Something to Answer for

by P.H. Newby

This book is the winner of the inaugural Booker Prize in 1969. It was 1956 and he was in Port Said. About these two facts Townrow was reasonably certain. He had been summoned there, to Egypt, by the widow of his deceased friend, Elie Khoury. Since he was found dead in the street, she is convinced he was murdered, but nobody seems to agree with her. What of Leah Strauss, the mistress? And of the invading British paratroops? Only an Englishman, surely, would take for granted that the British would have behaved themselves. In this weirdly disorienting world, Townrow is forced towards a re-examination of the basic rules by which he has been living his life; and into a realization that he too may have something to answer for.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Egypt, Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, British Literature, Africa

285 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1968

About the author

Percy Howard Newby CBE (25 June 1918 – 6 September 1997) was an English novelist and broadcasting administrator. He was the first winner of the Booker Prize, his novel Something to Answer For having received the inaugural award in 1969.

Early life
P.H. Newby, known as Howard Newby, was born in Crowborough, Sussex on 25 June 1918 and was educated at Hanley Castle Grammar School in Worcestershire, and St Paul's College of Education in Cheltenham. In October 1939 he was sent to France to serve in World War II as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. His unit was one of the last to be evacuated. Afterwards he was sent to the Middle East and served in the Egyptian desert.

Career
Newby was released from military service in December 1942, and then taught English Literature at King Fouad University in Cairo until 1946.

From 1949 to 1978 he was employed by the BBC, beginning as a radio producer and going on to become successively Controller of the Third Programme and Radio Three, Director of Programmes (Radio), and finally Managing Director, BBC Radio.

His first novel, A Journey into the Interior, was published in 1946. He then returned to England to write. In the same year he was given an Atlantic Award in literature, and two years thence he received the Somerset Maugham Prize.

He was awarded a CBE for his work as Managing Director of BBC Radio.

Author, friend and colleague Anthony Thwaite in his obituary states: "P. H. Newby was one of the best English novelists of the second half of the century."

Reviews

[Kinga · Rating 5 out of 5]

There was a time when ‘readability’ was the least important factor which the Booker Prize Jury took into consideration. At least that must’ve been the case back 1969 when they awarded the inaugural Booker to P.H. Newby for his novel ‘Something to Answer For’. Of course back then Booker Prize was some niche award that didn’t even have its ceremony and the winner was informed by post. The jury didn’t have to worry about sparking national debate with their choices.

I see that many reviewers called this novel confusing, disjointed, with unlikeable characters and I’d like to tell them: ‘man up, please!’ Yes, it is difficult but it’s rewarding. It needs time, patience and attention. It’s like that girl who is so hard to turn on but once you dedicate some time to the task and figure it out, she’s fire.

And this book is beautiful and it’s fire. It uses the strangest literary technique of an unreliable third person narrator. The third person is nominal only because in fact we are stuck in Townrow’s, the main character’s, head. And this head receives a blow quite early on and confounds Townrow. We share some of the frustration when he tries to piece everything together and decide who is a friend and who is a foe.
The facts are few: it’s 1956, he came to Egypt to help Mrs Khoury, widow of his friend Ellie. Mrs Khoury believes her husband was murdered, so Townrow is there to offer support, help solve the mystery, con Mrs Khoury into handing all her assets to him…? It’s rather hard to say. The same events are told and retold, they change their significance as Townrow remembers whole new episodes that followed or preceded them.

As Townrow wanders around Port Said in a confused state and falls in love with Leah, a married woman, the history happens in the background. Nasser nationalizes the Suez Canal which causes a diplomatic and then a military crisis. This in turn causes a crisis for Townrow, who in his overheated head was only sure of one thing, that the British government was essentially good and just. He suspected that he himself was of rather questionable morals but he could sleep at night because he knew that the people who make all the decisions are free of such flaws.

He painfully realises that it is only his actions he can be somewhat sure of, and that he is responsible for them, because everyone has ‘something to answer for’. So there starts the most bizarre quest for redemption of a character who can’t even remember if he is British or Irish, that is, whether he is a side in the conflict or a neutral observer.

At times Townrow even suspects himself to be American, and occasionally when in her arms, he half wishes to turn out to be the estranged husband of his lover, Leah. P.H.Newby knows how to write romance and sexual tension. I know it seems unlikely when looking at his photos and remembering he was the director of BBC Three, but I am sure he could show a girl a good time. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I just get turned on by superb writing, gentle, underlying humour, a knack for vivid description, an ear for dialogue… Yes, it could be just me.

In the end of ‘Something to Answer For’ we don’t quite know whether Townrow was good or bad and whether he redeemed himself or quite the opposite, reached the heights of moral corruption. The novel did a circle and took us to the beginning with Townrow coming to the conclusion that what he thought was his past is actually his future.

PH Newby’s main claim to fame might be the fact he was the inaugural Booker Prize winner, something irrelevant back then, but a crown achievement for a writer today. And it’s true I would’ve never got to read ‘Something to Answer For’ if it weren’t for the Booker thing, but now I want to read more Newby’s novels. And I will be kept busy for long as he wrote some twenty-three of them.

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Townrow saw himself floating in and out of this dream for the rest of his life, and each time there would be a new twist. Next time there would be no nuns and the warship would be American. There would be times when there was a cross on the dead man’s chest and there would be times when there was not. The terrible thing about the form this particular dream took was the longing.

Townrow is a snake that eats his own skin to hide the evidence. He would be the nightmare victim in horror films who dare under the covers for what of the other reality has crossed over. Too bad he is also the bad guy who hasn’t watched to the end. Can he live with himself and his douche bagginess. On Fridays, he is in love with phantom tits and ass. The epic unrequited love of porn magazine biographies. You like what you like to think you’d like if anyone asked you to explain yourself. Townrow describes himself as the guy who has to marry every woman he dates. Today, alone, he feels remorse like the man who has broken his favorite toy. The money was just resting in his account! Back in England, his job is distributing disaster relief funds to himself. He’s always deciding if he has anything to go back to. It’s perfect that he wouldn’t really listen to anyone else because he’s always thinking about his pet fuck-ups (another favorite is a girl he didn’t knock-up and they kicked him out of the seminary anyway. No way it went down how Romeo says). What good would it do to do the right thing, anyway? An old lady he met from his uniform days writes to him that her ancient Lebanese husband has died so Townrow kicks it back to Egypt with dollar signs in his sockets. He tells immigration he is there to marry an old lady for her money. It is interesting to me how Townrow gives himself away when he doesn’t have to. He thinks more than once that he doesn’t know how to behave when he doesn’t know what is expected of him. Townrow can’t be a genial old family friend to the widow if he isn’t sure she likes him and he is not smooth at all about pressuring her to transfer all of her holdings to him. He’s like one of those convicts used to getting away with it because they blamed their pathetic friend. I'm always fascinated by liars who seem to believe their own lies. He gives other officers names and assumes identities. I wanted to know the history between him and these men. There are allusions to an old army incident of getting thrown off a horse. If Townrow was a real man I'd have said shame over being seen thrown from his horse is as much of a motive as stealing Mrs. K’s inheritance. In a paranoid moment, he accuses his obsession, Leah, of having witnessed it. Townrow can’t beat the lawyer’s Jewess daughter Leah into his arms with jealous persistence. Old Townrow thinks more than once that he wishes he was her. I can’t stop thinking about how he wished he was who he loved, like in the hollow where a heart would be is a vampire heart. How he gives himself away goes hand in hand with his paralyzed yearning to be another. I've read theories that Townrow doesn't know what is happening but I read it as a constant belief rewrite of a liar getting used to the taste. Time in ‘Something’ belongs to a madman and events happen out of order. Townrow has conversations with people who had previously disappeared from his sight. Is there blood on his hands or his mind. People he hated are his dearest friends when it suits what he wants to tell himself. It could be possible that they all had it coming and he throws a body off a balcony. He’s on his belly trying to root for himself. Townrow keeps going back to a conversation in the Rome airport with a Jewish man if the English could have warned the Jews about the death trains and didn’t. He decides that he was Irish and off this hook but doesn’t know for sure if his passport is British or not. Townrow hopes that what he says is true and I loved this. Memories of his Irish woman mother returns when shit is going down. Time stops for him, too, when he has these reveries, wounds to nurse. It is the 1956 Suez crisis. Elie is not dead at all to haunt his money schemes. Mrs. K returns every night to the scene of her husband’s supposed murder. It's horrible how their real lives marionette in the backdrop of what Townrow is owed. Leah’s husband is in a mental institution in America. Police come and take people away and then they are back like nothing happened at all like you should watch your own back. I wouldn’t bet on my dog’s life that everything happened as Townrow believes it did, nor would he when he is wanting a new story. It is a long time to spend with a person as slimy as Townrow. I thought it worth it for the dreams of a monster. The monster is always slipping out of his skin and I loved it. Skin watching the slither and remembering. He compares himself to a tiger a lot probably because those predators don't see as their prey. Leah is asking this despicable human man (who may have dug up a dead body to force his widow out of the country in another scam) to meet with her at another time to see her as the normal person she always was, as everyone else who knows her knows her as. Townrow didn’t understand at all. He was always thinking he might be her husband in that institution after all. He would only see her true face if she was his invention after all.


Even after the shower there was enough salt on his skin for him to taste it when he licked his wrist. Or perhaps his tongue was so dry it drew the salt blood. The air was as hot as his blood, no more, no less. He saw himself lying on an immense strand, half in and half out of the water. Instead of legs he had scaly flippers. The white waterfall hung in the air, collapsed and ran up the beach to cover his flippers. The air dazzled.

[Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is set in Egypt in 1956 as Nassar nationalized the management of the Suez Canal, revoking the rights of the British and French. The US and Britain had previously backed out of a commitment to help finance the Aswan Dam because some of Nassar’s recent actions were too friendly towards the Soviet Union. The nationalization led to the Suez Canal Crisis in which Israel invaded Egypt and Great Britain and France joined with the goal of regaining control of the Suez Canal and overthrowing Nassar. The novel is not historical fiction; instead, Egypt in 1956 functions as a backdrop for the story.

Timenow, a British or Irish citizen, who had previously been in Egypt as a soldier, returns after the death of a friend, Elie Khoury, to help or possibly swindle Elie’s wife, Mrs. K. You never really know which stories about Timenow to believe or what his intentions are, and after suffering a head injury early on, neither does Timenow. Events are presented in waves, stepping forward in time, moving back and then forward again. Which stories are true, which are dreams, what is just rampant imagination in the absence of solid memory? As the novel progresses, more is revealed, but nothing ever becomes certain. I thoroughly enjoyed the mixture of confusion and possibility.

The complexity of the historical events is matched by the human. The characters have layers and depth, just as the time and place does. I know some readers did not like trying to discern what was truth and what was imagination or dreams, so I can’t recommend this to just anyone, but read it if you think you like this kind of puzzle. As I read this novel, it reminded me of Warlight by Michael Ondaatje and A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone, both of which I loved and in which uncertainty and possibilities play a significant role.

Something To Answer For was the first winner of the Booker Award in 1969. I have not read anything else yet by P.H. Newby, but if this book is an indicator, he never achieved the recognition he deserved.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bizarre and kafta like book. Townrow is a conman who after being beaten and left naked on a Port Said beach develops a conscience. However, he is also obsessed with helping his dead friends widow. All this happens during the Suez crisis after Nassar nationalises the Suez Canal.

Townrow doesn’t know what he is imagining or what is real. An affair with Leah, gun smuggling to Cyprus, seeing his dead friend, interrogation by Egyptian and British all add to a surreal story.

The story is in a way Monty Python and entertaining with the ending leaving you guessing or wondering what happens. It reminds me of another Man Booker winner the famished road where the author wakes up and we find it’s all a dream. However, this is different with all the characters unlikeable. It was interesting to find out more about the Suez Crisis and when France and England were no longer super powers after America ordered them out of Egypt.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose this one as I was curious to learn more about the very first Booker prize ever awarded, as well as learning more about the Suez Canal crisis of 1956.

The writers workshop rule for critiquing others' work is that one has to start with saying something nice. Here, Newby has a phenomenal sense of place. I truly felt as though I were watching a movie; moreover, he is very good with characters. Despite my issues with the plot, I felt motivated to continue to see how they turned out.

The plot ... showed promise in the first part of the novel. It was an exotic location at a 10th time with interesting characters, let's see what happens! Unfortunately, the unreliable main character took over in a somewhat paranoid fantasy sense, along with the action shifting to a surreal, Kafka-esque feel. I became less and less able to get a grasp on events, a literal 'fun house mirrors' effect that proved frustrating indeed. The inconclusive (to me at any rate) ending seemed symbolic, but of what? I hadn't nearly enough interest to think about it.

Three stars because Newby could write. I can see how it won the Prize, being more proximate in time to the events, as well as judges who approached the story from a different angle, shall we say. I could recommend the book to a more patient reader with access to a library or cheap used copy.

[Irene · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel has the distinction of being the first ever recipient of the Mann Booker Prize. So what does it say about my literary taste or my intellectual ability if I did not enjoy it, finding it unnecessarily confusing? The narrator is a less than honest man, skimming off the profits of a large fund that he is supposed to be managing. He has traveled to Egypt to convince his friend’s widow to put the estate in his hands, presumably to allow him to enrich himself by its wealth. But after that initial introduction to the novel, the plot spun in erratic directions. The narrative jumped around in time with no warning or time stamps. Strange events were recounted and contradicted. I don’t know if the narrator was dreaming, hallucinating, lying or some combination of these interwoven with reality. The only character development that I could discern was a movement from a blind faith in his British government to a realization that he need not defend and can not presume the actions of his government as upright.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is always interesting to read Booker winners but I have rather mixed feelings about this one (the first). At face value it reads like a comic picaresque dream story, a confusing narrative set in Egypt during the Suez crisis, but it addresses wider issues of responsibility, national identity and the end of the British empire.

[Leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first Booker winner...

It’s 1956, and Townrow has returned to Port Said, a place he first visited when serving in the army in WW2. This time he’s there at the request of Ethel Khoury, the English widow of an Egyptian man who had befriended Townrow on his earlier visit. Mrs Khoury believes Elie, her husband, was murdered and wants Townrow to... well, actually I have no idea what she wanted Townrow to do, so, moving swiftly on...! Anyway, Townrow is a bit of a small-time crook and his plan is to con Mrs Khoury out of the possessions the wealthy Elie left her. But on his first night in Port Said, Townrow is attacked and is left with a head injury which makes his memories confused, and then Nasser, the President of Egypt, announces he is nationalising the Suez Canal – one of the last outposts of the dying British Empire. When the British and French decide they must retaliate to keep the Canal under Western control, the situation in Port Said will soon be as confused as the thoughts in Townrow’s head, though not quite as confused as this poor reader.

At the halfway point I would happily have thrown this in the bin but it redeemed itself a little in the last quarter when finally Townrow begins to live in the present rather than in his jumbled thoughts and memories. It won the first ever Booker Prize in 1969, beating Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark amongst others. I imagine that lots of people decide to read the Booker Prize winners in order, get halfway through this one, and decide not to bother...

Sifting through the general incomprehensibility of it, Newby is satirising the British imperial mindset, and examining the effect of the Suez crisis on the British psyche, I think. It’s clearly aiming at humour some of the time, and even veers towards farce occasionally, but not very successfully – it’s too messy. Although not terribly moral himself, Townrow has a profound belief in the decency of the British in their dealings with their citizens, allies and colonial dependencies. The first sign of a crack in this belief is when he is accosted at the airport by a Jew from Hungary who insists that in 1942 the British deliberately failed to warn Hungarian Jews not to board the trains that would take them to the Nazi death camps. Townrow denies this could possibly have happened (did it? I don’t know), but the question remains in his fractured mind. Then when the British bomb Cairo after the annexation of the Canal, he is shocked to the core. This is not the way the Britain in which he believes would act, apparently. (I find that strange, because of all the things we did in the Empire era, was that really the worst? Perhaps it’s a time dilation thing – to Newby it was pretty much current affairs; to me it’s part of a long history.)

The underlying suggestion, I think, is that it was the Suez Crisis that changed the British attitude from hubristic imperialist pride to the kind of breast-beating shame that followed in the second half of the twentieth century. Again he may well be right, although I’d have thought the loss of India was a bigger milestone on that journey. To me what Suez represents is the British realisation that it no longer dominated the world, politically or militarily, and that America had become the new superpower. So shame, yes, but of our weakness in the present rather than of our actions in the past. But, and I freely admit I didn’t have a clue what Newby was trying to say most of the time, that wasn’t what I felt he was suggesting. However, I’m pretty sure Townrow’s head injury, confusion and loss of faith in British decency is symbolic of what Newby saw as the effects on the national psyche of the sudden collapse of the Empire after the war.

So all very interesting and just my kind of thing. Unfortunately, the rambling confusion of Townrow’s thoughts, the complete unreliability of his memory, the constant shifting back and forwards in time, all left me grinding my teeth in frustration. It should never be quite this hard to work out what an author is trying to say. But more than that, the way Townrow’s memories keep shifting means that there’s no plot to grab onto and no characterisation to give the book any form of emotional depth. Who are these people? Every time Townrow tells us about Mrs Khoury, for example, she is different than she was the last time. His mistress, Leah, shifts about from everything between being the tragic wife of a mentally ill husband to being some kind of sadistic dominatrix, and all points in-between. I didn’t have a clue who she really was even as I turned the last page, but I’m almost positive she was symbolic of... something. Townrow himself is rather better drawn, but unfortunately is entirely unlikeable – even his partial redemption rings false. And either Townrow or Newby, perhaps both, have an unhealthy habit of referring to women as bitches or sluts, and clearly one of them at least finds the most important aspect of any woman to be her breasts. Well, it was the ‘60s, I suppose.

Overall I found this far too vague and frustrating to be enjoyable. It does become clearer at the end, which raised it slightly from the 1-star rating it was heading towards, and made me regret that Newby hadn’t chosen to tell the story in a more straightforward way throughout. He clearly had interesting things to say, but the execution doesn’t match the ambition. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this one. 2½ stars for me, so rounded up.

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[Angus McKeogh · Rating 4 out of 5]

The inaugural Booker Prize winning novel from Newby. Way different than what I was expecting, but in a good way. Steeped in mystery because of the narrator's memory issues; however, the story maintains its appeal and I felt it never got so entirely strange that I couldn't follow the plot line. Rest assured everything is revealed in the end. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Recommended!

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. An interesting, engaging, memorable novel about Townrow, a British man in his 30s, who is a delusional, unpredictable, unreliable, odd character who is grappling with his own morality and identity. Set in 1956 in Port Said, Egypt. President Nasser of Egypt has taken control of the Suez Canal from the British and French. The British and French respond by bombing Egypt's main cities.

Townrow, who has been requested to travel to Port Said from England by the widow of his deceased friend, Elie Khoury. Elie was 60 years old when he died. Townrow initially tries to persuade the widow of Elie Khoury to sign over all her assets to Townrow as he isn't a Jew and the Egyptians are less likely to confiscate property of an Irishman. Townrow reasons that he is Irish as his mother is Irish. Townrow meets and falls in love Leah Strauss, an American who is in Port Said to see her dying father. Leah is married. Her husband is sick and in a hospital in the USA.

In this time Britain comes to reassess its place in the world. Townrow too, must reassess the life rules he has been living under. A worthwhile read due to the engaging plot. It's not an easy read as the novel shifts suddenly from the past to present and present to past, with Townrow's account of what happens, being unreliable. For example, sometimes as a reader you are not sure whether the facts being related are actually a dream of Townrow's or whether Townrow's account is more wishful thinking rather than reality.

Winner of the 1969 Inaugural Booker Prize.

[dirt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most people read this book because it was the first winner of the Man Booker prize in 1969 and that is why my book club chose to read it too. Getting your hands on a copy of this out-of-print tome is not easy. You can find it used for ungodly sums of money. I saw it going for between $40 - $50, but save your cash and get it through inter-library loan.

Since I had time to kill while I waited (because inter-library loan is not the speediest of demons), I checked out some reviews and basically they all boil down to "No one understand why this book won an award." Reading so many negative reviews may have tainted my reading, but it is honestly difficult to slog through. I couldn't finish it and many of my fellow book clubbers weren't able to get to the end either.

You know how Built to Spill sang:

No one wants to hear
what you dreamt about
unless you dreamt about them
don't let that stop you
tell them anyway
and you can make it up as you go

Not bad advice if you think about it. Well P.H. Newby really took it to heart. The idea is cleverly executed. I could really hear someone telling me, "So I had this dream and this guy was there, but he was dead, but not really. So I went drinking with him. And then I got out of this car and could see everything! I could just focus on a point and see it all. Maybe I am Irish." This type of narration was ok for the first 100 pages, but then it quickly turns into not-for-pleasure reading.

