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Something Like a House: haunting evocation of Mao’s China |
This year’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction has been awarded to Sid Smith for his novel Something Like a House. The Prize for Biography goes to Robert Skidelsky for John Maynard Keynes: Fighting For Britain 1937- 1946.
The prizes, first presented in 1919, are Britain’s oldest book awards. Previous winners have included DH Lawrence, EM Forster, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch, William Golding, James Kelman, Doris Lessing, Graham Swift, Beryl Bainbridge and Peter Ackroyd. Last year’s winners were Zadie Smith and Martin Amis.
The prizes are awarded annually, on the recommendation of the Regius Professor of English Literature at University of Edinburgh Professor John Frow.
Something Like a House (Picador) Sid Smith’s first novel is a richly imagined account of life in post-revolutionary China. Jim Fraser, a deserter from the Korean War, is enslaved by a minority tribe in the highlands of Communist China. Ignorant of the language and customs, Fraser must somehow build a life amid the physical and moral turmoil of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and confront the horrifying secret of his past.
From Something Like a House:
Then he was shipped to the war.
‘Hand grenades have these little squares on them,’ the sergeant had said. ‘It’s like they make bars of chocolate, so that every bugger gets a bit.’
Fraser saw the flash of his grenade that night in Korea. He forgot to duck and a pine tree lit up for a moment like a green army tent. Surely they would ignore him, the Chinese, if they overran the camp. All through the freezing night he was scared and incredulous: whatever he did the Communists would notice even him.
But nobody was killed, just a Chinese, and they tramped the snow to search the body. It was frozen solid, with bits of blood in its clothes like stained glass, but they raised it with enormous effort and left it sitting on a tree stump, one eye open and a hand cupped by its ear like someone deaf.
They evacuated the camp, part of the general UN collapse, and fled south through the terrible Chinese ambush around Kunu-ri and on to a great Allied regrouping. The ice turned to mud, the rivers flooded and everyone thought they were going home.
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Fighting for Britain: final volume of Skidelsky’s meticulous biography |
John Maynard Keynes: Fighting For Britain 1937- 1946 (Macmillan) This is Volume III in Robert Skidelsky's highly acclaimed trilogy. Dealing with the period from 1937, when Keynes had become the most renowned economist and one of the most famous figures in Britain, to his death in 1946, the final volume focuses on Keynes’s outstanding contribution to financing the war effort, to the building of the post-war economic order, and on his role in the ‘other war’ Britain’s struggle to preserve its independence within the Atlantic Alliance.
From Fighting for Britain 1937 1946:
‘Keynes’s war was different from Churchill’s war. Nazi Germany, to be sure, had to be defeated; this was the ultima ratio of both their efforts. But, whereas the military struggle occupies the foreground of Churchill’s war, it was the backcloth only to Keynes’s war, which was financial and economic. In this war, the United States occupies the foreground as ally but also as rival. Churchill fought to preserve Britain and its Empire against Nazi Germany. Keynes fought to preserve Britain as a great power against the United States. The war against Germany was won; but, in helping to win it, Britain lost both Empire and greatness. Hence, the title of the concluding volume of Churchill’s war history, Triumph and Tragedy, also fits this volume.
In his narrower, and subordinate, sphere, Keynes rivalled Churchill. He was, in fact, the Churchill of war finance and post-war planning. His achievement was the more remarkable in that he held no official position. He was merely an unpaid adviser to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a room in the Treasury. His peerage in 1942 gave him rank, but no responsibilities. In a Presidential (or dictatorial) system he would probably have been Minister of Finance. In the British system he was, for many purposes, de facto Chancellor of the Exchequer. Certainly he was regarded as such by the Americans, and sometimes as President of the Board as well. But his authority was largely personal.’
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