The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 10: The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens – the first woman to win the Booker Prize

In 1970, when the Booker Prize was still in its infancy (its second year running, in fact), the prize was awarded to Bernice Rubens. Rubens was the first woman to win the award and is still the only Welsh person to ever win the prize. 2023 marks the centenary of Rubens’ birth so this week, we’re taking a closer look at The Elected Member – a piercing novel that explores what happens to a respectable, close-knit Jewish family when their prodigious son becomes a middle-aged drug addict.

The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens

Bruno’s Dream by Iris Murdoch

Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel by William Trevor

Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen

The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

When I Grow Up by Bernice Rubens

The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis

In Transit by Brigid Brophy

The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence

The Hungry Grass by Richard Power

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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Bernice Rubens:

I think writers, novelists especially, are very much to blame for promoting their work to some mythological status-

James Walton:

It’s the mystique.

Bernice Rubens:

It’s rubbish.

James Walton:

Of being a writer.

Bernice Rubens:

Yes, it’s rubbish. It’s a job like anything else. You sit down and the secret is you stay sitting.

James Walton:

That was the voice of Bernice Rubens, who was born a hundred years ago this year, and is was going to be the subject of the latest Booker Prize podcast with me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

And me, Jo Hamya.

James Walton:

But before we get onto Bernice, we’re going to look at her life generally, but also concentrate on the book that she won the Booker Prize with, which was The Elected Member in 1970 second ever. Booker Prize, the first woman to win, and still the only Welsh person to win. Her book is a pretty close up view of family life. Jo, where do you fit into your siblings and things?

Jo Hamya:

I have one younger sister and then… Well, my mom’s Polish, my dad’s Ugandan. There’s a sort of weird sense that my cousins are also my brothers and sisters. In fact, in Polish you don’t really say, “Cousin,” you say, “The brother who belongs to your aunt,” or “The sister who belong belongs to your uncle.” But I’m the eldest, and I think probably classic eldest daughter syndrome, I rewrote all of their personal statements when they were trying to get into uni. I would babysit them at family parties. I think it does make for a really neurotic personality. I see where Norman in The Elected Member is coming through. It’s a lot of pressure, a lot of stress to take.

James Walton:

Fair enough. Well, I’m also the oldest actually of, I’ve got two younger sisters. I don’t know really. I’d like to think I was the golden boy, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I do know that now that my mum’s getting a bit older, she’s on Merseyside where my two sisters live, so they do far more of the looking after. But if I pop home for a weekend or something, I’m just the greatest person in the world and they’re flogging their guts out, looking after her loads of the time. Then I just make the odd phone call, show up and “Oh, James…” Which I must say they take in very good [inaudible]. It would drive me nuts if I was them.

Jo Hamya:

But it is true that the oldest becomes the golden child in a weird way. They’re like the benchmark. They set the standard, especially if you’re a high achiever, which I think is probably fair to say, we both try to be.

James Walton:

Yes, okay. Achiever of some level to be debated. But we turn to our subject this week of Bernice Rubens. This is, as I say, born a hundred years ago, first woman to win, second winner. We probably should say for our American listeners that The Elected Member was called Chosen People in America, really for reasons that we can discuss.

Jo Hamya:

Oh, I totally knew that.

Yeah.

James Walton:

Oh, can I just do, but the 1970… Can I just do a few tales from granddad? Because I was-

Jo Hamya:

Please do. Yes, I love them. Yes.

James Walton:

I was, in fact, alive.

Jo Hamya:

How old were you in 1970? Jesus.

James Walton:

Quite, quite young.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, that’s what I thought. You’re making it sound like you were walking around as a 20-year-old man.

James Walton:

No, no, no. I was quite young, but remember some of it. I remember it was the first general election I remember which conservatives won under Edward Heath. I remember it was still pre-decimal currency, pound, shillings of pence. I remember Apollo 13. The thing I actually do remember really, really vividly was the World Cup in Mexico. I think for people of a certain generation, Brazil 1970 was as good as football ever got. What I found out since that, I don’t remember at all, not surprisingly it was the first Glastonbury. I didn’t remember that. But it’s also when the Beatles split up.

