re: Man Booker Prize 2008
I've just, within the last few minutes, been handed it to review. Well, I suppose that the readership of the magazine that the review will be for will like a "generic ... thriller". If anything, it might convince them to think the Booker more accessible than many of them usually would.
I'm a quarter of the way through it.
How on earth did this ever make it anywhere near the longlist – never mind the shortlist?
It's a run-of-the-mill thriller – I have seen absolutely nothing thus far that lifts it above that. And it's not remotely original.
Howlingly obviously, Martin Cruz Smith did a vastly better job with a very similar idea in the excellent
Gorky Park – which actually had me wanting to run down to Whitechapel and buy matjes herrings and enjoy them with a neat vodka on the side, so good was it at conjuring a sense of Moscow. But nobody is going to suggest that Cruz Smith should have been Booker listed or that
Gorky Park is literary fiction.
And it is also reminds one of the case of Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered 52 women and children – where the investigation was hampered by the reluctance to acknowledge that crime existed in the Soviet Union. That case was later made into a film,
Citizen X.
It's so blatantly anti-Soviet that Tom Rob Smith seems to spend much of essentially beating the reader about the head with his: 'oh look how awful life in Stalin's Soviet Union life was'. But yet again, Cruz Smith did a vastly better and more subtle job of creating, on the page, a sense of a culture of paranoia.
Looking at the list of judges, I'm wondering if it's on the list because Portillo (or any of the others, for that matter) just found the propaganda so knicker-wetting fab that it dulled any sense they might have had of critical ability.
