When the Man Booker prize shortlist was announced earlier this month, all I could think about was this time last year, when I was judging the Folio prize. Specifically, all I could think about was the novels I’d had to let go. I don’t mean those that I tried, and failed, to get on our shortlist; I mean those that I knew would never make it even to the long list, but to which I felt strongly attached nevertheless. It was such an unexpectedly melancholy business.
Let me press a couple of these on you. The first is Life Drawing by the American writer Robin Black which I read in a single spellbound sitting. Augusta and Owen are a long-term couple who’ve moved to the country. Ostensibly, their new isolation will enable Gus to paint and Owen to write. In reality, however, they’re escaping an affair Owen had with one of Gus’s students. At first, all is calm, though too much remains unsaid. But then into the empty house next door moves Alison, whose subtly invasive presence will soon throw up the past again. Though it goes a little awry towards the end, I can’t think that I’ve read a more intense account of the unspoken intimacy that is as necessary to a long-established couple as the very air they breathe.
The other novel is Euphoria by Lily King, a bestseller in America but little noticed here. It’s 1933 and Nell Stone, a Margaret Mead-ish character, is studying a tribe deep inside New Guinea with her macho anthropologist husband, Fen, and a more reticent British colleague, Andrew (this pair are inspired by two of Mead’s husbands, Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson). Another triangle, then, but in a much more extraordinary setting. Intensely dramatic and persuasive, Euphoria should come with a money-back guarantee – and a paper fan for those many moments when the jungle humidity is just too much.
