Penelope Lively
The following novels constitute the shortlist for the 1987 Booker Prize:
The judges of the 1987 Booker Prize were: PD James (Chair), Lady Selina Hastings, Allan Massie, Trevor McDonald, and John B Thompson.
Notable Omissions from the 1987 Shortlist
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Moon Tiger Penelope Lively |
Dustjacket synopsis:
"Claudia Hampton - beautiful, famous, independent - is dying.
"Meanwhile she tells her nurses: 'I'm writing a history of the world', the 'whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute'. As memories cloud in, Claudia re-creates the richly patterned mosaic of her life and times, from childhood just after the First World War to the present day. But as Claudia, the successful and popular historian knows, her story is enmeshed with the stories of others, and they too must speak: Gordon, her brother and adored adversary; Jasper, charming, untrustworthy lover and father of Lisa, her cool convetnional daughter - and, at the centre of Claudia's life, Tom, her one great love, both found and lost in wartime Egypt."
Quotes:
"Her most ambitious book to date. I think it is also the best...there is a new emotional
depth to Penelope Lively's writing" - The Times
"A very clever book: it is evocative, thought-provoking and hangs curiously on the edges
of the mind long after it is finished" - Literary Review
"One of the finest British novelists now writing" - Independent
"A complex tapestry of great sublety...Penelope Lively writes so well, savouring the words
as she goes" - Daily Telegraph
First Paragraph:
'I'm writing a history of the world,' she says. And the hands of the nurse are arrested for a moment; she looks down at this old woman, this old ill woman. 'Well, my goodness,' the nurse says. 'That's quite a thing to be doing, isn't it?' And then she becomes busy again, she heaves and tucks and smooths - 'Upsy a bit dear, that's a good girl - then we'll get you a cup of tea.'
A history of the world. To round things off, I may as well - no more nit-picking stuff about Napoleon, Tito, the battle of Edgehill, Hernando Cortez...The works, this time. The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute - from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine. I'm equipped, I consider; electicism has always been my hallmark. That's what they've said, though it has been given other names. Claudia Hampton's range is ambitious, some might say imprudent: my enemies. Miss Hampton's bold conceptual sweep: my friends.
From the Penguin paperback edition, 1988.
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Anthills of the Savannah Chinua Achebe |
Dustjacket synopsis:
"Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, published nearly thirty years ago, was hailed as a
classic and has sold in millions and in over forty languages round the world. His 4th novel
A Man of the People published in 1966 was in Anthony Burgess' 1984 selections of the 99
best novels in English since 1939. Now comes this fine novel full of savage irony, set
in a country where power has corrupted ideals, terror has silenced all but the bravest, and
only fools and flatterers survive.
"Two years after the military coup which swept a brilliant young Sandhurst-trained army officer to power, an uneasy calm reigns in the backward West African state of Kangan. The failure of the referendum to make him President-for-Life has left His Excellency nervous and embittered, and more and more he looks to his bullish head of state security for reassurance and a firm hand with those he suspects of disloyalty.
"For the men who helped put him in power, his oldest friends, the future is suddenly dangerous and uncertain. Chris Okiro, Commissioner for Information, whom His Excellency blames for the referendum defeat, knows his days are numbered as his former classmate grows into the role of ruthless dictator. Ikem Osodi, poet and editor of the National Gazette, is just as uneasy but believes his crusading editorials may yet have influence on his childhood friend. In the blood-letting that follows a peaceful demonstration from the drought-stricken north, both men are in danger of their lives. Together with their friend Beatrice Okah, who is strong, beautiful and wise, they are players in a drama of love and friendship, betrayal and death, that mirrors the history of their troubled land.
"Anthills of the Savannah is an outstanding novel of contemporary Africa, bleak, angry, disenchanted and yet, ultimately, full of hope."
First Paragraph:
'You're wasting everybody's time, Mr Commissioner for Information. I will not go to Abazon. Finish! Kabisha! Any other business?'
'As Your Excellency wishes. But...'
'But me no buts. Mr Oriko! The matter is closed, I said. How many times, for God's sake, am I expected to repeat it? Why do you find it so difficult to swallow my ruling. On anything?'
'I am sorry, Your Excellency. But I have no difficulty swallowing and digesting your rulings.'
For a full minute or so the fury of his eyes lay on me. Briefly our eyes had been locked in combat. The I had lowered mine to the shiny table-top in ceremonial capitulation. Long silence. But he was not appeased. Rather he was making the silence itself grow rapidly into its own kind of contest, like the eyewink duel of children. I conceded victory there as well. Without raising my eyes I said again: 'I am very sorry, Your Excellency.' A year ago I would never had said it again that second time - without doing grave violence myself. Now I did it as a casual favour to him. It meant nothing at all to me - no inconvenience whatever - and yet everything to him.
