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A Shock
The Goldsmiths Prize
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2021 Goldsmiths Prize Shortlist - A Shock
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Hugh, Active moderator
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rated it 3 stars
Oct 06, 2021 12:12PM
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A Shock by Keith Ridgway
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I’m really looking forward to this and this is the first I’ve heard of it.
GY (passing on John Self's guesses) and David both mentioned it as a contender yesterday.(Indeed Gumble has redeemed himself!)
For US based readers and indy press fans - this one is out with New Directions in the US. So buy it from there.
https://www.ndbooks.com/author/keith-...
That ND feature it also tells me it's going to be good
Kamila Shamsie said: At first it seems we might be in a book of interlinked stories, but discovering you aren’t quite where you thought you might be is part of the deliberate disorientation of A Shock. It soon becomes clear that the sections in the novel don’t interlink so much as echo and rhyme. The observation is acute, the dialogue sparkles, the movement between interiority and surveillance is deft. It is a novel of in-between places that keeps the reader off balance to surprising, intelligent and sometimes eerie effect.”
I am deeply embarrassed at mentioning an unheralded Goldsmith shortlisted book. And even worse I think I was one of the first to mention Little Scratch as a contender.
Completely ruined my hitherto deplorable record.
I guess One Sky Day might have been my “read it but did not mention as a vague contender” book but Paul listed it instead.
It’s nice to not pay shipping!
I heard about this through David Hebblewhite - he praised it highly during one of our RoC meetings. I have bought it and am looking forward. As I have ditched meticulously planned TBR stacks the probably of reading this will be soon (when it arrives in a month)
message 9:
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Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
(last edited Oct 09, 2021 12:46PM)
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rated it 3 stars
My review herehttps://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
The way I can best describe this book is as follows.
Imagine someone made a collage of South London Life which was a combination of representational art with the more occasional absurdist elements and which was made from overlapping pieces of material which are drawn from the detritus of South London Life itself.
After I wrote this I found the author’s own description which I think is not that different, he calls it an enneaptych – a nine-panelled painting – “each panel portrays something of its own, but it’s how they work together that makes it what it is. You usually see panel paintings on altars. And, yes, the altar here is London. And it’s a foul and profane and fractured altar, but it’s mine, and I’m poisoned by it”
There is a lot to like, particularly the interaction between the ideas of liminal spaces and of lives being trapped and circumscribed and how both are represented physically as well as emotionally. I liked the way that a party (and the Labour Party) and a party wall were all ways in which the different characters both converged and were trapped.
My two biggest issues I think were:
Firstly that it is all just a bit too sordid for me (two chapters in particular rather ruined my experience but the whole thing felt tainted)
Secondly that it is perhaps oddly a little too straightforward (at least compared to my prior expectations) - the connections between the different characters and chapters seemed in many cases a little too obvious (even at times over Laboured - if you can pardon the pun). A good example of this would be a subtle detail of the first chapter which is explained in painstaking detail by a character in the last story.
I rather like Mrs Grant's literary taste - read everything .. except English writers and North Americans. Although otherwise the part set in the private school feels poorly pitched (e.g. the attempt to replicate the children's accents in text)Perhaps they should have given the connected short stories with a sense of place slot to Luckenbooth
I happen to have some inside info on that one. The judges controversially had marked that as ineligible as the book is set outside London and the author does not live there either. They did note that the author did degrees at two different London universities but because she left to finalise her PhD in Edinburgh it counted against her.
That makes sense. Do wonder if we ought to have an explicitly London only prize. Could pay for it out of the £40bn per annum fiscal transfer out of London to the rest of the UK.I was looking at a policy proposal the other day. Trial Universal Basic Income in London. Pay £3,500 to each man, woman and child, non-means tested and tax free. And it doesn't cost a penny in extra spending for the government as it's entirely self-funded by London.
Paradise Block (shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize) would also have been a much better choice for connected short stories with a sense of place. A Shock is an odd pick for me - perhaps it is deliberate London-centricity, perhaps the others weren’t entered for a novel prize, but whatever the reason, this is a rare misfire on a strong list.
I’m enjoying this so far. I wouldn’t consider it a misfire, although it is miles behind the other two I’ve read on the list (Sterling and Assembly). It’s still better than one or two on the Booker shortlist.
This is an expectations thing I think, as discussed on Checkout 19 thread (and that vs Pond)I read this as the 6th book on a list where the other 5 books were all book-of-the-year level for me, so I was expecting/hoping to be blown away. And it just felt like one of several connected short story collections this year which probably qualified more as the author insisted it was a novel* (remember David Szalay's All That A Man Is).
I guess you are now coming to it after GY and I (think Neil is also in same camp) had given it a disappointed meh, so can be pleasantly surprised that it's actually not bad if measured objectively.
Incidentally this one does make me want to seek out his previous book (which has been on my radar for some time) so I can't have disliked it that much.
[* In turn that reminds me a bit - see this year's International Booker - of books that are ostensibly memoirs but qualify for fiction/novel prizes on the grounds they are entered. And then often do well, since as novels they seem innovative.]
I haven’t quite finished it yet. After a short WhatsApp confirmation from GY that I had correctly guessed what the final chapter would be (I don’t think it is difficult), I thought I was going to be a bit bored but it turns out there’s a couple of chapters that make it more interesting. So I am probably on the positive side of meh at the moment.