Sadly, I missed the book discussion, but one of the book clubbers passed Sam Jordison's review that gave me a different take on the events. Sam's take is that the blow to Townrow's head caused his confusion. Which is a totally plausible idea, but Newby dropped so many references to dreams throughout the book that I am sticking with my assertion that Something to Answer for won the Man-Booker prize because it was the original "And then he woke up and it was all a dream" book.

[Brendon Oliver-Ewen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank god that’s over. This was the kind of book where I started looking at my % progress at 11%, seriously considered giving up on my Booker Prize challenge at 23%, and by the mid-point was choosing to lie in the dark at night trying to sleep rather than soldiering on.

So yes. I finished. And I give kudos to any rational, non-misogynistic, non-sexist, non-racist person who manages to get through it as a choice, rather than necessity. Because that, my friend, is overcoming adversity.

Ok, my brief actual review: I have started a challenge to read all the Booker Prize winners and this, chronologically, was the natural starting point. Our Irish-English hero/anti-hero/d!ckhead main character is a criminal, sexist, racist, egotistical rapist who floats through the book in, ostensibly, a fever dream. For tone, one of my favourite quotes from our hero: ‘Women did not understand honour... women did not understand that kind of loneliness.’ He spends the majority of the book trying to defraud a widow in Egypt of her money and having an affair with a Jewess he thinks is ‘reasonably’ good looking (as he rapes her because, you know, men have urges) while engaging in honourable manly friendships with manly men engaged in manly criminal activities, and putting up with the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and subsequent French/British response. And *spoiler alert* the end of the book finds him sailing alone fascinated by the corpse he is sharing the boat with.

How this book won the Booker is beyond me. I can only suggest that it has aged... badly? Or the judges were former soldiers engaged in Egypt who liked brandy and hashish? And found words with more than three syllables challenging?

Too harsh? Not too soon.

Not recommended.

[Colin Davison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Greene, Kafka, a bit of Waugh. It's astonishing that this should be the 17th novel by a now little-known author who also had a full-time job running the Third Programme.
The plot is labyrinthine, with the narrator himself confused about past events and, perhaps as befits a small-time fraudster, even about his own identity. It reminded me in some ways of Antonioni's film Blow-up released a couple of years earlier.
The widow of gun-runner invites the central character to Egypt, where his own mental confusion increased by the chaos of the Suez invasion. The author's style and structure are radical and confident, brilliantly culminating in a surreal climax in which, trying to redeem himself, the hero is last seen trying to sink the arms merchant's buoyant coffin.
Confusing certainly, but an engrossing tale and worth reading again. A worthy, and surprising first Booker Prize winner. I loved it.

[Ensiform · Rating 3 out of 5]

The winner of the first Booker Prize, this novel takes place during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis and centers on Jack Townrow, a British man who makes his living as a corrupt Fund Distributor. With nothing holding him to home, when he is asked to come to Egypt (called the UAR in the novel though that seems to be chronologically off) by Mrs. Khoury, the widow of a man, Elie, he met ten years earlier in Cairo, he goes. On the way, during a stopover in Rome, Townrow gets into an argument with two men over Britain's knowledge or lack thereof of the Final Solution in 1942. Townrow is incensed that anyone would believe the British government to be capable of colluding in genocide, while the Israeli and Greek are more cynical. In Port Said, on the Canal, he goes to a bar he used to frequent, whose Greek proprietor spins him a yarn about Mrs K's taking Elie's body, along with a fortune in coins, to Lebanon though the Canal, which directly led to Nasser’s decision to nationalize it, precipitating the looming French and British invasion. Townrow drinks until he blacks out – it seems likely to the reader that the bar owner drugged him – and awakens naked and bleeding in the desert, and is attacked by a startled camel driver, causing his head and eye to be bandaged for most of the rest of the novel. After this incident, the novel becomes much more dream-like in its narrative, with Townrow a very unreliable narrator who gives false names, who cannot remember his nationality (though he asserts that he is Irish as part of a scam he tries to run on Mrs K), nor his age, nor whether his mother is alive. He imagines that Elie is still alive, or that he is watching the burial at sea. He meets an Egyptian Jew, Leah Strauss, who is married to an American locked in an asylum back home. She repels his attentions, though apparently she later becomes his lover, and she an obsession for him. Townrow walks though scenes of mob unrest (and kills a man, though apparently nothing comes of it), is arrested as a spy, and watches bloody gunfights between Egyptian and British troops with detachment. At the end of the novel, Townrow comes to believe that a citizen is not responsible for the morality of his government and has only himself and his own actions to answer for.

I don't usually write such a detailed plot summary in a review, but this book, with its scenes that seemed to go nowhere but had huge influence on what came after, seemed to call for it. This is a somewhat bewildering novel, as it is difficult to tell how much of what was related actually took place or how much was a fever or drunken dream. Did Townrow really dig up the body, or watch a burial? Did he really kill a rioter accidentally? The book is very much Graham Greene – efficient British man gets in way over his head in a post-colonial foreign country because he doesn't understand the history and culture the way he thinks he does – but a Greene novel as co-directed by Christopher Nolan and David Lynch. I understand that this is a story of self-discovery, and it's written with skill and erudition, and its message that a person is responsible for his or her own morality is welcome enough, but there’s always a part of me that resents books which make no distinction between internal and external processes. How can the reader judge whether Townrow's choices are apt and his journey worth taking when we can’t even know what’s happened to him?

