet nostrils, as though scenting us.

'Rome, Rome is near...' whispered Alice. 'Look, look in front....'

I raised my eyes.

What was the blur of black on the edge of the night sky? Were these the
lofty arches of an immense bridge? What river did it span? Why was it
broken down in parts? No, it was not a bridge, it was an ancient aqueduct.
All around was the holy ground of the Campagna, and there, in the distance,
the Albanian hills, and their peaks and the grey ridge of the old aqueduct
gleamed dimly in the beams of the rising moon....

We suddenly darted upwards, and floated in the air before a deserted ruin.
No one could have said what it had been: sepulchre, palace, or castle....
Dark ivy encircled it all over in its deadly clasp, and below gaped yawning
a half-ruined vault. A heavy underground smell rose in my face from this
heap of tiny closely-fitted stones, whence the granite facing of the wall
had long crumbled away.

'Here,' Alice pronounced, and she raised her hand: 'Here! call aloud three
times running the name of the mighty Roman!'

'What will happen?'

'You will see.'

I wondered. '_Divus Caius Julius Caesar!_' I cried suddenly; '_Divus Caius
Julius Caesar!_' I repeated deliberately; '_Caesar!_'


XIII

The last echoes of my voice had hardly died away, when I heard....

It is difficult to say what I did hear. At first there reached me a
confused din the ear could scarcely catch, the endlessly-repeated clamour
of the blare of trumpets, and the clapping of hands. It seemed that
somewhere, immensely far away, at some fathomless depth, a multitude
innumerable was suddenly astir, and was rising up, rising up in agitation,
calling to one another, faintly, as if muffled in sleep, the suffocating
sleep of ages. Then the air began moving in dark currents over the ruin....
Shades began flitting before me, myriads of shades, millions of outlines,
the rounded curves of helmets, the long straight lines of lances; the
moonbeams were broken into momentary gleams of blue upon these helmets and
lances, and all this army, this multitude, came closer and closer, and
grew, in more and more rapid movement.... An indescribable force, a force
fit to set the whole world moving, could be felt in it; but not one figure
stood out clearly.... And suddenly I fancied a sort of tremor ran all
round, as if it were the rush and rolling apart of some huge waves....
'_Caesar, Caesar venit!_' sounded voices, like the leaves of a forest when
a storm has suddenly broken upon it ... a muffled shout thundered through
the multitude, and a pale stern head, in a wreath of laurel, with downcast
eyelids, the head of the emperor, began slowly to rise out of the ruin....

There is no word in the tongue of man to express the horror which clutched
at my heart.... I felt that were that head to raise its eyes, to part its
lips, I must perish on the spot! 'Alice!' I moaned, 'I won't, I can't, I
don't want Rome, coarse, terrible Rome.... Away, away from here!'

'Coward!' she whispered, and away we flew. I just had time to hear behind
me the iron voice of the legions, like a peal of thunder ... then all was
darkness.


XIV

'Look round,' Alice said to me, 'and don't fear.'

I obeyed--and, I remember, my first impression was so sweet that I could
only sigh. A sort of smoky-grey, silvery-soft, half-light, half-mist,
enveloped me on all sides. At first I made out nothing: I was dazzled by
this azure brilliance; but little by little began to emerge the outlines
of beautiful mountains and forests; a lake lay at my feet, with stars
quivering in its depths, and the musical plash of waves. The fragrance of
orange flowers met me with a rush, and with it--and also as it were with a
rush--came floating the pure powerful notes of a woman's young voice. This
fragrance, this music, fairly drew me downwards, and I began to sink ...
to sink down towards a magnificent marble palace, which stood, invitingly
white, in the midst of a wood of cypress. The music flowed out from its
wide open windows, the waves of the lake, flecked with the pollen of
flowers, splashed upon its walls, and just opposite, all clothed in the
dark green of orange flowers and laurels, enveloped in shining mist, and
studded with statues, slender columns, and the porticoes of temples, a
lofty round island rose out of the water....

'Isola Bella!' said Alice.... 'Lago Maggiore....'

