My apologies for the hideous alliteration in the title line, can't resist doing this as often as possible, cheesy though it is. I was supposed to post about this yesterday but fell asleep on the sofa instead otherwise it would have been Sunday Scribbles (this leads me down dangerously silly paths: Tuesday Twitterings, Wednesday Witterings, Thursday Thoughts, Friday Frivolities ..and that's enough).
I have been giving serious consideration to the Man Booker prize, not because I will be reading them all, I 
may be undertaking Elaine's Personal Challenge this year, but I am still very much a novice in the contemporary reading stakes, so am not even thinking of attempting this feat. However, I have two of the 2007 long list to hand ( and I will have to purchase Winnie and Wolf by A N Wilson as it involves Wagner and his music and I can never resist anything written including this), and so decided to have a crack at posting on this award.
First of all, I undertook some research to see which of the Booker prize winners or shortlisted books of the past I have actually read and came up with the following:
- Amsterdam - Ian McEwan
- Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
- Possession - A S Byatt
- Remains of the Day - Ishiguro
- Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner
- Staying on - Paul Scott
- Heat and Dust - Jhabvala
and in the short lists Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood and Pascali's Island - Barry Unsworth.
Now I am aware that this is a pathetically small percentage of all the books nominated since this award's inception, but I feel that it lends an air of spurious authority to this post in that I have at least read some, so here we go.
On reviewing the above titles, I tried to remember what I had felt when reading these books and it came to me that with the possible exception of Hotel du Lac (which I found intensely irritating and wanted to scream at the heroine to Get a Grip) all of these books totally took me over, I could not put them down until I had finished them, I was grumpy if anybody interrupted me during the reading of same, and when I had finally reached the last page and closed it up, I went 'Phew' and the memory of these books stayed with me for some considerable time. Obviously, other books I have read which have never made the list or were even in contention, have had the same effect on me, not as many as I would like, more's the pity, but we are concerned only with Man Booker for the purposes of this post.
So, now I come to The Welsh Girl which I finished yesterday. Set in a strongly nationalist village in Wales, we meet Esther who works in the local pub in the evenings and helps her father on his farm during the day. She speaks good English, not approved of by her father, and longs to leave for the brighter lights of Liverpool or London. A POW camp is built nearby and a contingent of German prisoners is shipped in shortly after D-Day. Among them is Karsten Simmering, trying to come to terms with the fact of his surrender to the enemy, though he really had little choice. Jim, a young evacuee billeted on Esther and her father, haunts the outskirts of the camp along with his gang of friends, and through his conversations with the prisoners, Karsten sees Esther and is drawn towards her. He manages to escape for a few days from the camp and meets up with Esther, who hides him and gives him food, but after an abortive attempt to row to Ireland, he gives himself up.
The main body of the story is built on this relationship and the longing of both Karsten and Esther to be anywhere other than where they are. The aimless daily routine of the POW camp is well done, no Wooden Horse tunnel digging heroics here, just getting through the grinding boredom of each day and trying to survive while waiting for news from the outside world.
As well as Esther and Karsten's story there is another strand and another character. We meet Captain Rotherham, a German Jewish refugee working for British intelligence as an interrogator. At the start of the story he is in the cinema watching a film of a Hitler rally and realises to his horror 'that if he could, he would want nothing more than to join the Nazis. That was the day he realises that he and his mother would have to leave Germany'.
In his role as an interrogator, he is sent to interview Rudolph Hess who is being held in confinement in Wales. It is Rotherham's job to assess if Hess is fit to be sent to trial and he realises that he is expected to find him fit because he, Rotherham, is a Jew, something that Hess spotted immediately and which Rotherham had denied. The book was setting out intriguing possibilities, but then switched abruptly to the capture of Karsten and the events posted above. Rotherham seemed to vanish entirely from the narrative and I was beginning to wonder if he would ever reappear when he popped up in the last twenty pages or so to talk to Hess again. These two sections of the story have the most impact and power and I felt rather short changed that they were so brief. He is then sent to the village to investigate Karsten's escape and finds, to his bitter humour, that he is not wanted in the pub, not because he is German or a Jew, but because he is English.
"....and suddenly it felt not only possible but right to not be German or British, to escape all those debts and duties, the shackles of nationalism. That's what he had glimpsed in the pub, what had sent him into fits of laughter......"
For me, Rotherham was the most interesting character in The Welsh Girl, and I felt he was sorely neglected and the book would have been better if his struggle with his being a Jew and German, had been expanded. As it was, we had a rather simplistic love across the barriers story between Karsten and Esther, who was already pregnant after being raped by Colin, a Sapper in the British Army; we learn vaguely that Karsten worked on the farm after the end of the war, but then went home; Esther's father died in an accident in a mine, and that Esther had remained in the valley with her daughter who she had managed to pass off as the child of a local soldier killed in the war and is respected as a war widow.
We learn all of this in the last twenty or so pages and I felt rushed and suddenly realised I was on the last page. When I closed up the book, I was left with a vague feeling of disappointment, a feeling of 'well, is that it?' and somewhat let down. Please don't misunderstand me, I enjoyed reading this very much, am glad that I did and look forward to reading more of this author, but, somehow, do not think this will make the shortlist even though, according to the blurb, this is a 'memorable writer of sinewy intelligence'.....
But, as my knowledge of contemporary fiction is fairly narrow and my credentials for judging same are somewhat limited, I wait to be proved totally wrong.
