Is this one of the emptiest motivational statements ever invented? I mean it must come close right? No-one sits down to write a prize winning work – it’s enough pressure just filling out a page with a few hundred words. The worry over the next bit of dialogue, the next chapter, the next paragraph, this character background, that description. The whole thing coming together in some sort of cohesive, sensible, whole. Every word having to be dragged forth from the depths of somewhere. These are the things that concern writers.
Publishers and marketeers however like prizes. Prizes achieve two things; increased visibility and money – both of which a writer needs. But to win a prize is also an encouragement so I should get down off my high horse and start trying to answer the main question of today which is who will win the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020?
Or if it is not a big question in terms of global pandemics, it is a big question for book bloggers who care about such things.
So far on the 2020 shortlist I have read:
Bernardine Evaristo Girl, Woman, Other
Maggie O’Farrell Hamnet (Reviewed Below)
I have not managed to read Hilary Mantel The Mirror and the Light and I have not managed to read Dominicana by Angie Cruz
I have thus read only four out of the six shortlisted titles. Yet today, 9th September, at 7pm UK time the winner is being announced. So I have run out of time. While it is not normal to choose a winner on the basis of having read four out of six shortlisted books (!) I am in the fortunate position of being a blogger and not a judge.
Evaristo’s book concerns itself with the experiences of 12 different women of colour in contemporary UK with bits set in the US. Natalie Haynes book is of women’s experiences as survivors of war in ancient Greece at the time of the Trojan wars and Hamnet – in 16th century Stratford on Avon where Maggie O’Farrell lays her tale (incidentally also a time when theatres are shut because of the plague) is about a woman and two children whom history has forgotten while canonising her playwright husband.
These books are all works of vision, the writing is lucid the characterisation articulate, they are all executed with compelling panache. These authors have created story where there was no story before, just absence, silence and history’s marginal note. These authors have produced strong and highly visible stories of women from times and places where women have been most silenced and most invisible. Only Jenny Offill has dealt with the future. Without the imperative of historical context, she alone considers how we are moving into an unknown territory of climate destruction and for a while she was my front runner.
Then as I read each one of these books I thought that this must be the one that wins. Until I move on to the next and then think, no, this one. Ultimately perhaps it does not matter. All these books are here to stay. Today I vote with my heart rather than my head. I do not think I shall ever again envisage the life of the bard of Stratford without seeing it as O’Farrell has written it, without seeing him married to the Agnes of this book, or parent to the Hamnet of her devising, an unknown child whose name was given to one of the world’s most famous plays. O’Farrell has written a scene for Hamnet and his twin sister Judith which will bare comparison with anything that was penned by their famous father, and this is my choice for winner
Hamnet
The name Shakespeare overwhelms every thought that one might have of writing about him. I mean unless from a purely biographical point of view and that must be hard enough. In any book that is ‘about’ him, he must automatically be the most important character must he not?
How do you overcome that? This is the genius of O’Farrell’s book. In the whole 372 pages the man himself is referred to as the husband, the son, the father, even the latin tutor, or ‘Latin Boy’ by Bartholomew, his brother in law, but never is the name Shakespeare mentioned. Not even a ‘Will’. And although it sounds as though it cannot be made to work, it does work and I was half way through the novel before I even thought about it. This is what gives the other characters in the book room to breathe and particular his wife Agnes and son Hamnet.
“How can he live without her? He cannot. It is like asking the heart to live without the lungs, like tearing the moon out of the sky and asking the stars to do its work, like expecting the barley to grow without rain.”
So what new do we learn about the bard? Nothing. At least nothing except that he did not do it all on his own, that he had support. That the cost of all that success was not borne solely by him.
“The father comes to the new house twice, sometimes three times a year. He is home for a month in the second year they live in the house. There have been food riots in the city he tells them, with apprentices marching on Southwark and pillaging shops. It is also plague season again in London and the playhouses are shut.”
Some things just don’t change.
