The Sellout by Paul Beatty

The Sellout has recently won the Man Booker Prize 2016, so I wanted to read it to see what I thought. I must admit, while I was reading the first chapter I was thinking, 'What is going on here, I'm not going to like this'. But you must stick with it, because you will end up enjoying it.

It's hard to sum up in a sentence what the book is about. I tried to explain to a colleague and they just looked at me slightly puzzled as I garbled a disjointed account of the story. They also looked slightly alarmed when I used the words 'funny' and 'racism' in the same sentence. But it's true!

The opening chapter is set in the Supreme Court in America. The case is 'Me v. the United States of America'. The Me in question is Mr Me - originally Mee but over the generations the final letter was dropped. That case title itself is ironic as Mr Me (who is black, and whose first name is never known) is accused of owning a slave, and almost the whole black population of America is mad at him for turning the civil rights clock back so many years.

Now if you are sensitive to racial language or indeed any language at all, you may want to avoid this book, but do bear in mind that the whole book is a satire, full of wit and sarcasm. Mr Me believes in segregation, and to find out why, we are taken through his life starting with him being home-schooled by his father, who would put Me through test scenarios (including electric shock treatments) to test fear, prejudice, servility and obedience. We learn about the small town he grew up in , how it was taken off the map and why he tries to get it back on there. We find out how he gets to 'own' a 'slave', about his girlfriend Marpessa, about the Dum Dum Donut Shop where they hold racism and black inequality talks, and about why an old friend of his father's tries to kill him.

It's a marvellous book like no other - it pushes boundaries and raises eyebrows. It's brilliant.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

I haven't read a Zadie Smith novel since 'White Teeth', and that was years ago (1999) - so long in fact that I'd forgotten what it was about. I just looked up a précis and was surprised to read similar threads in the storyline to this one. In fact it seems that in a few of her books, Zadie sticks to themes that she knows and is obviously comfortable with - multiculturalism, racism, the state of society, class wars.

These themes abound in 'Swing Time'. The story mainly follows the life of the narrator, whose name is never revealed to us. Her mother is Jamaican, her father an East Ender with a possible criminal past, but who is now past trouble and dotes on his family. They live in a council flat on the Willesden Road. During childhood she becomes friends with Tracey during a dance class, though it quickly becomes clear that Tracey is the more natural dancer out of the two. Tracey has a white British mother, and an absent Jamaican father, who is regularly in and out of prison. The narrator's mother is not overly keen with Tracey as she lives on the opposite council block which contains the type of one-parent families that she'd frown at, and she's also not keen on how Tracey acts and the language that comes out of her mouth. We follow this friendship through the next few years, and we see how their lives take separate paths, how the friendship breaks up, how they both try to follow their dreams - Tracey becoming an actress in musical theatre, the narrator becoming a personal assistant to a famous pop star. But what does the future hold for them both?

The book is very long, and the narrator goes back and forth in time to give us snippets of her moments with Tracey when they were young, then back to the present, then back to when she got the job, then back again...At times, I wished the story was told in a straightforward timeline. There were places where I wasn't sure which job her mother had, where she was living, how old the narrator and Tracey was, etc. There's a huge part of the story that takes place in West Africa. The famous pop star that the narrator works for (imagine an Australian version of Madonna) has decided to use her millions to set up a new girls school there, so there is much travelling back and forth to the area to put things in place, make sure things run smoothly, etc. However, I found this part of the book rather laborious and boring, I kept looking at the page numbers on my e-reader and sighing to see how much I still had left to read. I was yearning to learn more about Tracey - the parts of the book that included her and the narrator were definitely the most exciting and interesting.

What I found interesting while reading this book was that I kept forgetting that the narrator was half Jamaican, so when characters make mention of her brown skin, I'm momentarily surprised. However, with Tracey, that's how I always pictured her - a dark skinned beauty with attitude, defiant, disrespectful, rude but ambitious.

The last part of the book took my interest again, but overall it was far too long and didn't hold my attention all the way through. I'm not sure I'll be reading another Zadie Smith book again.