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.