I murmured only 'Ah!' and continued to drop. The woman's voice sounded
louder and clearer in the palace; I was irresistibly drawn towards it.... I
wanted to look at the face of the singer, who, in such music, gave voice to
such a night. We stood still before the window.

In the centre of a room, furnished in the style of Pompeii, and more like
an ancient temple than a modern drawing-room, surrounded by Greek statues,
Etruscan vases, rare plants, and precious stuffs, lighted up by the soft
radiance of two lamps enclosed in crystal globes, a young woman was sitting
at the piano. Her head slightly bowed and her eyes half-closed, she sang an
Italian melody; she sang and smiled, and at the same time her face wore an
expression of gravity, almost of sternness ... a token of perfect rapture!
She smiled ... and Praxiteles' Faun, indolent, youthful as she, effeminate,
and voluptuous, seemed to smile back at her from a corner, under the
branches of an oleander, across the delicate smoke that curled upwards
from a bronze censer on an antique tripod. The beautiful singer was alone.
Spell-bound by the music, her beauty, the splendour and sweet fragrance of
the night, moved to the heart by the picture of this youthful, serene, and
untroubled happiness, I utterly forgot my companion, I forgot the strange
way in which I had become a witness of this life, so remote, so completely
apart from me, and I was on the point of tapping at the window, of
speaking....

I was set trembling all over by a violent shock--just as though I had
touched a galvanic battery. I looked round.... The face of Alice was--for
all its transparency--dark and menacing; there was a dull glow of anger in
her eyes, which were suddenly wide and round....

'Away!' she murmured wrathfully, and again whirling and darkness and
giddiness.... Only this time not the shout of legions, but the voice of the
singer, breaking on a high note, lingered in my ears....

We stopped. The high note, the same note was still ringing and did not
cease to ring in my ears, though I was breathing quite a different air, a
different scent ... a breeze was blowing upon me, fresh and invigorating,
as though from a great river, and there was a smell of hay, smoke and hemp.
The long-drawn-out note was followed by a second, and a third, but with an
expression so unmistakable, a trill so familiar, so peculiarly our own,
that I said to myself at once: 'That's a Russian singing a Russian song!'
and at that very instant everything grew clear about me.


XV

We found ourselves on a flat riverside plain. To the left, newly-mown
meadows, with rows of huge hayricks, stretched endlessly till they were
lost in the distance; to the right extended the smooth surface of a vast
mighty river, till it too was lost in the distance. Not far from the bank,
big dark barges slowly rocked at anchor, slightly tilting their slender
masts, like pointing fingers. From one of these barges came floating up to
me the sounds of a liquid voice, and a fire was burning in it, throwing a
long red light that danced and quivered on the water. Here and there, both
on the river and in the fields, other lights were glimmering, whether close
at hand or far away, the eye could not distinguish; they shrank together,
then suddenly lengthened out into great blurs of light; grasshoppers
innumerable kept up an unceasing churr, persistent as the frogs of the
Pontine marshes; and across the cloudless, but dark lowering sky floated
from time to time the cries of unseen birds.

'Are we in Russia?' I asked of Alice.

'It is the Volga,' she answered.

We flew along the river-bank. 'Why did you tear me away from there, from
that lovely country?' I began. 'Were you envious, or was it jealousy in
you?'

The lips of Alice faintly stirred, and again there was a menacing light in
her eyes.... But her whole face grew stony again at once.

'I want to go home,' I said.

'Wait a little, wait a little,' answered Alice. 'To-night is a great night.
It will not soon return. You may be a spectator.... Wait a little.'

And we suddenly flew across the Volga in a slanting direction, keeping
close to the water's surface, with the low impetuous flight of swallows
before a storm. The broad waves murmured heavily below us, the sharp river
breeze beat upon us with its strong cold wing ... the high right bank began
soon to rise up before us in the half-darkness. Steep mountains appeared
with great ravines between. We came near to them.

