Orange Prize Shortlist 2006

The shortlist for The Orange Prize was announced yesterday. Inevitably it includes the usual suspects: Ali & Zadie Smith – which reminded me that I still haven’t read On Beauty.

One of Richard & Judy’s Book Club 2006 choices – The History of Love by Nicole Krauss – is also on the list, although the winner – Labyrinth – was not entered as its author Kate Mosse is one of the co-founders of the Orange Prize. The other three contenders are the best-selling novelist Hilary Mantel for Beyond Black, first-timer Carrie Tiffany for Everyman’s Rules For Scientific Living, and Sarah Waters with Night Watch – which is currently being serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book At Bedtime.

Newsnight’s Martha Kearney is chairing the judging panel, which includes the comedienne and novelist Jenny Éclair, Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas, columnist and novelist India Knight and children’s laureate Jacqueline Wilson. The winner will be announced on June 6th.

The six books on the shortlist for the £30,000 Orange Prize are:

Memento Mori

I was listening to the radio this afternoon while taking one last thorough browse round my favourite but, sadly, soon-to-be-closed bargain bookstore (amazingly I did manage to resist the temptation to buy anything) when I heard on the news that Dame Muriel Spark had passed away. I moaned quietly. Well, I hope it was quiet. I knew she was getting on a bit (she was 88) but it’s still sad to hear that one of my favourite living authors is no more.

The bookshop had one of her books in stock – two together in fact: Aiding and Abetting / The Go-Away Bird. I loved Aiding and Abetting – a deliciously witty story (aren’t they all though?) about a psychiatrist who suddenly finds herself consulted by two different patients both claiming to be Lord Lucan. It’s a pity the miseryguts Booker Prize judges didn’t see fit to shortlist it that year (as they had in 1969 and 1981). The Go-Away Bird on the other hand is yet another one of those books-I-haven’t-read. I didn’t buy it though – the bright red cover design would look garish next to my other Muriel Spark books which are orange Penguin paperbacks. I picked most of them up as a job lot in a sale at West Bridgford library a few years ago, and I’ve been looking forward – ok: meaning – to read them ever since.

Coincidentally I’d seen one of them in my local library earlier this morning, it was her first novel:

The Comforters

Although her first break had come six years earlier, in 1951, when she won a short story competition in The Observer. I’d pleased to see that The Observer have republished that story: The Seraph and the Zambesi.

In all there are ten of her books sitting on my shelves, most of them still waiting to be read:

The Comforters (1957)
Robinson (1958)
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960)
The Bachelors (1960)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)
*The Public Image (1968)
The Abbess of Crewe (1974)
The Takeover (1976)
*Loitering With Intent (1981)

*shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

I will treat myself to one of them tomorrow; and, I suppose in the circumstances, I really must get hold of her 1959 book: Memento Mori…

Island

The next book-I-haven’t-read-yet was chosen by chance. I just opened The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction at random and the first name I saw was: Gary Indiana. Nope, never heard of him; but on the opposite page was a picture of a book I did know, one I was very keen to get hold of a few years ago, and eventually did…and yet I still haven’t read it. This is the picture…

Island

by Aldous Huxley

I found my copy of Island in the pile next to my printer rather than in its place on the shelf, which means it is probably within twenty or thirty places of the front of my to-be-read queue. Coincidentally, I came across a perceptive reference to Huxley’s Brave New World while I was reading Dubravka Ugresic’s Thank You For Not Reading last week (I went back to the library and got it out after all) and she quotes this passage from Neil Postman’s Foreword to his book Amusing Ourselves to Death:

“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

When I read I Brave New World I was astounded at how it seemed to be getting more and more relevant every day. I’ve always felt that Orwell was too pessimistic in his view of humanity: oppressive regimes are always overthrown eventually. It’s not the boot stamping on the face forever that we have to fear, it’s the laziness in the face of an information overload, the shhh-Corrie’s-on I-don’t-want-to-think-about-it attitude, the lure of blissful ignorance and of soma.

But going back to Island, or “Huxley’s Utopia” as the blurb describes it, the quote on the cover describes it thus:

“Huxley’s last novel in which the horrors of Brave New World melt into the vision of an eastern state governed by reason and love.”

Fascinating. I really must read it…someday.

There’s an Island Foundation devoted to “creating a more sensible society as inspired by the ideas of Aldous Huxley.” Good luck to them. Their website is here.