The Ondaatje Prize: the best written book on this year's shortlist
And the best-written previous winner ^ And Comic-Turn Green Glove Versus Pantomime-Pinballing-Blob BOB
In today’s issue
— ‘A rheumy slit glued shut./ My eye./ A gate against eternity.’: our pick of the best-written book shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize, the winner of which will be announced on the 14th of May.
The prize is given by the Royal Society of Literature for a work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry that evokes the "spirit of a place", and is written by someone who is a citizen of or who has been resident in the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland.
—’The brig Henrietta having made Sandy Hook a little before the dinner hour – and having passed the Narrows about three o’clock – and then crawling to and fro, in a series of tacks infinitesimal enough to rival the calculus, across the grey sheet of the harbour of New-York…’: the best-written previous winner of the prize.
—‘Things surely haven’t gone so far that we can’t object to a child-torturer’s storyline being played for laughs’: Comic-Turn Green Glove Versus Pantomime-Pinballing-Blob BOB, part 8 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have already shown this series.
You can also browse our author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
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THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2024 SHORTLIST
— Falling Animals by Sheila Armstrong (Bloomsbury)
— Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad (Vintage)
— A Flat Place by Noreen Masud (Penguin Random House)
— Cuddy by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury)
— No Man’s Land by David Nash (Dedalus Press)
— Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors by Ian Penman (Fitzcarraldo Editions)
The best-written of these is
Prologue
Inner Farne. AD 687.
March 20th. A Sunday.
A rheumy slit glued shut.
My eye.
A gate against eternity.
I open it.
All is as was; stone, sea and sky
pouring in.
The other stays locked
lest the eternal world be rent asunder,
torn in two,
split down the middle
like a mackerel for the smokehouse rack.
And for a long soft moment
one part of me dwells in darkness,
the other in light.
For a moment a part of me lives
in death and the other dies in life.
.
Limbo silence
then that silence is broken.
A seagull shrieks –
a pubbled white thing of feathers and beak
flung sideways on an unseen western gust,
one of His comic details.
But.
But it cannot be put off any longer. It is time to
open the other eye.
To raise the cullis, open the gate. Prise it.
I do.
And I die.
.
Now here I lie,
something tickling at my elbow.
It is a large spider climbing the waxy incline of my cold and lifeless limb.
Even here in death I feel it.
Even here in death I serve a purpose as all things living serve you
o lord.
I think: what I would like now more than anything is to be licked about the face by dogs or nipped at the toes by Coldingham crabs or nuzzled at the earlobes by seals or otters who waddle over low-tide banks, trail-dragging patterns from seabed to skyline, tresses of kelp draped across the head of one or two as if in anticipation of a gaudy performance, others barking with throaty delight, black eyes as black as peat clods, sea-swollen bodies shifting on the hissing sand. The sun over the land.
Strange the way the dead mind works.
Such curious cravings.
Such
queer notions.
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2023
Winner of the Winston Graham Historical Prize
Chosen as a book of the year 2023 by The Times, Guardian, Telegraph and New Statesman
'An epic the north has long deserved' FINANCIAL TIMES
'A sensational piece of storytelling . A singular and significant achievement' GUARDIAN
'Marvellous, artful, enchanted' DAILY TELEGRAPH
PREVIOUS WINNERS OF THE ONDAATJE PRIZE
2004 Louisa Waugh Hearing Birds Fly
2005 Rory Stewart The Places In Between
2006 James Meek The People's Act of Love
2007 Hisham Matar In the Country of Men
2008 Graham Robb The Discovery of France
2009 Adam Nicolson Sissinghurst: an Unfinished History
2010 Ian Thomson The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica
2011 Edmund de Waal The Hare with Amber Eyes
2012 Rahul Bhattacharya The Sly Company of People Who Care
2013 Philip Hensher Scenes from Early Life
2014 Alan Johnson This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood
2015 Justin Marozzi Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood
2016 Peter Pomerantsev Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
2017 Francis Spufford Golden Hill
2018 Pascale Petit Mama Amazonica
2019 Aida Edemariam The Wife’s Tale
2020 Roger Robinson A Portable Paradise
2021 Ruth Gilligan The Butchers
2022 Lea Ypi Free. Coming of Age at the End of History
2023 Anthony Anaxagorou Heritage Aesthetics
The best-written of these is
All Hallows
November 1st
20 Geo. II
1746
I
