The Walter Scott Prize 2019 — the shortlist reviewed by bookseller Charlie Bush

The Walter Scott Prize is awarded for fiction of exceptional quality and set in the past. The lion’s share of the storyline must be at least be at least 60 years ago and this rule is drawn from the subtitle of Walter Scott’s Waverley: ‘Tis sixty years since’.

The award is made at the Borders Book Festival at Scott’s home in the shadow of Melrose Abbey at the end of this week. Past winners of the prize have included Sebastian Barry, Andrea Levy and Benjamin Myers. Whilst other literary prizes must fret over corporate sponsorship, the Walter Scott enjoys the patronage of the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, distant relatives of historical novelist Scott himself. First awarded in 2010, the prize was founded by the Buccleuchs and festival director Alistair Moffat, to reflect what, inaugural winner Hilary Mantel with Wolf Hall (and how excited are we to get our hands on the concluding book in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy next spring), described as a turning point in the fortunes of the historical novel. She suggested that the fortunes of historical fiction were looking up and that it was no longer quite as ‘deeply unrespectable’ as it once was.

The sense that historical novels has been rather looked down upon as ‘mere genre fiction’, not to be taken seriously as works of quality, may exist in some quarters. A publisher of a literary novel with a historical setting may resist this categorisation for their authors. I do wonder if this argument might be rather overstated, two of the shortlisted novels for the prize this year are previous Booker winners, Peter Carey twice, for historical novels — well before any ‘Wolf Hall turn’.

This debate aside, a decade on, how are things looking?

The shortlist for the Walter Scott prize is strong and it has been a great pleasure to read the list. This year’s list is strongly weighted to the Twentieth Century, with four of the six shortlisted titles set substantially in the 1940s and 50s. Of the remaining two, the early Nineteenth Century and the late Fifteenth Century are our scene. This chronological cluster is, in some ways, something of a shame and did, I confess, reduce my initial enthusiasm. However, the period of social transformation during and after the Second World War is ripe for novelists and the fruit is nourishing and varied. Thanks to the judges and prize academy for such an excellent selection.

First in my reading and in chronology is Samantha Harvey’s The Western Wind. The past, as we know, is another country but this novel is the only one on the list that is set in the firmly foreign pre-modern era. Part of the brilliance of Harvey’s medieval murder mystery is how vividly she conjures up a mental landscape of the period, replete with a real and overwhelming existential fear of the work of devils and the wrath of God. And yet, like the end of the second world war, the end of the fifteenth century is a time of loosening of society’s conventions and a certain waning of authority and this tension is fascinatingly explored.

The novel opens with a Somerset river in spate and the wealthiest man of the village of Oakham, Thomas Newman, presumed drowned in the flood. The reluctant village priest, John Reve, is tasked by Church authorities to investigate.

Oakham is isolated by the river and is, it is claimed, the only village in England to have a confession box. This Italian innovation is introduced out of desperation, due to villagers reluctant to confess their sins in person to their priest and neighbour: was it his poultry that they have stolen or his sister’s bed into which they had crept? The novel is written largely through the confessions of Oakham’s parishioners. These encounters, through a loosely-woven hazel screen providing a questionable anonymity, permit a performance of sincerity and, variously, frantic piety and fatalistic impiety. Closing the curtain of the confession allows the curtain to be lifted on parishioners’ perception of their world, relatively unencumbered by feudal niceties.

Inevitably, what passed between penitents and confessors in 1491 is, more or less, wholly lost but Harvey’s construction feels convincing on the experience of treading the knife’s edge between fleshy frailty and damnation in the face of failing harvests, petty jealousies and the spectre of disease. This tortuous landscape is most compelling explored through the person of John Reve, the priest himself, whose burden as curer of souls, responsible for the eternal life of everyone in the parish weighs heavily.

