Something to Answer For
by P. H. Newby
Summary
Townrow is English, or possibly Irish, and is no longer certain which. He goes to Port Said in 1956 at the request of the widow of an old friend, Elie, who she is convinced was murdered. Almost immediately Townrow is hit on the head in the street, and from that point the novel stops being reliable in any conventional sense.
He drinks a great deal of bad local spirit. He recovers, relapses and recovers again. Events are narrated and then contradicted, and at one point he digs up Elie's grave to make sure the man is really dead. Around him the Suez crisis is assembling, and by the end British and French aircraft are over the canal and Townrow, who came to investigate one death, is watching his country do something he cannot square with anything he believed about it.
The two collapses run together, which is the design: a man who cannot trust his own account of the last week, and a nation that has just discovered it is no longer what it told itself it was.
It is short, strange, and genuinely difficult in a way that has kept it out of print for long stretches. Expect no reliable ground at all. Best for readers interested in how the postwar English novel started to come apart, or in Suez as the moment the empire stopped pretending.
It comes in under three hundred pages and can be found secondhand without much trouble. Treat it as a document of where the prize began rather than as a book anyone would press on you today, and it becomes a great deal more interesting.
Historical Context & Significance
Something to Answer For won the first Booker Prize, awarded in 1969 for a novel published the previous November. That makes it the beginning of everything this archive records, and it is now among the least read winners in the list.
P.H. Newby was a career BBC man, a producer who rose to become Controller of Radio Three, and this was far from his first published book. He was not a young discovery and the prize was not designed to make one.
The novel's choice of Suez was pointed. In 1969 the crisis was thirteen years past and still the clearest marker of British decline, and a first prize for a book about national self deception set a tone the Booker has returned to repeatedly since. Newby continued writing but never had comparable attention again, and the inaugural winner has spent most of the intervening years out of print.