Having finished Wolf Hall a week or so ago, I thought it was high time to post -- lest memories of the book grow dim. Not, of course, that I see there being much chance of that: Mantel's novel reads like a smoking orange brand on one's imagination.

There has been much fuss from the book's admirers and detractors in the British press about British familiarities with the corners of the Tudor histories it relates -- on the one hand, critics argue that Mantel breathes vibrant and re-considered life into a past grown threadbare with yawning overhandling in grammar school lessons (or, as John Mullan has noted, that she has "unstitched" that past), whereas on the other, critics accuse her of copping out in telling a tale so often told, of cheating readers of encounters with the unknown. All of which brings me to what was, perhaps, the greatest thrill for me in reading Wolf Hall: that I know almost nothing of the historical record from which Mantel has written. Growing up in southeastern Wyoming, one's grade school histories are those of the Oregon Trail, trading posts, bison massacres and Wild West shows. I, of course, went into Mantel's splendid imagining of Henry VIII's court knowing a fair bit about Elizabethan England (from the numerous Shakespeare biographies I'd read and documentaries I'd seen), but next to nothing about the the political landscape that preceded, and gave rise to, it. Sure, I knew something about the dubious origins of the Church of England (belonging, as I do, to the Episcopal Church, its American counterpart), but had neither heard nor read the name "Thomas Cromwell" (the main character in Wolf Hall, and architect of the marriage between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, through whose all-seeing vision and intuition Mantel imagines this world -- indeed, her appropriation of his perspective proves to be an act of ventriloquism every bit as convincing and enchanting, in its way, as Peter Carey's assumption of Ned Kelly's voice in his 2001 Booker Prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang) before reviews of the novel began appearing in the Spring. I turned page after page, discovering (most of) its cast of characters and their tangles of relationships for the first time and couldn't have been -- as a result -- more transported than I was.

From the outset, the prose is all one would hope it to be in a Booker Prize-winning novel. Whether relating the beating a teenage Cromwell takes from his father in the opening pages -- "Come on, boy, get up. Let's see you get up. By the blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet." -- or, later, describing "[a] wash of sunlight [...] over [a] river, pale as the flesh of a lemon," Mantel's ear is perfect. (I read one sentence that made me wince with its tinniness, its rattle -- one in a book of 650 pages.) But the moment I knew that Wolf Hall was something rare and overwhelming came during the scene in which Cromwell's daughters succumb to the plague: the prose in those two pages is so gorgeous, and Mantel's empathies so profound, I was reminded of nothing so much as the Gospels and the masterpiece that secured Sigrid Undset the Nobel Prize for Literature (and a candidate for the best novel I've ever read), Kristin Lavransdatter (in, it must be stressed, the Tiina Nunnally translation).

And how unexpected that a British novel -- from an agnostic's pen and published in 2009 -- should consider religion with the gravitas it deserves (modern and postmodern British novelists tending so often to treat religion as a subject for dismissive ridicule and contempt, as the butt of some humanist joke making the rounds among the intelligentsia)? It is cause for celebration. As is this novel -- for all it attempts and all it accomplishes.

Its shortlist competition in 2009 (those I've read in italics): AS Byatt's The Children's Book, JM Coetzee's Summertime, Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze, Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger.

Reading: 1st

A deserving winner

Here in six hours or so, the 2009 Booker Prize winner will be announced. I'm almost 200 pages into Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall -- and it has my vote. I've never correctly predicted a winner, but she's the odds-on favorite to win, and it's a smashing good read: prose like stained glass, plot that crackles with tension, characters one loves and characters one hates, a world that feels real down to the cuts of its jewels and the salt in its sweat. Not to mention how moved I've been at certain of its passages (indeed, I'm reminded at times of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter, which is about as high a compliment as can be paid a novel).

