Hi, everyone. Welcome to Susurrus, the Fountain Ink fortnightly podcast. I’m your host Nandini Krishnan, and with the Booker Prize 2023 set to be announced tomorrow, what could we possibly talk about but the shortlist?

This must be the year of the dystopian fiction, because at least three and arguably four of the six shortlisted novels deal with something of a post-apocalyptic world…or at least an alternate reality which is a dystopia. 

I’ll start with the two that are set in a world that could be ours, more or less today.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray is the first of the books on the shortlist that I read. And I was immediately struck by the humour and the sadness in the writing, the humour in the sadness even. The characters do the things you’re desperately hoping they won’t, you want to call out to them and ask them not to do this…you want to shout, ‘You know what to do, go to Sarah’s house, not to the damn Drain!’ You’ll know what I’m talking about when you read the book. But it is part bildungsroman, part family drama, and told in several voices that so skilfully layer the characters, entirely changing our perceptions of them as they go.

The other one set in our reality is Chetna Maroo’s debut novel Western Lane. The title finds mention in the very first page of the book, and the sentence where it finds mention is: "This is what I hear when I remember the year after our mother died, and our father had us practising at Western Lane two, three, four hours a day." So, you know it’s a story about grief. It’s also a story about squash, about a man trying to raise three adolescent girls, of whom the youngest is the narrator of that sentence. In a larger sense, it’s a novel about how sports–I guess particularly for those of us with sporty leanings–can become a way into redemption from grief.

And now for the four novels that I’ve bunched together as alternate reality, maybe because they tend to have Biblical overtones in setting, theme, even title. Let’s start with This Other Eden by Paul Harding, with another very unsubtle reference–the story is set in the fictitious Apple Island, which is full of sinners in some sense. It’s this sort of oasis of an island off the American coast where fugitives and outcasts have built a society. I guess the central question here is what happens to the misfits? Even as I say this, I’m reminded of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. You have nothing, and you build a system up from scratch. You could model yourself on anything, or you could choose to make something completely new. And yet, what do you choose to do? Except in this case, they have had more than a century to build their system, and the collapse comes from outside. I don’t want to give too much away, but here you have policing from the outside–the long arm of law reaching into the oasis, and what happens after.

I should at this point talk about another novel with some similar themes, which is Prophet Song, but it is my personal favourite for The Booker, along with The Bee Sting and I want to book-end the podcast with these two, and so I’ll come to that right at the end.

There’s If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffrey, which has been described as a novel-in-stories. It begins in 1979, with a migration to America. And then it follows two generations as they negotiate the world into which they are born, the world in which they grow up, the political and cultural climate, and how their encounters with this climate alter their own perceptions of their world. To me…this novel dwells a bit on the obvious…it tends to ram in its themes. But maybe that’s exactly what has got it into the shortlist, and what might get it the Booker, because no one seems to be a fan of subtlety now. So if you’re fond of the idea of “calling out”, maybe this is the book for you.

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein is kind of the opposite of this. Very feminine writing if one can still use that as an adjective without being accused of misogyny. And very subtle in some ways. My favourite thing about it is the atmospheric … well, I guess you could say the atmospheric nature of the threat, how it slowly grows, how one feels unsettled. And the fact that the narrator is a flawed one. Maybe ‘atmospheric horror’ is the term I was looking for. And maybe in some ways, you could compare it with Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, in that there is an outsider entering a community with its own ways which are near impossible to comprehend, and what that outsider begins to observe and feel and experience. I found it hard to read in some ways, but there is my own personal hangup…I find it hard to read books where bad things happen to animals, and boy, do bad things happen. I had to tell myself these animals don’t really exist except in the imagination of the writer–which was also my coping mechanism while reading The Discomfort of Evening.

Last, and arguably my favourite along with The Bee Sting, is Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song. I fell in love with the writing first–the opening page is so lyrical and so perceptive of human emotion, even while describing what is seemingly the simplest thing…a mother answering the doorbell, her youngest on her hip. You could read more about it, but I hesitate to give the slightest thing away, because Paul Lynch so expertly challenges our misconceptions–the things we take for granted…for instance, when you hear mother-of-four, you picture a suburban housewife, right, not a scientist? Here, again, you have Ireland being taken over by a tyrannical regime, and although we know the trope–the rules break down, chaos is rampant, the society is collapsing, and the individual must make hard choices…what stands out is the fact that the writing, the plot, and the characters somehow make this novel unique. It feels like a story that has never been told before.

All right then, we’ll know in about twenty-four hours which one of these will walk away with the grand prize. But we now have six new books to read. So let me sign off by wishing you happy reading. Do send in your thoughts and comments to feedback@fountainink.in, that’s f-e-e-d-b-a-c-k at-the-rate fountainink.in, and if you’re not sure of that spelling, you can look up the listing on the podcast or the username on whichever social media network you found this on. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks. Goodbye, folks