IMPAC
Flanagan has scooped the Man Booker for his epic story of Australian POWs enslaved by the Japanese to build the Burma railway during the Second World War. Tasmanian Flanagan’s own father survived the starvation, brutality and disease of “the Line”. Flanagan tells the story through the experiences of a survivor, Dorrigo Evans, a surgeon whose wartime leadership has made him a celebrity in civilian life. From the first sentence, there is a palpable sense of a writer aiming for a greatness that befits his subject. Ultimately, however, Flanagan falls short. And while The Narrow Road must be a favourite, an IMPAC-Booker double would be rather more acclaim than the book deserves.
TransAtlantic finds McCann on familiar ground — reaching back into history for patterns and connections, this time across that well-worn route between Ireland and America. McCann begins with a bravura account of Alcock and Brown’s flight, before imagining Frederick Douglass’s visit to Dublin and Cork, and George Mitchell’s experiences during the Good Friday Agreement negotiations. The effect is similar to McCann’s last work, Let the Great World Spin, but the result is superior. However, the book is overly schematic. The best parts follow the lives of Lily Duggan, an Irish immigrant to the US, and three of her female descendants; but, sometimes, the public history occludes the private, while McCann’s efforts to link the generations can be needlessly hokey, a letter unopened for generations chief among them.
Adichie tells the story of Ifemelu, who leaves Nigeria for the US, where she becomes a Princeton fellow, and a blogger on that abiding American subject: race. Her status as an American-African, rather than an African-American, is complex, and Adichie is alive to the many nuances around race, status and language in her adopted society. It makes for sharp satire. Readers of Zadie Smith will find much to recognise, but the Nigerian perspective keeps Americanah fresh.
In May, 2003, 45 people were killed in a series of suicide bombings in Casablanca. As such cretinous acts proliferate across the news headlines, Binebine’s imagining of what inspired the perpetrators makes for a timely book. Horses of God is excellent on context and atmosphere. The background of the young would-be bombers’ lives is rich in detail — the filth of Sidi Moumen, their slum; its occasional savagery; its homoerotic friendships; the boys’ dreams of Europe and obsession with soccer. But when it comes to the process of “radicalisation”, Binebine’s account is all-too-familiar: the charismatic imam, the propaganda, the discipline that incipiently leads to ascetic murderousness. It’s nothing we haven’t seen or read in media exposes, nor in survivors’ accounts.
“Everything in this book is invented, but almost everything happened.” So Bernardo Kucinski prepares the reader for the Kafkaesque world that is Brazil under its military dictatorship. Kucinski mixes memoir and fiction in telling the story of his own father, driven by grief and rage after his daughter, a chemistry lecturer, has joined the ranks of ‘the disappeared’, those thousands of men and women murdered by military juntas in several South American countries. We follow K, as he encounters informers and extortionists, who offer hope and threats, by turns, and we meet a cast of characters compromised by dictatorship. Kucinski lifts the lid on a past with which Brazil is only now coming to terms. A journalist by trade, Kucinski has written a journalist’s book — forensic and thorough, if lacking in dramatic punch.
Andrei Makine’s short, memorable work is a deeply personal, exile’s reflection on the struggle to establish private space in a totalitarian society. The narrator is, like Makine, an orphan, and, like him, looks back to the Soviet era from France, where he lives after communism’s collapse. The contrast of grinding poverty and militaristic pomp is established early, and is an abiding backdrop as Makine’s orphan searches for freedom through love. The “shining city” of true socialism, always just another five-year plan away, is not just a folly of a regime approaching senile absurdity. It is the folly of all utopian dreams. But, says Makine, life is redeemed by fleeting moments of beauty and love. Only those cannot be destroyed.
Crace’s habit of imagining unwritten history is used superbly in Harvest. The story unfolds within a small, close community of subsistence tenant farmers. They toil for their grain on their master’s land, knowing they are one bad harvest away from hunger. It is an ancient cycle, but it is about to be broken by the arrival of several strangers: three of them a family pushed off the land by enclosure, and replaced by sheep (more profitable). A fourth is a new master, keen to have his own four-legged flocks. What ensues is a bloody parable of suspicion and revenge. The comparisons of Crace to William Golding are as apt and deserved as ever.
McDermott mines ordinary lives for the singularities that dignify them, that make any subject worthy of art. In Someone, that subject is Marie Commerford, the daughter of Irish immigrants whose life in Brooklyn we follow from a pre-war childhood to later years.
Along the way, there is heartbreak, the deterioration of her brother’s mental health, occasions for Marie to reassess and relive her past.
This is novel as portraiture, and it is the strokes of McDermott’s pen — poetic, observant, imaginative — that make it sing.
The Australian-born Hannah Kent has eschewed the edict often directed towards first-time novelists: ‘Write what you know’. Instead, she’s delved into the archives around the case of Agnes Magnusdottir, who, in 1830, was the last person executed in Iceland.
Agnes’s last days were spent on an isolated farm. Here, Kent allows her to speak, an act of imaginative empathy that elevates the subject above the “inhumane witch” we read about among the letters and documents used in the book.
The Iraq war veteran is an established character in contemporary US film, drama and fiction. Robinson’s returning Marine, Conrad, has familiar complaints: he finds himself a stranger to his own family; he cannot settle in a present that has been changed forever by his recent past.
But nothing here is in broad strokes: Robinson is excellent at teasing out the bafflement and alienation Conrad feels, his panic attacks, his simmering rage, his suicidal urges.
Sparta is the name of Conrad’s base, but it is also Robinson’s indictment of the US, which, like Sparta, makes its boys into warriors, but leaves it to the warriors to “restore themselves as men”.
These shortlisted books are in no particular order. The winner of the 2015 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, who will receive literature’s richest prize of €100,000, will be announced on June 17
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