G.
by John Berger
Summary
G. is the son of an Italian merchant and an Englishwoman, born illegitimate and taken as a child to England. He grows up detached from everyone, becomes a seducer of considerable persistence, and moves through Europe in the years before the First World War, arriving repeatedly at moments where history is visibly turning: the Milan riots of 1898, an early aviator's attempt on the Alps, Trieste in 1915 as the empires prepare to break.
The book is not interested in telling this as a story. Berger interrupts constantly with essays on sexuality, on what a drawing can and cannot record, on why the novel form is inadequate to a life, and with diagrams. Sex is described with unusual seriousness and no titillation at all, as the one experience in which a person is briefly not a social product.
It is a genuinely experimental novel and one of the least conventional books ever to win this prize. There is no continuous narrative and nothing resembling a resolution.
Read it if you know Berger's Ways of Seeing and want the fiction that argument came out of. Do not read it expecting a story about a man called G. Readers who want narrative should start with To the Wedding instead, which is a far more approachable book.
It is around three hundred pages and among the hardest books on this list to finish, which is worth saying plainly rather than pretending otherwise. Its influence on how writers think about looking, and about what fiction owes to history, has been considerable.
Historical Context & Significance
G. won the Booker Prize in 1972, and John Berger used his acceptance speech at the Cafe Royal in London to attack the people giving it to him.
Booker McConnell's wealth, he pointed out, originated in more than a century of trading in the Caribbean, whose modern poverty he called the direct result of that exploitation. He announced that he would keep half the money for his living costs and give the other half to the British Black Panther Movement, on the grounds that it had grown out of what companies like Booker had created in the Caribbean.
The half he kept funded A Seventh Man, his study of migrant workers in Europe. It remains the most famous acceptance speech in the prize's history.