This post is a work in progress - I’m going to keep reading and writing about the 2018 Longlist even now that the prize has been announced (Milkman is up next!), but I wanted to publish what I’ve read so far in case anyone is interested.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

What a brilliant book! Washington Black is an expansive and dazzling work of historical fiction. The novel’s titular character, a young boy named Washington Black, is born enslaved on a sugar plantation in nineteenth century Barbados. In a series of fortuitous and rather extraordinary circumstances, he escapes slavery and becomes a devoted naturalist, illustrator, inventor, and scientist. Throughout the rather capacious novel, Wash travels all the way from Barbados to Virginia to the Arctic to Nova Scotia to London to Amsterdam and finally to Morocco.

Washington Black has an almost ethereal or fantastical undercurrent, yet Edugyan is steadfastly committed to historical faithfulness. As someone who studies the history of plantation slavery, I can say that Edugyan’s treatment of Wash’s life on the plantation is extremely delicate and careful. Though Wash’s story is fiction (and the course of his later life is unlike the vast, vast majority of enslaved people’s), the book remains faithful to many aspects of enslaved people’s experiences. It is abundantly clear that Edugyan read countless slave narratives in the course of writing this novel, and the details she uses to bring life to her characters and their environments are drawn faithfully from the historical record. While I wish more casual readers would read the narratives left by enslaved people (if you're interested and want any recommendations I’d be happy to share some), I would highly recommend Washington Black as an example of fiction about slavery handled delicately and successfully.

More specifically, my PhD research is about slavery and nature - in particular I’m looking at the ways that enslaved people thought about and interacted with the natural world. In Washington Black, the characters are deeply attuned to the environment, and Wash is a keen illustrator and student of aquatic life. Throughout the book he explores and develops his own passion for science and the study of the ocean. My research argues historians have long neglected enslaved people’s environmental and scientific knowledge, so it’s an absolute thrill to see that Edugyan has not only included those themes in her novel, but has centered them.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

I probably should have written this review of Normal People before immediately binge reading Sally Rooney’s other novel Conversations with Friends, because now the two books are blurring together in an interesting but confusing way. I really couldn’t wait though - after reading Normal People I was left with such an intense book hangover that I felt I had to read everything Rooney had ever written. Set in small town Ireland and in Dublin, the book follows Marianne and Connell through young adulthood and their tumultuous love story. This is one of few books I’ve read where the love story feels intensely real, and I almost want to leave my review at that.

Sally Rooney has crafted a romantic storyline that is both modern and timeless, and I have to agree with the many critics who are calling her the voice of a generation. This is one of the best books I’ve read in a long, long time.

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

The Water Cure seems to be one of the most talked-about books on the Man Booker list. The novel is billed as dystopic and its main characters are three sisters who live and survive with their parents on a small island in a toxic world. Surrounded by the sea, the sisters undergo “cures” devised by their parents to protect them from the toxicity that surrounds them. The book revolves around gender (though not in any coherent way), and the girls are taught to fear men - especially those who wash up on the shore of their small island in the middle of the book. Overall the book wasn’t really my cup of tea - I’m not big on the sci-fi genre of books about gender/power/pain/suffering. I elaborate on this a bit in my review of Naomi Alderman’s The Power.

My main criticism - and it’s a pretty major one - is that the book is not very good science fiction. A successful dystopia needs to clearly lay out the logic and rules of the alternate world. Ideally there’s a backstory - i.e. how the world of the book came to be - but at the very least there needs to be some understanding of how the world functions and on what premises it operates. The Water Cure doesn’t have this, and I was left feeling unsure whether it truly was an alternate world or whether the family was cult-like and the parents abusive. It’s possible this confusion is an intentional narrative device - we see the world through the eyes of the girls and their world is what their parents tell them it is - but for the reader it just doesn’t really work. I was constantly confused and that clouded my ability to appreciate the book’s plot or figure out what Mackintosh was trying to say about gender and power.

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under is a modern retelling of Oedipus set on the quiet riverbanks of southern England. Even having read the three Theban plays (admittedly years ago), I was still surprised by some of the twists and turns in Johnson’s retelling. (If you’re confused by what I’m talking about, read this after reading Everything Under - but only after, don’t spoil it!). The book has an air of mystery, drama, and Greek tragedy that leaves you right on the edge of your seat.

Johnson gives shape to an impressive number of characters for such a short book, and though she introduces them slowly (some not until relatively late in the book), they become a true cast of characters - you can almost picture them stepping forward to take a bow at the end of the novel. That Johnson has maintained the heart and soul of the original play, while setting the story in a completely different context (modern England rather than ancient Greece) and telling it through a different format (a novel rather than a play) is seriously impressive.

From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

This has been a Man Booker Longlist infused with water. From the ebb and flow of The Water Cure’s salty sea, to the turbulent mystery of Everything Under’s streaming river, to the ocean that is everything but low and quiet in Donal Ryan’s lyrical fourth novel. Told from three perspectives, the novel follows three characters whose lives are seemingly very different. Farouk is a refugee from Syria, Lampy is a young man living with his mother and grandfather in Ireland, and John is elderly and spending his final days reflecting on his life of cruelty. The three men are consumed by different kinds of grief, and Ryan connects their stories in unexpected ways.

My personal preference is for longer novels with more character development, and I felt character development was something I particularly missed in this book. At around 180 pages, Ryan doesn’t have much space to work with his characters, and by the time I got to John’s final section I had completely forgotten about Farouk. I know a lot of people loved this book and the “aha” moment of realizing how the characters connected, but if I’m being honest it just didn’t work for me. The disconnect I felt about the three different characters wasn’t remedied by realizing that in the end they were actually linked.

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Crime novels rarely make the major book prize lists, so I had really high hopes for this one. It was entertaining, and I flew through it in half a day, but I don’t know that it deserves a spot on the Man Booker list. The book is told from multiple perspectives and centers around a 14-year-old boy named Jack whose mother was murdered three years ago. Jack has taken to petty burglary to support his two sisters, and in the process begins to solve his mother’s murder cold case.

Some of the characters were underdeveloped - Jack’s sister Joy, for example - and a few of the plot twists felt a bit forced. I do like crime fiction a lot, but I don’t think anyone can ever live up to the standard Gillian Flynn set for me back in 2012. If you do have recommendations though, please send them my way!

The Overstory by Richard Powers

(Added March 2020). Two years later and I’ve finally read The Overstory, which has definitely been one of the more enduring books from the 2018 Man Booker list, and which has been recommended to me by so many other readers. My partner is currently going through a phase of reading books about trees, so I figured it was time to read the ultimate tree-novel (if that’s a thing). The Overstory weaves together the stories of a number of different characters throughout the United States, all of whose lives begin to revolve around trees. The first hundred or so pages set up the dramatis personae, and then Powers begins to bring the stories together, pulling individual characters or their ideas into conversation with one another. This works a lot better than in Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea - in The Overstory the meetings of the different characters are less a punch line than they are integral to the story. Powers also uses much more space to explore the characters’ interactions, and I felt like there wasn’t a simplistic and heavy-handed “we are all connected” message like there is in Ryan’s book.

I did have a few minor quibbles with the book that meant I wasn’t entirely swept off my feet by it. Neelay’s character, for example, is almost always described solely in terms of his disability, and I found that very one-dimensional and frustrating. I liked Dorothy and Ray’s story, but it felt much more disconnected and stand-alone than those of the other characters. I would read an entire book solely about Patricia Westerford though, and overall I think The Overstory is definitely worth reading and is one of the most compelling climate-fiction books I’ve seen yet.