Each of the six Booker novels does something unique
As the Guardian’s fiction editor, I’ve been writing about the Booker prize for years. Now, as a judge, I’ve seen behind the curtain
• Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner make the 2024 Booker prize shortlist
As the Guardian’s fiction editor, I’ve been writing about the Booker prize for years. But this time, I was privileged to go behind the curtain, as part of the judging team along with artist and writer Edmund de Waal, musician Nitin Sawhney, and writers Yiyun Li and Sara Collins. The longlisting stage was a delight: choosing the books we wanted to spotlight. (Though of course we’d happily have produced a directors’ cut of 30 books or more.) Losing some of them at the shortlist meeting was harder, though as we talked about each book, unanimity fairly quickly evolved. Each of these six novels does something unique; weighing them against each other to find a winner will be trickier still.
James by Percival Everett feels like the book he was born to write. It’s a reworking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a toxic foundation stone of the American literary canon, but it would not be overpraise to say it supplants it. The novel is told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim, who in the original is both a lesser creature and a learning opportunity for Huck to demonstrate his own humanity. Everett fills in the gaps, to show the hell behind Twain’s easy humour. His James saves the folksy slave dialect for whites, and talks very differently among his own people. Throughout his career Everett has explored the construction of race through cliches of thought and language, and that fascination reaches its full expression here. He’s always played with genre, too: James combines satire, parody, adventure story, children’s fiction, horror. And he makes it look easy – it’s ferocious, but ferociously readable too.
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