One thing that’s not changed actually, though, in August of fact year Rolling Stones started their European tour, so 1970, but also the 1970 Booker Prize. This is only its second year, but that seemed to have hit the ground pretty much running. Also, quite a distinguished shortlist. Iris Murdoch with Bruno’s Dream, William Trevor, Mrs. Eckdorf at O’Neill’s Hotel. I think it’s quite interesting, Elizabeth Bowen, famous for I think a great blitz novel, The Heat of the Day was shortlisted for Eva Trout, but that as far as I can work it out, means that she’s the only ever shortlisted Booker author who was born in the 19th century.

Jo Hamya:

Really?

James Walton:

And was one of the judges, Rebecca West, who had a child with H.G. Wells in 1914 and was a Booker judge. But I’d just like to say that even in those days there was shock omissions, I don’t know if newspapers used the word snub, but the book that was snubbed, shockingly omitted that year was the French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. I spoke to the chair of the judges that year, David Holloway, a few years later, and he said he did regret that they hadn’t short-listed that, he thought it was a mistake. The headline when Bernice Rubens won for The Elected Member in the Liverpool Daily Post was, “Unknown novel wins top award.” But even then, the Booker effect was there because The Chosen People, as it was in America, sold 14,000 copies the next week in America, so already it’s hit the ground running. I read Bernice Ruben’s autobiography When I Grow Up.

Jo Hamya:

Isn’t it the last thing she wrote?

James Walton:

Yes. It was actually so last that it was published posthumously and she doesn’t mention The Elected Member at all. In fact, the only couple of passing mentions of the Booker is one that when she’s buying a flat in the early seventies, she says, “I decided to buy a flat. I borrowed a book from my mum. I’d recently won the Booker, and that helped, too.” That’s, it isn’t in the book, but she does talk about the statuette, and her daughters had added pubic hair to the crotch and arm pits, if I may say. Oh, and the other thing she does talk about is she judged the Booker Prize in 1986. One of my favourite book of facts used to be that, again, as far as I can see, there’s only been one once where four of the five judges had been women, and that was 1986. The winner was not only a bloke, but it was Kingsley Amos.

Jo Hamya:

Oh, Jesus.

James Walton:

Not normally thought of as the most feminist, although disappointed.

Jo Hamya:

Maybe he had a good chat.

James Walton:

Bernice I don’t think was very pleased about that. She says in, When I Grow Up, her autobiography, “Prize went to Kingsley Amos’ the Old Devil’s, certainly a book that made you laugh. You read it straight on a Monday and forgot it on the Tuesday.” It was a depressing decision, she says. But you’ve got possibly even more interesting things about the 1970 Booker Prize than that, have you?

Jo Hamya:

I’ve got the judges’ notes from that year. As context to our listeners, before I became the host of this podcast, I was working for Booker as an archivist of sorts. Booker has a wonderful archive at Oxford Brooks University Library, and it’s filled with press clippings and ceremony footage and administrative-

James Walton:

I love that so much.

Jo Hamya:

Letters, but it’s also filled with judges’ notes. I really wanted to see them because I think I kind of knew on instinct that Dame Rebecca West was always going to instigate some sort of cattiness. There’s a rather fabulous letter from David Holloway, who had recently been to a judge’s lunch and Rebecca West had just returned from Mexico City. She’s famously always flying off to America or South America and missing judges meetings.

James Walton:

I think that kind of grande dame has more or less disappeared now, isn’t it? But she must’ve been the epitome thereof.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. Well, Holloway says, “She walks like a dame. She talks like a dame, and I wish that she had stayed in Mexico City. I fear that we’re going to have a rather long, hard day on the 22nd. I take it that the others, like me, will agree that the extra books Dame Rebecca has added to the list will have to be considered.” There’s this whole thing he’s writing to Marilyn Edwards, who’s then secretary, this laboured thing of, “Oh, we’ve got to deal with her.” But I have to say that her notes on which books should be considered for the shortlist, there was no long list back then, are amazing.

Her notes are incredible and they range from on Bridig Brophy’s In Transit, “Twaddle. Out.” On The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence, “Cheaply written, and nothing underneath it except a familiar story to which nothing has been added. Out.” Even when she’s being complimentary and pushing a book in, as with Richard Powers The Hungry Grass, she says, “I have the most odd feeling about this book. I read it with a pleasure and a sustained interest in the leading character, but the story is so badly told that I really cannot understand the significance the reader is supposed to attach to most of the episodes. I should have said a quite incompetent book. Yet there is solidity in Conroy’s character and I got a definite pleasure from reading it. Mixed reviews.”

