P.H.Newby Something to Answer For (1969)

As promised, this is my review of the first novel to win the Booker Prize (now called the Man Booker Prize). I’m not going to give each novel a rating as I don’t think it is particularly fair to compare novels written forty years ago to those written today, considering that the novel as a genre has undergone a massive amount of change during the intervening period. I will probably finish with some sort of ranking of the ones that I enjoyed the most, though.

Something to Answer For is not a particularly complicated novel in terms of plot: Townrow, the protagonist, goes to Egypt at the request of the wife of a friend, who believes that her late husband was murdered. Mostly set in the Egyptian city of Port Said during the Suez Crisis of 1956, it portrays the adventures of Townrow, as he faces up to not only the conflict occurring around him between Egypt and her former colonial rulers, France and Great Britain, but also the conflict within himself between his innate selfishness and his desire to make amends for the failures of his past.

Something is a product of its time, pertinently raising questions concerning the nature of war crimes and colonialism, written at a time when the last vestiges of Britain’s empire were gaining their independence. Newby was a soldier in Egypt during the Second World War and his knowledge and enthusiasm about Egypt seeps through every page; although the protagonist of the novel is an arrogant, disinterested rake, his descriptions of the landscape and people of Egypt evoke a tantalising portrait of a beautiful country that is on the brink of emancipation and conflict.

I don’t think that Newby’s work would win the Man Booker Prize if it were nominated for the award today, as the plot is not particularly outstanding; however, it is, as I said previously, a product of its time and I would say that the questions that it raises concerning war and aggression, racism and colonialism are just as pertinent today as they were forty-one years ago. Ultimately it makes the Western reader question whether, as the product of a formerly imperialistic culture, we all have something to answer for.

The Booker Prize Project

As some of you may or may not already know, I love reading and I collect books. More than any other item books have always enthralled me, with the infinite possibilities for escapism and allure of exotic locales provided by fiction. As a child I was always encouraged to read and when I was bullied at school I found novels to be my salvation: like opening the Narnian wardrobe into another world, except it could be any one of an infinite number of worlds. I have always preferred books to films; films show you how a story unfolds and only permit one image of the action, whereas books allow the reader to envisage the characters, settings and events in their own minds in any number of ways; the images of Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’ that I conjure up will potentially be very different to those envisaged by another reader of the same novel. It is this democracy of imagining that I love about reading.

Having said this I have to admit that, most of the time, I am a lazy reader. I am not usually one for “literature” or the classics. I enjoy reading “chick-lit”, love murder mystery novels and have a fondness for the works of Agatha Christie bordering on the obsessive. I am well aware that such work is not considered to be as intrinsically literary as other more mainstream works. I was pondering this the other day while I was reading about the latest winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, awarded this year to Howard Jacobson’s ‘The Finkler Question’. I realised at this point that I had not even heard of, let alone read, any of the novels on the Booker long list this year.

Such thoughts have prompted me to action. I am going to read every single winner of the Man Booker Prize since the award’s inception in 1969 and will review them systematically on here. I am aware that I am not the first person to have conceived of such an idea but I have never claimed to be original – I am doing this because I hope that it will be an enjoyable experience, as well as an eye-opening one. I’m also not aiming for this to be particularly literary or serious in tone – I just want to be able to remember which novel is which! I’ve already read three of the winners – ‘The Blind Assassin’ by Margaret Atwood (2000), ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martel (2002) and ‘The Line of Beauty’ by Alan Hollinghurst (2004) and I did enjoy them all, but feel it would be beneficial to read them again (if only to satisfy my OCD about completing sequences in order!). I have already read the first two novels and reviews of these will follow shortly.