Something to Answer For

P H NEWBY
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER 1969

Something to Answer For won the inaugural Booker Prize back in 1969 and turned out to be a perfect example of why I chose to read all the Booker winners in the first place; here was an author I hadn't heard of who'd written around twenty published works of fiction, half a dozen non-fiction and several children's books. What happens to these authors in a world of digital-only browsing, when seredipity has all but disappeared? Judging by this booker winner, I shall be picking him up again.

The protagonist, Townrow, finds himself in Suez, just as the crisis is about to engulf both the canal and himself. The story is often surreal and is more a framework around the dissolution of the character himself and the end of Empire... the expectation that everything will come good, that Townrow himself, in his perpetual dream state, will always be alive, if not OK somehow.

Ostensibly it's about Townrow going to Suez having been invited by the widow of a murdered friend. But I got the sense that he would always have ended up there, that he was almost meant to have been there, where else could he have ended up?

The writing is very atmospheric and of great quality, it's surreality reminded me of Burroughs, though written as if this wasn't somehow surreal (a great fan of Burroughs, he was always a very deliberate wordsmith, like Will Self toying and playing with language, whereas Newby is clearly simply a formidable writer, I wouldn't call this 'literary' in that sense, it's too well written for that). Townrow comes from a long line of anti-heros, reminding me of Meursault in Camus’ The Outsider, someone who let's events overtake him, though here he is supposedly meant to have come to Suez with a mission.

I was reminded also of the title character in The Chronicles of Thomas Convenant (a series I read as a teenager), the anti-hero who was reluctantly the focus of the story, a distasteful character who starts out by raping a young woman. You really didn't want to be the hero.

But this isn't existential misery, as The Outsider (again, I read this decades ago) could be. There are comic turns and the writing, as noted above, is absorbing and very atmospheric. The blurb on the back makes it out to be a standard murder mystery, it is anything but. In some ways it had the feeling of a Paul Bowles story, a dissolute male listlessly searching for identity; set is a desert arena, dusty and desolate with natives fighting to survive, sensing the end of their colonial masters’ dominance, and happy to simply bide their time until the colonists have left, as always, in the end, they do.

Though I have to admit that I didn't feel that I necessarily understood the whole story, I don't think I needed to. It builds a very dreamlike world and was very absorbing. As the first book I read deliberately as part of my Booker journey, it was not a tough read, and well worth it. I shall be looking out for more of his work in the future.

Selected Further Reading

1. Newby, P.H. Something to Answer For, 1968.
2. Camus, Albert. The Outsider, 1946.
3. Burroughs, William S. Cities of the Red Night, 1981.
4. Self, Will. The Book of Dave, 2006.
5. Donaldson, Stephen R. Lord Foul’s Bane, 1977.
6. Bowles, Paul. Let it Come Down, 1952.
7. Bowles, Paul. Collected Stories, 1939–1976, 2009.