James Walton:

Indeed. Did that make the shortlist? I can’t remember.

Jo Hamya:

No, it didn’t. Of the famous omission from that year, John Fowles is the French Lieutenant’s Woman, Dame Rebecca says, “This seams a foolish enterprise and worked out with very little talent. The last paragraph seems to me remarkable in its pretentiousness.”

James Walton:

Oh, wow. I wonder if she just basically got her way. I wonder if that was why it wasn’t in, you can only guess.

Jo Hamya:

Well, she has an extremely sort of interesting review of our winner, The Elected Member by Bernie Rubens. One sentence that says, “I wish Jewish authors would not write of themselves as if they were strange animals in the zoo, but this is a good and touching and funny book.”

James Walton:

Oh, thanks Jo. Should we do a bit on Ruben’s herself, then?

Jo Hamya:

Yes, we should. I feel like having read her autobiography, you are more ofay with Ruben’s history than I.

James Walton:

Okay. In that case, I will clear my throat and begin. A very interesting beginning actually, which is why she grew up in Cardiff, which was her father was a Lithuanian Jew who came to Hamburg, so this would be around the turn of the century, I think 20th century, obviously. That was the centre of getting Jews to America from czarist Russia as it still was then, except there was a lot of conman there. They would say, yes, they would charge people for tickets to New York and send them to Liverpool, Cardiff or whatever. Sure enough, that’s what happened to her father. He was sent to Cardiff and according to her, it was three weeks because he didn’t speak English, he spoke Yiddish. Three weeks before he realised that Cardiff wasn’t New York. There must have been a few… She also says it is very interesting, I don’t know enough about history or sociology to know, but this enormous growth in Jewish people in Britain in the early 20th century was simply because of this con thing going on in Hamburg.

She did consider herself very Jewish. On Desert Island Discs she was asked, “How important is your Jewishness to you?” I think it was Sue Lawley in those days. She said, “It is me.” She says, “Not all their books are Jewish,” although as we’ll find out The Elected Member certainly is. “But they all do have a Jewish vision.” When her dad arrived in Cardiff, he was a tallyman, too, who would buy clothes, I think in the city and then go and sell them around in the mining valleys of South Wales. She would sometimes go with them and would hear the miners coming out of the pits singing in close harmony. Also, it was an amazing family. In this little small house in Splott, in Cardiff, there was her and her three siblings, all of whom became very accomplished professional musicians.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

There’s her brother Harold, who was the infant prodigy and I would suggest the basis for the main character in The Elected Member. He became a concert pianist of great note before certain mental issues set in. Her sister Beryl played in the orchestra for the Welsh Opera, and her brother Cyril was a violinist for the London Symphony Orchestra and what a thing to come out of a small house in Splott. Anyway, she also wished she’d been a musician, too. Again, on Desert Island Discs, she said she considers herself a successful novelist who failed to become a musician.

Jo Hamya:

That’s my line.

James Walton:

Oh, sorry.

Jo Hamya:

No, no. I just mean that I frequently say this as well, but she ended up learning how to play cello and piano, didn’t she, quite well.

James Walton:

She did. Yeah. Quite well by all of our standards, I think. Not very well by her family’s standards. She also said she would give up all of our novels to play one bar like Rostropovich, who I believe was a cellist. Her story is that her family couldn’t afford a cello. By the time they could, it was too late for her to reach the level that the rest of her family did. She went off to Cardiff University, became a teacher. She was sacked from a Birmingham school for campaigning against caning.

Jo Hamya:

Good woman.

James Walton:

Exactly. She published her first novel in 1960. Oh, she married Rudi Nassauer, who was also a writer who she seems to have adored, but he was extremely unfaithful and left her for a woman she describes in her autobiography as “Ugly, thick, and sublimely boring.” No hard feelings there.

Jo Hamya:

Well, she’d had 23 years of marriage.