Keen to avoid the tropes and conventions of whodunits, historical or otherwise, Harvey adopts a reverse structure, with the novel starting four days after Newman goes missing and working backwards, day by day. Reve’s reluctance to uncover the truth and his desire to turn back time to before Newman’s death bleeds into this temporal structure, coagulating to form a dreadful sense that some secrets are best left to lie. Into the mystifying medieval world, a story told backwards could bring greater muddle, yet, the careful unpeeling of plot functions as a clearing of the clouds and made this, I found, all the more compelling a read. In the Western Wind, Harvey has artfully constructed an atmospheric and human story that both sheds light and casts dark shadows.

Opening in the late 1930s, Cressida Connolly’s After the Party revolves around three upper class sisters and their families living in Sussex, after the middle sister Phyllis Forrester has returned from South America. The sisters and their husbands are idealistic and minded to see social improvement, to make Britain great again. The development of motorways, employment of urban youth and the regeneration of the high street are all preoccupations. Phyllis and her husband Greville are encouraged into joining a new movement by her rather grand older sister Patricia. Phyllis throws herself dutifully into volunteering to run the laundry and catering for the Party’s summer camps for inner city youths, becoming increasingly involved in the movement and its bid for political power.

It is, of course, big society gone bad. The adulation of the Party’s Great Leader, known as the Old Man, is akin to something more recently seen on the left of contemporary British politics. Keen students of Twentieth Century will, from a brief synopsis of this book, however have guessed that Phyllis has become involved in a rather different sort of socialism. The summer camps and political meetings are all endeavours of the British Union of Fascists. Connolly’s novel is sufficiently subtle that although abstractly the ideology of the party is obvious but she manages deftly to make the revelation that the Great Leader is Oswald Mosley feel somehow surprising.

After the Party can serve as a salutary lesson in the insidiousness of sinister nationalistic ideology, hidden in plain sight, behind the neat veneer of duty, national pride and — even — respectability. Connolly’s characters are not pure political party cadre automatons, indeed the greater preoccupations of the characters are sisterly competition, dinner parties, affairs and the avoidance of caring for their elderly parents.

In this novel, the plasticity of deeply-held opinions and the rehabilitation of those who hold detestable views demonstrates how socially embedded political and ideological opinions have always been. This is demonstrated by how Phyllis’ more socially-aware and better-connected sister, Patricia, avoids being interned. The difference between dangerous fifth columnists who must be interned for the security of the realm and entirely forgivable eccentrics with strong views is to a great extent dictated by social capital, even in a state at total war. Connolly also demonstrates the contingency of events — Phyllis’ own internment, first at Holloway and, later in the War, on the Isle of Man is consequence of a decision, neither ideological nor particularly remarkable.

The second part of the novel concerns the imprisonment of Phyllis or ‘rank and file’ party members. Connolly’s treatment of this rather sorry lot is not a monsterising portrayal, indeed they are entirely pathetic and bewildered. Isolated by their membership of a nationalist party affiliated with the Nazis, they are cut off from the great national endeavour of their time and made pariahs beyond the pale. The novel is told in part through the device of Phyllis’ recollections for a journalist in 1979 and encourages the reader to think of dangers of isolation, as well as those of social acceptability of hard nationalism. After the Party is a subtle and revealing piece of work, written with an adroit hand.

The remaining novels on the shortlist, all fall into a distinctively post-war milieu and deal, to some extent, with surviving a war but still carrying its scars. Swapping the twentieth century for the nineteenth, the war of Costa-winning Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is the Peninsula War and, particularly, the disastrous retreat through Spain by the British Army. John Lacroix is a British cavalry officer returned to his family home more dead than alive after a particularly harrowing war, deeply effected by some terrible event during the miserable escape from the French. This novel is an evocative portrayal of trauma and an attempt to outrun it, as well as the possibility of finding freedom in a life beyond the war.

