Week four: readers’ responses to the novel

Jane Austen used to chat with ­family and friends about the afterlives of characters from her novels. How happy would Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax be together? It was evident from his discussion of Oscar and ­Lucinda at the Guardian book club that Peter Carey has no such attachment to the people he had invented. “Do you ever revisit the characters you create, in your mind?” asked one reader. He spoke of the characters whose stories are incomplete, giving the example of the wonderful Wardley-Fish, who travels to Australia merely to find ­Oscar and manages to keep missing him. “Years could go by without me thinking of Wardley-Fish,” Carey answered drily. “You’ve got these people alive in your mind, I hope, but I haven’t any more.” He paused. “I shouldn’t say that, ­really”.

“Emotional attachment” (as one reader put it) was exactly what many felt towards his leading characters. People loved the novel because they loved Oscar and Lucinda. The canny exercise in post-modern narrative – with its framing narrative, its shifts of viewpoint, its allusiveness – seemed to many a rather traditional thing: a love story (albeit one in which the lovers do not meet for more than 200 pages). The readers’ willing surrender to the illusion that the protagonists were real people was shared by bloggers on the book club website. One compared the effect to that of Ian ­McEwan’s Atonement. “To me, Atonement and Oscar and Lucinda provoked a huge emotional response; I see them as the two most powerful romantic tragedies – or whatever you would have it – of the past two decades.” ­Another suggested that the effect of our identification is (as George Eliot might have hoped) to expand our own sympathies. “When I read a novel in which there are characters for whom I long to see the best in life, and whose misfortunes wound me as though happening to me, I come out the other side, I hope, more attentive to the people around me, more concerned for them . . . And no characters I’ve ever met have ever inspired such pronounced aching in me to see good done them than Oscar Hopkins and Lucinda Leplastrier.”

So there was perhaps a little ­puzzlement that Carey did not share what one reader called her “affection” for the book. For this novelist, the reality of the novel was its plan, not its characters. Some readers acknowledged their pleasure in the design as well as the characterisation: “Although it is big and has all the virtues of a page-turning saga, it also feels very compact and structured.” This reader felt that the pleasure of identification would not have been so great without his strong sense as he read that everything was “planned”.

What had not been planned was the novelist’s excursion into historical fiction. Carey responded ruefully to a member of the audience who suggested that his novels showed him setting out to tackle the various phases of Australian history. No. He had stumbled on the story of a church transported to a secluded spot, and had not been able to avoid the expedition to the 19th century. The place to which the story led was his starting point.

A correspondent in last week’s paper corrected my casual (I agree) use of “the outback” to refer to the location of the novel’s concluding episodes, in which Oscar travels with the glass church to Boat Harbour, “in the parish of Never Never”. She pointed out that this was not somewhere in Australia’s “harsh, inhospitable desert interior”, but what is now “the pretty, leafy, exceedingly hospitable little town of Bellingen on New South Wales’s central eastern seaboard”. Yet in the novel the ­journey to this place is hellish (not least because the aquaphobic Oscar insists on traveling by land). En route, Oscar encounters settlers who live in primitive conditions beyond any human law. He himself is reduced to violence to counter the sadism of Jeffris, the expedition leader. A blogger who had revelled in the descriptive pleasures of the novel was prompted to the same error of nomenclature, in complaining that “the rawness of the outback scenes seemed too abrupt and arbitrary an ending after so much opulence”.

“When you reached the ending, I wonder if you felt as bereft as I did?” asked a reader at the book club. “I felt fantastic,” Carey responded. All that mattered was “getting the end to work”. His bereft reader was happy, she said, with what might be thought the unhappy ending of the novel. Yet she had become so involved with the leading characters that she was “lost, for days” after she had finished it. Carey could not share her feelings, but he did thank her for them.

