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Something to Answer For

3.12 of 5 stars 3.12 · rating details · 101 ratings · 23 reviews

This book is the winner of the inaugural Booker Prize in 1969. It was 1956 and he was in Port Said. About these two facts Townrow was reasonably certain. He had been summoned there, to Egypt, by the widow of his deceased friend, Elie Khoury. Having been found dead in the street, she is convinced he was murdered, but nobody seems to agree with her. What of Leah Strauss, the...more

284 pages

Published 2008 by Faber and Faber

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Nov 19, 2012 Kinga rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: dreamy-books

There was a time when ‘readability’ was the least important factor which the Booker Prize Jury took into consideration. At least that must’ve been the case back 1969 when they awarded the inaugural Booker to P.H. Newby for his novel ‘Something to Answer For’. Of course back then Booker Prize was some niche award that didn’t even have its ceremony and the winner was informed by post. The jury didn’t have to worry about sparking national debate with their choices.

I see that many reviewers called...more There was a time when ‘readability’ was the least important factor which the Booker Prize Jury took into consideration. At least that must’ve been the case back 1969 when they awarded the inaugural Booker to P.H. Newby for his novel ‘Something to Answer For’. Of course back then Booker Prize was some niche award that didn’t even have its ceremony and the winner was informed by post. The jury didn’t have to worry about sparking national debate with their choices.

I see that many reviewers called this novel confusing, disjointed, with unlikeable characters and I’d like to tell them: ‘man up, please!’ Yes, it is difficult but it’s rewarding. It needs time, patience and attention. It’s like that girl who is so hard to turn on but once you dedicate some time to the task and figure it out, she’s fire.

And this book is beautiful and it’s fire. It uses the strangest literary technique of an unreliable third person narrator. The third person is nominal only because in fact we are stuck in Townrow’s, the main character’s, head. And this head receives a blow quite early on and confounds Townrow. We share some of the frustration when he tries to piece everything together and decide who is a friend and who is a foe.
The facts are few: it’s 1956, he came to Egypt to help Mrs Khoury, widow of his friend Ellie. Mrs Khoury believes her husband was murdered, so Townrow is there to offer support, help solve the mystery, con Mrs Khoury into handing all her assets to him…? It’s rather hard to say. The same events are told and retold, they change their significance as Townrow remembers whole new episodes that followed or preceded them.

As Townrow wanders around Port Said in a confused state and falls in love with Leah, a married woman, the history happens in the background. Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal which causes a diplomatic and then a military crisis. This in turn causes a crisis for Townrow, who in his overheated head was only sure of one thing, that the British government was essentially good and just. He suspected that he himself was of rather questionable morals but he could sleep at night because he knew that the people who make all the decisions are free of such flaws.

He painfully realises that it is only his actions he can be somewhat sure of, and that he is responsible for them, because everyone has ‘something to answer for’. So there starts the most bizarre quest for redemption of a character who can’t even remember if he is British or Irish, that is, whether he is a side in the conflict or a neutral observer.

At times Townrow even suspects himself to be American, and occasionally when in her arms, he half wishes to turn out to be the estranged husband of his lover, Leah. P.H.Newby knows how to write romance and sexual tension. I know it seems unlikely when looking at his photos and remembering he was the director of BBC Three, but I am sure he could show a girl a good time. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I just get turned on by superb writing, gentle, underlying humour, a knack for vivid description, an ear for dialogue… Yes, it could be just me.

In the end of ‘Something to Answer For’ we don’t quite know whether Townrow was good or bad and whether he redeemed himself or quite the opposite, reached the heights of moral corruption. The novel did a circle and took us to the beginning with Townrow coming to the conclusion that what he thought was his past is actually his future.