Recovered from his injuries and catatonic state, Lacroix resolves to desert the army and flee north to the isles of the Scotland to recuperate and continue his father’s efforts at collecting the music to be heard there as a form of escapre. With little more than his fiddle, a pistol and cash hidden in his boots, Lacroix travels by ship and increasingly smaller boats, outwards from the civilised and thoroughly corrupted cities of Bristol and Glasgow, to the Hebrides. Miller captures the fundamental spirit of these dreich islands in some of the most captivating writing in the novel. On the isles, Lacroix falls in with a trio of free-thinking siblings living on the periphery of the civilised world. Lacroix’s escape seems complete but a life of recuperation with one of the Fender siblings, the direct, independent and spirited Emily, will not be so easily won. Something — or someone — ominous has followed Lacroix back from the war.

A British and Spanish joint tribunal back in Spain has investigated a ghastly atrocity visited upon Spanish peasant by British soldiers during the retreat. The junta insist that there is a price that must be paid and for the sake of the alliance, a vicious British corporal and an observing Spanish officer are ordered to track down and deal summarily with the scapegoat officer deemed responsible, without the burden of a court martial. This possibly improbable scenario leads to Lacroix being pursued by an unlikely but determined pair.

Fleshy and natural, this novel avoids the dreamlike fuzziness that sometimes creeps into others on the shortlist. Here any haziness is a direct result of copious laudanum and whisky, self-administered. Violence and murder abound but this is also a novel that relishes music, friendship and science. Miller’s writing has humour and contrast, indeed many of the most amusing lines are from the mouth of the menacing Corporal Calley — especially in relation to his horror at travelling over water or his attempts to induct the Spanish officer, Medina, into the British ritual of tea making.

Miller’s characters are strongly realised and instantly iconic: Calley, the single-minded hunter is compelled by an almost psychotic sense of duty, a child labourer in the cotton mills and then professional soldier. He is both a product of the war and its instrument of revenge. Emily’s determined independence and the desperate bravery with which she faces the gradual loss of her sight make her a memorable character who displays an agency that is remarkable for the period but also wholly convincing. With pace, plot and drive, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is an absolutely engrossing and shimmering book, with an atmospheric and authentic sense of its Georgian setting.

The characters of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight also struggle to shake off a war that will not rest. Set mainly in London and opening in 1945, Nathaniel and his sister Rachel are abandoned by their parents who, they are told, are moving to Singapore for their father’s work. The teenagers are left at home to fend for themselves under the casual supervision of a mysterious lodger and family friend that they nickname Moth. Warlight is an elegiac and river mist-wreathed book that wrestles with memory, repression and alienation.

In the absence of their parents, the siblings are exposed to an eccentric cast of Moth’s enigmatic, cipher-like, friends and acquaintances, who include a boxer turned greyhound smuggler, a glamorous anthropologist and a beekeeper who might be an art thief and all orbit around this melancholy household. Escapades that verge on the illegal follow in fragmented and illusionary episodes that capture the uncertainty and free fall of life in London immediately after the war. River voyages with ‘The Darter’ feel particularly redolent and form a touchstone for the whole book. In the second half of the novel, an adult Nathaniel looks back on his teenage years, attempting to overcome repression and gaps in his memory, to understand his mother and the consequences of her secret war work. Ondaatje is on his own ground here, the reconstruction of half-forgotten adolescences was a preoccupation in a previous novel, The Cat’s Table.

It is not only personal memory that is under exploration in Warlight; adult Nathaniel’s works for a secret department of the government with responsibility for deletion of war records that posterity would read unfavourably. His work allows him to uncover what his mother’s war as an special operations executive agent and through this create his own portrayal of her life. There are huge questions of reliability about what Nathaniel extrapolates from records about her life while, before her death, she remains tight-lipped and estranged from him. Warlight plays fascinatingly with recollection, projection and possibly plain delusion: Nathaniel imagines what cannot be know from the archives, including her relationship with the enigmatic Moth. Ondaatje masterfully navigates the waters of memory, fiction and history to create a novel that engages without cliché with wartime and espionage literature.

Robin Robertson’s The Long Take won the Goldsmith Prize, which recognises novels that break the mould and do something daring by extending the possibilities of what a novel can be. The Long Take is certainly the mostly formally unusual of the books on the Walter Scott shortlist, taking a poetical epic form. The Long Take’s unrhyming passages of verse, follow the life of Second World War veteran Walker as he returns to North America and a land unfit for heroes. Interspersed with the verse, prose paragraphs recollect, in ghastly detail, Walker’s war experience including the horror of beach landings on D-Day.