From the Heineman hardback edition, 1987.
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Chatterton Peter Ackroyd |
Dustjacket synopsis:
"What is the mystery of Thomas Chatterton? A young poet and elderly female novelist try to
decode the clues found within an eighteenth-century manuscript, only to discover that their
investigation is disclosing other secrets for which there is no solution. But they are not
alone in their quest: the mystery is being revived in an earlier age, as in the mid-nineteenth
century Henry Wallis paints his celebrated portrait of Chatterton lying dead in an attic room.
And Chatterton himself, the young man who was described as the originator and inspiration of
the Romantic Movement, steps forward with his own story of the events that happened in August
1770.
"Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton is about death. It is about plagiarism. It is about the nature of poetry. In Hawksmoor Mr Ackroyd introduced a new sense of time into English fiction, and now in his latest work he has extended his range in ways that will surprise and delight the readers of his earlier novel. Chatterton is at once both tragic and profoundly comic, a meditation on human destiny and a satire on human folly."
First Paragraph:
'Come,' he said. 'Let us take a walk into the meadow. I have got the cleverest thing for you that ever was. It is worth half a crown merely to have me read it to you.'
He waved the little book at her, but his eager manner frightened the girl and she walked away from him quickly. Then, taking courage from the sight of a friend sitting on the church steps, she called out to him over her shoulder, 'What a poor boy you are, to be sure. And Lord, Tom, how your shoes gape open!'
From the Hamish Hamilton hardback edition, 1987.
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Circles of Deceit Nina Bawden |
Dustjacket synopsis:
"This is a story about lies and truths and about a painter, a copyist, who paints modern versions
of Old Masters and is 'bothered by bills and artistic conscience in about equal measure...susceptible
to, bullied and badgered by women'. Major figures on the foreground of his crowded life
canvas are Clio, his child-bride and her young boy; Helen, his first wife who left him, badly,
but never really separates; and his mother who observes it all with a splendidly caustic humour.
In the background, always, is his own silent son. Nina Bawden is at her best in this novel about
the bumbling yet herioc ways we try to defeat the impossibility of protecting another human
being with love."
Quotes:
"Plays with time and notions of forgery and fidelity in life and art, as well as tracing with
extraordinary exactness and creative tact, the pain and survival of loss of a loved one" -
Guardian
First Paragraph:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of a wood:
They never forget
That even the dreadful martydom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scatches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the foresaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
'Musée des Beaux arts' by W.H. Auden
The key is the torturer's horse; the apparent irrelevance to what is, in fact, the main theme. I think this is the point of the poem but I cannot be certain. I distrust poetry. It has always seemed to me the most deceitful art, full of attention-seeking tricks, like a child showing off. Look at me, how clever, bet you can't guess what I mean. But I like this particular poem.
From the Virago paperback edition, 1997.
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The Colour of Blood Brian Moore |
Quotes:
"With its rapid pace and persistent atmosphere of polite menace Moore has created a brilliant
thriller - but it is much more than that...As in Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory
the personal crisis of one man of God is set against the greater conflict of Church and State
and, despite the overwhelming forces of evil, a spiritual triumph is finally achieved.
Superficially, The Colour of Blood may seem less complex but its effect is just as
impressive" - Time Out
"Brian Moore leads the field with a style that can only be called immaculate. The Colour
of Blood is a superbly constructed suspense narrative. You can't put it down" - The Guardian
"A Hitchcockian sequence of chases, shaken certainties, mistaken identities, masquerades,
detections and escapes. Brian Moore has always shown a mastery of suspense, and having turned
his hand now to the political thriller he has produced something exemplary...easily the most
accomplished new novel I have read this year" - Sunday Telegraph
"Surprise is the essence of this beautifully crafted novel. Brian Moore's versatility, his
life-long refusal to keep writing the same book over again, is too much taken for granted. He
is a novelist who can be read for pleasure...he writes simply and economically, but with a true
generosity of vision" - The Observer
First Paragraph:
The car taking him back to the Residence entered Proclamation Square sometime between nine and nine-fifteen. He had not looked at his watch since leaving the meeting. It was raining, a summer shower. In the square, the statues, roofs and monumental buildings were wetted slick; the pavement glistened. He switched on the pencil lamp over his clipboard to read, not his notes, but a small book by Bernard of Clairvaux.
