Something to Answer For Paperback – May 11, 2011

I read that this was the only winner of the Booker Prize to go out of print. Well, I can see why. Usually I love this type of setting: Mediterranean adventures in the 1960s. The books opens promisingly enough, setting this scene. Somewhat reminiscent of The Magus. Unfortunately there the similarities end. The plot is not exciting, the characterization is poor, and the writing is confusing and uninspiring. The felt this book dragged along. I wouldn't even have had in on a shortlist for the Booker.

Like the others who have reviewed this book, I was lead to it because it was the first recipient of the Booker Prize. I had read a couple of Booker winners previously which I enjoyed, and thought the list of winners would be a quality reading list to help me get over the paralyzation I suffer when trying to pick my next book. After finishing "Something to Answer For", I am excited for the trip I have in store!What I loved about this book was the uncertainty; trying to figure out what was real and what was not. I felt this kept me more engaged and reading more carefully for the little clue that would make it all clear. Newby does a fantastic job of making you connect with the protagonist, Townrow, and after a long stretch of reading I couldn't help but carry a little bit of his confusion with me, making me question some of my basic assumptions about who I am. It is also refreshing to have stories like this where the character, even after making some dubious choices throughout his life, can still draw you in and remind you that it isn't always black and white: doing something considered morally suspect does not make one a bad person. I love when books make you connect and feel for a person that you might otherwise judge based on a few of their actions."Something to Answer For" kept me enthralled from beginning to end, and I highly recommend it for a challenging, insightful read.

The main character was very disoriented and it distracted from the narrative. Maybe that was the point. I’m surprised this won the first Booker Prize.

An interesting tale of a man out of his element but still somehow sure of himself, it can be a little hard to follow but is ultimately rewarding.

The book is excellent but did it didn’t come in a separate packaging and it was permeated by essential oils that came along with the book.

Deserved Prize Winner, with great spirit of place

Absolutely awful. Unclear to the point of being impossible to follow, with characters you won't feel any empathy or compassion for.

Stream of consciousness overlaid on brain damage!

Thanks to Amazon, I was able to complete my Booker Prize collection! I couldn't find this book anywhere else.P H Newby’s novel Something to Answer For won the inaugural Booker Prize in 1969, so it takes pride of place leftmost on my Booker shelf. At the opposite end sits Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, one of two 2019 winners. The books sit, quite appropriately, at opposite ends of a spectrum.Whereas Atwood’s novel is fast-paced, taking in over a decade of future-history across the entire North American continent, Newby gives an account of a few weeks in 1956 in the Egyptian town of Port Said. Where Atwood’s narrative whips from one event to the next, Newby’s is ruminative. Atwood’s plot is laid out in one direction with pristine linearity, like the TV-show storyboard it truly is; Newby’s story, on the other hand, is crumpled and not so much multi-layered as multi-dimensional. Clearly, these are very different types of novel: Newby’s is better. He takes in time, space, the exterior world and captures the multiple facets of the human consciousness.The plot is simple enough. Townrow is trapped in Port Said, having journeyed to the side of an old acquaintance, Mrs Khoury, from whom he is for various and shifting reasons throughout the novel reluctant to part. Ostensibly he is trying to solve the murder of Mrs Khoury’s husband, Elie, and for one reason or another he fails. He is inhibited less by external factors than by his own avarice, guilt, lack of willpower, lapsing memory, lust, sorrow, bad luck and other various forces which seem to overlap dizzyingly. All this buffets him about, until it is too late to leave: The Suez Crisis is raining chaos – and rockets – down on Port Said. Meanwhile he gets drunk (a lot) and beaten (severely) and appears to veer between near-destruction at others’ hands and at his own.Newby does not simply take the reader on a journey with Townrow; he thrusts us into the carnage of his mind. In it I heard echoes of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Whether Townrow is brain-damaged early in the narrative, whether he is mad or whether he is the waste product of a broken system of English arrogance deprived of a place in the world is for the reader to determine. Newby’s ability to encapsulate the chaos of Townrow’s circumstances is masterful.I have to criticise the publisher Faber for not tidying up the text: there are typographical errors every few pages, particularly towards the end. Did the proof-reader find the book too much and fall asleep?Newby’s fifty-year-old novel is ambitious and by no means an easy read. For a fairly slim book, it took me a lot of sittings to complete. But literary prize winners shouldn’t read like YA fiction – sorry, Margaret! More recent Booker Prize winners definitely have something to answer for.