And the 2009 Man Booker Prize shortlist is:

AS Byatt's The Children's Book
JM Coetzee's Summertime
Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer's The Glass Room
Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger

Of these, I've read The Little Stranger and while I found it quite spooky, I also thought it might have benefited from the shifts in perspective that gave her two previous shortlisted novels (Fingersmith and The Night Watch) such architectural and empathetic depth (although it must be said that Waters's strict adherence to Dr Faraday's interpretation of events does lend the narrative a kind of claustrophobia which, in turn, heightens the terror of the piece -- which may have been her aim). I've purchased the Byatt and Mantel novels from Amazon UK and will be reading Wolf Hall while my wife is in Paris later this month. Coetzee's novel -- because I haven't read, and am indifferent to the idea of reading, its predecessors Boyhood and Youth -- doesn't interest me. Mawer's hadn't interested me, but the extravagant praise from those readers and bloggers who made it a point to read all thirteen longlisted novels has made me, at least, curious. I almost gave in and ordered the Foulds novel alongside the Mantel and Byatt as it hasn't (yet) secured an American publication date (whereas both The Children's Book and Wolf Hall will be published stateside in October), but went with Adam Thorpe's Hodd (which, in all likelihood, will never be published in America -- and, owing to Thorpe's French citizenship, was ineligible for the Booker Prize) instead.

The winner will be announced 6 October.

There has been a great deal of news on the Booker Prize front this morning, both exciting and melancholic.

To begin: Booker Prize-winner Stanley Middleton has died at age 89 following a long fight with cancer. I haven't read his novel Holiday (co-winner in 1974) yet, but am looking forward to doing so. An article about his life and death can be found here.

In other news, 2009's judges have announced the Booker Prize longlist and it is as follows:

A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book
J.M. Coetzee's Summertime
Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze
Sarah Hall's How to paint a dead man
Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness
James Lever's Me Cheeta
Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer's The Glass Room
Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind
James Scudamore's Heliopolis
Colm Toibin's Brooklyn
William Trevor's Love and Summer
Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger

My wife and I bought the Byatt novel for my brother last month, and I'm looking forward to buying it for myself once the resolution moratorium is at an end. I'm a little surprised at the inclusion of Sarah Hall's book as -- from the little I've read in the press -- it sounds more like a collection of stories than a novel. But a number of writers these days (including last year's winner Aravind Adiga with his recent Between the Assassinations) seem to be marketing their short fiction collections as novels, perhaps in an effort to shoehorn in on prize eligibilities (including the Booker's) from which they'd otherwise be excluded. I've read a lot about Mantel's new novel, and I've been arguing for months now that it will be the one to beat; I'm most excited to read it, I think. Lever's "novel" seems off-putting and bizarre, the kind of book it would take an act of God to make me read. Toibin's has earned fine reviews, but hasn't interested me (I have it in proof -- if anyone reading this would like it, leave a comment letting me know as much and an e-mail address, if I don't have already it). Trevor's new one sounds wonderful -- his fiction never fails to move me. Waters's newest novel is good (I read it in proof), but lacks the virtuosic narrative pull of her previous two books (both Booker Prize nominees).

The shortlist will be announced 8 September.

Confession time: I've had a singular hiccup in my New Year's resolution to not purchase books for myself. No, I didn't go on some spree, unable to stand it any longer, filling three baskets at Barnes & Noble with titles I have the vaguest interest in. No, it wasn't that at all.

Last week, my wife and I were driving around Missoula when I told her: "You know what book, more than any other book, I'd like to see Folio publish? Oscar and Lucinda." When I returned home later that morning after dropping Kelly at work, I checked my e-mail, and there it was: an e-mail from Folio announcing the publication of four new books, including Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, in celebration of the Booker Prize. I couldn't believe my eyes. And because it was this book (one of two on which I wrote my M.A. thesis) -- and after so wistful a thought, an hour prior, that Folio might one day see fit to recognize it for the masterpiece it is -- we decided I should and could be permitted this one wrinkle in the resolution. And so I ordered it the next day.

Reading that e-mail was one of the most unexpected thrills I've ever felt, and ordering the book perhaps the most satisfying book purchase I've ever made. Indeed, I'm all a-shiver with the prospect of owning so beautiful an edition of so beautiful a book.

And now: back to the business of no books.

I finished William Golding's Rites of Passage late last week and have to admit mild disappointment with it. I'd never read him before -- not even Lord of the Flies (I know, I know) -- but thought: a Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature must bode well, right? And I've always had a keen interest in seafaring tales, so where could it have gone wrong?

