Sisters of the chick-lit clone

You never know what clues she may inadvertently record that could plug the gaps in the police’s investigation, you can’t tell what locking mechanisms will be rampant a century from how and what archival value her shots of an average 21st century door latch will gain. Astrid is narrativising her present and her past, she is also gathering all the bits and nuggets of her life to be placed at the service of future, imaginary assemblers of narrative.

But as the story is carried forward by her writer mother, her reclusive brother and her self-obsessed stepfather, the narrator’s hegemony becomes apparent. A narrator can choose how much to tell and what to withhold. Together, they do convey a plot, for instance the activities of the enigmatic Amber who strays into their summer home, stays on and changes each of their lives. But the more they tell, the more the gaps multiply, the more we know of Amber, the more mysterious she becomes.

This has been a very good year for the Booker Prize. Its longlist this time was pared down to just 17 novels, but managed to gather together the dominant storytellers of the day, old masters like Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and J.M. Coetzee (who between them have four Bookers, one Nobel and a Booker of Bookers). And in controversially excluding them from contention on ceremony night on October 10, the jury has given the shortlisted fray a common platform. Just like Smith, the rest — Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go, Julian Barnes (Arthur & George), Zadie Smith (On Beauty), John Banville (The Sea), Sebastian Barry (Long Long Way) — subvert established narrative forms and techniques to make their point.

Ishiguro, the only former winner in the reckoning, is a master at this. His last novel, When We Were Orphans, harnessed the sensory techniques of computer games to play with memory and history. Now, in his most chilling book yet, he profiles human clones without calling them as such. It is ‘‘England, late 1990s’’, and 31-year-old Kathy H. begins to tell of her life as if she were an established chick-lit heroine rolling her mind back to the boarding schools of our pre-teen reading years.

In fact, school is her primary source of pride (‘‘I’m a Hailsham student — which is enough by itself to get people’s backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record.’’) But even as she flits back to remembrances of her bossy friends Ruth and Tommy, she can’t help but dwell on this record. She is a ‘‘carer’’, it bears boasting that her ‘‘donors’’ do better than most.

Words that like, at first ominous intrusions in an achingly pedestrian telling — so reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian story of humanity stripped of basic rights — later begin to alert the reader to the fact that something is not right in this idyllic tale set in the gentle English countryside. Why do some teachers recoil at their touch, for instance? The sterility forced into Ishiguro’s prose hints at a fundamental separateness: folks like Kathy H. are really organ factories.

An ominous future — human cloning — is insinuated into a gentle past to inquire, what does it mean to be human?

Barnes, in turn, asks, what does it mean to be modern? Using the structure of the historical novel, a cadence mindful of factual detail and a tone distrustful of any flamboyance, he returns to a minor crime sensation at the turn of 19th century, referred to then as the Great Wyrley Outrages, for which George Edalji, a solicitor, was convicted in 1903. Edalji, instructed by his father, a Bombay-born vicar who was a Parsi convert to Christianity, into the modernising embrace of Britishness, throughout has a strong hunch that he is a suspect for racial reasons alone.

Arthur Conan Doyle draws on rationality and scientific reasoning to establish his innocence. But these thought processes do not quite glide with his drift towards mysticism. In Barnes’ telling, the past is not really another country and it reflects on today’s issues of racism and reason, empire and multiculturalism.

Zadie Smith too is asking questions, but with so much exuberance and with such lush descriptions that you could miss some of them, caught up as you are bound to be in counting the ironies. Inspired by E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, On Beauty is soaked in the culture wars in American East Coast academia. Just as in the original, the affairs of two families collide, the Belseys and the Kippses, at Wellington, a college on the outskirts of Boston.

Howard Belsey (English and married to a black American) and Monty Kipps (Trinidad-born critic of affirmative action preparing a lecture series, ‘‘Taking the Liberal Out of the Liberal Arts’’) are sharpening their arguments over Rembrandt’s paintings. Their families, meanwhile, are striking up a matrix of acquaintances and updating ledgers of betrayals and slights.

One of them, Zora Belsey, plays interpreter. She takes courses in art history and poetry at Wellington, but also conveys to her elders the debates raging in street culture. Her brother, Levi is the most alive of all of Smith’s characters (and given her flair for characterisation, this means his words literally echo off the pages). His middle-class, literary family is his biggest burden, he mingles with ‘‘street poets’’ and poses as a resident of Boston’s roughest neighbourhood.

The Irish contingent in the fray for the 50,000-pound prize is a disparate duo. Sebastian Barry, more acclaimed for his plays, returns to passing mentions in earlier novels to bring to life a soldier who goes to the warfront, in World War I, in pursuit of a sense of self and finds himself estranged from every loyalty worth fighting for, spurned by nationalists and the English both.

In Banville’s The Sea, Max Morden repairs to the seaside to come to terms with this wife’s death. It was here, however, that he’d had a life-transforming encounter with the Graces half a century ago. In Banville’s mindful prose, every moment captured appears as affirming as it could be unsettling.

On Monday, then, be glad for the health of the novel, that it is by fulfilling its subversive mission.