Walker too has guilty secrets that he carries about with him as he tries to settle in city after city, roaming from New York to Los Angeles to San Francisco unable recover from his memories. Robertson writes compelling about the plight of all these men who suffered in the slaughterhouse of war, for whom Walker is an everyman, and how their lives afterwards was plagued by those horrors. Walker’s search for a purpose is beset by the trauma he has suffered which does not allow him to move on, in a country that progresses inexorably.

The Long Take is a book that must be read to be fully appreciated. It is unrelenting and at times hard to read but, all the while, an essential piece of work that will enter the post-war literature canon.

Double Booker winner and one of Australia’s foremost novelists, Peter Carey’s book A Long Way From Home is ostensibly about the wild and long-distance, round-Australia car race of the 1950s — the Redex Trial. However, Carey has something rather more substantial in his sights, namely the plight of Australia’s aboriginal population with a particular emphasis on integration, lack thereof, and the complicated issue of passing. A Long Way From Home is the only novel on the shortlist to engage seriously with colonialism and its consequences, even though this is only, substantially, in the closing part of the book.

A Long Way From Home is told throughout as a double hander with alternating chapters from the perspectives of Irene Bobs, a sharp-witted and efficient driver and wife of Titch (the best car dealer in the state of Victoria), who is quite capable of taking herself and their neighbour Willie Bachhuber, a rather hopeless schoolmaster and quiz show and cartography nerd, who is not. Theirs are two entirely distinct voices, such that you can open the book on any page, read a sentence and know instantly whether you are in an Irene or Willie chapter. They embark together on the race for different reasons, the Bobs are after the acclaim and celebrity that will propel them to ownership of a lucrative Ford dealership. Willie has lost his job, his place on a radio quiz show and his sense of self, and so, because Irene asks him, this directionless young man becomes their navigator.

There are a lot of motors, gaskets, engines and springs in this novel and Carey has evidently drawn heavily on his own childhood when his parents, like the Bobs, ran a dealership in the town of Bacchus Marsh. It might be argued that this rather subverts the prize’s intention that the novels cannot be drawn from personal experience. The part of the novel in Bacchus Marsh before the race starts is a little too drawn out, while the Redex Trial, when it comes, is pacely written and the reckless thrill of this lethal marathon is gripping.

Halfway around Australia, a falling-out leads to Willie abandon the race and become marooned, ostensibly a long way from home. He takes up a job as a teacher of aboriginal children on a vast estate ranch. Willie’s efforts to teach his white geography of Australia are complicated by elder aboriginal people’s perspective on their land and by a wholly unexpected revelation. Willie is drawn involuntarily into a greater understanding of aboriginal cultures and the atrocities and marginalisation suffered at the hands of white Australians. It could be a structural flaw that this episode comes so late on and is not as fully explored as the reader might like. Nevertheless, Carey has laid careful and understated groundwork and, in many ways, the earlier body of the novel is the essential set-up to Willie’s discovery and would undoubtedly reward re-reading.

So, six novels shortlisted, who will win the Walter Scott Prize at the Borders Book Festival on Saturday?

My hunch would be that Warlight by Michael Ondaatje is the odds on favourite while The Long Take by Robin Robertson would be a good outside bet. Personally, I would be delighted to see Andrew Miller’s Now We Shall Be Entirely Free or The Western Wind take the prize.

And, if none of these catch your fancy, there many compelling historical novels that did not make the shortlist, including Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile by Alice Jolly, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan and Painter to the King by Amy Sackville.

The winner has now been announced — congratulations to Robin Robertson, author of The Long Take. The judges said

“Robertson shows us things we’d rather not see and asks us to face things we’d rather not face. But with the pulsing narrative drive of classic film noir, the vision of a poet, and the craft of a novelist, The Long Take courageously and magnificently boosts the Walter Scott Prize into its next decade.”