The Best of the Non-Bookers

oppose, we become champions of the underdog, bravely fighting an obtuse establishment.
So when the organisers of the Booker prize announce a contest for the Best of the Bookers — the best novel to win the Booker prize in the last 40 years — what can a committed bookworm like me do but take issue with their nominees? Here, therefore, is my alternate shortlist: five classic novels that never won the Booker Prize, but should have.

THE BLACK PRINCE
By Iris Murdoch
Shortlisted: 1973)
Of all the literary enterprises of the last century, few compare in ambition to Iris Murdoch’s engagement with Shakespeare. In novel after dazzling novel, Murdoch provides variations on Shakespeare’s work, variations that amplify the Bard’s themes even as they subvert them. The finest of these novels, and arguably Murdoch’s most experimental work, is The Black Prince. Ingeniously deploying Shakespearian imagery, Murdoch uses the device of an unreliable narrator — in the form of unsuccessful author Bradley Pearson — to render Hamlet as a scathingly funny dark comedy. Turning Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy into an Nabokovian tale of comic misadventure would be an accomplishment in itself, but doing so while remaining faithful to the themes of Shakespeare’s play — sexual jealousy, repression, indecision and intellectual angst — is a feat nonpareil.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE
By Margaret Atwood
(Shortlisted: 1986)
Combining speculative fiction with social critique, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a masterpiece of dystopian writing — a book that bears comparison with such classics as Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. Set in the Republic of Gilead — where fundamentalist Christian forces have established a totalitarian state under the guise of fighting terrorism — The Handmaid’s Tale tells the story of Offred, a woman reduced to sexual slavery by the new system. Hailed as a feminist classic for its critique of patriarchy, The Handmaid’s Tale is also an exploration of the fragility of freedom, and of the dehumanising effects of exploitation. It is, moreover, a moving portrait of a woman oppressed but resistant, that owes much of its power to Atwood’s ability to enter and inhabit the thoughts and actions of her characters, so as to make them seem entirely authentic.

AMONG WOMEN
John McGahern
Shortlisted: 1990)
If The Handmaid’s Tale is a novel about patriarchal tyranny, John McGahern’s Among Women is a book about emasculation — about the way frustration and failure can turn a man against everything and everyone he loves. As small-time farmer Michael Moran struggles to come to terms with his memories of the past, his worries about the future and the difficulty of maintaining both his connection with and control over his family, McGahern renders the frenzy of his desperation in prose that is at once aching and lucid. The characters in Among Women are wounded and angry, but they dance out their rage in an atmosphere of gentle sadness, so that watching them from a distance we feel only sympathy, see only their pain. All in all, Among Women is a beautiful novel about memory, family, and the terrors of growing old.

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
By Jon McGregor
(Longlisted: 2002)
Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things never made it past the Booker prize longlist when it came out in 2001. But it should have. In fact, it should have won. Written in prose that practically sings off the page, and deftly switching from character to character, McGregor’s debut novel is a sparkling camera obscura of a book, showing us the events on a single street in a single day from a startling array of perspectives, then bringing these fragments together into a magical whole. Yet there is more to this book than technical brilliance and an exquisite ear for language — in describing the street’s inhabitants, Jon McGregor delivers portraits of people so unforgettable that by the time you close the book you know them as well as you know your own neighbours. And probably like them better.

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
By J.M. Coetzee
(Never shortlisted)
My all time favorite non-Booker is a novel that wasn’t even shortlisted for the prize the year it came out, but remains, in my opinion, the finest work of one of our greatest novelists, who went on to receive the Nobel prize for literature.
With its unsettling mix of brutality and mythic grandeur, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians has all the starkness and poetry of a play by Sophocles, combined with just a hint of Kafkaesque disquiet. It is tragedy at its most distilled, a bleached bone of a book that thrills with its austere lyricism. Coetzee has won the Booker twice — for Life and Times of Michael K. and Disgrace — and is on the Best of the Booker shortlist for the latter novel, but for me, Waiting for the Barbarians will always be his best work.