'Shout: "Lads, to the barges!"' Alice whispered to me. I remembered the
terror I had suffered at the apparition of the Roman phantoms. I felt weary
and strangely heavy, as though my heart were ebbing away within me. I
wished not to utter the fatal words; I knew beforehand that in response to
them there would appear, as in the wolves' valley of the Freischütz, some
monstrous thing; but my lips parted against my will, and in a weak forced
voice I shouted, also against my will: 'Lads, to the barges!'


XVI

At first all was silence, even as it was at the Roman ruins, but suddenly
I heard close to my very ear a coarse bargeman's laugh, and with a moan
something dropped into the water and a gurgling sound followed.... I looked
round: no one was anywhere to be seen, but from the bank the echo came
bounding back, and at once from all sides rose a deafening din. There was a
medley of everything in this chaos of sound: shouting and whining, furious
abuse and laughter, laughter above everything; the plash of oars and the
cleaving of hatchets, a crash as of the smashing of doors and chests, the
grating of rigging and wheels, and the neighing of horses, and the clang
of the alarm bell and the clink of chains, the roar and crackle of fire,
drunken songs and quick, gnashing chatter, weeping inconsolable, plaintive
despairing prayers, and shouts of command, the dying gasp and the reckless
whistle, the guffaw and the thud of the dance.... 'Kill them! Hang them!
Drown them! rip them up! bravo! bravo! don't spare them!' could be heard
distinctly; I could even hear the hurried breathing of men panting. And
meanwhile all around, as far as the eye could reach, nothing could be seen,
nothing was changed; the river rolled by mysteriously, almost sullenly, the
very bank seemed more deserted and desolate--and that was all.

Extract: The Whales by Evie Wyld

Christos Tsiolkas and David Mitchell, both much-tipped when they appeared on the award longlist, have been overlooked in the six finalists

It headed the most controversial Man Booker prize longlist in years, but Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap has failed to make the final cut for the literary award, as has David Mitchell's much-tipped fifth novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

Judges overlooked Australian novelist Tsiolkas's tale of the consequences when a child is slapped at a suburban barbecue – which is either "unbelievably misogynistic" or "riveting from beginning to end", depending on who's asked – and Mitchell, twice shortlisted for the prize in the past, to select a shortlist which ranges from two-time former winner Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America to Emma Donoghue. The Irish writer has also stirred up debate with her Josel Fritzl-inspired Room, the story of a boy and his mother imprisoned in a tiny room for years.

Orange prize winner Andrea Levy's The Long Song, about the last years of slavery in Jamaica; Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, a cerebral comedy about grief and Anglo-Jewishness; experimental novelist Tom McCarthy's C, which tells the story of Serge Carrefax, a first world war radio operator who escapes from a German prison camp; and South African writer Damon Galgut's tale of a young man travelling through Greece, India and Africa, In a Strange Room, complete the six-strong shortlist for the £50,000 prize, announced this morning.

"It's been a great privilege and an exciting challenge for us to reduce our longlist of 13 to this shortlist of six outstandingly good novels," said chair of judges Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate. "In doing so, we feel sure we've chosen books which demonstrate a rich variety of styles and themes – while in every case providing deep individual pleasures."

The panel of judges had previously read 138 books to select the 13 titles for their longlist, with Martin Amis's new novel The Pregnant Widow and Ian McEwan's venture into comic fiction Solar both overlooked and Carey the only previous Booker winner on the longlist.

His inclusion on the shortlist today for Parrot and Olivier in America, a reimagining of Democracy in America author Alexis de Tocqueville's visit to the New World, gives him the chance of becoming the first ever writer to win the Booker three times, having previously taken it in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and 2001 for True History of the Kelly Gang.

"The omission of both David Mitchell and Christos Tsiolkas from the shortlist is a real shock. While both writers might rightly feel aggrieved at being overlooked, I imagine it took some wrangling amongst the judges to reduce one of the best longlists in years to six," said Jonathan Ruppin at independent book chain Foyles, who, while praising all six books for their "lightness of touch which means the reader doesn't get bogged down in something worthy or dull", predicted that Room was the most likely title to go on to win the award.

Waterstone's tipped C to take the prize, with fiction buying manager Simon Burke calling it "a challenging yet dazzling novel". "The news that David Mitchell has not made the shortlist will cause great wailing and gnashing of teeth across the bookworld, but perhaps is a useful reminder of the independence and unpredictability of the Booker," he said. "But this is still a hugely varied and exciting list, worthy of the Booker brand. Carey and Levy have to be strong contenders, but our money is on Tom McCarthy. The more people that read [C] the better."

The bookies agreed, with William Hill immediately installing McCarthy as 2/1 favourite to win the prize. "There has been a considerable media buzz around all of the books on the shortlist, and literary punters have staked more money in total on Tom McCarthy to win than any of the other authors, so he is a worthy favourite," said spokesman Graham Sharpe. Donoghue and Galgut came in second at the bookmaker, both at 3/1, with one customer so sure that In A Strange Room would win that they placed £400 on Galgut at 7/1, the largest single bet on the prize "for a few years", said Sharpe.

Carey came in fourth, at 5/1, with Levy at 7/1 and Jacobson the 8/1 outside to take the prize.

The opinion-splitting novels picked for this year's longlist have helped make it the most popular since 2001, with Tsiolkas's novel selling the most copies, followed by Donoghue's. The winner, who will join a roster of former winners including Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle and JM Coetzee, will be announced on 12 October. Last year's winner Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel is the fastest-selling Booker winner ever, with sales of around half-a-million copies to date.

The Man Booker shortlist in full:

Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America

Emma Donoghue's Room

Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room

Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question

Andrea Levy's The Long Song

Tom McCarthy's C

The books that send me back to school

For Ralph Miliband governments could never tame capitalism. New Labour thought otherwise – and then came the financial crisis. But what will David or Ed do if they gain the leadership? By John Gray

Viewed from one angle Ralph Miliband was a theorist of revolution who failed to notice the radical transformations going on around him. A lifelong Marxist, he never doubted that the future would be shaped by the struggle against capitalism. In fact it was capitalism that proved to be the revolutionary force in the late 20th century, consigning socialism to the memory hole. By the time Miliband died in May 1994, the Soviet system had been replaced by a type of resource-based authoritarian capitalism, while China's Communist party was overseeing the development of an unbridled market of a kind that Milton Friedman could only dream about.

In Britain in the 1980s Miliband managed to convince himself that Labour, which he had always bitterly attacked, might, under the influence of Tony Benn, turn into a genuinely socialist party. In fact Labour split, which more than any other single factor enabled the continuing dominance of Thatcher. Probably only the battles fought by Neil Kinnock prevented Labour disintegrating altogether. When John Smith became leader, the party began the "prawn cocktail offensive", a rapprochement with the financial sector pursued through private lunches with leading City figures, which formed the prelude to New Labour. Only weeks after Smith died (in the same month as Miliband) the party would start burying any trace of its socialist past.

When he gave the Bennite wing his intellectual support, Miliband was colluding in the politics of make-believe. Yet in one vital respect this intractably oppositional Jewish refugee from nazism had a firmer grip on reality than the social democrats who eventually prevailed in Labour's internecine conflicts, and when he ridiculed Anthony Crosland's vision of a domesticated and pacified capitalism, he left the party with a dilemma it has not been able to resolve. Like Marx, Miliband understood that states and governments are never autonomous actors; their options are shaped, and often foreclosed, by the distribution of power and resources. This was the central theme of Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society (1969), a penetrating assault on social-democratic thinking in which he developed and extended the argument against revisionism of his earlier Parliamentary Socialism: A Study of the Politics of Labour (1961).

In The Future of Socialism (1956), Crosland had argued that Labour must distinguish between means and ends (a theme pursued later by Blair). Capitalism had changed fundamentally, and rather than opposing it Labour should use the market to advance socialist values. Properly managed to ensure steady economic growth, free markets could be used to promote an egalitarian society in which everyone could live the good life. Against this rosy vision, Miliband urged – rightly, I've always thought – that the world had not changed as much as Crosland and his fellow-revisionists imagined. Capitalism remained an unruly beast, and the idea that governments had learnt how to tame it was just an illusion.

The oil shocks of the 70s were an early warning of the fragility of the postwar order. The shocks were not fatal, and capitalism survived the crisis (as it will survive the present crisis, in one form or another). But it was already becoming apparent that while governments could withstand upheavals in the global economy, the state was not the directing agency social democrats imagined it to be. As Miliband saw it, the state was a servant of these forces rather than their potential master. Of course he exaggerated. The interests of capitalists are often at odds, and in any case politics is driven by far more than class conflict. Even so, Miliband's view that the state is constrained, reactive and hemmed in by market forces has become increasingly plausible with the passage of time. But if this is so, what role can there be for a party that aims to make capitalism a force for the collective good? Can a future Labour government succeed where past governments have failed and harness capitalism to a vision of social improvement? Or should Labour accept that it is capitalism itself that must be changed?

These are precisely the questions that face Miliband's sons as they contend for the Labour leadership. The clash between the two has an undeniable drama, and it is not just a matter of sibling rivalry. It occurs at a time when the world economy is in a crisis the founders of New Labour believed to be impossible. Lacking the Marxian insight that capitalism is inherently volatile and constantly mutating, they never doubted that the deregulated finance-capitalism that developed in the US towards the end of the past century would last. The left had to overcome its suspicion of the free market, and accept that only by exploiting its productivity could government improve society: social democracy and neo-liberal economics were actually complementary.

Just like Crosland, though without his Keynesian grasp of the dangers of recurring boom and bust, New Labour believed capitalism had been tamed. But as Ralph Miliband suspected and events have confirmed, the anarchic energy of the free market is not so easily controlled. The fall of communism was celebrated as a triumph of capitalism, which now became practically world-wide; but the effect was to make capitalism more unstable, as disturbances in one part of the system were rapidly transmitted to all the rest. The fragmented world of the cold war was more resilient to shocks, and also more hospitable to social democracy, than the world that ensued. Governments found that few of the levers they used to control the economy worked as they had before. New Labour did not want to control the market. A feature of the understanding it reached with the City was that financial markets would continue to be deregulated. In part this was accepted as the price for power, but it also reflected New Labour's Fukuyama-like faith that market capitalism was the final stage of economic development; the future lay with the self-regulating market.

As could be foreseen, things turned out rather differently. With regulatory controls relaxed or scrapped the financial institutions whose support Labour had wooed became predatory, raking in vast profits from strategies whose risks they did not understand. Inevitably this hubris led to their downfall, and the financial system imploded. The market millennium lasted hardly more than a decade, leaving a legacy of unsustainable debt.

The happy conjunction of neo-liberal economics with social democracy on which New Labour was founded is now history. This is the truth evaded in Tony Blair's autohagiography. If New Labour is obsolete it is not because of the personal defects of Gordon Brown, Blair's delusional moral certainty and incessant war-mongering or even the dysfunctional relationship between the two leaders. It is because American finance-capitalism, the model for virtually everything that New Labour ever did, has blown itself up.

The problem with the debate between the Milibands is not that it risks turning into a public family feud. It is that neither of the two contenders has come to terms with the bankruptcy of the New Labour project in which each of them was involved. Neither has acknowledged, or perhaps fully understood, the implications of the financial crisis for a future Labour government. It can only mean an erosion of the very foundations of Britain's social democratic inheritance. Yet in different ways, each of the Miliband brothers still sees government as capable of controlling market forces – the illusion their father presciently exposed.

In his Keir Hardie lecture in July, David Miliband spoke eloquently of moving away from state paternalism and reviving Labour traditions of mutualism. The state can no longer be the centre of knowledge and initiative – its function is rather that of empowering society. Top-down Fabian control must be replaced by open democratic relationships. No doubt these are desirable goals, if very much in the spirit of the prevailing conventional wisdom and perhaps not so different from Cameron's fluffy "big society". The larger difficulty is that Miliband is harking back to Crosland (whom he recently cited as his political hero) at a time when Crosland's thinking is no longer applicable.