PH Newby’s main claim to fame might be the fact he was the inaugural Booker Prize winner, something irrelevant back then, but a crown achievement for a writer today. And it’s true I would’ve never got to read ‘Something to Answer For’ if it weren’t for the Booker thing, but now I want to read more Newby’s novels. And I will be kept busy for long as he wrote some twenty-three of them.
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Apr 03, 2013 Alex Rendall rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Something to Answer For is not a particularly complicated novel in terms of plot: Townrow, the protagonist, goes to Egypt at the request of the wife of a friend, who believes that her late husband was murdered. Mostly set in the Egyptian city of Port Said during the Suez Crisis of 1956, it portrays the adventures of Townrow, as he faces up to not only the conflict occurring around him between Egypt and her former colonial rulers, France and Great Britain, but also the conflict within himself bet...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Ensiform rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

The winner of the first Booker Prize, this novel takes place during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis and centers on Jack Townrow, a British man who makes his living as a corrupt Fund Distributor. With nothing holding him to home, when he is asked to come to Egypt (called the UAR in the novel though that seems to be chronologically off) by Mrs. Khoury, the widow of a man he met ten years earlier in Cairo, he goes. On the way, during a stopover in Rome, Townrow gets into an argument with two men over Br...more The winner of the first Booker Prize, this novel takes place during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis and centers on Jack Townrow, a British man who makes his living as a corrupt Fund Distributor. With nothing holding him to home, when he is asked to come to Egypt (called the UAR in the novel though that seems to be chronologically off) by Mrs. Khoury, the widow of a man he met ten years earlier in Cairo, he goes. On the way, during a stopover in Rome, Townrow gets into an argument with two men over Britain’s knowledge or lack thereof of the Final Solution in 1942. Townrow is incensed that anyone would believe the British government to be capable of colluding in genocide, while the Israeli and Greek are more cynical. In Port Said, on the Canal, he goes to a bar he used to frequent, whose Greek proprietor spins him a yarn about Mrs K’s taking Elie’s body, along with a fortune in coins, to Lebanon though the Canal, which directly led to Nasser’s decision to nationalize it, precipitating the looming French and British invasion. Townrow drinks until he blacks out – it seems likely to the reader that the bar owner drugged him – and awakens naked and bleeding in the desert, and is attacked by a startled camel driver, causing his head and eye to be bandaged for most of the rest of the novel. After this incident, the novel becomes much more dream-like in its narrative, with Townrow a very unreliable narrator who gives false names, who cannot remember his nationality (though he asserts that he is Irish as part of a scam he tries to run on Mrs K), nor his age, nor whether his mother is alive. He imagines that Elie is still alive, or that he is watching the burial at sea. He meets an Egyptian Jew, Leah Strauss, who is married to an American locked in an asylum back home. She repels his attentions, though apparently she later becomes his lover, and she an obsession for him. Townrow walks though scenes of mob unrest (and kills a man, though apparently nothing comes of it), is arrested as a spy, and watches bloody gunfights between Egyptian and British troops with detachment. At the end of the novel, Townrow comes to believe that a citizen is not responsible for the morality of his government and has only himself and his own actions to answer for.

I don’t usually write such a detailed plot summary in a review, but this book, with its scenes that seemed to go nowhere but had huge influence on what came after, seemed to call for it. This is a somewhat bewildering novel, as it is difficult to tell how much of what was related actually took place or how much was a fever or drunken dream. Did Townrow really dig up the body, or watch a burial? Did he really kill a rioter accidentally? The book is very much Graham Greene – efficient British man gets in way over his head in a post-colonial foreign country because he doesn’t understand the history and culture the way he thinks he does – but a Greene novel as co-directed by Christopher Nolan and David Lynch. I understand that this is a story of self-discovery, and it’s written with skill and erudition, and its message that a person is responsible for his or her own morality is welcome enough, but there’s always a part of me that resents books which make no distinction between internal and external processes. How can the reader judge whether Townrow’s choices are apt and his journey worth taking when we can’t even know what’s happened to him?(less)

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Sep 03, 2010 dirt rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club, probably-won-t-finish

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Most people read this book because it was the first winner of the Man Booker prize in 1969 and that is why my book club chose to read it too. Getting your hands on a copy of this out-of-print tome is not easy. You can find it used for ungodly sums of money. I saw it going for between $40 - $50, but save your cash and get it through inter-library loan.

Since I had time to kill while I waited (because inter-library loan is not the speediest of demons), I checked out some reviews and basically they...more

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Sep 26, 2011 Samantha rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: booker-prize

This book was a really slow start for me. It took me a month to read the first 100 pages. But once I finally got into it, I really enjoyed it. Townrow was a very closed off character, but turned out to be quite sympathetic, if still difficult to figure out. The plot is still pretty confused in my head, and I'm trying to figure out exactly what happened, and, more importantly, in what order. But I generally found it to be an interesting treatise on the nature of memory and identity, and the role...more

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Feb 02, 2012 Courtney H. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: bookers

Because I seem unable to stop drawing comparisons between the various Bookers that I've read, I figured I'd try to go back and give at least some sort of review. Of course, my memory is like a sieve so I don't really remember anything I read more than two hours ago, which means these reviews should be taken with a grain of salt at least.

