A Booker Prize Victory Has Revived The Debate Over Whether Literary Fiction Needs to Be Realistic

M John Harrison’s Booker Win Redraws Literature’s Borders (Picture Credit – Hugo Glendinning)

The oldest winner in the prize’s history has reopened a debate that is older still: does fiction have to be realistic to tell the truth?

It is a particular kind of loneliness to be told that the way you see the world does not count. For six decades, M John Harrison has written about collapse, longing and the strangeness of ordinary life, and his books have usually sat on the shelf marked science fiction, a few aisles away from “proper” literature. On 9 November, aged 81, he became the oldest writer ever to win the Booker Prize. The judges chose 'The End of Everything', a 198-page novel, unanimously. The win crowns a career, and it also reopens an old, uncomfortable question: why do we trust realism to tell us the truth?

The novel is set on the Kent coast a few decades from now. A calamity has shattered Britain and brought mysterious, powerful lifeforms with it. Phillip Tennent lives with his ageing aunt and gathers whatever the tide brings in. Mary Beard, who chaired the judges, called the book “the politics of now seen through the lens…

Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle