Reviews From the Archive
An occasional series, cross-posting my reviews from The Complete Booker.
To see my progress with completing the Complete Booker Challenge, see here.
Some readers may be aware that I have recently suffered a computer catastrophe, and lost many files because my automatic back-up external hard drive failed as well. Well, today, a review of P H Newby’s Something to Answer For, which won the first ever Booker Prize, reminded me that some reviews that I posted elsewhere, are still out there on the other sites.
For some time, I was an active contributor to The Complete Booker and while most of what I reviewed I had also cross-posted here at ANZ LitLovers, there are a few reviews there from before I had my own blog. They are not great reviews, but still, over the next little while, I’m going to cross-post those reviews here as well, in a series called ‘Reviews From the Archive’ … just in case The Complete Booker site gets deleted or hacked or whatever…
Something to Answer For, by P H Newby, won the inaugural Booker in 1969.
December 25, 2003
I’m going to start by blogging Something to Answer For by P.H. Newby because it’s the winner of the inaugural Booker, and the pride of my Booker Prize collection. This is what I wrote about it in my journal, back in December 2003….
I paid $225 AUD to read this book! It’s the most expensive book I’ve ever read, like drinking a Penfold’s Grange – except that one expects a Grange to be a finer wine than any other, whereas Newby’s book is not better than all the other Bookers I’ve read. It’s just a whole lot harder to acquire.
I was so excited when it finally came, all the way from the SA Book Exchange. (That’s South Africa, not South Australia.) I was thrilled to hold it in my hands – a slim little hardback, with an orange and white cover in a mildly groovy design, a concession to the Swinging Sixties by Faber and Faber, but it still has a 1950s feel about it, as befits the book trade at that time.
Beware: spoilers
The story has a fifties feel about it too. It’s baffling, because it has an unreliable narrator, but the gist of it is that the anti-hero, Townrow, has to skip London because he’s been embezzling. His landlady, Mrs Khoury, is the catalyst for his flight, because she thinks her husband has been murdered over in Egypt, and so – both to help her out and also evade the law -Townrow departs, hoping to be richly recompensed for his trouble because Mrs K is rich.
Egypt, however, is in the throes of the Suez Crisis and in the chaos Townrow gets hit on the head in an attack – and thereafter nothing he says can be taken at face value. He says so himself: he mis-remembers things; changes things; gets confused; and deliberately lies. He says this partly depends on circumstances, and it’s partly because of the nature of memory.
Newby, however, is interested in more than duplicitous memories. En route to Cairo, Townrow is accused by a Jew who blames Britain for its failure to warn the Jews about the trains to Auschwitz and Buchenwald. His accuser says that the British authorities knew, and chose not to warn the Jews. Townrow reacts with indignation, arguing that one can always trust the British to act with honour, but his subsequent repudiation of this naive response is the main focus of the story…
As events unforld, Townrow encounters various examples of British duplicity, from the incompetence and deceit of their intelligence officers to the betrayal of its own citizens in Port Said. By the time Townrow faces interrogation himself, he tells his inquisitors that he will not answer any quetions about his Egyptian associates because he trusts them at face value but he doesn’t trust the British at all.
He decides from this point onward to live life for the moment, taking things at face value. He manages to evacuate not only Mrs K husband’s exhumed coffin, but also some nuns and his dubious girlfriend, and then sails off in a boat – to take what comes…
Or so he says. He doesn’t really want to face up to three years in gaol for his crime, does he?
I finished reading and journalled this book on 12.12.2003.
Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
$225! You certainly were determined to read it. :)
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By: karenlee thompson on July 1, 2020
at 9:05 am
Yes, but it’s worth even more now. The cheapest first edition at AbeBooks is $100USD but it’s a library copy (which mine is not, mine is in perfect condition). The next one is $418.42USD, which is over $600AUD. So I could sell mine for more than twice what I paid for it. (And I have explained that to The Offspring so that he doesn’t chuck it to the OpShop when I depart for the Great Library in the Sky.)
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By: Lisa Hill on July 1, 2020
at 12:25 pm
Amazing! And a good thing for The Offspring to be aware of. LOL.
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By: karenlee thompson on July 9, 2020
at 8:36 pm
I didn’t realise about your computer breakdown. At least it was your computer and not you! I’m sure you must revere your expensive book. We should all have one or two of those. 🐧🐧🐧
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By: TravellinPenguin on July 1, 2020
at 10:47 am
I’m very fond of this book… and I was very lucky to get it for my Booker First Editions collection. I was getting dispirited about my chances because everything that came up was in the UK or US, and because we’re in a different time zone, every time I got a notification about this book on my wishlist, it was already sold by the time I was up in the morning.
But yay! one night I was up very late working on stuff for school, and there was a copy in South Africa. I emailed them immediately, and they still had it so out came the credit card and the book was mine!