[Kenneth · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is probably one of the worst books I've ever read. Calling it erratic wouldn't be enough, as the plot is all over the place, with some sort of slipping/skipping timeline that never offers any sort of orientating anchor. None of the characters offer any depth or complexity of personality, and the plot.... What can I say about the plot? After 285 pages, I have no clue what the whole point of the book was.

I would never have finished this novel if I wasn't planning on reading every winner of the Man Booker Prize. Thus far, having read John Banville's "The Sea," as well, I am not impressed.

If you see this book at your local bookstore, run away, and don't look back.

[Flor · Rating 3 out of 5]

First Booker Prize winner (1969).

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

P. H. Newby’s novel Something to Answer For won the inaugural Booker Prize in 1969, so it takes pride of place leftmost on my Booker shelf. At the opposite end sits Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, one of two 2019 winners. The books sit, quite appropriately, at opposite ends of a spectrum.

Whereas Atwood’s novel is fast-paced, taking in over a decade of future-history across the entire North American continent, Newby gives an account of a few weeks in 1956 in the Egyptian town of Port Said. Where Atwood’s narrative whips from one event to the next, Newby’s is ruminative. Atwood’s plot is laid out in one direction with pristine linearity, like the TV-show storyboard it truly is; Newby’s story, on the other hand, is crumpled and not so much multi-layered as multi-dimensional. Clearly, these are very different types of novel: Newby’s is better. He takes in time, space, the exterior world and captures the multiple facets of the human consciousness.

The plot is simple enough. Townrow is trapped in Port Said, having journeyed to the side of an old acquaintance, Mrs Khoury, from whom he is for various and shifting reasons throughout the novel reluctant to part. Ostensibly he is trying to solve the murder of Mrs Khoury’s husband, Elie, and for one reason or another he fails. He is inhibited less by external factors than by his own avarice, guilt, lack of willpower, lapsing memory, lust, sorrow, bad luck and other various forces which seem to overlap dizzyingly. All this buffets him about, until it is too late to leave: The Suez Crisis is raining chaos – and rockets – down on Port Said. Meanwhile he gets drunk (a lot) and beaten (severely) and appears to veer between near-destruction at others’ hands and at his own.

Newby does not simply take the reader on a journey with Townrow; he thrusts us into the carnage of his mind. In it I heard echoes of Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Whether Townrow is brain-damaged early in the narrative, whether he is mad or whether he is the waste product of a broken system of English arrogance deprived of a place in the world is for the reader to determine. Newby’s ability to encapsulate the chaos of Townrow’s circumstances is masterful.

I have to criticise the publisher Faber for not tidying up the text: there are typographical errors every few pages, particularly towards the end. Did the proof-reader find the book too much and fall asleep?

Newby’s fifty-year-old novel is ambitious and by no means an easy read. For a fairly slim book, it took me a lot of sittings to complete. But literary prize winners shouldn’t read like YA fiction – sorry, Margaret! More recent Booker Prize winners definitely have something to answer for.

[Courtney H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Because I seem unable to stop drawing comparisons between the various Bookers that I've read, I figured I'd try to go back and give at least some sort of review. Of course, my memory is like a sieve so I don't really remember anything I read more than two hours ago, which means these reviews should be taken with a grain of salt at least.

PH Newby was the first Booker I read after making the decision to go through them all. It was not what I expected; and to be honest I'm not sure anyone could expect this book. It tells the story of the Suez Canal Crisis as a backdrop to the personal crisis of Townrow, the protagonist. Townrow was probably not all that reliable to begin with, and as he gets hit on the head quite early in the book, it does not get better from there. He is often confused and that means that the story (limited third-person narrator whose unreliability strides with Townrow) is equally confused. Before I realized how confused Townrow was, I accepted events that later unraveled; and then of course there were events narrated that you know from the get-go are actually some sort of hallucination; and then there are those events that when you reach the last page you still don't actually know where they fall on that spectrum of reality/hallucination.

I really enjoy books that successfully blend the local with the large historical moments, and it is hard to do successfully. Often those historical moments are mere props, or are used to trigger some sort of emotion response in the reader, and so you resent it for being used in such a manner. Here, Newby is more deft and the crisis plays out so naturally and so unwittingly -- for because Townrow does not really seem to understand or give credit to the depth of what is going on, you can ride along with him -- and the lives of the characters blend so surprisingly and effortlessly with the story of Egypt. I particularly appreciated Newby's development of alliances and relationships as they begin, collapse, are betrayed, renew, all through the eyes of unreliable Townrow and which are as political as they are personal. Townrow is the perfect protagonist for this book: slightly immoral, largely affable, bizarrely gallant, unreliable and often irritating, and totally engaging. I particularly enjoyed the train scenes; the best in the book, I think.

It took me a bit to get into the style of these early Bookers, but ultimately, though Newby's books are tough to find now, this one at least is worth digging up.

[Geoff Wooldridge · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Booker Prize winner is normally a solid guarantee of a decent, if not excellent read. There have been few exceptions among the 44 winners I have read to date, and this inaugural 1969 winner is definitely one of them. In fact, I have ranked it lowest of all the Booker winners I have read to date.