The novel is the journal of Edmund Talbot, written as a gift to his godfather (that the latter might live a vicariously youthful life) and meant to be a document of the comings and goings aboard the vessel. Golding, for his part, succeeds in the voice of the novel -- it feels authentic to the literature and correspondences of the Regency period -- but in too little else. One would think that the sea would fan the flames of an author's powers of description, but there was very little prose in Rites of Passage noteworthy for either its observational precision or its striking beauties. One exception would be a passage early on in which the sailors -- on deck, in their oilskins, during a mighty gale -- "resemble nothing so much as rocks with the tide washing over them." I felt, with this passage, that I saw precisely what Golding intended me to see, that he was -- in that moment -- the captain of a narrative ship capable of inspiring envy in other writers and gratitude in careful readers. But the book almost never sees such piercing and lovely descriptions again. Still, though I'm a reader who loves language above even character and the spinning of the yarn, I've learned to recognize, over the years, that a fine novel needn't luxuriate in alliterative language or flights of metaphor to be a fine novel. In short, not every writer has the poetic sensibility of Sebastian Barry or Peter Carey or Iris Murdoch. Two of my very favorite novelists -- Rohinton Mistry and Sarah Waters -- mine their genius (and genius it is) elsewhere: in depth of character, or startling empathies, or byzantine plotting, or sensitivities to period and politics, or experiments in perspective. In their cases, the prose serves ends more foundational than itself -- the brilliance is in the bricks. And while this was nearly the case with Rites of Passage -- Golding's tweaking of perspectives (giving us, in the journal, Talbot's view of Colley and then, in the letter, Colley's view of Talbot's behavior towards Colley) deepens the pathos manyfold and makes characters of caricatures (until we're allowed his voice, Colley seems like a thin unflattering riff on Austen's Reverend Collins in Pride and Prejudice) -- the book has too much going against it (e.g. a too-awkward mishmash of horror and humor, a narrator it seems Golding wants us to like despite his giving us little or no good reason to) for it to sing as a Booker Prize-winner should.

I liked Rites of Passage well enough, but shouldn't the novel that saunters off with the most prestigious literary prize in England be liked better than well enough?

Its shortlist competition in 1980: Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country, Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day, Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid, Julia O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men, Barry Unsworth's Pascali's Island

Reading: 1st
An undeserving winner

In 2005, the people over at the (Man) Booker Prize gave out the first ever Man Booker International Prize -- an award given every two years to a writer for his or her entire body of work. Unlike the Booker Prize proper (which is open to no one but British or Commonwealth writers of novels in English -- not even short fiction collections are eligible -- and is given to an individual book), the Man Booker International Prize is open to writers from around the globe, writing in all languages and genres, and is intended to rival the Nobel Prize for Literature in prestige. As with the Nobel, controversies abound over the writers who make the shortlist, fail to make the shortlist, are chosen as winners, are passed over as winners. (Philip Roth -- whose following couldn't be more devoted and whose tally of prizes across his almost 50-year career is unsurpassed -- was nominated for his work in 2005 and 2007, but lost first to Ismail Kadare and then to Chinua Achebe. I haven't read Achebe -- I know, I know -- but I have read Kadare's novel Spring Flowers, Spring Frost, and it comes nowhere near the brilliance of even Roth's second-tier fiction, let alone a book like American Pastoral. Hence the controversies.)

In recent weeks, 2009's committee, chaired by novelist Jane Smiley, announced its shortlist nominees for the Man International Booker Prize:

Peter Carey
Evan S. Connell
Mahasweta Devi
E.L. Doctorow
James Kelman
Mario Vargas Llosa
Arnost Lustig
Alice Munro
V.S. Naipaul
Joyce Carol Oates
Antonio Tabucchi
Ngugi Wa Thiong'O
Dubravka Ugresic
Ludmila Ulitskaya

Of these, believe it or not, the only two writers I've read are Carey and Doctorow. Carey -- on whose work I wrote my M.A. thesis -- is my favorite living novelist. Doctorow (who has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice, the National Book Award once and the National Book Critics Circle Award three times) is splendid in his own right -- I've only read his City of God, but it blew my fuses, to be sure.

The winner will be announced on 27 May.