“Are you high?” I was having an imaginary conversation with the 2024 Booker Prize judges. That’s because I was unimpressed with The Safekeep, a nominee.
Every year the judges are given a mountain of books, this year 156, to skim, scan, peruse, and, whenever possible, actually read. The Booker Prize judges are committed to positive thinking, or they would not be on the panel. They will not say an interview, “What a shit-load of bad books!”
And so it begins. The brave Booker judges launch their list.
And then I read one of them.
After finishing The Safekeep, a first novel by a Dutch writer, Yael van der Wouden, I wrote in my book journal, “It is barely literary fiction.” Let me elaborate: it is NOT literary fiction. It is pop fiction.
The plot is simple. There is a mystery surrounding Uncle Karel’s country house. It is 1962, and the strange, possibly Aspergers heroine, Isabel, has lived here since her family fled Amsterdam in 1944. Now Isabel lives alone in the house and devotes herself to cleaning and polishing her late Mother’s cherished things, special plates with the design of a hare, fancy silverware, and furniture. She also gardens maniacally. Everything looks perfect, though Isabel’s mental health is none too good.
Then her younger brother Hendrik tells her the things were not Mother’s at all, but came with the house. Isabel is uncertain. That couldn’t be true, could it? And when her older brother Louis installs his sexy girlfriend, Eva, in the house with Isabel, while he takes a business trip, she is outraged. She should not have to deal with this silly woman. Spoons begin to disappear. Either Eva or the maid is stealing. But the house belongs to Thomas, and he can move in and kick out Isabel any time he wants.
If this novel were by Evie Wyld, author of the superb novel, The Bass Rock, we would be on board. Wyld writes elegantly and lyrically about a house, and meticulously etches the characters and their surroundings. But The Safekeep is lumbering and lackluster, lacking complexity, even as the relationship between Isabel and Eva intensifies. The one saving grace is Eva’s diary, in the final part of the book.
The judges must have thought,. “Well, it’s not special but what about the ending?”
Yes, but… there’s the rest. It won’t win the Booker! The judges are not high: just diplomatic.
I just finished reading this novel a couple of days ago, so I was quite interested in your review. My own reaction was a bit more positive; I thought various chunks of The Safekeep were quite powerful (Eva’s diary, for example, and the whole theme of dispossession/possession and historical blindness). That being said, however, it WAS a debut novel, with many of the faults associated with an author’s first attempt! Like you, I found the writing rather overblown and the plot far too neatly resolved in the end; not to mention rather draggy with the Isabelle/Eva relationship. Of the three nominees I’ve read so far (Orbital & Wild Houses are the other two), it’s definitely the weakness. I’m about a third of the way through Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History BTW and, so far, I’m enjoying it.
It’s the Booker context that makes it so disappointing. I would not have read it, nor focused my disapproving eagle eye on it, if I weren’t mad about the Booker Prize. The “intruder in the house” has been done better elsewhere. The diary is an interesting twist, the war details horrifying, but there isn’t enough to make it Booker-worthy, she says who isn’t on the panel of judges!