It’s 1956, and Townrow has returned to Port Said, a place he first visited when serving in the army in WW2. This time he’s there at the request of Ethel Khoury, the English widow of an Egyptian man who had befriended Townrow on his earlier visit. Mrs Khoury believes Elie, her husband, was murdered and wants Townrow to... well, actually I have no idea what she wanted Townrow to do, so, moving swiftly on...! Anyway, Townrow is a bit of a small-time crook and his plan is to con Mrs Khoury out of the possessions the wealthy Elie left her. But on his first night in Port Said, Townrow is attacked and is left with a head injury which makes his memories confused, and then Nasser, the President of Egypt, announces he is nationalising the Suez Canal – one of the last outposts of the dying British Empire. When the British and French decide they must retaliate to keep the Canal under Western control, the situation in Port Said will soon be as confused as the thoughts in Townrow’s head, though not quite as confused as this poor reader.At the halfway point I would happily have thrown this in the bin but it redeemed itself a little in the last quarter when finally Townrow begins to live in the present rather than in his jumbled thoughts and memories. It won the first ever Booker Prize in 1969, beating Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark amongst others. I imagine that lots of people decide to read the Booker Prize winners in order, get halfway through this one, and decide not to bother...Sifting through the general incomprehensibility of it, Newby is satirising the British imperial mindset, and examining the effect of the Suez crisis on the British psyche, I think. It’s clearly aiming at humour some of the time, and even veers towards farce occasionally, but not very successfully – it’s too messy. Although not terribly moral himself, Townrow has a profound belief in the decency of the British in their dealings with their citizens, allies and colonial dependencies. The first sign of a crack in this belief is when he is accosted at the airport by a Jew from Hungary who insists that in 1942 the British deliberately failed to warn Hungarian Jews not to board the trains that would take them to the Nazi death camps. Townrow denies this could possibly have happened (did it? I don’t know), but the question remains in his fractured mind. Then when the British bomb Cairo after the annexation of the Canal, he is shocked to the core. This is not the way the Britain in which he believes would act, apparently. (I find that strange, because of all the things we did in the Empire era, was that really the worst? Perhaps it’s a time dilation thing – to Newby it was pretty much current affairs; to me it’s part of a long history.)The underlying suggestion, I think, is that it was the Suez Crisis that changed the British attitude from hubristic imperialist pride to the kind of breast-beating shame that followed in the second half of the twentieth century. Again he may well be right, although I’d have thought the loss of India was a bigger milestone on that journey. To me what Suez represents is the British realisation that it no longer dominated the world, politically or militarily, and that America had become the new superpower. So shame, yes, but of our weakness in the present rather than of our actions in the past. But, and I freely admit I didn’t have a clue what Newby was trying to say most of the time, that wasn’t what I felt he was suggesting. However, I’m pretty sure Townrow’s head injury, confusion and loss of faith in British decency is symbolic of what Newby saw as the effects on the national psyche of the sudden collapse of the Empire after the war.So all very interesting and just my kind of thing. Unfortunately, the rambling confusion of Townrow’s thoughts, the complete unreliability of his memory, the constant shifting back and forwards in time, all left me grinding my teeth in frustration. It should never be quite this hard to work out what an author is trying to say. But more than that, the way Townrow’s memories keep shifting means that there’s no plot to grab onto and no characterisation to give the book any form of emotional depth. Who are these people? Every time Townrow tells us about Mrs Khoury, for example, she is different than she was the last time. His mistress, Leah, shifts about from everything between being the tragic wife of a mentally ill husband to being some kind of sadistic dominatrix, and all points in-between. I didn’t have a clue who she really was even as I turned the last page, but I’m almost positive she was symbolic of... something. Townrow himself is rather better drawn, but unfortunately is entirely unlikeable – even his partial redemption rings false. And either Townrow or Newby, perhaps both, have an unhealthy habit of referring to women in sexualised derogatory terms, and clearly one of them at least finds the most important aspect of any woman to be her breasts. Well, it was the ‘60s, I suppose.Overall I found this far too vague and frustrating to be enjoyable. It does become clearer at the end, which raised it slightly from the 1-star rating it was heading towards, and made me regret that Newby hadn’t chosen to tell the story in a more straightforward way throughout. He clearly had interesting things to say, but the execution doesn’t match the ambition. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this one. 2½ stars for me, so rounded up.

