Out came a thought and then another...

Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me is one of the 19 longlisted books for the Booker prize 2006.

An article on the book and its author from the Edinburgh Book Festival provides a comprehensive idea of both, particularly for someone who has not read O'Hagan:

ANDREW O'Hagan's profile has risen relentlessly since the publication of The Missing in 1995, thanks in no small measure to his brilliant essays in the London Review of Books and the New Yorker (new readers should start with his pieces on Michael Jackson and lad mags). Literary prizes have burnished his reputation, too, in the shape of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the EM Forster award, as well as the Booker shortlisting for Our Fathers in 1999.
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The novel's themes are exposed in the first paragraph, as David Anderton stands on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle with his mother, watching "the streets of the New Town begin to glow with moral sentiment" and the two characters resting "like passengers bound for distant lives, warm in our coats and weak in our hearts". The forced separation of those who love, the innate frailty of human beings, our love of comfort and, most of all, the willingness of others to judge our weaknesses are the themes running throughout.
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Like opening a Fabergé Egg to discover a stale Malteser instead of a golden miniature, Be Near Me dazzles from start to finish, but leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Andrew O'Hagan has all the talent he needs: had he applied more scrutiny to his own assumptions, turning his critical acumen against his own creative instincts, he might have made this handsomely-executed book into something more meaningful and significant.

The Observer review of Be Near Me says that the novel asks a lot of questions about Scotland and its working class:

...the book explores a wider dread. As in his previous work, O'Hagan conducts a resonant inquiry into Scotland and its working class. Once a home to chunky industry, Dalgarnock is now a town blighted by unemployment and scorched expectations; you know Mark's father has mental health issues when he hallucinates that he has a job. The only people with a regular salary are in sepia prints on the classroom walls. The sectarian rift, too, is wider than Father David will accept.

Go over to Faber's page on O'Hagan to read chapter 1 of Be Near Me.

O'Hagan is a young author, born in 1968, as this Wikipedia entry indicates {the mention of age brings to mind a letter that Margaret Mitchell wrote to the public relations person of the Pulitzer Prize organization. This was after Gone With the Wind was shortlisted in 1936/1937. She said something like she was not old enough to be ashamed of her age and not young enough to have not been capable of writing GWTW. However she said her age was irrelevant to the quality of her work and she refused to divulge the year she was born in.}

Andrew O'Hagan was shortlisted for the Booker in 1999 for his first novel Our Fathers, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award that year. His second novel Personality won the James Tait Black Memorial prize in 2003. Be Near Me is his third novel.

A number of Andrew O'Hagan's articles for the London Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor, are available online.

Posted by Echo/Lavanya on Saturday, August 19, 2006 at 9:40 PM | Permalink