I’m still hoping for the same kind of luck with Midnight’s Children. It is soooooo expensive…
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By: Lisa Hill on July 1, 2020
at 12:30 pm
Computer and backup drive failures? You have my complete sympathy.
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By: Jennifer on July 1, 2020
at 12:55 pm
I know, you wouldn’t read about it.
Print is best.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 1, 2020
at 4:34 pm
I don’t think I have a first edition that valuable. I probably have first editions of all Miles Franklin’s books after she stopped being published by Blackwoods and was taken up at last by Angus&Robertson. Some of dad’s books date back to the 1750s but his Walter Scotts are reprints from around 1850, damn! Something to Answer For actually sounds interesting. Was the Booker purely British at the beginning?
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By: wadholloway on July 1, 2020
at 5:38 pm
The Miles Franklin ones are probably worth more as a collection than individually, but maybe get them valued by an expert?
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By: Lisa Hill on July 1, 2020
at 9:35 pm
Wowser! Sorry about the pc catastrophe! As for the book, it sounds like an odd one. Cheap copies can be got in the UK, but I don’t know I feel desperately impelled to read it!!
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By: kaggsysbookishramblings on July 1, 2020
at 11:32 pm
I’d completely missed the news about the computer catastrophe. You were so unlucky for the back up to go as well. I’ve just bought a back up service from Backblaze at reasonable cost because I don’t want to lose all my family history info I have worked 20 years to accumulate.
As for the Newby, well you know from my recent review that I struggled to get a purchase on this novel. I certainly wouldn’t have paid that much for a copy…
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By: BookerTalk on July 3, 2020
at 7:46 am
Karen, you know this, when you have the collector’s bug, you are not necessarily sensible!
I do think STAF has something to offer even now. If we think ourselves back to 1969 when Britain was coming to grips with the loss of its empire and the old securities about the Middle East were disappearing too, this novel introduces the readership (which would have been mostly British back then) to the idea that Britain has not always acted with honour. That was probably very confronting in the postwar glow of having fought (mostly alone) and won on the side of honour against the evil of Nazism. I imagine my parents reading this and being shocked. They were — like many people then and now — politically naïve about their own country, even though they read Orwell & Co.
So I’m not sorry I read it, and I think it’s good that there are now cheap paperback copies available too.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 3, 2020
at 11:03 am
Interesting perspective Lisa, yes that point of view would have been uncomfortable for many readers.
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By: BookerTalk on July 4, 2020
at 5:17 pm
A bit like Americans at the moment, coming to terms with the change in their status as world leader…
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By: Lisa Hill on July 4, 2020
at 5:51 pm
Oh don’t let that horrid orange faced man hear you even hint that they are no longer leaders of the free world
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By: BookerTalk on July 8, 2020
at 8:21 am
Ha!
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By: Lisa Hill on July 8, 2020
at 10:24 am
Many thanks for telling us about this book, I’d never heard of it nor of the author. I downloaded the Kindle edition for US$7.03 (sorry), so it’s now on my Kindle TBR. I’ve just started Christina Stead’s House of All Nations on my Kindle, so it may be a while till I get round to Newby …
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By: Paul on July 4, 2020
at 6:25 pm
Hi Paul, thanks for dropping by!
House of All Nations, wow! You must be a fan of Christina Stead to tackle that! I have it on my TBR and I think it is the fattest chunkster I have. I meant to read it last year for CS’s birthday, but I am such a dilettante, I flit from one thing to the other — which I relish doing because I had to be so super-organised at work, and now, I can be myself.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 5, 2020
at 10:19 am
I’m a big fan of Christina Stead and I’m also ashamed that until your post I’d never even heard of P H Newby, despite the fact that he wrote over 20 novels and was also head of the BBC Third Programme! Anyway thanks again for for your review of “Something to Answer For”. Like you I was very impressed by the way the novel describes a man who can no longer distinguish reality from fantasy or dreams, perhaps owing to a head injury, but perhaps also because of a psychological reaction to extreme stress. It reminded me of similar themes in novels by Paul Bowles and Graham Greene. “Graham Greene called him ‘a fine writer who has never had the full recognition that he deserves’” (https://phnewby.net/something-to-answer-for/) – I would certainly agree and would like to read more of his work.
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By: Paul on August 5, 2020
at 3:11 pm
Well, I did not know about that wonderful website. I think I’d better see about finding about more about PHN!
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By: Lisa Hill on August 5, 2020
at 3:20 pm
I’ve been trying too. Most of his novels are out of print but I’ve ordered a second-hand copy of “Kith” from Abebooks. Graham Greene thought it was his best novel. I’ll let you know when I’ve read it!
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By: Paul on August 8, 2020
at 12:35 am
Please do!
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By: Lisa Hill on August 8, 2020
at 12:47 am
[…] Something to Answer For, by P.H. Newby, winner of the inaugural Booker Prize in 1969 […]
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By: 2020 A Year in First Lines | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog on December 18, 2020
at 1:22 pm