Literary prizes are not a viable betting proposition. Second guessing a panel of judges is probably not something I'm going to do again but this year, after the fact, I certainly thought I should have backed my feeling that Hilary Mantel would win again. I was afraid of Will Self- who isn't- but can see now that him winning was not a realistic outcome. Alison Moore's debut novel was never likely to win either but I'm glad it was short-listed to bring it to my attention because I liked it a lot.
It is 'slight' but accomplished and beautifully made like a poem with its recurring images, themes and understated language.
Futh, the main character, goes on a walking holiday after the break-up of his marriage and both his childhood and marriage are recounted in flashbacks. There is also the life of the couple who run the inn in which he stays at the beginning and end of the walk.
He is an unprepossessing character, awkward and somehow secondary in his relationships with his father, his childhood friend Kenny, his wife, the hotel people and even Kenny's mother. He works in the less masculine world of perfumiers, which is not approved of by his over-bearing father, and smells, whether redolent of place and time or those of alcohol or smoking caught on the breath of others, are a central theme of the narrative. He has a habit of checking out emergency escape routes whenever staying in an unfamiliar room and his father bores his mother on the subject of lighthouses during their unhappy time together.
It is an unhappy book with all of the characters defined by their dissatisfactions, the tawdry or unredeeming sex they pursue or engage in and their obvious inability to escape such circumstances. Futh's walk significantly takes a wrong route, doesn't deliver much relief from the life he is leaving behind but the steady rhythm of the sentences draws us on towards a gripping climax as the ordinary and undramatic chapters sustain an undertow of vague threat until leaving us, expertly delivered, through lighthouse references, to a point of apparent no return.
Possibly not somehow big enough, despite Julian Barnes' win with an equally short book last year, to win such a prize but a very good novel and I'm pleased for its author, publisher and for myself as a reader that the shortlist surely brought it to a wider readership.
