On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons

"This is another beautifully written book. Laura Cummings is an art critic, and as a piece of writing, this sort of stands as an artwork in itself. She’s reporting the mysterious things that happened to her mother when she was a child. It’s written with real clarity and limpidity, but within it are the artefacts of her mother’s childhood. There are lots of photographs from the family collection. There are some paintings, because art is very important in the story—Cumming writes very, very well about art and photography. It reminded me very strongly of W G Sebald . Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But she’s also writing a story about her mum, which is kind of an investigation. It’s not dissimilar to the Casey Cep book in the sense of it being a sort of mystery story. But the artefacts, the means of telling the story, become critical. Her mother is alive, but ageing. So this is looking back on her mum’s life. And that’s rather beautifully and sensitively and movingly done. Because it’s about family in the end. Modern families, and indeed all families, have their secrets, and have better moments that they’re happy to testify to and those that they’ll try to avoid talking about in public. So everyone has a certain connection to this story, which is: How do you deal with the ghosts of the past? How do you deal with the complexity of life? Because not everything is as straightforward as 2.4 children and a family. In some ways, this is a hymn to the complexities buried beneath most humble lives. Not really. I think nonfiction is a fairly broad and welcoming church. I think we all know what is and what it isn’t nonfiction. You know it when you see it. All of the books that we’re talking about now are clearly nonfictional accounts. Now, the extent to which they use creative writing, the beauty of artistry… There needs to be quality at that level of the sentence. Whatever one gets chosen in the end will be a beautiful piece of writing. Like I said, the question then rests on the subject matter. Is the importance, the heft of the subject more important than the beauty of the writing? And there is no right answer to that question. Each judge will have their own calibration as to what they prefer. There are six of us and we’ll have to thrash it out to find one that we can agree on. And by one, I mean one not two. Yes, I think it’s ridiculous. A ridiculous thing to do. I mean, we have six judges. We don’t have an odd number, so the chairman can’t be the casting vote. But we’re going to go for one. I think the Booker judges neglected their duties by not awarding it to one person. They literally had one job. I regard my job, and our job, as to pick one winner and that’s what we’re going to do."