It deals with a chap called Townrow, who can't quite work out if he's English or Irish, where he has or hasn't been before, what names or aliases he has used in the past, or why he even exists really.

Townrow is a complete tool - a shyster, a conman, a pathological liar and one very confused human.

The setting is Port Said, Egypt in 1956. He has been summoned by the wife of an old acquaintance, Elie Khoury, who is presumed dead. Mrs Khoury believes he has been murdered.

The story descends into a shambles, into a web of intrigue and uncertainty, as the Egyptians take over control of the Suez Canal, and British forces decide to invade Egypt and wage war in the Middle East. This is just another period of conflict and political instability in this region, and a further example of British colonialist meddling.

Townrow embarks on an affair with Leah Strauss, the daughter of Mrs Khoury's lawyer, who is Jewish and married to an absent American. This seems to be Newby's attempt to add a bit of romance and sexual spice into the story.

The story is very muddled, bordering on surrealistic at times. There are many shady characters, apart from Townrow, and there is a baffling subplot about gun running to Cyprus for the Greeks. It's all a bit whacky, disjointed and hard to keep track of.

The novel concludes with a farcical episode in which Townrow and others attempt to rebury the corpse of Elie Khoury at sea, during which they encounter a British destoyer.

Frankly, I was lost and mystified most of the time. Townrow was a complete ass of a character and the plot made very little sense to me. I had the sense that author, P H Newby, may be something of a racist.

Not recommended - thankfully Booker Prize winners since 1969 have been mostly considerably better than this.

[Phoebe Turner · Rating 1 out of 5]

As the inaugural booker prize winner, I expected a novel slightly more prize-worthy and perhaps niche enough to grab enough attention to have been the first of its kind. With an almost concussed writing style it was a chore to read and with flaky characterisation at best it was a struggle to nail down the protagonists or even the plot itself. It could be said it is reminiscent of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island with multiple layers of reality making the book extremely difficult to follow. I have never felt such a prevailing sense of skepticism whilst reading a book, questioning at every turn of the plot the plausibility of his account of the events. However, despite starting out anticipating a murder mystery and being was sorely disappointed i was intrigued to see where the tangent would take me.

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[Old Man JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

A real mixed bag. At times well written and showing signs of being a good read and then falling apart to become a totally confusing diatribe. It takes place around the period that Egypt took control of the Suez Canal and is, probably, an expose of British conduct in world affairs but I'm not positive that this is the underlying message. The book seemed to weave in and out of reality and was fairly disorienting.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing first attempt to conquer the Booker list. This book is like an irritating drunken dream - I have no idea what the point was or why it was written

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

tl;dr a fascinating study of collective guilt and responsibility enshrined in this singlar snapshot of both history and literature

You couldn’t answer for anything outside your own personal experience. And if you remembered your own experiences wrongly you didn’t count at all. You weren’t human. (p. 198)

The question of responsibility hangs over every political act of war – are individuals to be blamed for the actions of their own governments? In Something to Answer For, the inaugural Booker Prize winner, P.H. Newby stretches that question to its absolutely literary limit, relying on unreliable narration, a difficult plot structure, and an endless parade of ambiguous narrative events that only leave a blood-trail of further questions in its wake.

In 1956, Egypt claimed national ownership of the then jointly(?)-owned Suez Canal, sparking the UK and France to collude with Israel to try to take back their shares by force. This boiling conflict serves as the political backdrop of Something to Answer For. As our anti-hero(?) Townrow tries to sort out the affairs of his friend’s widow, Mrs. Khoury, his memory appears to fail him. He begins to question the whole point of being there, his relationship to Mrs Khoury’s husband Elie, past events that befell him in his time in Egypt as an Embarkation Officer for the British Army.

It appears at first that Something to Answer For will have some sort of murder-mystery (GoodReads rating reflecting, this certainly is not the case). What we’re presented with is a series of unfortunate, inexplicable, surreal-at-times events that call into question: who is Townrow and what has he done? The eponymous “somethings” that he is made to answer for are many. For example, early on, he is blamed by an Israeli Jew for “not warning his people about the trains” that took countless Jews to the concentration camps in Germany. Later, he is made to answer for the death of Elie Khoury, and predictably comes up short. As violence intensifies throughout the book as a result of the Suez Canal’s nationalization, he refuses to answer for the UK’s actions, claiming an Irish identity (and possibly even American?).

Newby’s exploration of this theme is absolutely absorbing, even if the narrative gets a bit repetitive and frustrating, as I wasn’t sure what to make of most of the actual events of the novel. Townrow’s inner dialogue, frequently defensive, brusque, and impulsive, reflects accurately the instinct for a nation to “cover their asses”, so to speak. But was it a joy to read? Not quite – much of the novel is quite confusing and wears that proudly on its sleeve. Jarring scene transitions abound, and the chronology is loose and slippery. And despite the violence ramping up past the halfway mark, there was little actual tension, since we don’t know who can be trusted (not least the narrator himself). My emotional involvement was scant in this novel, but I can appreciate from a distance what it’s doing.

Something to Answer For is no great joy to read, but it is a remarkable experience. Newby’s interrogation of post-colonial (ha-ha) Britain (by which of course we just mean the deflation of its status as a Middle-East intervener) is singular and strange, and if anything, a fascinating snapshot of British literature and history.

[Amber Manning · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find this to be a really interesting choice for the first Booker Prize because it deals very largely with the waning British Empire… in fact, I think it wonders whether one can even really be “British” as the Empire (rightfully) both disintegrates and is destroyed. From the beginning, Townrow, the protagonist, has trouble remembering where he is from and no one–not the hotel, not the police, not him–can find his passport; at some point, an American passport is “found” but never actually revealed to the text. We know–and I think he knows, despite insisting that he is Irish like his mother–that he is British but the Suez Canal, being a liminal space that defies borders and boundaries, becomes the operating metaphor for the book (Christou says “Nasser said that before the Canal there was nothing here but a sandbank. Every brick and camel dropping in the twin cities of Port Said and Port Fouad is Canal. I am Canal. This boozer is Canal. You are Canal. The harbour is Canal. We’ve been nationalised.”). Newby makes this pretty damn explicit and not just because he sets the novel amidst the 1956 tripartite aggression of Israel, the U.K., and France; the entire novel circulates on who–with what passport–will be able to hold property in Port Said. As such, boundaries, rights, nation states, citizenship, and even identity seem to be in constant flux. Townrow, despite insisting that he has never before seen gunfire, really seems to be suffering from some kind of PTSD; he–and the reader–have difficulty discerning what is real and what is not (for example, he thinks he remembers bringing his friend Eli’s coffin across the sea to go to Lebanon but this is something that actually happens–or doesn’t happen–at the end of the novel). For me, this is is Newby’s genius; this novel comes at the cusp of globalization, at the moment when having any kind of national identity seems to be dismantled; as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out in Empire, the world migrant begins to look and feel different because global capital starts to shift. This is certainly unsettling for members of the British Empire and I think Newby rightly interrogates this new-found crisis in identity; however, I would have liked to see more of how colonialism has always already led to hybridity that is portrayed as instability and how colonized people are, as a result, de-identified and simultaneously hyper-visible. If Sylvia Wynter is right (she is), and white colonialism has mistaken the white man for the human, Newby does a great job of looking at how a white man loses his grip on his own form of what is human, but doesn’t do much to think through how exactly we stop mistaking the forest for the white hetero-patriarchal trees. I do like, though, an ending of floating; I like that Townrow doesn’t get a teleology–after all, what is progress after the Holocaust??--and instead becomes “intent, as though he had finally managed to strike a light with a damp match and was protecting it in the wind.”

[Chad Boehne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I decided to read this book because I generally enjoy most Booker Prize winners. This is the first winner from 1969. For the life of me, I can’t imagine what the judges saw in this book that made them want to give it the prize of the best fiction book written in the UK in 1969. It was just slightly better than awful. The first 200 pages are a mess of words where you’re trying to both make a connection with the main character while simultaneously trying to simply figure out what is going on. Then the last 80 or so pages are somewhat interesting, but still a jumbled mess and the ending just leaves you scratching your head.

Yes, the book is from the sixties, however, this is the same period where authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Michael Crichton, and plenty of others were releasing novels that are still amazing today. Sure those weren’t British, however, the classic Master and Commander was and it’s twice as good as this mess.

Unless you’re on a weird quest like me to read all Booker winners, skip this one. You’re welcome.

[Poornima Vijayan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There IS something about this book my P.H. Newby. The narrative is so distracted and fragmented and yet that's where the beauty lies. Is a man who does not remember his nationality sane or insane? Townrow is a superbly sketched character. Within the many meanderings of the novel that jumps from reality to imagination and back, there is deep philosophy. What do you have to answer for? Can a man define himself and start afresh? Am I who you believe me to be?

Set in Port Said during the Suez crisis, Townrow is there to help his friend Elie Khoury's British wife. A person who accidentally benefited from a con, he sees no harm continuing to use these methods for personal benefit. It's not the plot that makes the book worth reading. It is the meandering narrative, so flippant and yet profound.

[Colby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for the same reason almost everyone reads it — it won the inaugural Booker prize all the way back in 1969. I plan on reading the other nominees, but I highly doubt it’s even the best of the shortlisted novels, much less of all the books published in 1969. It’s not bad necessarily, but its premise (a mystery set in Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis) is far more interesting than what actually happens. Townrow is a frustrating narrator whom is equal parts unreliable and hard to support. I never rooted for him to escape Egypt alive(!) making this a difficult read.

[Olivier Bosman · Rating 3 out of 5]

BOOKER WINNER 1969. I struggled a little with this one. The jumbled narrative reflected the main character’s memory loss and confusion, but it did make it hard to read. I suppose back in 1969, Britain was still coming to terms with its colonial past and the Suez crisis was still fresh in people’s mind, making this a poignant read, but now the quaintness of the setting soon wears thin, and at the end the plot got so surreal that I just lost it.

[Ewa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly, I can't make anything of what I've just read. I'd call it oneiric but that doesn't quite make a point. It seemed to me fluid - if writing can be so. It has some points you could attach yourself, too but in the end, they didn't help, not really. This is the kind of book to give you a major book hangover.

[LauraT · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too confused; about a period I'm not particularly interested into. Still wondering why I've picked it up - and why have I not abandoned it!!!!!

"Amin surprised everyone by jumping to his feet and beginning to shout hysterically. “I protest. What the Europeans did to the Jews is a great crime. No Arab rejoices at it. It is infamous to imply Arabs approve what the Germans did. We spit on the Germans. We spit on the Europeans.”"