PH Newby was the first Booker I read after making the decision to go through them all. It was not what I expected; and to be honest I'm not sure anyone could exp...more Because I seem unable to stop drawing comparisons between the various Bookers that I've read, I figured I'd try to go back and give at least some sort of review. Of course, my memory is like a sieve so I don't really remember anything I read more than two hours ago, which means these reviews should be taken with a grain of salt at least.

PH Newby was the first Booker I read after making the decision to go through them all. It was not what I expected; and to be honest I'm not sure anyone could expect this book. It tells the story of the Suez Canal Crisis as a backdrop to the personal crisis of Townrow, the protagonist. Townrow was probably not all that reliable to begin with, and as he gets hit on the head quite early in the book, it does not get better from there. He is often confused and that means that the story (limited third-person narrator whose unreliability strides with Townrow) is equally confused. Before I realized how confused Townrow was, I accepted events that later unraveled; and then of course there were events narrated that you know from the get-go are actually some sort of hallucination; and then there are those events that when you reach the last page you still don't actually know where they fall on that spectrum of reality/hallucination.

I really enjoy books that successfully blend the local with the large historical moments, and it is hard to do successfully. Often those historical moments are mere props, or are used to trigger some sort of emotion response in the reader, and so you resent it for being used in such a manner. Here, Newby is more deft and the crisis plays out so naturally and so unwittingly -- for because Townrow does not really seem to understand or give credit to the depth of what is going on, you can ride along with him -- and the lives of the characters blend so surprisingly and effortlessly with the story of Egypt. I particularly appreciated Newby's development of alliances and relationships as they begin, collapse, are betrayed, renew, all through the eyes of unreliable Townrow and which are as political as they are personal. Townrow is the perfect protagonist for this book: slightly immoral, largely affable, bizarrely gallant, unreliable and often irritating, and totally engaging. I particularly enjoyed the train scenes; the best in the book, I think.

It took me a bit to get into the style of these early Bookers, but ultimately, though Newby's books are tough to find now, this one at least is worth digging up. (less)

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Jun 10, 2012 Katy added it

Shelves: booker-prize-winners

Reflections and discussion questions from The Booker Prize Book Club:

According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography’s entry on this the first Booker Prize winner, “some found the award to Newby’s novel ironic because the prize was created and given by a company that represented values questioned in the novel… Booker Brothers McConnell, a multinational conglomerate, sold popular fiction as one of its commodities along with rum, sugar, and engineering products.” The company has 51% of future ri...more

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Jan 24, 2013 Manda rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: booker-prize-winner, read-in-2013

Hmmn. I liked this book and didn't like this book.

To explain, this book is about a rather shallow man who goes to Port Said in Egypt just about exactly as the Suez Canal crisis erupts in the 1950's. Interesting, especially for me, as my Dad's family had to flee Egypt leaving lots of their property behind, some of which is still being battled to be reclaimed even still.

In this book the fleeing bit is at the end - the background is the few months when Nassar claims the canal before the English wi...more

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Mar 07, 2009 Jenny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read09, booker-winners-and-listed, location-egypt

Townrow might be the most unreliable narrator I have come across - it is impossible to distinguish what is actually happening and what is fantasy in his head. I do think he might actually be in Egypt, but whether or not people are dead or alive, whether the British are attacking the Suez canal or not, and whether he is good or bad is a complete mystery. This is the first recipient of the Booker prize, and to be honest that is a bit of a mystery to me as well.

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Sep 12, 2012 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Once I've read a book I like to read a few reviews and see how my thoughts stack up against what the general consensus is. There seems to be an overriding opinion that this book is too confusing and the characters aren't likable enough.

On the second point, I think Townrow especially is not very likable, but he sets himself up. He's honest all the time that he's not a very nice person, and in that sense you admire his honesty and his sense of self.

