Three Booker Prize contenders: The Trees; The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida; Treacle Walker

The Trees is black comedy — which we might define as laughing at things we’re not supposed to laugh about — at its darkest. It is a funny crime novel that uses as its springboard the racist murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. If anyone can get away with this, it is Everett, who over a four-decade career has made a speciality of head-spinning satirical takes on race in the United States.

The book starts off with a kick: in the town of Money, a white man, Junior Junior, is found dead — garrotted by barbed wire — and next to him lies the mutilated figure of a black man who holds Junior’s severed balls in his hand. (This, a recurring image in the book, presumably inspired the cover design of a couple of dangling cherries, and will drive male readers to cross their legs repeatedly as they read.)

More such crimes occur, first in Mississippi, then further afield. Each time, more curiously, the dead black man — which might be the same one at every scene — disappears from the mortuary. “Is he dead?” asks one investigator. “On and off,” comes the reply.

State detectives are sent to find out what has happened, though the best summary they can come up with at first is “there’s a crazily battered and likely dead Black man running on the loose, maybe killing White boys with shady histories”. The shady histories include involvement in the Emmett Till lynching and membership of the Ku Klux Klan.

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There’s much more to come, including a 105-year-old woman, a cadaver supply company (“Are they playing catch with an eyeball?”) and a cameo from a certain orange-faced US president. The last point is indicative of something wider: there’s a hasty, bashed-out quality to the book at times that makes it feel less substantial than the weighty subject matter would suggest. I have my doubts whether it will stand up on rereading, as it needs to in order to win the prize, but the fact that the judges have promoted it from longlist to shortlist may prove me wrong.

Anyway there’s no gainsaying laughter, or the serious things the book reminds us of, so as a daring and potentially controversial piece of high entertainment, The Trees fits the bill nicely. And so what if it all seems a bit chaotic? “I don’t get it,” says one of the detectives when faced with yet another eccentric local. “What’s to get?” his partner replies. “She be crazy.”

This is a classic Booker book — a little known author telling us in an inventive way about a significant historical event. In fact Karunatilaka is not quite unknown: Seven Moons is his second novel and his debut, Chinaman, won the Commonwealth Book Prize and was named by Wisden to be the second-best cricket book of all time. (So close!)

His new novel is set largely in 1989, at the height of the Sri Lankan civil war. The book makes a virtue out of the complexity of its subject matter by offering a cynical dramatis personae of the organisations involved. “LTTE: Want a separate Tamil state. Prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this. JVP: Want to overthrow the capitalist state. Are willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.”

But the heart of the story is our narrator, Maali Almeida — he is a war photographer, he is gay (“you prefer cock to cooch”) ... and he is dead. His afterlife task is to find out who killed him and why. The obvious suspects are a couple of thugs, Balal and Kottu, who banter about feeding bodies to cats. But the truth — taking in Maali’s relationship with the beautiful young man DD — is more complicated.

Like The Trees, Seven Moons takes a hard subject and gives it a light touch and even comedy. “Even the dead enjoy a bit of slapstick.” And it is steeped in western popular culture and music, from Pet Shop Boys to Queen. But there are grotesque descriptions too of torture and killing, which require a strong stomach to take.

The messiness of the war and the messiness of Maali’s death are reflected in the style, which jumps about from period to period. For me the confusion marginally exceeded the reward, and I’d be surprised to see this book win.

This is the hardest book on the shortlist to assess. That does happen sometimes with the Booker: take 1995, when Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road won. It was the third part of a trilogy and (as I found out) didn’t stand up if you tried to read it cold.

Treacle Walker is not quite like that. It is a stand-alone novel, but it has been received most enthusiastically by those who are deeply embedded in Alan Garner’s work — the work of more than six decades. He deals in myths and legends, in the landscape and lore of northwest England, and in what irksome literary terms (something Garner himself would never adopt) would describe as liminal places: borders between worlds, points of ambiguity.

The other border relevant here is between books for children and adults: Garner’s work doesn’t really recognise the distinction. In Treacle Walker the central character is a boy, Joe, who swaps some scrap with a rag and bone man in exchange for a donkey stone (for scrubbing steps) and an empty medicine jar.

These objects lead to changes in Joe: his vision (in an eye test he sees letters that aren’t there), and in his surroundings, as a mummified old man, Thin Amren, appears. There is little description and lots of dialogue, so Garner can surprise us by Joe suddenly saying to Thin Amren: “Why’ve you got no clothes on?”

But there’s no sense that Garner, however playful, is trying to trick the reader. He’s a serious writer and this book is a serious work but one whose restlessly magical elements (“the glamourie”) will baffle as many readers as they delight. It has a weird power which is just as hard to get out of your head as it is to understand.

One critic described Garner’s oeuvre as “densely connected but sparely wrought”, and this seems key: if you don’t have those connections already, as I don’t, then much of the book’s value will be lost on you. It may be that this is more a lifetime achievement acknowledgment for Garner than an award for a specific book — but the books are so interlinked that it’s all the same thing anyway.