When I agreed to sit on the panel for the Goldsmiths prize last year, I hadn’t really considered what an odd thing it is to judge a literary prize. With its remit “to reward fiction that breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form”, a cause dear to my heart, I was just happy to agree. On Thursday, we announced the shortlist. Beatlebone by Kevin Barry is a storm of a novel – unsettling and mesmerising. It’s formally interesting also, with the novelist choosing to step on and off the page. Calling Richard Beard’s Acts of the Assassins an update of the martyrdom of the apostles does it no justice. Although playing a game of genre – it’s a whodunit, featuring a jaded, compromised detective – it is a book about Faith and the layers of Time on which we walk. Max Porter’s exquisite Grief Is the Thing With Feathers works both as a poem and an essay on the afterlife of bereavement and by the end movingly resolves its characters’ situation, and its form into a novel. Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island is a hard diamond – highly allusive and infuriatingly intangible, it is at once rare, of tremendous clarity and very much look-but-don’t-touch. Any attempt to pin Magnus Mills’s strangely wonderful allegorical tale The Field of the Cloth of Gold to a single time or place would be a mistake. Finally, the plot of Lurid and Cute by Adam Thirlwell, a novel full of unnerving linguistic juxtapositions, plays with readers’ expectations while the internal dysfunction of the narrator makes disturbing, self-justifying sense of it all.
There was some discussion of the low number of eligible entries by women but, given the prize’s previously unblemished record, hopefully this year will prove a blip. I look forward to our next judges’ meeting, to pick the winner.
