One of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary awards, the Women’s Prize for Fiction was first awarded in 1996, and was established after the shortlist for the 1991 Booker Prize for Fiction included no female authors, despite 60% of novels published that year being written by women. In 2020, the Women’s Prize celebrated its 25th year with a diverse collection of literature from a variety of exciting authors. In an effort to catch up on some of modern history’s most critically acclaimed fiction, I set myself the assignment of reading all of this year’s nominees. From favourite to least favourite, here are my thoughts on (most of) this year’s shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Note: Although it appeared on the shortlist, I did not read The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel as I haven’t read the first two books in the Wolf Hall trilogy.
Girl, Woman, Other is a triumph of modern fiction, a prime example of exceptional literary talent that is not only meticulously crafted, but also performs a “sweeping history of the black British experience” (Gay, 2019). A polyphonic collection of character studies, the novel examines the lives of twelve black, British women throughout the last century, and was published in 2019 to a torrent of accolades: joint-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, a Sunday Times bestseller, one of Barack Obama’s 19 Favourite Books of 2019, and identified as Book of the Year in 25 different publications, including Oprah Magazine and TIME. It’s a high-profile piece of fiction, and for very good reason.
As a white woman, I couldn’t relate to a scrap of Girl, Woman, Other, but I loved it nonetheless. Informational and entertaining, the novel gave me incredible insight into a wide variety of black, female experiences, and the diversity of challenges that black women have encountered during the last century. My absolute favourite thing about this book is how many different intersections of womanhood it examined. Race, class, sexuality, gender identity, historical context; Evaristo considered it all, and I learned so much about so many different black/female experiences, and how the intersections of these different facets of personhood affect the way that women interact with the world, and how the world interacts with them. One of my favourite character studies in this book was that of Dominique, and her abusive relationship with Nzinga. It’s rare to see stories of domestic abuse in same sex couples; they’re often portrayed as more harmonious and idyllic than heterosexual relationships, but this isn’t universal, and it’s important to share stories about same sex domestic abuse and to acknowledge that abusive behaviour isn’t unique to men; women can be abusers, too. I also enjoyed Yazz’s perspective. Her youthful, righteous indignation was reminiscent of the fiery feminism that I paraded in my teens, and as the teens say, we do love to see it. I felt this novel was a shoo-in for the Women’s Prize, and I’m grieved that it didn’t win; there is such invaluable perspective to be gained from this novel, and I feel that not awarding it the Prize was a missed opportunity.
Set in the Dominican Republic and New York City in 1965, Dominicana is the story of Ana Cancion, a Domincan teen who marries a man twice her age and moves with him to NYC. Ana feels no love for her husband, Juan, but she cannot refuse him when he proposes and promises to take her to New York; in 1965, the Domincan Republic was on the brink of civil war, and Ana’s marriage to Juan will eventually allow her family to immigrate to New York, a city synonymous with opportunity. Initially, Ana is lonely and miserable, but when Juan returns home to protect his family’s land from the civil disorder, Ana is free to make friends, take English lessons, see movies, go dancing, and fall in love with Juan’s charismatic younger brother, Cesar. When Juan returns, Ana must make an impossible choice: follow her heart and flee with Cesar, or stay and observe her duty to her family.
I often gravitate towards novels that explore countries and cultures with which I’m not familiar. The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste is my most anticipated nominee on the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist for this reason, and Dominicana had the same allure; I’ve read hardly any fiction set in the Dominican Republic and knew nothing of the Dominican Civil War before I started reading this book, so I appreciated the history lesson as well as the exposure to a greater diversity of characters. I disliked the writing style of this book — I don’t know about you, but I’m quite partial to speech marks, and their absence in Dominicana made the reading experience more stilted and less enjoyable. That being said, I thought the story was remarkable, and found Ana an enduring young woman on a powerful and moving journey. Her life is hard and often miserable, but it is not without its pleasures, and it was interesting to bear witness to Ana’s various triumphs and tragedies; the book did not have a neat, conclusive narrative arc, but instead acted as a window into a year of Ana’s life, with its unpredictable rhythm and unrelenting motion. I have a love/hate relationship with the ending of Dominicana for that reason. I appreciated that the ending Cruz chose was the most faithful to how the life of a Dominican living in 1960s New York might have progressed, but I wanted something happier for Ana; I wanted things to resolve in the way that would make her most content, but I recognise that the bleak ending is a testament to Cruz’s realistic storytelling. Although I never thought that Dominicana was strong enough to secure the prize, I certainly appreciated its nomination; authors like Angie Cruz have important stories to tell, and characters like Ana have invaluable lessons to impart on people like me.
A Thousand Ships is a retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of the women who suffered from it the most: Penelope, Cassandra, Polyxena, Hecabe, Clytemnestra, Creusa of Troy, and the Muse Calliope all offer their own perspective on history’s most famous and most fictionalised war. Classical history is dominated by the mythos of men, and A Thousand Ships joins the growing trend of retelling ancient fables from the female perspective.