James Walton:

Indeed. He’d already had a child, which she didn’t know, and that was a shattering to her. But then even when he was dying, I think more or less in his last illness, she looked after him. She looked after Rudi. A prolific author, 26 novels and all as well as autobiography, shortlisted again for the Booker with A Five-Year Sentence, which was the favourite of her novels. But Iris Murdoch, who was on that 1970 shortlist, got a revenge that year by winning with The Sea, The Sea in 1978. Her main subject, she says herself was family. “Everything that happens in family is more so in a Jewish family,” she says. Is also quite famous for our friendship with Beryl Bainbridge, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize many times without winning. I remember the two of them when I first got into the literary world, just at the side of the room smoking a lot.

Jo Hamya:

Of which room?

James Walton:

Literary parties, there would be the two of them just sort of looking on with their fags. Actually, it’s rather nice bit where Beryl Bainbridge provides a forward to the autobiography When I Grow Up, and she says this, “So me and Bernice as adults, we had loved the men we married and they had walked away crashing our hopes, after which we had gone in for gentlemen callers,” which is a great phrase. “The one thing that we were equal to was our devotion to cigarettes. We smoked as if there was no tomorrow, which of course there isn’t.” Then they have an argument about whether what they’re looking for in men. Beryl writes, “Neither of us had ever fallen for anyone for reasons higher up than the waist.” There was that friendship, which was fantastic. They’re also both fans of soap operas, so there they are. There’s Bernice Rubens in the smallest of nutshells.

Jo Hamya:

She’s fabulous.

James Walton:

She is. She’s terrific. We probably should move on to the book then.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, we should.

James Walton:

Want to say a bit about that?

Jo Hamya:

The Elected Member takes place in the east end of London, and it concerns the Zweck family, who bears a passing resemblance to Rubens’ own upbringing. Their patriarch is the Rabbi Zweck who also immigrated to London, married and then had three children, the eldest Norman, and then the middle child Bella, and the youngest Esther. He has this sort of slightly hysterical and demanding wife who determines at a very early stage that Norman is a prodigy. That’s because he picks up languages like no other. I think by the time he’s seven or something, he speaks fluent Polish, and Yiddish, and English, and then he picks up the romantic languages and then he picks up Russian. She begins to stagger his age because this is of interest to the local papers, and she makes him younger and younger so that by the time he reaches his bar mitzvah, which I think is supposed to be at the age of 13, he’s actually 16.

James Walton:

That’s when she’s still saying he’s 13.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. This also has an effect on Bella. This is a theme of the novel, that a lot of the hardships that Norman goes through tend to compound themselves on Bella, whose age is also staggered. There’s a really touching part of the novel where Bella, who throughout the whole book wears white cotton socks, the ones she had from girlhood, as a 14-year-old or 15 year old, takes a pair of her mum’s silk stockings and tries to put them on. Her mum absolutely forbids it because she’s supposed to be 11 or 12 in accordance with Norman’s staggered ageing. Anyway.

James Walton:

Then she ends up wearing ankle socks for the rest of her life.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. Norman fulfils his prophecy of being a prodigy. He becomes a fairly successful lawyer who the Jewish community in London really revere until he’s not. He gets addicted to amphetamines and it, in the way of all addictions, it starts as him taking a pill a day, and then that’s not enough to trigger a reaction. Then he takes two, and then he takes four, and then a handful, until he begins hallucinating and it turns him into a completely different person. Crucially, one who sees silverfish crawling all around his room.

James Walton:

[inaudible] insects, aren’t they? I had to look that up, little creepy crawlies. That’s actually the book begins with him necking the amphetamines and seeing silverfish.

Jo Hamya:

That’s where we meet him. This is massively distressing to Rabbi Zweck, who by this point has lost his wife and is also estranged from his daughter Esther, because she’s decided to marry outside of the Jewish faith to a perfectly nice chap called John.

James Walton:

Rabbi Zweck’s got that thing. Basically he promised his dying wife that he would never reconcile with Esther.

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

He’s stuck with that. Anyway, yeah.

Jo Hamya:

It’s really heartbreaking. Norman, in the end, is committed to a psychiatric hospital, which really puts a strain on the family. Rabbi Zweck is torn between the intense concern he feels for his son, but also for himself and how it genuinely is impacting his physical health. He has a heart attack midway through the book out of stress, and the only person left to pick all of this up is the middle child, Bella, who I think grows in resentment as the novel progresses. Her life has essentially been stunted because of Norman, from the moment that she had to pretend to be 11 when she was 14. That really is, I suppose, all I can say about the novel without spoiling it. It revolves around this tension that’s woven into every aspect of the Zweck family dynamic.