John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week he will be looking at Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. Join them for a discussion at 7pm on Tuesday 2 March, Hall One, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9AG. Tickets are £9.50 online (www.kingsplace.co.uk) or £11.50 from the box office. Tel: 020 7520 1490.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey | Book club is a post from: Book Addicts Book Group

Week one: chance

How can a novel be true to chance? Novels aspire to be level with life, but the sense of pattern that all good ­narrative provides can seem un­lifelike. ­Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a beautifully managed narrative, but one that respects accident. Partly this is by having leading characters who are themselves fascinated by chance. Oscar, brought up in mid-19th-century Devon by his loving but utterly inflexible father, a leading member of a fundamentalist Christian sect, believes that happenstance is in fact providence. God must be behind all chance events. By a private process of divination, casting a stone on to a lettered grid, he perceives that his father’s faith is false, and that he should desert him for the household of the local Anglican vicar. Every day the boy throws lots under “the terrible pressure of eternity”.

Later, as an odd, solitary student at Oxford, he is accidentally chosen as a gambling companion by the roguish Wardley-Fish, who knocks on his door mistaking it for the college room of another undergraduate. He needs a companion for the races, and Oscar’s fate is sealed by the error. For, being a connoisseur of the pattern beneath apparent randomness, Oscar, whom Wardley-Fish supposes an innocent abroad, has a peculiar gift for gambling. Naturally, at Newmarket and Newbury, Catterick and Sandown Park, he sees “God’s hand everywhere about”. Meanwhile, over in Australia, Lucinda, a young lady with feminist sympathies and a large inheritance, is also becoming addicted to gambling. When she visits London, her mother’s friend George Eliot complains that when George Lewes takes Lucinda out for tea, she attempts “to seduce him into a game of chance”.

Oscar and Lucinda, being a love story, has a pattern implied in its title. The two eponymous characters grow up, in the novel’s early chapters, thousands of miles apart, but are destined to be brought together. Carey sharpens our curiosity about how this will be managed by keeping them separate for almost half the book (they speak to each other for the first time on page 231 of my 520-page edition). Groups of chapters alternate between England and Australia as, we suppose, the paths of Oscar and Lucinda move to some unlikely intersection. Chance does the trick. Oscar, now a clergyman, embarks on a mission to bring Christianity to Australia. (Naturally his decision to go is made by tossing a penny, which comes up heads: “you did not need to be a mind-reader to know that God was sending him to New South Wales”). Lucinda is on the same ship because, having visited London more or less in search of a husband, she has given up hope and decided to return. Religion is their ostensible bond: Lucinda seeks Oscar to hear her confession. But in fact it is gambling. In Lucinda’s cabin the two experience a kind of ecstasy, playing poker together for penny bets. All is delicious, concentrated stillness, the previously twitchy Oscar, Lucinda observes, “all strapped down like ­Ulysses at the mast”.

The novel’s dénouement will eventually be brought about by a wager, when Oscar, determined to prove his love, bets Lucinda that he can transport a glass church to the outback and erect it on her behalf. The stake is her whole fortune – and implicitly her hand in marriage. Gambling and religion are made inextricable as a way to get to the workings of chance. It is hard to think of a novel so rich in ­theological schism and argument. Its characters readily identify each other as ­Evangelicals and Puseyites, Rechabites and Latitudinarians. Their varieties of belief are anxiously dogmatic. “Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier,” Oscar tells Lucinda, “we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it . . . We must gamble every instant of our allotted span”. Religion in the novel is not absurd. Narratively it answers the characters’ needs to find something better than randomness. The two protagonists of Oscar and Lucinda struggle to make the flukes of their lives into patterns.

The very form of Carey’s novel seems to make chance visible. It is composed of 111 short chapters, often digressing and including the back-stories of a crowd of minor characters. Every little chapter is a self-contained episode, each one a testimony to luck. There is also its framing device, for the novel is narrated by someone ­revealing his own genealogy. We know from its first paragraph that “the ­Reverend Oscar Hopkins (1841-66)” is “my great-grandfather” (and if we look at those dates we might guess at some impending mischance). What is the strangest instance of chance that a person can think of but the chance that brought his or her parents together?

“In order that I exist,” says Carey’s nameless narrator, “two gamblers, one Obsessive, the other Compulsive, must meet”. Lucinda follows a path to Oscar “as complex as that of a stainless steel Pachinko ball”. But near the end of the novel we realise that the chance occurrence to which we have always been heading is not what we ­expected: the narrator owes his ­existence to an accident that will surprise the cleverest novel reader. The greatest novel in English dedicated to the consequences of chance events, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, is similarly a long story of how its narrator’s conception came about. Carey wonderfully reanimates this ­narrative mission.

