The Carol Shields Prize, 2024, and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2024: Dances, The Blue, Beautiful World & In Defence of the Act

I’m belatedly trying to read a few more of the titles that appealed to me from the Women’s Prize longlist before the shortlist announcement on 24th April, while finishing up my last Carol Shields Prize longlist review!

Carol Shields Longlist

Dances, which follows Cece, a young Black woman who becomes the first Black female principal at the New York City Ballet, is one of several novels on the Carol Shields Prize longlist that foreground a sister’s painful relationship with her rebellious, frequently absent brother/s (the other two are Brotherless Night and Between Two Moons). In Cece’s case, her older brother Paul, a talented visual artist, is the centre of her emotional world: he provided the encouragement and, initially, the financial backing for her to study ballet when her mother believed it to be a waste of time because of the innate racism of dance companies. But when the novel opens, he’s been missing for five years after becoming a drug addict. Now all Cece has left is her art.

The ballet books I devoured as a child always featured young white girls who were innately gifted and sailed relatively effortlessly to the top; in contrast, contemporary ballet books aimed at adults, with the very honourable exception of Meg Howrey’s The Cranes Dance, tend to play into Ambitious Women Meet Bad Ends, starring white women who invariably give up ballet because it is toxic and bad for them. Dances is a refreshing counter-balance. Nicole Cuffy explores Cece’s difficult relationship with ballet, her body, and the societal oppression she faces as a Black woman, but also lets her continue to love to dance. As Cece reflects, the relationship between her and ballet is fundamentally different because she is Black: ‘I was always so adamant about classical ballet. Not contemporary. Not jazz. A rebellion. An insistence that Black women can be ethereal too. That we don’t always have to be drawn in bold lines. Paul never drew me in bold lines. Always thin, intricate strokes, a precise kind of chaos’.  This is in some ways, a conventional novel, but it’s also quietly moving.

In my overall ranking of the longlist, I’d place this one sixth, below Brotherless Night but above Between Two Moons. I read it as a buddy read with Bookish Beck.

Thanks so much to Nicole Magas at Zgstories  for sourcing a free copy of this book from the publisher for me.

I’m not aiming to read the full Carol Shields Prize longlist this year, but I’ve selected nine titles that I do want to read. This is number nine. I’ve already read Birnam Wood, I Have Some Questions for You, Land of Milk and Honey, Loot, Brotherless Night, The Future, A Council of Dolls and Between Two Moons.

Women’s Prize Longlist

The Women’s Prize has shunned SF for much of its recent history. I think the last SF novel to be longlisted was Becky Chambers’s The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet back in 2014. So it’s absolutely typical that when the Prize finally nominates SF again, it’s a totally left-field choice – which is not to say that Karen Lord’s The Blue, Beautiful World is bad. Lord’s complex book, the third in a trilogy, is set on an Earth where it gradually dawns on both the reader and the characters that alien humanoid civilisations of different kinds are already among us. Many use virtual face technology to blend in, wearing a series of electronic masks, but there are also conscious spaceships, ‘intelligent leviathans’, that have infiltrated Earth’s oceans. Lord is interested both in how different alien factions try to manage the incorporation of Earth into a wider galactic civilisation and how humans themselves react to this. One major plot-line, therefore, focuses on Owen, a pop megastar who is actually from Alpha Pisces Austrini and is using his wealth and influence to manipulate people and corporations on Earth. Another focuses on a group of young people from across the globe who have been chosen to take part in what they think is a theoretical exercise in global diplomacy in a first contact scenario, but, it turns out, is actually all too real.

When Lord stays put on Earth, this book is original, thought-provoking and subtle, a bit reminiscent of Malka Older’s Infomocracy. Unfortunately, the brief glimpses we get of the alien civilisations outside Earth’s limits make them feel much more cartoonish, even though it’s clear they’ve been developed over the course of the first two books of this trilogy. The Romanesque names, the overblown pronouncements, the paint-by-numbers politics… perhaps this would have felt deeper had I read the first two, but I somehow doubt it. On a more meta level, I do wish the Women’s Prize hadn’t gone for this one, because it is exactly the sort of SF novel that will put off non-SF readers, and I just don’t think it’s a great fit for the Prize. So many other options… Nina Allan, Grace Curtis, Emily Tesh, or indeed the one I’d have picked, Naomi Alderman. Sigh. But SF fans, Lord is worth reading.

To be honest, I’m a bit upset. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book that went so wrong, so quickly, after the three-quarters mark. What happened? Did Effie Black get scared off by her own daring? Did someone steal her MS, a la Yellowface, and quickly scribble out the most conventional ending they could think of given what had come before? So many questions.

In Defence of the Act is meant to be about an evolutionary psychobiologist, Jessica, exploring the ethics of suicide; her own childhood trauma leads her to secretly believe that there can be times when killing yourself is the right thing to do. After all, if her abusive dad had succeeded when he first attempted suicide, both she and her two siblings might be considerably less screwed up. Jessica’s research focuses on species of spiders where certain individuals kill themselves to ensure the furtherance of either their genes or those of their close relatives, so in this context, suicide can make sense from an evolutionary perspective. In Jessica’s own life, she follows the same rule, but flipped: she breaks up with girlfriend Jamie because she doesn’t believe she can ever have children because of the fear of becoming her father, but Jamie ought to fulfil her desire of becoming a mother: ‘because the world needs more people like her’.

Trouble is, the last quarter or so of this novel tosses all of these difficult questions out the window. It’s impossible to fully discuss the problems with this novel without spoilers, so, if needed, my spoiler-tagged review is on Goodreads.

PS I love a small publisher, but my god have époque press burdened In Defence of the Act with a hideous, early-00s YA-ish cover and an even worse turn-of-the-millennium ‘computer’ font inside [second photo]. Seriously, we’re almost in this kind of territory.

Are you tempted by anything from the Carol Shields or Women’s Prize longlists?