James Walton:

But it is incredibly sad because they all love each other.

Jo Hamya:

Oh, massively.

James Walton:

This is not a product of… Well, I was going to say abuse, but actually there’s a passage in her autobiography that I keep mentioning, When I Grow Up, which I think is central to understanding The Elected Member, really. She says here, “I cannot even claim an abused childhood. My father never suffered unemployment. My mother took in nobody’s washing, no uncle laid a finger on me, and I was never hungry, yet I was abused. We all were, my brothers and sister by parental expectation. Such expectation is abuse of a kind. It doesn’t matter that it was motivated by love. Its effect was damaging and long-lasting.” I think it’s harsh, I must say, but that’s clearly what she thinks. Parental expectation as abuse is at the heart of this book, isn’t it? Also, that idea of parents never being able to let their children go.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, but as you say, it doesn’t preclude the idea of love. Even as doctors are carting Norman off to a mental hospital, Rabbi Zweck experiences this real paternal pain. There’s a passage that actually made me cry. It goes, “ ‘Papa,’ Norman called from his room. His voice was desperate and imploring like a little boys. It was a cry for immediate help and protection. It was a cry of physical pain, and Rabbi Zweck responded, whatever had happened to his son, he would kiss it better and tell him a story to keep his mind off the pain. He hurried to Norman’s room.”

James Walton:

No, it is a really heartbreaking book and part of the heartbreakingness is that it’s almost, as I say, it’s not… I have already said that, but they loved each other, but in fact, it is the fact that they love each other that causes all the damage, really, and that’s even worse. Again, a big theme of the book and her autobiography, and I think other of her books is the idea of parents being unable to let go. She says about our own parents, “I knew they were motivated by love, but they saw us not as individuals, but extensions of themselves. They could not bring themselves to let us go.”

Then speaks of her own parenting, “Later on with my own children, I learned that letting go is the hardest goal for a parent to achieve. Try as I would, I could never relinquish that hold.” Of her own first child, “Sharon was my first child, and as such, she brought the brunt of my expectations. I was not mom’s daughter for nothing.” The impossibility of doing anything about this, and one of the patients in the mental hospital where Norman’s holed up, who actually unfortunately for Norman is a great source of amphetamines.

Jo Hamya:

The minister.

James Walton:

The minister of [inaudible], he calls himself.

Jo Hamya:

I love this guy.

James Walton:

Partly, Norman wants to get out of the mental hospital, it’s horrible. But on the other hand, he can get some pretty good drugs there from the minister.

Jo Hamya:

And cheaper than on the outside.

James Walton:

Cheaper than he’s ever had. It’s this one, again, a very sad scene where he rings Bella and says, “Can you bring what he needs?” He’s being charged a pound a week for as many drugs as he wants, but he hasn’t got any money because he’s in a mental hospital. He rings Bella and says, “Can you bring me some money, please, because I’d like to buy some chocolate.” Bella thinks, “Actually, I’ll tell you what would be even nicer, to go and buy him the best chocolate money can buy.” He turns out with actual chocolate and he’s like, “Where’s the bloody money?” Then she realises what’s gone on then, and lets him steal from her purse.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, I think we’ve been talking about the novel as a family oriented one, but it’s also an astonishingly good depiction of what addiction does to a family. I found that scene, it’s quite prolonged, the scene of Bella realising that Norman is trying to distract her and Rabbi Zweck while he uses his foot to slide her bag over to his bed so that he can steal the money from it. It’s actually money from the family shop, so he’s really stealing from them all. I found the description of her being aware and facilitating it, not that she ignores it, she actually distracts Rabbi Zweck so that Norman can get on with the job properly, and then tries to think of an excuse as to why the money has gone missing so that she can exculpate him. That conflict of, “I want him to get better, but I don’t want him to be in pain.”