It does get better over time I think - but The Sweat and The Joke rather tipped me over the edge beforehand.
Ok, I have finished it now and I moved out of “meh” and into “I like it”. For me, it doesn’t threaten any of the 3 I had already read before the list was announced, but I am glad it is on the list because I doubt I would have read it otherwise.
I am very tired of short story collections. Short Stories are the most difficult to write and even otherwise talented authors often turn out so-so short stories. Even in a good collection there will be a few stinkers. Now my expectations are low for this book. Which is good.
message 20:
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Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
(last edited Oct 12, 2021 07:21AM)
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rated it 3 stars
I don't see this as short stories - its a series of chapters told from different viewpoints about a group of inter-related characters, the stories they are trapped in (*), the ones they escape from and the ones the invent (both for others and for themselves).(*) the idea of being trapped in a narrow or hidden space is key to the novel.
There is a lot to like here but for me it loses at least 0.5 stars each for: a drug taking chapter (which makes Great Circle's shrooms look like literature), general squalidness and the worse attempt at London accents since Dick van Dyke (which sadly in this case are seemingly meant to be public school accents).
Hi don't hknow hwhat hyou mean habout the haccents
I gave it 4 stars but I forgot to allow for the accents so I may need to knock a star off - they were a low point.
They hwereOn reflection I am being very unfair to Dick van Dyke
- he did not actually live in London
- I can at least see what he was trying to do
- Mary Poppins is a masterwork
Sorry to hear this one is not going down so well. For what it's worth, here's my review:https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
I have to concede that A Shock is not in the same league as Hawthorn & Child. When I made my guess in at the shortlist, I thought Lean Fall Stand and The Tomb Guardians would be more likely contenders than this.
Still, I find there is some powerful writing here (I love the first chapter, for example). From a Goldsmiths point of view, the loosely connected structure really works to reflect the sense of community in the book.
Heck, I even liked the bit with the accents, because I thought it was meant as a deliberate parody of fiction that represents working-class accents phonetically.
message 25:
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Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
(last edited Oct 12, 2021 09:07AM)
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rated it 3 stars
That is a very good point on the accents David - deliberately adding aitches to parody the way of dropping them to show working class accents.The Party is definitely a highlight: I think having read that and The Camera I felt the book rather descended after that - with a brief pick up for The Story
Hmmm - that could indeed be clever on the accents! Problem I had was that as someone living in South London, the only bit I could identify with was the private schoolkids, and they don't speak anything like that. This year's trend appears to be to flatten vowels - so eg the 'o' in a word like swollen is pronounced more like the o in "not" than the o is "no".
As GY has kindly pointed out elsewhere, I live in weird “Checkout 19 Land” so I don’t know much about London accents. For me, it was just awkward to read but I get that it might have been clever.
Surely though Paul you are talking about South West London and a West London ( as well as North of the River) school - this is set in South East London including from every indication (it seems to be the other side of Denmark Hill) the private school.Those accents are miles apart.
That puts you firmly in Alleyns territory doesn't it, and I know several kids who go there as well as the headmistress.
My copy arrived today. I’ll be starting it in a few minutes. I hope I like it because I had figured This One Sky Day would be last place book in rankings.
This one just didn't work for me. I can see how others would like it, but I could not get into it and found it too all over the place. I appreciated the talent involved in writing it but I just didn't like it.
This really could be a solid short story collection. The part that doesn’t work for me is presenting this as a novel. There’s no real link between these stories, other than they take place in the same part of south London.
David, I think I disagree (but in a friendly way, of course!). I think what makes it a good Goldsmiths novel is that what makes it a novel is the echoes between chapters rather than the direct links. Yes, characters pop up in different stories and the beginning and end are direct references to each other, but it was the central bit where the couple in the pub make up stories for each other that cemented it as a novel, and an innovative one, for me.Does that make any sense?
That makes sense, Neil, from the standpoint of whether it is an innovative Goldsmiths novel. For me, though, that innovation came at the cost of making this feel like it was lacking coherence. By calling it a novel, it sets up some expectation that there will be threads running between the stories that bring it together in a more interesting way than it did. The threads that existed here weren’t particularly innovative, interesting, or coherent. Which is too bad because I liked most of the stories.
I must admit I quite liked the threads - it was (some of) the stories that ruined it for me.
The threads that were there make this an interesting collection of stories. It just felt lacking as a novel.
The question of whether or not a book is truly a novel or truly fiction has come up a lot this award season!
Keith Ridgway interview and another attack in the University administrationhttps://www.newstatesman.com/culture/...
This collection is growing on me the longer I think about it. One thing I liked was the difference in style from story to story. Did anyone notice an intentional mimicry of other author's styles in the different stories? For example, The first story has a William Trevor aspect;The second story is somewhat Joycean; the third story had another distinct style. And despite different styles they all had unifying stylistic elements as well. I thought this was very clever of the author.
I probably should have gone on to 3rd chapter until the book hooked me, then went back and read the 2nd chapter.
The Mookse and the Gripes
Books mentioned in this topic
A Shock (other topics)Hawthorn & Child (other topics)
Lean Fall Stand (other topics)
The Tomb Guardians (other topics)
A Shock (other topics)
