Damon Galgut: longlisted for the Booker Prize. Photo credit: johnwmacdonald

The South African writer, Damon Galgut, has been longlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel In a Strange Room. The book has received near universal acclaim in the media.

Writing in The Observer, William Skidelsky described Damon Galgut’s latest novel as “suberb” and compared it to Isaiah Berlin’s well-known description of the hedgehog, “which knows one big thing”, as opposed to the fox, “which knows many things”. For Skidelsky, “there’s a kind of ambition . . . in narrowing your focus” and In a Strange Room is about as “about as hedgehog-like as a work of fiction can be”.

Galgut’s novel-cum-travelogue consists of three short sections featuring a South African, also called Damon, drifting through three journeys during different stages of his life. It is “written in the third person, but with a twist. Every so often the narrative flits to the first person, before returning to the third.” Skidelsky enjoyed the device, which he felt successfully helped to poise the novel somewhere “between memoir and fiction”. He concluded that the novel is “a quite astonishing work”.

“Damon Galgut is a master of isolation and intensity,” said Philip Womack in The Telegraph, revelling in “an excellent piece of work that is as inviting as it is troubling”. Womack praised the “ordered prose, brimming with tension” and enjoyed the “beguiling spell” cast by the switches in narrative tone. “The narrator is both involved and distant. Damon meets people, watches them, watches himself watching them, attempts to cross the bridge that separates him from others, but always, heartbreakingly, is repelled. He is a good man in a baffling world, where connections are made and then cruelly broken, and where nothing is certain.”

John Harding in The Daily Mail was deeply struck by the protagonist: “an obsessive loner, restlessly on the move, journeying not to arrive but in a quest for himself. At turns depressing and exciting, for those who stay the course, it’s ultimately worth the trip,” he wrote.

In The Scotsman, Allan Massie admired the “low-key and subtle” stories, and Galgut’s “acute understanding of how people relate, or fail to relate, to each other. Most of his characters are seeking to find more in life than they feel they have been offered.” Massie found the world portrayed “often cruel and corrupt”, but discerned “room, welcome room, for simple kindness”.

“Travel writing has such a wretched name these days that one is reluctant to associate any serious writer with it, but I have to say that Damon Galgut’s new novel contains some truly superlative examples of the genre,” said Jan Morris in The Guardian, rather confusing her genres. Although “there is a good deal of unhappiness in the book”, In A Strange Room left Morris with “a soothing sense of serenity.”

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