Crosland's vision was based above all on economic growth – steady, continuing and robust. Following Keynes, he believed that wise economic management could create a society of abundance. But the effect of the financial crisis has been to curtail growth, at least in developed economies. Even if the economy recovers, governments will not have the largesse he assumed would be available. Bailing out the banks has passed the burden of debt on to the state, and no British government can expect to avoid large-scale cut-backs in borrowing and spending. Instead of the market generating wealth that could be used by governments for collective purposes, the resources of government have been pre-empted for the repayment of debts incurred by the market's excesses. Against this background, the post-paternalist state is likely to mean higher unemployment and cash-starved public services.

Unlike his brother, Ed Miliband has chosen to define his candidacy explicitly in terms of New Labour's failings and argues forcefully for the need to remodel capitalism. "Britain's big question of the next decade," he has written, "is whether we head towards an increasingly US-style capitalism – more unequal, more brutish, more unjust – or whether we can build a different model, a capitalism that works for people and not the other way around". Once again these are noble aspirations but far removed from reality. Globalisation is an idea that has been greatly over-hyped, yet governments' freedom of action has without question been reduced as capital has become more mobile. Even the US may soon find it difficult to fund its ballooning federal debt. But if American capitalism is entering a crisis zone, Britain will not have the luxury of forging a new economic model; it will have trouble just staying afloat. Ralph Miliband's pessimistic assessment of the future of social democracy could well be vindicated.

If one of the Miliband brothers wins the Labour leadership and becomes prime minister he will confront in an acute form the constraints on the power of the state his father astutely identified. Rather than controlling or reshaping capitalism, a Miliband government would find itself struggling to preserve Britain's social democratic inheritance in the face of capitalism's renewed disorder. Ralph Miliband seems never to have lost the Marxist faith that history would eventually open the way to a truly socialist society. He would surely have appreciated the curious dialectic through which it has fallen to his sons to defend the social democracy he so fiercely attacked.

Booktrust teenage prize shortlist spans time, space and genre

It's the start of another school year and I'm dreaming of new pencil cases, satchels and the books I read in class. But what are the books you remember from your own school days?

Fourteen years after I finished school, there's still something about September which feels like the start of the year, and I'm nostalgic this morning for new pencils and felt tips, satchels and packed lunches. As the hope of the nation barrels back into classrooms, I'm also thinking back to the books I read in school.

I was away last weekend and talking about how we all read William Golding's Lord of the Flies (and no, the weekend wasn't that bad, it's just that one of my friends is currently making her way through his complete works, to settle a bet). I was 14, and I think there couldn't have been a more perfect book to pick for kids of that age – if you're not going to be hooked by Ralph and Piggy and Simon and Jack, and "kill the pig, cut his throat, spill his blood", then you're not going to be hooked by anything. This was the edition we had – just looking at it casts me back to yellow highlighters and doodling and the horrors of reading aloud.

Anyway, the shocking gloriousness of Lord of the Flies made me hungry for more Golding. Our school library was pretty small, but it did, impressively, have a copy of Pincher Martin. I am quite sure I failed to get any allegorical, existential meaning from the book, but it successfully terrified me, burning an image of Martin clinging to his lonely rock into my brain. In typically disorganised fashion, I promptly lost the book for about a month and was subsequently banned from the school library for giving it back so late – obviously as a sop to all those Golding fans clamouring for more of his work.

Golding and my thieving tendencies aside, Jane Eyre bored me, King Lear enthralled me, and I described Romeo and Juliet in my mock GSCE as a novel – so something clearly went wrong there (thankfully I'd got the right end of the stick by the time the real thing came around). But the other book which really stands out in my memory from schooldays is Wuthering Heights. I was on to A-levels by then, but for some reason we were still going through the purgatory of reading (droning) aloud in class – possibly one of the best ways to make a group of teenagers lose interest in a novel. I was lazy, more interested in messing around than working, but I was so caught up in the melodramas of Cathy and Heathcliff ("Do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you! Oh God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!") that I'd be pages ahead when it came to my turn to read and would get in trouble for not concentrating. And I distinctly remember spending a break time racing to the end.

The rest of it, though, the years of English classes and essays, revising and exams, has largely faded into oblivion, which is rather worrying. But how about you? Indulge my nostalgia and tell me what you remember of your own literary school days.