Booker Prize 2021 longlist: All hail the return of the historical novel

Phew. The Booker longlist has been announced for 2021 and, after years of technical trickery and an over-willingness to engage in identity politics, we have a longlist of 13 novels that is so sensible it feels almost radical..There are no graphic novels, no 200-page poems, no brain-scrambling first-person narratives. Instead, here is a longlist featuring several big hitters – Kazuo Ishiguro, Damon Galgut, Richard Powers, Rachel Cusk – that combines meaty contemporary issues with novels that are, whisper it, by and large a pleasure to read. Perhaps emboldened by the relief and approval that met last year’s winner, the achingly sad, invigoratingly beautiful Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, this year’s longlist appears to have the reader firmly back in mind..Moreover, it feels like a throwback to the Booker’s glory days. Of the 13 longlisted books, at least six are historical novels of the sort exemplified by past Booker winners such as Michael Ondaatje, Peter Carey and Pat Barker. Nathan Harris’s The Sweetness of Water (one of only two debuts) is set in the waning years of the American Civil War. Damon Galgut’s highly praised, technically accomplished The Promise looks at the poisonous legacy of apartheid through four generations of a white South African family. Sunjeev Sahota’s delicately lovely China Room contrasts two different stories of atrophying lives in the past and present Punjab. Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men is set among the Somali community of Tiger Bay, Cardiff, in 1952. Big issues of race, post-colonialism, war and immigration reverberate, of course, but they are notable for being examined through the long view of history rather than the amnesiac anxieties of the present..Moreover, prize shortlists are usually awash with debut novelists; this longlist features only two. This seems significant at a moment in which our culture feels almost hysterically obsessed with the previously unheard and the new. The second debut, Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This, is the most technically innovative – a playfully fragmented novel that beautifully emulates the jittery, atomising experience of life online..But it’s also one of only a couple of novels here set specifically in the present. One wonders if the judges felt under pressure to opt for acclaimed, buzzy, of-the-moment debuts about race and identity, lauded on social media, such as Raven Leilani’s Luster, Natasha Brown’s Assembly or Detransition, Baby by the trans writer Torrey Peters..Instead, they’ve steered an artful line between the lesser-known and the established. Of the latter, Ishiguro tops the list with his superb latest novel, Klara and the Sun, effortlessly grafting mind-blowing ideas about AI and human consciousness onto a simple little fable about a robot. Richard Powers, a Pulitzer Prize winner shortlisted in 2018 for The Overstory, is nominated again this year for his forthcoming eco novel, Bewilderment, as is Rachel Cusk for Second Place, albeit in what feels more like a nod to the achievements of her career than for this particular novel. It’s perfectly Cuskian, if you like that sort of thing (I do), but doesn’t compare with the preceding landmark Outline trilogy..Elsewhere, several novels excel in the old-fashioned joys of storytelling. Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual is a vortex of interweaving narratives that imagines, in gorgeous, gleaming prose, what lives five children killed by a bomb in 1944 might have gone on to live. Maggie Shipstead exemplifies the transporting powers of fiction with her fabulous Great Circle, about a fictional female aviator, that spans decades and continents. Mary Lawson’s A Town Called Solace, a relationship novel set in Ontario in 1972, contains the same quiet, piercing comforts as an Anne Tyler story..So who should win? If it were up to me, it would be a toss-up between Damon Galgut, Kazuo Ishiguro and Maggie Shipstead, with Ishiguro just inching it. But we’ve a long way to go yet. In the meantime, for your summer holiday reading, this longlist is a good place to start..The ‘Booker Dozen’.Susannah Goldsbrough runs through the 13 books on the longlist.A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson.The fourth novel by this Canadian author tells the intertwining stories of a young man, an old woman, and a child in 1970s Ontario..No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood.The Priestdaddy author tells of a celebrity yanked into the real world when her unborn niece has a congenital disorder..A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam.When his grandmother’s carer dies, a man makes a treacherous journey north through civil war-torn Sri Lanka, in the Tamil author’s second novel..The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed.Spotlighting racial injustice, the author fictionalises the true story of a Somali seaman accused of murder in 1950s Cardiff..Second Place, Rachel Cusk.A psychodrama based on the story of real-life arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan and her tangle with DH Lawrence in 1920s New Mexico..Bewilderment, Richard Powers.An astrophysicist is forced to focus on earthbound problems when his nine-year-old son turns violent in the playground..The Promise, Damon Galgut.The South African author’s second longlisted novel addresses apartheid through a family of poor white Afrikaaners and their black servants..China Room, Sunjeev Sahota.A former shortlisted author combines the tales of a Punjabi child bride and, 70 years later, her heroin-addict British grandson..The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris.This Civil War-set debut by the 29-year-old Texan follows two freed brothers who find themselves working for a grief-stricken plantation owner..Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead.The twin stories of an aviator’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe and a Hollywood actress who portrays her onscreen..Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro.The Nobel-winner’s return to sci-fi is narrated by an "AF" (artificial friend) to a teenager suffering from a disease brought on by genetic modification..Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford.The Costa-winner imagines the future lives of five children killed in the infamous V2 attack on a London Woolworths during the war..An Island, Karen Jennings.An elderly lighthouse keeper’s solitary life on an island off the southern coast of Africa is interrupted by the arrival of a shipwrecked refugee..The Daily Telegraph.Read more. ‘Shuggie Bain’ was rejected 32 times, and it’s not the first masterpiece snubbed by publishers Dubai-based Booker nominee Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar probes into the ‘most essential relationship’ An essential guide to the Booker Prize 2020