John Mullan is professor of English at University College London.

John Mullan on Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a post from: Book Addicts Book Group

1998

3.5.98 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

7.6.98 Beloved – Toni Morrison

5.7.98 Fatherland – Robert Harris

2.8.98 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières

6.9.98 Wild Swans – Jung Chang

4.10.98 Angela’s Ashes – Frank McCourt

1.11.98 Vanity Fair – William Thackery

6.12.98 Possession – AS Byatt

1999

3.1.99 1,000 Acres – Jane Smiley

7.2.99 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy / Honourable School Boy / Smiley’s People – John Le Carre

7.3.99 Brazzaville Beach – William Boyd

4.4.99 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

2.5.99 Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood

6.6.99 Snow Falling on Cedars – David Gutterson

4.7.99 Behind the Scenes At the Museum – Kate Atkinson

1.8.99 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – JK Rowling

5.9.99 Private Papers – Margaret Forster

3.10.99 Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels

7.11.99 Longitude – Dava Sobel

5.12.99 Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes

2000

2.1.00 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

6.2.00 House of Spirits – Isabel Allende

5.3.00 Larry’s Party – Carol Shields

2.4.00 Cold Mountain – Charles Frazier

7.5.00 Northern Lights – Philip Pullman

4.6.00 In the Springtime of the Year – Susan Hill

2.7.00 Fasting, Feasting – Anita Desai

6.8.00 Stalingrad – Anthony Beevor

3.9.00 Other People’s Children – Joanna Trollope

1.10.00 Enduring Love – Ian McEwan

22.10.00 The Miller’s Tale/Prologue – Geoffrey Chaucer

3.12.00 Waterland – Graham Swift

2001

7.1.01 Man and Boy – Tony Parsons

4.2.01 Moon Tiger – Penelope Lively

4.3.01 Touching the Void – Joe Simpson

1.4.01 The Witch of Exmoor – Margaret Drabble

6.5.01 The Black Dahlia – James Ellroy

3.6.01 The Shipping News – Annie Proulx

1.7.01 The Kitchen God’s Wife – Amy Tan

5.8.01 London Fields – Martin Amis

2.9.01 The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing

7.10.01 If I Don’t Know, Serious Concerns, Making Cocoa – Wendy Cope for Kingsley Amis

4.11.01 Talking to the Dead – Helen Dunmore

2.12.01 About a Boy – Nick Hornby

2002

6.1.02 Knots and Crosses / The Falls – Ian Rankin

3.2.02 Empire of the Sun – JG Ballard

3.3.02 Music and Silence – Rose Tremain

7.4.02 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

5.5.02 Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter – Mario Vargas Llosa

2.6.02 Headlong – Michael Frayn

7.7.02 See Under Love – David Grossman

4.8.02 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou

1.9.02 From the Holy Mountain – William Dalrymple

6.10.02 A Dark-Adapted Eye – Barbara Vine

3.11.02 The Illustrated Mum – Jacqueline Wilson

1.12.02 Polo – Jilly Cooper

2003

5.1.03 Writing Home – Alan Bennett

2.2.03 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

2.3.03 After Rain – William Trevor

6.4.03 An Awfully Big Adventure – Beryl Bainbridge

4.5.03 Original Sin – PD James

1.6.03 Rebecca – Sally Beauman for Daphne du Maurier

6.7.03 The Tortilla Curtain – T Coraghessan Boyle

3.8.03 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire – Amanda Foreman

7.9.03 Down by the River – Edna O’Brien

5.10.03 Junk – Melvin Burgess

2.11.03 Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud

7.12.03 Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd

2004

4.1.04 Clinging to the Wreckage and Rumpole & the Younger Generation – John Mortimer

1.2.04 True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey

7.3.04 Fingersmith – Sarah Waters

4.4.04 Falling – Elizabeth Jane Howard

2.5.04 Nice Work – David Lodge

6.6.04 The Scold’s Bridle – Minette Walters

7.7.04 Mort – Terry Pratchett

1.8.04 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark

5.9.04 The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster

3.10.04 How the Dead Live – Will Self

7.11.04 Regeneration – Pat Barker

5.12.04 The World’s Wife – Carol Ann Duffy

2005

2.1.05 White Teeth – Zadie Smith

6.2.05 A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson

6.3.05 The Hippopotamus – Stephen Fry

3.4.05 Independence Day – Richard Ford

1.5.05 Small Island – Andrea Levy

5.6.05 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13¾
- Sue Townsend

3.7.05 The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
- Dr Oliver Sacks

7.8.05 Blood Rain – Michael Dibden

4.9.05 Le Grand Meaulnes – Alain-Fournier
[Michèle Roberts was our guide]

2.10.05 The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi

6.11.05 The Gunpowder Plot – Antonia Fraser

4.12.05 We Were the Mulvaneys – Joyce Carol Oates

2006

1.1.06 Flashman – George MacDonald Fraser

5.2.06 Holidays in Hell – P.J. O’Rourke

5.3.06 We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

2.4.06 Noughts and Crosses – Malorie Blackman

7.5.06 Hotel World – Ali Smith

4.6.06 Time to Depart – Lindsey Davis

2.7.06 Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
- John Berendt

6.8.06 Rum Punch – Elmore Leonard

3.9.06 English Passengers – Matthew Kneale

1.10.06 Old Filth – Jane Gardam

5.11.06 Malignant Sadness – Lewis Wolpert

3.12.06 Miss Garnet’s Angel – Salley Vickers

2007

7.1.07 The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

4.2.07 The Mermaids Singing – Val McDermid

4.3.07 Eleanor of Aquitaine – Alison Weir

1.4.07 What A Carve Up! – Jonathan Coe

6.5.07 My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult

3.06.07 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

1.07.07 The Female Eunuch – Germaine Greer

5.08.07 The Remorseful Day – Colin Dexter

2.09.07 Tales of City – Armistead Maupin

7.10.07 Joseph Knight – James Robertson

4.11.07 The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver

2.12.07 Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally

2008

6.01.08 Alice Sebold -The Lovely Bones

3.02.08 The Birth of Venus – Sarah Dunant

2.03.08 William Pitt the Younger, A Biography – William Hague

6.04.08 Simon Armitage – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

4.05.08 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Half of a Yellow Sun

8.06.08 Jan Morris – Venice

6.07.08 ÅsneSeierstad – The Bookseller of Kabul

3.08.08 Colm Toibin – The Master

7.09.08 Gore Vidal – Point to Point Navigation

Complete list of Radio 4 book club books from 1998-2008 is a post from: Book Addicts Book Group

The 1981 book beat five other former Booker winners shortlisted from the prize’s 40-year history.

BEST OF BOOKER NOMINEES
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (won in 1981; also the previous winner of the Booker Of Bookers, in 1993)
Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)
Oscar And Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974)
The Siege Of Krishnapur by JG Farrell (1973)
The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (1995)

Sir Salman, who was unable to attend the event as he is currently on tour in the US to promote his latest novel, sent his thanks via a pre-recorded message. It is the third Booker award for the author, who was also the winner of the Booker of Bookers in 1993.

“Marvellous news – I’m absolutely delighted and would like to thank all those readers around the world who voted for Midnight’s Children,” the author said.

His sons, Zafar and Milan, were in attendance at the award ceremony at London’s South Bank Centre to receive the custom-made trophy.

“It’s a wonderful alternative to have my real children accepting the prize on behalf of my imaginary children,” Sir Salman said.

When voting closed at midday on the July 8, 7,801 people had voted via online and text, with 36% voting for Midnight’s Children.

The shortlist was chosen by a panel of experts including novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup.

“The readers have spoken – in their thousands. And we do believe that they have made the right choice,” Glendinning said. She added that Midnight’s Children had won by a “quite a large margin”.

The Booker Prize, which was first awarded in 1969, has spawned 41 winners because it was shared between two authors in 1974 and 1992.