James Walton:

One of the things the minister says to the rabbi when he shows up is, “You realise that the one thing that all these people in this family have got in common is that we’ve all got families.” The minister has got this big idea that as far as the minister’s concerned, everything bad that happens to him, his mother regards as something terrible happening to her. It’s basically just all about her. If you want to be brutal, that’s slightly true of the other members of Norman’s family as well. They do feel sorry for him, but they also feel awfully sorry for themselves. All that infant prodigy stuff, Norman in his life had been an event for them all. It was something that happened to them and had ultimately nothing to do with Norman at all. This is the narrator speaking, “And now Norman was in a nuthouse asserting his rights, the rights not to have been chosen.”

Jo Hamya:

I think this book is full of equal opportunity offenders, and it’s not as though they don’t bring some of their own misery on themselves. As far as the relationship between the siblings, Norman, Bella, and Esther, the novel builds to an explanation as to why Norman got addicted to amphetamines in the first place. Yes, it’s tangentially to do with the fact that he was the elected family prodigy, particularly by his mother, but also slightly to do with the fact that he can’t handle the fact that he’s gay and that actually-

James Walton:

I’d like to comment on this, but I’ll maybe even leave it. I’ve got one theory, which is that Bernice Rubens talks quite proudly about only ever doing one draught of a novel, and if she just has no idea what the plot is, she just writes it and all falls into place and that’s the draught and she sends it off. I do wonder if the bits of this book that are left a bit hanging-

Jo Hamya:

In what sense?

James Walton:

Well, for example, the fact that he’s so… Centrally he’s driven mad by the expectations of his family, particularly his mother, which his father inherits, but then there’s at least two other, and that all seems to hang together pretty well, but there’s at least two other things. There is that thing that I think you alluded to that he and Bella have incest. I don’t think there’s any much doubt about it. She recalled the story because she needed to. She needed to acknowledge her part in her brother’s disintegration, and then we flash back to his bar mitzvah, which ends with Norman went over to the window and as he did so, Bella slipped inside the sheets. Now, the room was quite dark and she felt her brother moving beside the bed and soon his forbidden body alongside her. I think that’s pretty unambiguous. But then there’s also a rather complicated story whereby the reason Esther, the one who married out, married out was because he tricked her that the Jewish guy she wanted to marry was gay because Norman fancied the guy, and that guy kills himself.

Jo Hamya:

Well, I think we should clarify. Norman has a best friend whose name is David.

James Walton:

That’s right.

Jo Hamya:

Yes. Norman has a best friend whose name is David. David starts to fancy Norman’s younger sister Esther. She quite likes him in return, and there’s talk of them maybe at some point getting married, so they get engaged. Meanwhile, Esther has had a wobble with this guy John, who works at the nearby library. Norman, who is in love with David, seizes us upon this and tells Esther, “I’ve been trying to leave our family home for years now, and mother keeps stopping me. You should do whatever you want with your life. Just leave. Write them a letter saying that you’ve married John and go,” which Esther does. She’s convinced by him. Not long after, Norman finds David dead, heartbroken. He’s committed suicide and that, ostensibly is why he starts taking amphetamines and also why Esther ends up marrying John out of guilt.

James Walton:

Yeah, I think she always quite liked John, but wanted to marry David because he was Jewish and that life would be easier and is persuaded by… This is all maybe a bit complicated to follow for listeners, but when Norman says, “No, you can’t do that because David is gay.”

Jo Hamya:

Yes.

James Walton:

He wanted him for himself. But do you think that… As I say, back to my first draught theory, do you think that hangs together and builds to that, or do you think it occurs to Bernice Rubens? She throws it in and it’s never quite… It doesn’t quite hang together, I don’t think.

Jo Hamya:

I don’t think there’s any doubt about the fact that it probably occurred to her while writing. There is actually somewhere in a interview, or I think I read this in her obituary in The Guardian where she says that she plans her characters but not the plot, otherwise, the novel would be boring to write. But I don’t have as much of an issue about it as you seem to on both counts, both the incest and the family psychodrama around who’s gay and who’s marrying who, interfaith relationships and whatnot. With the incest, I was thrown by it at first, but I think it still just slightly explains Bella’s stunted development a little more, the idea of why she would never marry and also her attachment to Norman, despite the amount of resentment that flows through this novel. She really, at certain points, sounds like she hates him both for causing their father physical and mental distress, and also for taking up so much of her time and life.

