Are self-published books any good? Part 2

The Booker Shortlist

In my quest to compare the opening chapters of professionally published and self-published novels, I have now read through all of the Booker samples. The verdicts are below and the verdicts on the self-published books will be available once I have read through the samples in the next few days.

Emma Donoghue - Room

I didn't think I was going to like this and was a little perplexed as to what it was doing on the Booker shortlist. Given the subject matter I expected a barely fictionalised ambulance-chaser about the Josef Fritzl case, prurient and voyeuristic. On the strength of this sample, I was very wrong.
The technique of telling the story through the eyes of a young boy who knows nothing other than space inside the Room brought a very different dimension to the story to what I expected. It transformed what could have been a true crime cash-in into a very intriguing study of the mind of a human being whose entire world is defined by four walls. I will definitely be reading the full novel.

Howard Jacobson – The Finkler Question

I didn't find this to be quite the stinker I anticipated after reading the reviews on Amazon, but neither did it seem to be the obvious choice for a Booker winner. The typical linguistic flamboyance of Booker winners wasn't present here and I found the prose somewhat bland and cliched, particularly when compared to last year's winner Wolf Hall. The sample worked better on an emotional level: it made me smile at times and some passages were rather poignant.
Despite this, I was a little underwhelmed and I'm not planning to read the whole book. The only reason I wanted to read on a little further was because the sample stopped midway through a paragraph mentioning the importance of windows in Czech history, something that has long struck me as particularly curious.

Damon Galgut – In a Strange Room

This was the Booker nominee that I knew the least about. I didn’t even know the basics of the plot before reading this (very brief) sample. I was impressed with Galgut’s lyrical writing style, although at times he seemed a little too distant from the action. Nothing in this sample would have discouraged me from reading on if I had the full book in front of me, but at the same time I’m not particularly eager to buy it.
Had I been doing a blind test I suspect I would have identified this as a self-published novel. It has the feel of a university creative writing course to it, with its elaborate language and focus on backpacking, which would have led me to wrongly believe it was a first novel. I was genuinely surprised to find it was written by a 47-year-old with a handful of novels already under his belt.

Peter Carey – Parrot and Olivier in America

I’m very glad that this sample was three times as long as In a Strange Room, otherwise I might have reached a very different conclusion. I didn’t really gel with the first half of this sample at all. It lacked incident, the sentences were formidably long and the vocabulary was difficult to the extent that it sometimes looked as if a dictionary had spilled onto the page (I think it was Orwell who said writers should never use a complicated word when an everyday one would do).
Luckily, it got better and by the end of the sample I was keen to find out what happened to Olivier and his dysfunctional aristocratic family. I found the latter half of the sample witty and interesting and I’m definitely keen to see how things develop.

Andrea Levy – The Long Song

A difficult one this. There was nothing wrong with Levy's writing and the situations she drew were interesting enough, but I couldn't help getting the feeling that I had read so much of this type of thing before. There has been a spate of slavery fiction in recent years, making it very tough to find a new angle. The opening paragraphs of The Long Song, with an old woman in the 1800s recalling her past as a slave, reminded me of similar opening paragraphs in Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes. Hill's novel came out just a year before Levy's so they were presumably writing them simultaneously, which just shows how common a theme this is becoming.
My problem with The Long Song is that I didn't find the writing in the opening chapters as compelling as that in The Book of Negroes or in Toni Morrison's Beloved or Alex Haley's Roots. It wasn't bad, but I felt it failed to bring anything new to this crowded genre and that alone didn't inspire me to read on.

Tom McCarthy – C

C was the sample that I was most looking forward to, but as it turned out it certainly wasn’t my favourite on the Booker shortlist. I enjoyed reading it, but it lacked the tension of Room or the vividness of Parrot and Olivier.
It’s a book I might read in the future, but I’m certainly not rushing to buy it at the current Kindle price of £7.80 (the paperback and no doubt a cheaper ebook will come in August. It certainly had potential and could develop into a great read, but for the moment it can wait.