“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.