The brig Henrietta having made Sandy Hook a little before the dinner hour – and having passed the Narrows about three o’clock – and then crawling to and fro, in a series of tacks infinitesimal enough to rival the calculus, across the grey sheet of the harbour of New-York – until it seemed to Mr Smith, dancing from foot to foot upon deck, that the small mound of the city waiting there would hover ahead in the November gloom in perpetuity, never growing closer, to the smirk of Greek Zeno – and the day being advanced to dusk by the time Henrietta at last lay anchored off Tietjes Slip, with the veritable gables of the city’s veritable houses divided from him only by one hundred foot of water – and the dusk moreover being as cold and damp and dim as November can afford, as if all the world were a quarto of grey paper dampened by drizzle until in danger of crumbling imminently to pap: – all this being true, the master of the brig pressed upon him the virtue of sleeping this one further night aboard, and pursuing his shore business in the morning. (He meaning by the offer to signal his esteem, having found Mr Smith a pleasant companion during the slow weeks of the crossing.) But Smith would not have it. Smith, bowing and smiling, desired nothing but to be rowed to the dock. Smith, indeed, when once he had his shoes flat on the cobbles, took off at such speed despite the gambolling of his land-legs that he far out-paced the sailor dispatched to carry his trunk – and must double back for it, and seizing it hoist it instanter on his own shoulder – and gallop on, skidding over fish-guts and turnip leaves and cats’ entrails, and the other effluvium of the port – asking for direction here, asking again there – so that he appeared most nearly as a type of smiling whirlwind when he shouldered open the door – just as it was about to be bolted for the evening – of the counting-house of the firm of Lovell & Company, on Golden Hill Street, and laid down his burden while the prentices were lighting the lamps, and the clock on the wall showed one minute to five, and demanded, very civilly, speech that moment with Mr Lovell himself.
Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2016
Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2017
Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017
Shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2017
Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year 2017
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire.
Killer BOB as a pinballing blob
Comic-Turn Green Glove Versus Pantomime-Pinballing-Blob BOB
In 1991 in the woods outside Buckie in Morayshire, Maddy and Demmy threw a Twin Peaks-themed fancy-dress party for my eleventh birthday. Killer BOBs in denim, Special Agent Dale Coopers in FBI raincoats, Laura Palmer and other schoolgirls in uniform, beatniks in caps and leather jackets, red-suited children as backwards-talking dwarfs. Torches and strobelights flashed in the dark, red drapes hung from the trees, speakers played the Twin Peaks soundtrack album Dougal had just given me for Christmas.
As we watched Demmy crack himself up doing Leland’s bereavement dance, Dougal handed me my birthday presents, a bottle of Famous Grouse whisky, and The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer written by David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer. I read it hungover the next day and by the end believed I was the only person who knew who’d killed Laura Palmer: Laura Palmer had.
In Twin Peaks Sheryl Lee plays both blonde Laura and her mousy brunette cousin Maddy Ferguson. So what if, said my insight, the Laura found dead wrapped in plastic by the lakeside wasn’t in fact Laura but Maddy with her hair dyed blonde? What if Laura faked her own death in this way, dyed her own hair brown and returned home to… well, here the theory fizzled out. But not a single person in school had claimed Laura had killed herself, and now the diary’s scenes with BOB invading her thoughts had helped me solve the mystery fascinating lots of people I knew.
I was of course wrong. While BOB could access Laura’s mind, it turned out he didn’t live there. In Season 2 we discover that he lives within her father Leland.
In the diary she says this about her times with BOB in early childhood:
Sometimes he would cut me between my legs, and other times he would cut me inside my mouth. Always tiny little cuts, hundreds of tiny little cuts. I had to use a flashlight in the bathroom or else my parents might wake up and see the light, and I’d be in worse trouble then.
Some nights he would make me sticky. Rub himself very fast, and he would say that I had to hold the sticky in my hands, close my eyes, and recite this little poem while I licked my hands clean. I only remember a little. This hasn’t happened for a long time, the sticky. He made me say:
The little bitch
Is awfully sorry
The little bitch
Drinks you up(I can’t remember more, except the last line.)
In this seed is death indeed.
A question for you about the demon responsible for this debasement and torture of an infant. How would you feel about this character’s storyline culminating in pantomime giggles?
How would you have felt if near the climax of Red Riding or True Detective 1 or The Stranger some peripheral Mockney comic turn called Green Glove (played by Jake Wardle) appeared onscreen and kerpowwwed and thwaakked the child-torturer, who’s now in the form of a pinballing blob, with a magical gardening glove until they exploded, and that was the end of both them and the central storyline that revolved around them? Because in The Return’s two-hour finale this is how the BOB who sliced the infant Laura’s vagina hundreds of times is defeated.
Freddie Sykes AKA Green Glove
.