Once again in terms of the complexity, it's an i...more

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Dec 03, 2011 Geraldine rated it 1 of 5 stars

So this was awarded first Booker prize. One can only hope the books get better. I found it a chore to read, disjointed, with unlikeable characters ( major Townrow, his mistressLeah,) Very confusing storyline. I waded through it only because I have set myself task of reading all the Booker prize winners. I am beginning to have doubts about my challenge.

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May 21, 2013 JodiP rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was my first attempt at a Booker Prize winner. While the writing was imaginatively descriptive, and the story intriguing, I couldn't get past the dated sexism of the writer. I gave up after a chapter.

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Jul 23, 2011 Elizabeth Moffat added it · review of another edition

I'm setting myself a challenge and that's to read all the winners of the booker prize! This was the first winner in 1969, and beautifully written but very confusing in points ad I think it's meant to be from the state of mind of our main character.

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Jul 08, 2012 Jafar rated it 2 of 5 stars

The first book to win the Man Booker Prize, but just about everything with this book, from its writing to its characters, was mediocre and/or annoying. Yes, I got the literary "trick" here: an unreliable narrator. Townrow is confused. To make it worse, he was beaten senseless in the beginning of the story and was left with a severe head injury. He doesn't really know who he is, not even whether he's English or Irish. People call him by different names and he's not sure if he knows them or not. E...more

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Aug 12, 2011 Simon Mendoza rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A convoluted tale of a man trying to find the truth

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Jul 20, 2009 Jen rated it 1 of 5 stars

Booker Prize 1969.

Read this as part of my quest to read all the Booker Prize winners.

Actually I didn't finish it. I really just didn't like it at all. It started out with promise but quickly became tedious. I have finally come to a place in my life where I feel that I can put down a book if I'm not enjoying it. Why waste the time reading something I'm not enjoying? I have slogged through so many crappy books, telling myself there will be some great turnaround and the story will redeem itself so...more

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Aug 06, 2012 Sarah rated it 2 of 5 stars

Another disappointing Booker Prize winner.

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Feb 02, 2011 Lisa rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: booker, britain, 20th-century

please see http://completebooker.blogspot.com/20...

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Jun 12, 2007 Sira added it · review of another edition

Weird and hard to follow. The narrator is unreliable and unsympathetic. This book won the first ever Man Booker prize. It's well crafted, but altogether confusing and fractured.

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Jul 02, 2008 Gina rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: awards-read, read-in-2008

1968 Booker

An uneven look at a former British soldier in Egypt during the Suez Canal takeover.

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Feb 11, 2008 Michale added it · review of another edition

Very difficult to follow - takes a lot of energy to read and not sure why I need to expend all that energy.

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Dec 16, 2011 Deanne rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: booker-winners

Probably my least favourite booker winner, difficult to work out what was going on.

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Jun 28, 2010 Evan Knudsen rated it 5 of 5 stars

This guy can write

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May 21, 2013 Summerwindian marked it as to-read

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May 19, 2013 Yeana marked it as to-read

May 19, 2013 Ayumh rated it 2 of 5 stars

May 18, 2013 Brigette marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: man-booker-prize

May 18, 2013 Leora Benioff marked it as to-read

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About P.H. Newby

Percy Howard Newby CBE (25 June 1918 – 6 September 1997) was an English novelist and broadcasting administrator. He was the first winner of the Booker Prize, his novel Something to Answer For having received the inaugural award in 1969.

Early life
P.H. Newby, known as Howard Newby, was born in Crowborough, Sussex on 25 June 1918 and was educated at Hanley Castle Grammar School in Worcestershire, an...more

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Warrior Pharaohs: The Rise and Fall of the Egyptian Empire

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Quotes from Something to Answer For

“It’s me, you fool. Who do you think it is? I’m coming in.”
He was already naked. She turned away from him as he slipped in by her side but he caught her in his arms and felt her body thaw his belly and thighs. That was all, just to lie there listening to the breathing and the silence and feel the warmth colour his belly and thighs and head. She never wore clothes in bed. They were naked and the warmth run out of her. He wanted to laugh, because it was such a marvelous discovery to make, this warmth. She was hissing like a snake.
“No, it’s wrong.” She went on hissing.
She brought an elbow back smartly and struck him in the paunch. She seemed all elbows, shoulder blades and heels. It was like trying to make love to a dough-mixing machine. She wanted it, didn’t she, otherwise why all this hissing and moaning?” — 3 people liked it

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