On Fiona Mozley's Elmet, the Booker-shortlisted novel written on a mobile phone

I thought it would be fitting, then, that I read and write about the book in the same manner that it was composed, writes Sanjay Sipahimalani on DailyO. Read on: 

When Fiona Mozley’s debut novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize earlier this year, news reports claimed that she had written all, if not most, of it on her mobile phone. A pleasant if unexpected change from all those novelists who confess that they simply cannot get started unless they have just the right quality of stationery or stock of sharpened pencils.

Mozley started the book, she has said, while on the train commute between her home in United Kingdom's York and an internship in London. Watching the Yorkshire countryside go by, she started to muse on “what the relationship between a person and a place was”, a train of thought that led to Elmet, the book that’s now reached the shortlist. At 29, she’s the youngest author on the list.

I thought it would be fitting, then, that I read and write about Elmet in the same manner that it was composed: on my own mobile phone. This is a device on which I, for one, haven’t written a novel. Texts, tweets, messages, notes and mails: yes. Fiction: no. Here, then, is the fruit of my thumbed labour.

As the epigraph that quotes a verse by Ted Hughes indicates, Elmet refers to a vanished Celtic kingdom in Yorkshire. Mozley’s novel, set in the near-present, deals with the fortunes of an unusual family comprising a father, a giant of a man who earns his living by bare-knuckle fighting in local contests; a 15-year-old daughter, a girl with pent-up appetites and furies; and an impressionable, gender-conflicted 13-year-old son, who tells us their story of their lives in retrospect while he mentally and physically journeys back to his homestead.

A few pages in, and I realise that reading an entire book on a phone is something I could get used to. I may not prefer it to print or to an e-book, but it’s not undoable.

The only problem is an infernal urge to fiddle. Every so often I switch fonts, point sizes and background shades and then switch them back again. Eventually, this diminishes to acceptable levels. (Including, to my pleasant surprise, the itch to check e-mail and social media updates.)

Mozley’s sentences are striking, managing to be tough and tender at the same time. “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives,” one reads, a deliberate calling forth of the links between person and place the author has spoken about. In this manner, she accretes rich and memorable details of the landscape, interiors, clothes, food and more.

Writing fully formed sentences on a touchscreen keypad is tricky, though. At least for me, it is; perhaps it’s to do with the size of my thumbs or that I hasten to put down words before they disappear from thought. As has been widely noted, predictive text is hit-or-miss – but when one turns it off, one is confronted by strings of unintelligible letters. One soldiers on, fingers crossed.

To begin with, Elmet’s chapters progress in the manner of overlapping episodes, speaking of the children’s interrupted stint in school, Christmas Eve celebrations, archery lessons, their father’s dealings with others, and more. Thus, it immerses us in a layered portrait of a realm that is aslant from our times. “In another world,” the boy recalls, “we might have grown up faster, but this was our strange, sylvan otherworld, so we did not.”

Soon enough, though, the narrative gathers momentum. The father takes the lead in organising resistance against a group of rapacious landlords; the locals start to come together for the cause; the landowners devise stratagems to regain power.

The latter half, with a nail-biting fight scene and its spiralling consequences, is almost unbearably tense and gripping. A tip: if you’re reading it on a phone screen, you’d be well-advised to turn off all those pesky notifications.

At the very end, one realises that the Gothic notes of the finale are cleverly foreshadowed from the start. (“It’s sort of like a Western, but set in Yorkshire,” the author has commented.) However, it can also be said that there are moments in the book that are overdone – for example, when people speak overtly of collectivism and the old ways.

Happily enough, though, I managed to remain riveted, even during an especially bumpy commute, and also managed to sneak in a few paragraphs during office meetings. (Shh.) It’s the narrative, the atmosphere and the language that stay in mind after the book is finished. Make sure your battery is charged.

2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist: What to expect on award day

With a different panel of judges each year, the prestigious literary award is famously unpredictable, writes Urvashi Bahuguna on DailyO. Read on: 

The Man Booker Prize, with a different panel of judges each year, is famously unpredictable. Two books from India, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, have won the prize in recent years. Though neither captivated readers the way Arundhati Roy’s 1997 winner The God of Small Things did, the prize catapulted both authors into lasting fame.