I’ll start by saying that I enjoyed this book, and I loved all of the differing perspectives that Haynes included; it was a neat touch to consider how women were impacted by the genesis and resolution of the Trojan War, as well as by its duration. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling while reading that I had read this all before. I read The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker last year and Circe by Madeline Miller the year before that, and the conceit of A Thousand Ships — retell Greek myth from the female point of view — was relatively indistinguishable from that of its predecessors. The Silence of the Girls in particular did almost the exact same thing as A Thousand Ships did, and although I acknowledge that both are good books, they felt too similar for me to enjoy A Thousand Ships more than I did. It was an interesting and well-written novel, but it didn’t bring much fresh perspective that I haven’t encountered before in novels about the Battle of Troy. I wish I could have more to say about this book because I really do love classical fiction, but to be honest, it was largely forgettable and didn’t leave a notable impact. I respect the amount of research that Haynes must have done while writing this book, but I would have liked to see a more unique take on the women of Troy.
Beginning in an environment not dissimilar to the onset of the Trump administration, Weather is a strange, irreverent, and meditative book about Lizzie Benson, an untrained librarian with a side job for which she is equally unqualified: she’s a fake therapist, providing advice to everyone from unwitting students checking out library books to her younger brother, a recovering addict with a baby on the way. On top of this, Lizzie is hired by her old mentor — a woman named Sylvia who has become famous for her prophetic podcast, High or Hell Water — to answer the mail she receives from listeners of the show.
Weather was a middle-of-the-road read for me. I’ve read it, and yet I feel like I don’t know anything about it; it aims to be aloof and mysterious, but in this pursuit, it became too detached for me to extract anything from it. I wasn’t blown away, nor was I sucked in; aside from the occasional chuckle at an amusing sentence, I felt nothing towards this book aside from an appreciation for how short it is. The writing style is sparse, disconsonant, and impersonal, and although I did get a sense of how Lizzie floated idly through her life, I didn’t feel a connection with her or any of the supporting characters; I feel as though Offill didn’t give me a chance, so impartial is the writing. I liked the general vibe, but even as I was reading, the words were slipping out of my head. Whatever this book was trying to teach me, it did so in too few words for me to take away anything of meaning. I’m disappointed that I didn’t enjoy this more, because the concept is quite intriguing and if I were to read the same story written in a more conventional narrative format, I’m sure I would have loved it. Unfortunately, this freeform, experimental style of writing was not compatible with me, and did not convince me to try any more of Offill’s bibliography. I know this book won’t go over everyone’s heads, but it did go over mine, and because of this, it was the least memorable book on the shortlist, although certainly not my least favourite.
Hamnet was inspired by Maggie O’Farrell’s fascination with the unfortunate life of William Shakespeare’s only son, who died at age 11 of unconfirmed causes (likely of bubonic plague). Yet although the novel is named for the young boy, its central character is arguably Agnes, O’Farrell’s witchy interpretation of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway. A woman with mysterious gifts, unusually attuned senses, and a natural instinct for homeopathic remedies, Agnes moves with her husband (his identity as the world’s most famous playwright is alluded to, but never explicitly mentioned) to Henley Street, Stratford, and bears three children: a daughter, and then twins, a girl named Judith and a boy named Hamnet. When Hamnet dies at age 11, Agnes is torn apart by her grief, and when, four years later, her husband writes a play bearing their deceased son’s name, she feels as if her child has been stolen from her a second time (Merritt, 2020).
I’m not afraid to say it: this was the worst book on the shortlist, and I’m disappointed that it ended up winning. It brought nothing to the table in terms of being current or relevant to the modern climate in any way. I’m certainly not saying that if a person of colour is nominated for a prize amongst a group of white people, the person of colour should win by proxy. What I am saying is that the POC authors with books on the shortlist wrote better, more interesting, and more relevant novels than Hamnet, all of which were far more deserving of the award. To critique the book itself, I felt that Hamnet began far too slowly and maintained its dragging pace throughout the rest of the book to ill effect. It was slow and boring, and slowness isn’t always a bad thing in books, but O’Farrell also gave no reason to like any of the characters or care much about their well-being. To be fair, I did think that Hamnet was a sweetheart, and I was very intrigued by the witchy elements of Agnes’s characterisation and appreciated the element of magical realism. That being said, there’s nothing else I liked about this book. I spent the majority of my time reading waiting for it to be over, and the only times I’ve thought about it since were spent hoping it didn’t win the prize, and then lamenting when it did. There were so many more interesting and important stories that deserved the recognition, and it strikes me as awfully ignorant for a book like this to win when other books clearly deserved it more.
WORKS CITED
Gay, R. (2019, December 28). Roxane's review of Girl, Woman, Other. Retrieved October 4, 2020, from https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3105399075?book_show_action=true.
Girl, Woman, Other. (2020, September 25). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl,_Woman,_Other#Reception.
Hamnet Shakespeare. (2020, August 2). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamnet_Shakespeare.
Merritt, S. (2020, March 29). Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell review – tragic tale of the Latin tutor’s son. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/yylu6otp.
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