Like other reviewers, I came to read Something to Answer For as I steadily work my way through winners of the Booker Prize. Newby won the inaugural Booker with this unusual tale of an Englishman in Port Said during the Suez crisis. The fact that it was out of print for so long says more for the fickle nature of publishing than for the quality of this book!That said, it wasn't always a comfortable read. The narrator is usually confused, sometimes drunk, and possibly concussed - maybe even deranged... This doesn't lend itself to straightforward narration. At times it felt like Catch 22 had been recast with characters from Waugh's Scoop and narrated by Joyce. On the whole this was a good thing - just not always easy to follow. At first I didn't think I was going to enjoy it at all, but it grew on me as it went on. Despite being set in a very particular time and place (written in 1969 but set in 1956), it felt like a remarkably modern (post-modern?) novel. Occasionally the language and attitudes betrayed the casual sexism and racism of a bygone age.So what was it all about? Identity, culture, confusion, attraction, commitment... Possibly. But at it's heart is the portrayal of a shallow, deceitful man who wants more, and wants to be better. He has let go of his moorings and is being tossed about by life. How many times does he openly regret the one event that changed everything? He is a man left wondering and wandering...

The book starts in a normal way with the main character asked to come out to Egypt by the widow of a friend. Since he was there with the army, when he arrives, before he visits the widow, he goes to one of the bars where he used to drink. When he gets hit over the head my first response was, “This is implausible. Let’s get on with the main story “. As I read on, I realised that this concussion was the most important fact as the plot continues with a confused search for identity. The tone is sometimes humorous and farcical. The hero - in his own estimation “a bit of a crook “ - can be infuriating. The action is often far-fetched but (as one realises when some things start to fall into place towards the end) the plot is skilfully constructed. On one level, this was “dated “. The hero seems more like Ian Fleming’s James Bond in his rugged male ability to survive extreme conditions and in a certain sexist attitude. On the other hand, it is quite Post Modern in its lack of definite bearings in life and its layers of truth. The background is the Suez crisis. The climax of the story is set against the details of the British and French attack and the conclusion is in the post-conflict situation. One of the questions, posed very early on in an airport conversation, is whether Britain has “something to answer for“. This also becomes the deeper quest of the protagonist.If the Man Booker Prize is the main reason why some of us have come to read Newby at all, then long live the Prize!Not always a comfortable read, I think this was well worth it.

I'm another of those starting to explore the Booker Prize winners that I have missed (and in this case not even heard of!) and I have to say that this one is pretty good. It's set in Port Said at the time of the Suez crisis. It reminds me of Camus' "l’Etranger" with its mixture of violence, existentialism and absurdity, with hints of Lawrence Durrell's "the Alexandria Quartet" (for the setting, for the Justine/Leah similarities and for the odd time perspective) and Joyce's "Ulysses" (but in a good way) for the interplay of Irishness and Jewishness and the recurring funeral theme..