Not every year’s winner is a crowd or a critic favourite – in fact, bafflingly this is almost never the case. This year’s longlist has been criticised for favouring “subprime output from famous names” and for neglecting stronger, lesser-known debuts like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. And now the five judges have whittled it down to six books. The winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize will be announced on October 17 where the winner will take home a £50,000 (Rs 41 lakh) prize.

Who’s out?
Arundhati Roy’s second novel, released to disappointed criticism and defensive praise, is out of the running, and can cease to dominate the conversation. Another literary heavyweight to bow out is Kamila Shamsie whose Home Fire garnered largely favourable reviews (some of whom have even called it Shamsie’s best work yet).

Colson Whitehead’s highly inventive The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, will have to settle for a place on the longlist. Another winner of other major literary prizes, Mike McCormack’s single-sentence novel called Solar Bones, is out of the running along with Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End. Before we say goodbye to the longlist, we’d recommend Home Fire and The Underground Railroad as books readers shouldn’t miss.

Who’s still in?
Emily Fridlund’s debut novel, History of Wolves, is set at the edge of a lake in the cold, frigid forests of Northern Minnesota. The novel follows the lonely fourteen-year-old daughter of cult members, who are the last of their kind, as she attempts to befriend new neighbours across the lake. When she begins to babysit their young son, she quickly comes to understand that they aren’t as happy or as ordinary as they first seemed. Some readers think Fridlund could have written a tighter plot, but for others the book was the atypical, aromantic coming-of-age book they had been waiting for.

George Saunders’ original, unnerving work, Lincoln in the Bardo, is everyone’s guess for this year’s winner. For twenty years, Saunders was haunted by a story his wife’s cousin told him – when Abraham Lincoln was US president, he lost his 11-year-old son, and entered his crypt on numerous occasions to hold his body. Saunders’ first full-length novel (and his eighth work of fiction) imagines a correspondence between Lincoln and his deceased son in a purgatory where other disquieted ghosts suspended between two worlds hover. The illicit communication between these ghosts, Lincoln and his son inspire a terrifying battle for the son’s soul.

The 2017 shortlist (l-r): Fiona Mozley, Mohsin Hamid, Ali Smith, George Saunders, Emily Fridlund and Paul Auster.
Pics courtesy: The Guardian

Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West imagines magical doors that refugees can supposedly step through to escape an unnamed Middle Eastern country in the throes of a violent upheaval. The novel follows a young Muslim couple who attempt a relationship at a time when everything, include their own selves, are rapidly changing. When they run out of time, they must step through a door without any assurance of what lies on the other side. In a time of refugee crises all over the world, Hamid taps into the anxieties and the hopeful delusions of the displaced.

Ali Smith’s Autumn is set against the post-Brexit violence of a country rethinking itself. The book is the first in a series of four seasonal state-of-the-nation novels. It’s set between the tender, nurturing friendship between a young girl and her elderly neighbour who introduces her to art and literature, and the ugly, divisive atmosphere in the wake of the anti-immigrant Brexit vote.

In the present day, the young girl has matured into an art history teacher in her 30s and her ageing neighbour is in a coma in a residential care facility where she visits him. Autumn weaves their dream-like relationship and philosophical exchanges with the bigotry and xenophobia on the streets.

Paul Auster is known for slim, tightly written works. However, his latest, 4321, is a bulky, almost-900-page meditation on the four possible ways one average man’s life could have gone during the American Civil War. This one is the most surprising inclusion on the shortlist – we thought we were done reading about average men. But if you love a book that won’t end or are a man wondering the other ways your life could have gone, this might be the book for you.

Fiona Mozley, who works in a York bookstore, wrote her disturbing debut, Elmet, on her phone. Set to be published in November, the highly-anticipated book is set in rural Yorkshire where a father of two young children builds a house with his own hands on isolated woodland he doesn’t own.

Not having read the unreleased Elmet, we’re cautiously betting our money on Saunders, but we secretly can’t wait for the creepy, Yorkshire book.