Okay, I’ll admit it. If given a choice of two books (or films) I have never heard of, and one has won a prize and the other hasn’t, nine times out of ten, I’ll pick the one that won the prize. Yes, I know it’s a little bit shallow and also, prizes aren’t everything, and I don’t always agree with the winners of these things, but if you must have a recommendation, a sway one way or another, a prize is as good a reason as anything to cast the deciding vote.
So, while the Booker winners haven’t always been up my alley, I find the Orange Prize books to be pretty much the kind of book I’m looking for. Now, a note about the Orange Prize before I continue: it is a women writers prize, which a lot of people think is derogatory and also, sort of elitist, and I can’t disagree with them there, but on the other hand, the Booker is usually a boys club, so why not have something that’s angled towards women? Okay, so the books tend to be of the same variety — many female characters, lots of internal monologues — but the writing is fine and sharp and these books often make up my favourites.
This time round, on holiday, I picked up Andrea Levy’s Small Island, about Jamaican immigrants to the UK during World War II. It sounds a rather dull subject, but from the minute I began it, I was completely hooked. (Which was good, because I had a very long train ride ahead of me with nothing to do.) I found two things interesting about the author, when I visited her website. One, that her parents were, in fact, Jamaican immigrants to England in the very same year and under very similar circumstances as the characters in the novel, and secondly, that Levy herself didn’t begin writing till she was in her 30s.
That second fact I found particularly interesting, because Levy basically decided to write the kind of books that she wanted to read. About the black British experience. And, you’ll forgive me if I go into a personal tangent here, but that’s pretty much the same reason I began writing — to create for myself and maybe other people like me the kind of book I wanted to read.
Small Island is one of those multi-voiced novels, where each character gets a first person narrative of their own, but the nice part is, all the voices are very genuine. You can hear each person speak, nothing feels fake or stilted, and there is no disjoint between chapters.
It paid off, my experiment with choosing a book based on the prize. It is easier sometimes to let someone else do the recommendations for you.
The columnist is an author