No Great Loss

There's a sense in which any award can function as a poisoned chalice - Was the winner really the best in the field? Will the next product or performance live up to the winning entry?

I can imagine it being fairly intimidating to have your novel awarded the Booker, for example. So I feel a little bit guilty doing the dirty on Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss and saying I'm surprised it carried off the award. The fact that I'm aware there's a fair body of critical opinion that says much the same doesn't make me feel any better.

I finished it yesterday evening, and was glad to have done so as it gave me the chance to move on (in this case to some Coetzee, who's rapidly becoming a 'favourite' writer.) Actually it slipped down well enough in some respects. I found the subject matter, the Nepali unrest and the experience of poor immigrants to America, engaging, sometimes fascinating. It struck me as generally a well written novel with plenty to enjoy stylistically as I turned the pages. In fact, I sort of kept murmuring that's nicely done in a connoisseur-like manner every so often.

No, the problem was that the characters never came alive for me. I felt no emotional engagement at all. And that was puzzling since in some respects Desai was pushing all the right buttons. But perhaps that was the problem - I recognised the buttons being pushed, well, some of them at least. I felt I was dealing with a set of types worked out on paper before the writing began.

The odd thing is, of course, that in one sense that's what any novel is offering. So it's got me thinking: what is the secret of that alchemy that lets a writer create real people? It can't be technique. Ms Desai has that in bucket-fulls. I'm a few pages into Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year which doesn't seem to have defined characters yet and already what 'characters' there are intrigue me, take on a life beyond the page.