Novelist Andrew Miller has won the 2011 Costa Book of the Year, his first major literary award, for his sixth novel, Pure. Set in pre-revolutionary Paris in 1785, Pure is the story of Jean-Baptiste Baratte, an ambitious young engineer, who is assigned the task of emptying the noxious, overflowing Parisian cemetery Les Innocents, and of demolishing its church.

Miller beat bookmakers’ odds-on favourite, poet and debut biographer Matthew Hollis for his work Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy for The Bees, debut writer, Christie Watson, for Tiny Sunbirds Far Away and first-time author, Moira Young, for Blood Red Road, to win the overall prize and a cheque for £30,000 at the awards ceremony.

Julian Barnes scooped the Man Booker 2011 Prize and a cheque for £50,000 for his short novel, The Sense Of An Ending. This was the fourth time Barnes was shortlisted for the prize; the first time was in 1984 for Flaubert’s Parrot, the second time in 1998 for England, England, and the third time in 2005 for Arthur & George.

Chair of Judges, Stella Rimington said it is a book that deserves to be read two or three times, as it is so crammed with information that you don’t necessarily take it all in on a first reading. It has -

the markings of a classic of English Literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading.”

When accepting the prize, Barnes commented on his book as being an object of beauty and the importance of this.

Those of you who have seen my book, whatever you think of its contents, will probably agree it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the ebook, it has to look like something worth buying, worth keeping.”

Click here for our review of The Sense Of An Ending.

Many book clubs work on the premise that it’s good to read books you wouldn’t ordinarily read. At The Company of Books we understand that there are people who only want, or have time, to read what actually interests them, and who would like to get together with a group of people to discuss that common interest.

Enter The Company of Books Pop-Up Book Club.

Every now and again we will choose two or three books based around a common theme. If you’re interested in reading and discussing the books, register for the meetings (one on each book). No long-term commitment required, no dinner-making or hosting, no need to read a book you really don’t want to read. All we ask is that you buy the books from us (there’s a 10% discount) and register for all the meetings in the set – that’s because we hope that the books as chosen will each add something to the reading of the others and offer a richer experience of all.

The books chosen for the first two meetings are:

Tuesday, 27 September              7.30 – 9pm

In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson

The true story of William Dodd, the history professor turned US ambassador in Berlin in the 1930s as Hitler was coming to power.  He’s not helped in his task by having a daughter who is extremely even-handed in her choice of amours, numbering among them the head of the Gestapo, and an official from the Soviet Embassy  . . .

Tuesday, 18 October                   7.30 – 9pm

All that I Am, Anna Funder

A new novel by award-winning Funder, based on real events and set in 1930s Berlin, in which a group of friends dedicated to resisting Hitler’s rise become hunted outlaws forced to flee the country, but continuing their resistance work despite the danger of betrayal, even from afar.

Drop in to The Company of Books to register. Places are limited.

The places for these sessions have now been filled. Watch this space for future pop-ups.

As part of this year’s Ranelagh Fest, Dermot Healy is in conversation with James Ryan on Wednesday 14 September. The poet, novelist and playwright will read from his latest novel, Long Time, No See.

The event will be held at Sandford Park School, Sandford Rd., Ranelagh and starts at 8pm. Tickets will be on sale at the door, priced 7 euro/5 euro (conc.) The Company of Books will have copies of Long Time, No See available to purchase at the event for signing by Dermot Healy. If you would like to reserve your copy of the novel, please drop in to the bookshop or call us on 4975413.

Thoughts on the Man Booker shortlist to be announced on 6 September.

When we did our TV3 book club stint in The Company of Books recently, we were each asked what chance we thought Sebastian Barry had of winning the Man Booker this year. At the time, none of us had read the other books, and it’s difficult to make a judgement about the winner of a race when you don’t know the form of all the runners. In an attempt to remedy this, I’ve been trying to concentrate on the Booker longlist for my reading matter since that question was asked.  To begin with, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that Barry, Barnes and Hollinghurst will definitely be shortlisted, possibly just because they are Barry, Barnes and Hollinghurst. I had thought Jamrach’s Menagerie showed promise based on the précis inside the dust jacket, but I’ve now read 170 pages and am still waiting for something other than pure narrative (and, to me, not hugely gripping narrative) to manifest itself. If it’s the sights, sounds and smells of 1857 you’re after there are more authentic-feeling novels out there. So I’ve abandoned Jamrach. Yes, I know it’s unfair to leave a book unfinished, but life is short for a busy reader, and if you’re an author hoping for £50,000, you don’t start working only half way through the shift.

I moved swiftly on to The Last Hundred Days by Patrick McGuinness, mainly because I know someone who knew him once upon a time. I’m only 70 pages in this time, and am jumping ship. The writing is limpid and assured, but it reads more like a very-well-written travel narrative/memoir than a novel, and is thus far marred by a somewhat hackneyed ‘my father was a bullying alcoholic and I’m glad he’s dead’ trope. A predictable narrator on the sideline of a tale runs the risk of not being much cared about. I’m off back to Herta Müller.

