Western Lane (2023)

Why this one?

The Booker Prize 2023 Shortlist was announced the other week, and to my great surprise I’d actually managed to read five of the six entries via my longlist adventures. As I’ll probably come back to, I was pretty gutted that two of my three favourites, In Ascension and Pearl didn’t make the final six, and I do believe it’s a weaker shortlist without either of those on it (leaving aside the brilliant books that didn’t make the longlist!)

Anyhow, this was the one I hadn’t yet read, so obviously it had to be d0ne.

Chetna Maroo is a British Indian author, born in Nairobi, Kenya and now living in London, England. Before becoming a writer, she worked as an accountant, and began by writing short stories. In 2022, she won the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a short story prize awarded by the Paris Review (also won in recent years by fellow Booker shortlister Jonathan Escoffery.) Western Lane is her debut novel.

Thoughts, etc.

Western Lane follows Gopi, an 11-year old British-Indian Jain girl living in suburban London in the 1980s, who has recently lost her mother. Alongside her two older sisters, she is left in the care of her Pa, who is clearly also struggling with grief despite a seeming lack of emotional empathy and uncommunicative nature. Both Gopi and her Pa channel their grief into an obsession with squash, training at the titular Western Lane centre where Gopi meets Ged, a white boy with whom she becomes quietly infatuated, and his mother, with whom Pa finds a connection.

The story is in some senses predictable, with Gopi using sport as an escape and motivation in the face of grief, plus a form of silent bonding with her otherwise distant father. There's a culturally difficult love interest, an obstructive aunt who can't get on with the idea of a girl playing sport, and a narrative that points inevitably towards a moment of sporting triumph against the odds. That much of it does indeed play out, and is moderately interesting along the way. The conflict with Aunt Ranjan in particular spiked my interest, familiar enough a theme as it is in South Asian literature. When Ranjan (and her more empathetic husband Pavan) adopt Gopi part way through the book, in the process distancing her from her sisters, Ged, and ultimately (it seems) her passion for squash, it feels like the beginning of a really compelling (if not necessarily original) story.

It's a little more interesting in its study of the relationship between Gopi and her father. It's one that oscillates from a seemingly impenetrable distance between the two, through a seemingly closening relationship driven by squash and hours spent on the court and watching a VHS tape of their hero, the Pakistani champion Jahangir Khan, to his dispatching of her to her aunt and uncle and a conflicted conclusion in which in many ways they seem further apart than ever. Beneath it all though there's a sense that beneath what's spoken and what's done, there is an underlying connection between the two that is more powerful than words or physical actions.

For me, this was a book with a lot of potential but one that didn't quite deliver. It's all tension and very little in the way of release, which is perhaps the point but didn't quite do it for me. On the one hand, there's the potential in here for a satisfying if conventional strength-over-adversity story to play out, but that perhaps needed a longer novel and a slightly different intent. On the other, there's a quiet and more literary narrative where much of what matters exists in the gaps between what's actually said and done. This worked to an extent but it felt like it didn't quite come together in terms of structural unity - stretched to a short novel it felt there were too many competing threads that clouded the overall message which might have been better served by a short story. The ultimate trouble for me is that as a read it doesn't quite settle on one side or the other, and so ends up being only partly successful on both fronts.

Score

7

A book that I enjoyed reading for its understated style and little moments of (especially cross-cultural) observation, but found a little frustrating as an overall package.

Based on a single read-through, this puts my final ranking of the shortlist as follows:

1. Prophet Song - Paul Lynch (9)

2. The Bee Sting - Paul Murray (8.5)

3. This Other Eden - Paul Harding (8.5)

4. If I Survive You - Jonathan Escoffery (8)

5. Western Lane - Chetna Maroo (7)

6. Study for Obedience - Sarah Bernstein (7)

On reflection, this isn’t quite the list I’d have liked to see this year. It’s not a bad list, but I feel that it’s lacking a real standout and there are so many other books even from my limited reading that I’d liked to have seen on here. (I’ve also inadvertently ranked all three Pauls as the top three, oh no!)

Prophet Song deserves to be read by a wide audience and I would also be very happy to see Murray get his dues, so it’s not all bad.

My fantasy list?

1. Biography of X - Catherine Lacey (10)

2. Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver (9.5)

3. In Ascension - Martin MacInnes (9.5)

4. Pearl - Siân Hughes (9)

5. Prophet Song - Paul Lynch (9)

6. The Bee Sting - Paul Murray (8.5)

Oh well, you can’t have it all!

Next up

A quick dip back into my Women’s Prize winners read-through, which is now reaching its final stretch, with Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet.