Mr Loverman, Bernardine Evaristo

It's easy to take pot shots at prizes in the arts. Distilling the distinctive, diaphanous and diverse into a "Best Of" list is crass and hierarchical, and even risks imposing an accepted version of the world using works that are unrepresentative of the wider culture. But, at their best, prizes can work to throw light on an artist hitherto lost in art's ocean. So it is, for me anyway, with Evaristo. Winning the 2019 Booker Prize for Girl, Woman, Other has led me, and probably many others, first to it, and then to her back-catalogue, including Mr Loverman.

This time around, the protagonist is very male, and while the novel's chorus includes his wife and daughters, it's really all about Barrington Jedidiah Walker. Originally from Antigua, Barrington - Barry - is Windrush generation, made good through the 1980s as a property developer, and now successful and semi-retired. Also, Barry is gay, and closeted, something that his long-term beau, Morris, would like them both to rectify. However, after a lifetime of hiding his true self, Barry is struggling with how to change, with the consequences it will wreak for his family, and with the searing memories of less tolerant times. And while Barry procrastinates, his wife, Carmel, reflects on her own life, and how their situation has imprisoned her aspirations and happiness. But change is coming whether Barry is ready for it or not.

What a brilliant book. Principally through the voice that Evaristo gives to Barry’s thoughts, fears and desires. He’s a great character to be in the company of, and credibly well-rounded with his missteps and failings showing. Ditto the supporting cast of Morris, Carmel, Barry’s divergent daughters, and Carmel’s church group. Evaristo sketches the latter well, first as the harridens perceived by Barry, but then more clearly as supportive friends, much put-upon by the men in their lives. But, more or less, this is Barry’s book, and it’s difficult not to warm to, and be both amused and touched by his stumbling emergence from the closet. Even (or especially) as he self-aggrandisingly reports to Morris that, “I ain’t no homosexual, I am a … Barrysexual!”

Inland, Téa Obreht

Some books you race through, enjoying the whole journey and missing it when it's done. Meanwhile, some books you read to the end because you're hoping it gets better or makes sense there. Set in 19th century America, Inland straddles the divide by alternating the narrative between a straightforward and well-told tale of frontier life, and a largely incoherent but intermittently fascinating parallel tale involving camels. In the former, a wife and mother is stuck waiting at home, slowly coming to the realisation that her husband and sons may not be returning, while steadily falling prey to ghosts from her past. In the latter, an immigrant from the Ottoman Empire falls in with the real-life United States Camel Corps in a trek across the West, largely traced out in conversations with the dromedary camel he befriends. In principle, the latter could have been great (and is, though only sporadically), but Obreht goes out of her way to make it incomprensible, with characters with multiple names, uncertainty about who's a camel and who's a human, and far (far) too much about ghosts. But while reading it, I largely overlooked this in the expectation that the two narratives would come together and make complete sense. They do, but they don't, and the novel ends on a downbeat note, where one narrative strand resolves clearly, the other rather unravels, and the whole is ultimately less than the sum of its parts. But there is great writing most of the way here, but it feels a little wasted by the author's commitment to incoherence (they might say "mystery"). I'd go as far to say that the book would work much better with the second strand entirely expurgated.