So what next? While I decide, let’s just take a pot shot at the shortlist without reading any of the books. As I said, Barry, Barnes and Hollinghurst are surely in. Next we have two books set in Europe during the war – Alison Pick’s Far to Go, and Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues. One might suppose that only one will make it. Having read it, I hope it’s Edugyan. On the same premise, there are two ‘Victorian’ novels – Jamrach’s Menagerie, and D. J. Taylor’s Derby Day. If either, I suspect Jamrach will get in (A. S. Byatt, the front cover tells us, thought it was fab). Similarly, there is Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, about an 11-year-old boy who arrives from Ghana to live in a tower block in London, “learning the tricks of urban survival”, and Yvette Edwards’ A Cupboard Full of Coats, wherein Jinx is forced to revisit the events that led up to the murder of her mother fourteen years previously in their East London home. Kelman born in Luton, Edwards in Barnet; one must surely go. Patrick McGuinness’ portrait of Bucharest in The Last Hundred Days is balanced by A. D. Miller’s Moscow in Snowdrops. Neither might get through here. Last but not least, or possibly least, I can’t yet say, we have The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers, and The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt, two offbeat tales, the first set a few months in the future following an act of biological terrorism, and the second about a pair of psychopathic cowboys. I have a feeling about that one . . .

So my prediction for the final six: Sense of an Ending, On Canaan’s Side and The Stranger’s Child; then The Sisters Brothers, Half Blood Blues, A Cupboard Full of Coats. I haven’t yet seen the betting odds – not that they matter, look at last year’s winner – but you can be sure that whomever I put my money on won’t be spending any £50,000 on a handbag.

         

Should we bluntly say that there are problems with this book, or should we, in the manner of the book itself say that, like the dough into which the weary-boned crone in the kitchen of the tired and time-eaten farmhouse forgets to put the yeast that will make the bread rise like a pheasant breaking cover from its scrub, the book falls flat too often to be satisfying? Say it straight, or meander like the sun-played stream that twists snakelike, sometimes poisonous, sometimes pure, ‘til it grows and finally reaches the great rising ocean, there are problems with this book.

Surprise, the first problem is the language in which it is written. (The first problem is actually the fact that it’s yet another book about being Irish. Being Irish in America “where everything is possible” and the nurse is Jamaican, the priest Polish, the criminal Swedish, the neighbour Greek . . . Being Irish in America when history – Larkin, the Lock-Out, de Valera, Collins, the Black and Tans (get it? –Black and Tans), Martin Luther King – is weighing upon you from every side. Oh, the sod-slicing weariness of it all.)

So let us pretend that the first problem is the language. In the first few chapters the word ‘like’ appears so many times that one might be forgiven for thinking that one was on the green line Luas to the Dundrum shopping centre. In school (in historical times, at least) we were taught about similes. If children are still being taught about similes, here is the handbook. There are moments of lyricism, but too much of anything is bad for you, and these are not always successful or appropriate.  What should be one of the most dramatic scenes in the book is utterly undermined by the introduction of tadpoles, a trout, a continent, an elephant’s ear, a sack of grain, and some flowering gorse, to name but a few of the images employed in the course of the description. “Too many notes”, as Emperor Joseph said to Mozart. There is downright bad writing too. In one place it appears that Greta Garbo was clutching at one of the book’s characters in the film Queen Christina.

Do we forgive this writing and overwriting by saying that what we are hearing is the voice of an 89-year-old griefstricken woman? Only to a point. There is too much self-conscious artifice on view for the voice to be psychologically convincing. Like in the tattered hem of the beggarwoman’s mouldering petticoat, mended in the dim, nostalgic light of a turf fire, the stitches are all visible. An author must take ultimate responsibility for the polish of a work; otherwise why not publish the wandering and overblown words of any or every person with a story to tell? That’s called blogging, not literary fiction.

Here the appropriate phrase might be ‘gilding the lily’. Apt enough, one could say, considering the narrator’s name: Lilly Bere – pronounced ‘bear’. How can we be sure? Because here is another problem: the book has a distinctly contrived feel to it. The narrator is ‘Bere’, a bear features literally and metaphorically, one at the start and the other at the end of the book. The book opens with Lilly breaking a porcelain doll; later her grandson breaks some Belleek china; the men each bring books to their various wars; Bill draws a picture at school and later enacts that picture. And on it goes, like the echoes that sing, swooping and soaring, through the hills with the lonely goatherd.

There is a sense that the book on occasion is striving for an epic tone. Homer is there, as is the Bible, DNA, an apocalyptic dust storm, wars aplenty. To offset these, and demonstrate the ‘world in a grain of sand’ motif, we have fairy cakes, pecan pies, potatoes (of course), countless fish and birds, and small things generally. The ending, with its encroaching darkness mirroring the snow at the end of Joyce’s The Dead, aims for the heights, literally and metaphorically, but again, contrivance diminishes the impact. The dancing bear appears, its glass-studded collar glinting. But the dancing bear, we remind ourselves from the information at the start of the book, has no teeth or claws. Which unfortunately makes it an apt metaphor for this novel: unnaturally ornate, and safe.

Not a truly awful book, but a not a great book, and certainly not a book worthy of a prestigious literary prize, audition its heart out though it might on every page.