From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about the books shortlisted for the 2014 Prize, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Tessa McWatt on Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Venus as a Boy by Luke Sutherland

Venus as a Boy - Luke Sutherland (PB cover image)The Folio Prize winners that should have been: Jean Rhys for Wide Sargasso Sea; Luke Sutherland for Venus as A Boy

I’m all for outsiders and outriders. Perhaps the Folio Prize is also a place for them. There are two books that I think might have vied for the prize had it existed in the past. The first is one that did find its way into the literary canon (and won the WH Smith Literary award), through the side hatch, via its intertextuality with Jane Eyre. Jean Rhys was an outsider’s writer, and her other books, particularly the harrowing Good Morning, Midnight (1939), expound an isolation and desperation so profound as to be nearly too painful to read. After Good Morning, Midnight she retreated, impoverished and isolated, while she honed and perfected the ultimate outsider, in bringing Bronte’s obscured and sketchy Bertha Mason to life. Rhys gave an infamous ghost the integrity of her own story, gave her madness a cause, and gave voice to a very specific, historical and cultural otherness. Wide Sargasso Sea brought Rhys attention in 1966, but a little too late for a writer who was publishing novels from the margins since the 1930s. The Other closes in on ‘us’ over time and, in all art forms, risk-taking outriders can eventually become insiders, even when they don’t mean to or necessarily want to.

Perhaps Rhys’s underdog protagonist is ancestor to Desirée, the narrator of Luke Sutherland’s Venus as a Boy. Desirée is a small island boy from Orkney whose life becomes destroyed by his own magical gift for sex — providing his partners with a kind of supernatural transcendence. Intertextual (the title is from a song by Bjork; there are direct associations to the myth of Midas) and with swagger and jazz in its sentences, Sutherland’s novel is the anti-hero’s apotheosis. Desirée is a sensuous, gender-confused, placeless, seeking, compassionate outsider who is, in the end, sacrificed to the brutality of contemporary Britain.

Desirée’s Orkney Island is so ‘outside’ of hackneyed bucolic literary references (it is a setting devoid of trees) and the London to which he travels so underground and yet familiar, that, like Rhys, Sutherland offers us a different way of looking at the stories we think we already know. The novel challenges the laws governing culture, beauty, and even physics, as Desiree slowly turns to gold. On the syllabus of contemporary novels at the university where I teach creative writing, this short book is, year upon year, the favourite by far among students. It speaks to those on the fringes; it makes myths for those who do not see themselves mirrored in the icons and mythical heroes of the mainstream. It’s a modern fable about belonging, metamorphosis and sexual liberation, written in language that chimes with all that is contemporary in its hybridity.