Do you not think that a man born with reason yet not living according to his reason is, in a certain way, no better than the beasts themselves? For the beast who does not rule himself by reason has an excuse, since this gift is denied him by nature. But man has no excuse.
Sometimes, reading St Bernard, he could abandon the world of his duties and withdraw into that silence where God waited and judged. But now he saw, peripherally, a black car racing very close to his. He turned to look. The driver, a woman, wore a green silk scarf tied around her head. Beside her in the passenger seat, a bearded man, holding a revolver in both hands, raised it, aiming at him. In that moment, Joseph, his chauffeur, wrenched the steering wheel around, deliberately crashing into the black car. Tumbled as in a centrifuge, he was buffeted and thrown clear, his body thudding on wet pavement. He lay for a long moment in a painful stupor staring at the ineluctable darkness of the night sky.
From the Paladin paperback edition, 1988.
Notes:
The Colour of Blood won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
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The Book and the Brotherhood Iris Murdoch |
Dustjacket synopsis:
"Iris Murdoch's twenty-third novel begins at a midsummer ball at Oxford, where a group of men
and women - friends since university days - have gathered. Under the stars they dance: the
charismatic Gerard Hernshaw; Rose Curtland, who has loved Gerard in silence for years; Duncan
Cambus and his restless wife Jean; Jenkin Riderhood, the saintly schoolmaster who is the
group's moral center; Tamar Hernshaw, Gerard's tomented niece; and, not least of all, David
Crimond, the monomaniacal Marxist genius. Years ago, the friends bonded together to finance a
political and philosophical book to be written by Crimond as a memorial to Sinclair Curtland,
Rose's brother; on this summer's evening, Crimond's actions at the ball touch off a crisis, and
by the night's end the vindictive ghosts of the past have effectively invaded the present.
"The Book and the Brotherhood then proceeds at a pace by turns reflective and violent: passion, hatred, a duel, murder, and a suicide pact disturb the old world of academic reflections and skating parties at country weekends. Partners change, Crimond's book is completed, somebody has to die.
"Of Iris Murdoch's last novel, Harold Bloom said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, "If The Good Apprentice marks the start of her strongest phase, and it may, then a great novel could yet come, rather surprisingly in the...form of the 19th-century realistic novel." This is the form of The Book and the Brotherhood: in its pages Iris Murdoch's genius for portraying the texture of experience makes love, politics, friendship, and the characters caught up in them palpable and immediate. And her wisdom and breadth of vision illuminate their story with a special radiance. The Book and the Brotherhood is a work of astonishing power."
Quotes:
"A thoroughly gripping, stimulating and challenging fiction...Iris Murdoch takes the conventional
romance into nightmare territory" - Stuart Evans, The Times
"The structure is that of a suspense novel, at times the romantic suspense novel...Ms. Murdoch
is here operating at the height of her formidable talents for language, for narrative, and
plot. And in describing emotional states running their crazy course she is superb -
Peter Lennon, The Guardian
"This is Dame Iris's 23rd novel. It is the real thing, no 50,000 novella, and it has the
assurance of a writer who has worked long in the medium...Her characters care about the human
condition and so, clearly, does their creator." - Anthony Burgess, The Observer
First Paragraph:
'David Crimond is here in a kilt!'
"Good God, is Crimond here? Where is he?'
'Over in that tent or marquee or whatever you call it. He's with Lily Boyne.'
The first speaker was Gulliver Ashe, the second was Conrad Lomas. Gulliver was a versatile, currently unemployed, young Englishman in his early thirties, pointedly vague about his age. Conrad was a more gorgeously young American student. He was taller than Gulliver who was rated as tall. Gulliver had never hitherto met Conrad, but he had heard of him and had addressed his remark which caused such excitement to, jointly, Conrad and his partner Tamar Hernshaw. The scene was the so-much-looked-forward-to Commemm Ball at Oxford, and the time about eleven p.m. It was midsummer and the night was not yet, and was indeed never entirely to be, dark. Above the various lighted marquees, from which various musics streamed, hung a sky of dusty blue already exhibiting a few splintery yellow stars. The moon, huge, crumbly like a cheese, was still low down among trees beyond the little streamlets of the river Cherwell which bounded the more immediate territory of the college.
From the Viking hardback edition, 1988.
Notable Omissions from the Shortlist:
"The Radiant Way", Margaret Drabble
"The Child in Time", Ian McEwan
"The Enigma of Arrival", V.S. Naipaul
"In the Skin of a Lion", Michael Ondaatje
"The Other Garden", Francis Wyndham
This page and its contents are copyright © 2002 by Perry Middlemiss, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Last modified: April 16, 2002.