The Booker Prize of Booker Prizes is a post from: Book Addicts Book Group

The one-off award marks the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, and the shortlist was selected by a panel of judges, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning, writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and John Mullan, professor of English at University College London.

The public is now able to cast their vote through online partnerships with national and international media, with libraries, reading groups and book retailers.

According to William Hill, Rushdie is the favourite to win at 6/4, with Pat Barker the second favourite at 3/1, followed by Peter Carey (4/1) and JM Coetzee at 5/1, Nadine Gordimer (8/1) and JG Farrell (10/1).

The previous time the Booker created a one-off celebratory prize was in 1993 to mark the 25th anniversary, which was also won by Rushdie.

The overall winner of The Best of the Booker will be announced as part of the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre on 10th July.

The shortlist in full:

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995, Viking; paperback Penguin)

Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988, Faber; paperback Faber)

JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999, Secker & Warburg; paperback Vintage)

J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973, Weidenfeld, paperback Phoenix)

Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974, Cape; paperback Bloomsbury)

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981, Cape; paperback Vintage)

This is a tricky one.  I loved Oscar and Lucinda, I love Peter Carey generally and of course he’s an Aussie!  I hated JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, in fact I think I even gave it away, and I don’t generally give books away. And Midnight’s Children is such a great book from Salman Rushdie.  The choice is hard but I would hope it was between Rushdie and Carey

The best of Booker is a post from: Book Addicts Book Group

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is the favourite Booker Prize winner of all time, according to a survey conducted by Abe Books ahead of this year’s official Best of the Booker award.

AbeBooks.co.uk asked 727 of its customers to name the best of the past winners and Martel’s novel – the Man Booker winner in 2002 – finished ahead of Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie with Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in third place.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and Disgrace by J M Coetzee were also among the top ten, while Holiday by Stanley Middleton was the only book to receive no votes.

A judging panel will announce an official shortlist for the Best of the Booker next week, followed by a public vote to decide the overall, to be announced in July.

Abe Books also compiled a list of the most expensive Booker Prize-winning novels sold through its sites, with a signed first edition of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children the most expensive at £1,500.

AbeBooks.co.uk Best of the Booker poll

1) Life of Pi by Yann Martel (12.4%)
2) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (10.5%)
3) The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (8.8%)
4) The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (8.5%)
5) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (6.9%)
6) The Bone People by Keri Hulme (5.5%)
7) Possession by AS Byatt (5.4%)
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (5.2%)
9) Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (4%)
10) The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (3.3%)

Most Expensive “Booker Prize-winning” books sold through AbeBooks

1. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (£1500) – Signed first edition.
2. In A Free State by V.S. Naipaul (£1280) – First edition, inscribed by the author
3. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (£900) – First Indian edition of 1997 winner
4. Life of Pi by Yann Martel (£600) – Signed first Canadian edition, one of only 2500 copies, of 2002 winner
5. Life & Times of Michael K and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (£575) – Coetzee’s two winning novels (1983 and 1999 respectively) sold together, both signed first editions.
6. The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens (£318) – First edition of 1970 winner
7. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje – (£312) Signed first UK edition of 1992 winner
8. Possession by AS Byatt – (£250) – Signed first edition of 1990 winner.
9. The Gathering by Anne Enright (£250) – Signed first edition of last year’s winner
10. Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally (£250) – Signed first edition in olive clamshell box of 1982 winner

AbeBooks conduct own best of booker poll with surprising results is a post from: Book Addicts Book Group

Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey
The Inheritance of Loss: A Novel by Kiran Desai
Gathering the Water by Robert Edric
Get a Life: A Novel by Nadine Gordimer
The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Carry Me Down by M. J. Hyland
Seven Lies: A Novel by James Lasdun
The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar
So Many Ways to Begin: A Novel by Jon McGregor
The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud
Black Swan Green: A Novel by David Mitchell
The Perfect Man by Naeem Murr
Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan
The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson
Mother’s Milk: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn
The Ruby in Her Navel: A Novel of Love and Intrigue in the 12th Century by Barry Unsworth
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

Man Booker Prize – the longlist is a post from: Book Addicts Book Group