The importance of earnest Byng

The death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn last Sunday provoked immense interest, both in the press and in terms of sales of his books, which was heartening. I'm not sure I can think of a more worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I remember in the last days of the Major administration a poll of MPs was conducted to find the favourite book of the House of Commons. The surprising runaway winner was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a result which hinted at some desperate attempt by the Conservative Party Whips Office to depict its moribund representation as possessed of both moral integrity and intellectual sophistication. I wonder what a similar poll today would identify, with the Labour Party as unpopular now as the Tories were then? Probably The Kite Runner. I'm sure that would tick the right boxes: empathetic, multicultural, popular with people who have no taste of their own.


Solzhenitsyn's passing reminded me of one of the more questionable novels to have achieved Booker recognition, The Industry of Souls by Martin Booth, which made the shortlist in 1998. It owes a great deal to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, portraying life in a Siberian labour camp through the twenty-year ordeal of a suspected British spy. It's rather sparing on the unrelenting misery of it all and the sex scene, where some of the internees temporarily escape their guardians and run into some female prisoners in caves, is about as plausible as a description of a swingers' party in Ann Widdecombe's autobiography.

Aside from that, it's not a bad book, just an unnecessary one, doing moderately well what Solzhenitsyn had already done with rather more style and authenticity. Solzhenitsyn-lite, if you will, Sebastian Faulks goes to the gulag.

Snowy wastes are also the setting for this year's unlikely Booker candidate, Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. The press as usual had little more to say on the announcement of the longlist than installing Salman Rushdie as de jure favourite, what with his being the only one the average news reporter seems to have heard of, despite the fact the Prize's most notorious previous winner, John Berger is also on the longlist. Odds are usually first given by Graham Sharpe of William Hill, who always cheerfully admits that he has almost nothing on which to base his initial figures. I suspect this year the bookies have been prowling blogs, as Netherland is now shortest priced and it's the book which probably received the most pre-longlist Booker tips.

So we in the trade are grateful to Jamie Byng at Canongate who, in typically rambunctious style, let rip on the Booker website with a tirade, dismissing Child 44 as "a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that".

I'd like to defend Child 44. Not as a Booker choice, because Byng is right that it shouldn't be on there. But it's a fantastic thriller, with the brilliant premise of trying to track down a serial killer in Stalin's Russia, where - officially - there is no crime. It has characters to believe in and care about, monstrous villains and a spectacular descriptive backdrop. But by whichever criteria one might define literary fiction, Child 44 is isn't. The writing is purposeful but never poetic, effective but never ethereal.

But Byng's beef was that it had been chosen over The Spare Room by Helen Garner, which he says is "is a modern classic that will continue to be read and enjoyed and appreciated long after all of us are dead".

Considering the fact that most shortlisted titles from the 70s, a significant number from the 80s and a surprising number from the 90s are out of print, I think that's a ludicrously optimistic assessment of the life of a novel. But a few other posters on the website concurred, if not in quite so fulsome terms, so I thought I'd give it a try.

And I'm certainly glad I did, as it's a truly memorable piece of writing. I do wonder, however, if it was omitted on the grounds of length. At 175 pages, it's scarcely longer than On Chesil Beach, the book on last year's shortlist which some felt should be excluded on the grounds of its being a novel, rather than a full length work of fiction. The Spare Room too might reasonably be described as a novella: the story is simple, linear and brief and and its first person narrative obviously limits its perspectives.

But much of its power resides in its simplicity. It is account of friendship, told from the point of view of Helen whose friend Nicola has come to stay with her while she undergoes a radical new vitamin C treatment in a desperate attempt to fight off the cancer which only Helen has conceded is terminal.

Bravely, the book focusses on how difficult it is, both physically and psychologically, to provide care for a terminal cancer victim. Their long-standing friendship obliges Helen to devote herself to her friend, draining her utterly, but the pain that Nicola endures makes it difficult for her to object. Only when another friend challenges the doctor who has hoodwinked Nicola is Helen finally able to confront Nicola with the truth: that she cannot cope and that Nicola must accept what is happening to her.

Curiously, Peter Carey's jacket quote that this is 'a perfect novel' and the earnestness of Jamie Byng's defence made me analyse the prose with far greater scrutiny than I might otherwise have done. It reminded me a little of Plainsong by Kent Haruf, another book which doesn't waste a word and which relies on the unadorned authenticity of its account to draw the reader in.

The Spare Room isn't quite so effective: its very occasional purple flowering jars, but that is in part because of the great care with which it has been put together. One sequence ends with the phrase "...she pedalled away in a westerly direction": the last four words add nothing to the meaning, but its particularly significant position means that one cannot help but analysing it and thereby finding is flawed.

There were perhaps no more than a handful of these instances and I'm sure that were I to pay to such attention to something more sprawlingly conceived I should find The Spare Room to be far more consistent. I've just read Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek, a diverting enough thriller with an interesting variation on the 'I woke up and it was all a dream' trope; it's translated from the original German and a couple of times, the word 'corpse' is used where 'body' would be more idiomatic. It caused me to pause, but on the whole the undemanding style meant that its slightly stilted and repetitive phraseology did its job.

The Spare Room achieves what it sets out to do almost unerringly, managing to confront its theme with a directness which is remarkable given the potential sensitivity of the topic. But I'm not sure it does anything much more than that. The book and its characters don't live on in my thoughts.

It should have made the longlist. But, then again, I feel just as strongly that The Outcast, In God's Country and One Morning Like A Bird should have made it. All of which proves nothing except that commentators dismissing 2008 as a bad year for fiction have either been reading the wrong books or are obsessed with established writers.

So Helen Garner has some way to go before achieving immortality, despite the vehemence of Byng's protestations. John Ruskin wrote, "All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time". The achievements of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn show quite how far even someone as talented as Helen Garner has to go in order to make that leap.