After this child-rape and -torture plotline featured in the original Twin Peaks and in Fire Walk with Me, many real-life victims of such acts expressed gratitude that at last the subject had been treated in mainstream filmed drama with the seriousness and sensitivity it deserved. Now picture us watching the 2017 climax of this vagina-slicer’s storyline played like the Penguin’s defeat in the camp ‘60s TV Batman. Kerplopp! Zwaapp!
The comic Mockney’s glove that performs this zwaapp on the vagina-slicer and molester, by the way, refers in the show’s usual pretentious way to a glove in Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. Are you getting a sense of what we’re dealing with? And this is just one scene. The 1000 minutes in total have so much material like this that in all seriousness it suggests demonic possession of the writer-director-producer-star responsible. Their artistic and ethical judgement can’t be trusted. Nor can their motives.
From Blue Velvet onwards Mr Lynch has often been labelled a corrupting force who’s got away with it due to the critics bowing at his feet. I still don’t believe that was fair comment on the man who made the original Twin Peaks or The Straight Story but it undoubtedly fits the Demonic Twin of David Lynch that in The Return gave us the scene in Part 10, which you’re meant to find so-bad-it’s-good funny, where the mentally disabled Johnny Horne, played by Eric Rondell, topples over tied to a chair and for three screened minutes twists around bewildered and terrorised on the floor as Mantovani’s muzak standard ‘Charmaine’ plays and a toy teddy bear repeats over fifty times in an English accent ‘Hello, Johnny. How are you today?’.
The showrunner that wrote and directed segments like this appears at best highly irresponsible, the sort of balloon who trolls on 4chan about rape, disability, and girls and women they find unworthy of their sexual favours. You could see 4channers playing a vagina-cutter’s comeuppance and a disabled man’s terror for pantomime titters, couldn’t you? In fact, for those who’ve never seen it, that might be a way to start getting a sense of this disaster, to picture it as some antisocial, porn-addicted, rape-entertained, rape-curious 4channer’s Twin Peaks sequel, with himself cast as the only clearly admirable central character in a world of people he fears and therefore scorns. 4chan Does Twin Peaks.
It’s okay to call out Green Glove versus BOB, I take it. Things surely haven’t gone so far that we can’t object to a child-torturer’s storyline being played for laughs. Of the other adults I know who were abused as children a fair number have a dark sense of humour, and we fire off the occasional joke among ourselves to relieve the heaviness of talk about abuse. But none of us would consider resolving an abuser’s TV storyline with any kind of pantomime, and nor would you, I expect, especially if you or anyone close to you’s e.g. had their genitals sliced or been forced to lick up an abuser’s semen. There’s a Line you don’t cross and resolving BOB’s storyline like that is way beyond it.
And it isn’t just the comic-turn and pantomime-pinballing-blob business, it’s the fact that in the overall Twin Peaks story this comic turn is a complete nobody, just some security guard plucked from nowhere to see off this character the whole story’s revolved around. It’s as though in The Sopranos that unfortunate gardener Sal Vitro ran into Holsten’s, tickled Tony’s ribs and threw onion rings at Carmela and A.J., and then killed the three of them with a slap from his gammy arm, followed by that final cut to black. That kind of denouement really would deserve years of controversy.
Except for this comparison to work these three Sopranos should now be in the form of blobs and have sliced Meadow for years before bludgeoning her to death, with her murder the central act of the series. Years of careful cuts in Meadow’s genitals, years of her licking up her father and brother’s semen, then Tony, Carmela and A.J. pulverise her skull until she dies, then into Holsten’s runs Sal the gardener… and on his head he’s got toy antlers. I’m seeing antlers with little Christmas bells. Plus Green Glove has a comedy accent that’s flagrantly irrelevant in the context, so how about we have the gardener-assassin in his antlers deliver a denunciation of the child-torturers in a stock Chinese accent, as he slaps these Meadow-slicers in the form of pinballing blobs till they explode, here in Holsten’s, in The Sopranos’ finale scripted by David Chase and aired by HBO?
Does that comparison work? If that was The Sopranos’ finale would it be okay to call it out as off-colour, twisted, not really what we hoped for when we started out eighty-six episodes ago?
No, it still doesn’t work. That denunciation of the Sopranos’ depravity implies some link between the comic-turn Chinese gardener-assassin and Meadow, whereas Green Glove and Laura Palmer have no link of any kind.
Also, for this final attempt at a Sopranos comparison to work no corporate reviewer, not one of them, would mention the antlers or the fact that this comic turn wasn’t exactly an appropriate choice as the Meadow-cutting-Sopranos’ assassin who brought this main storyline to an end in the finale. And that never would have happened, that conspiracy of silence, so we’re in the realms of the impossible. Plus David Chase wasn’t inhabited by a hyperdimensional demon, was he?
Oy! More for my to-read list.