This year’s Booker Prize winner feels less like high literature and more like a collective nervous breakdown, writes Harry Owen

Gather together five unconventional judges, hand them 163 novels to whittle down to one Booker Prize winner, and you should expect a peculiar outcome. This year’s judging panel reads like an eccentric, avant-garde dinner party. Chaired by Cambridge classicist Mary Beard and flanked by Pulp front-man Jarvis Cocker, the rest of the band’s lineup includes online-surrealist poet Patricia Lockwood, ‘lyrical innovator’ Raymond Antrobus and cultural critic Rebecca Liu. A ‘challenging’ winner was inevitable, but The End of Everything by M. John Harrison is totally bonkers.

I read dystopia – it’s my genre – but this was too weird even for me. Set in a decaying Britain where London has been abandoned and the surviving population huddles in squalid tented cities along the South Coast, the narrative drifts across a wasteland strewn with crashed airliners and rusted shipping containers. At the heart of it is an elderly, rifle-toting aunt steadily succumbing to dementia, accompanied by a bewildered nephew trying to navigate the ruins. 

At least for the first few chapters this is what’s happening. However, lurking on the shoreline is the bizarre ‘iGhetti’, a sentient beach-blob that steadily swells in size, absorbs coastal debris and begins telepathically bossing the surviving humans around.

A winner for the stockpiling age?

I can see why the judges fell for it. Beard would relish the themes of collapsing empires, while Cocker was bound to harbour affection for that distinctly grubby, rain-soaked English seaside melancholy. Harrison certainly creates an unforgettable atmosphere, the mood throughout is like a vivid fever dream – this element gets top marks.

The age-old question of whether art reflects life or vice versa feels particularly apt this year. I literally find myself stockpiling instant noodles, baked beans and wind-up radios, so parts of The End of Everything undeniably strike a nerve. Yet as the world around us slowly goes sideways, did we really need Britain’s highest fiction honour handed to a blob-slime barking orders on a pebble beach?? The oddest jury in recent memory gave us a book that feels less like high literature and more like a collective nervous breakdown – maybe that’s what we deserve.

If you’re considering reading it, my advice is simple – don’t bother. Pick up Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel instead. It’s a brilliant companion to Station Eleven, a dystopian novel that feels just recognisable enough to hit home, without pushing you over the edge of sanity. Or take our lifestyle editor Steve Dineen’s advice and try Black Bag, another Booker nominee with an admittedly absurd blob-based premise – a lecturer pays a man to attend his classes dressed with a black bag over his head and body, just his legs sticking out the bottom – which he called a “hell of a read” nonetheless.