She has to look after him and then eventually she has to play host to their Aunt Sadie who comes along to look after Norman and Rabbi Zweck when he falls ill. Then insofar as the whole plot with David, John, Esther, and Norman, I believe in it as a counterpoint to this idea that everything that’s bad to you happens to you because of your parents, which I think my mother, who again does listen to this podcast, will be glad to know I don’t fully buy. Yes, you are influenced by your parents, but you make your own screw-ups as life goes along. I think Norman’s screw-up is egregious. It does make me believe more in the idea of him as a drug addict because being a drug addict just because your mom and dad thought you were a prodigy is… I don’t know. I don’t really buy that.

But becoming a prodigy in the eyes of your parents and then becoming an extremely repressed person as a result of that, and making numerous bad decisions as a result of that to the point where you are complicit in your best friend’s suicide and your sister’s estrangement, I believe in much more as a route to addiction. Why I found reading this book so fun, to be honest, is that it is a little bit like playing the therapist. You do have to think hard about why this family moves the way it does and what characters’ motives are. It’s a really humanising book to read, which is actually also what I think it was also David Holloway said to Booker McConnell on a letter justifying The Elected Member as their winner.

He says of The Elected Member “Here was a book that clamoured to be given the prize. It took hold of the judges’ imaginations quite rapidly and would not be denied. Although the author has given it a very exact and much detailed background of life in the Jewish community in the East End of London, the problem that it discusses so brilliantly is the universality of the Zweck family, which has pinned all its faith on the future of Norman,” and it goes on.

But I think this idea that the novel sticks itself in your mind and almost evolves from there grows. You can’t get rid of these characters’ voices. You start to reason on their behalf, is part of that ability for Rubens to drop in the right details at the right moment. You could, in a sense, at certain instances call them underdeveloped. I think that is a result of first draught syndrome, but I don’t think they’re entirely misguided attempts. They do their job quite well.

James Walton:

Okay. I think we… Yeah, they’re striking certainly, and they certainly don’t spoil the book. Almost partly because they’re so underdeveloped, really. I might be giving the impression that the book was ruined for me by these little bits and pieces that didn’t quite work. It’s partly because they’re little bits and pieces really, and the main thrust of the book is so fantastic. It’s so many great individual scenes and individual moments, like you’re talking about when he found the minister dead in his bath, a guy he does love, really, but his first thought was-

Jo Hamya:

Does he?

James Walton:

Well, his first thought is, “I won’t be able to get any drugs anymore,” which is an unbelievably brilliant addict’s response, isn’t it? Then there’s one fantastic scene where his father is obsessed all the way through about where he is getting these amphetamines from, and he finds a bit of paper in his dressing gallery.

Jo Hamya:

Oh my God, I love that scene.

James Walton:

I know, and he thinks this must be where he is going. He goes to this address and it’s clear to us quite early on that this is a prostitute, but all the way through he meets this slightly shabby woman in a dressing gown and then says, “Yes, I’m here to see the doctor.” It’s sort of funny. Then he finds himself slightly fancying the woman much to his own disgust, and that’s just a brilliant, that’s a-

Jo Hamya:

That’s, I think, what was most striking to me about that scene is she’s wearing this bathrobe that she’s, for his benefit, tied quite tightly, but her breast falls out of it and he can’t help himself. It’s not totally sexual, though it slightly is. He reaches a hand out and tucks her breast back into her bathrobe, and she just calls him a dirty old man. But it’s so touchingly done, that misunderstanding, and the end result of it, because of that comment is that he goes home and he takes a really long bath and scrubs himself really hard. It breaks my heart.

James Walton:

No, he is a really heartbreaking character, but I think I would still maintain that what’s heartbreaking is also the fact that it confirms that fear of the minister’s, and I think of the book, that parents still see it as something happening to them, and of course you would. Again, it’s completely blameless, but that’s part of the problem. I should, before we go any further, because I’ve meaning need to do this for most of the thing, most the conversation so far is to quote the epigraph, which is from R.D. Lang, which Bernice Rubens says sums up the book in a nutshell, which is, “If patients are disturbed, their families are often very disturbing.”

Jo Hamya:

So true.

James Walton:

Jo, we normally at this point ask who we recommend it to. I’m certainly not going to recommend it to my children, that’s for sure.

It is a good book, isn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

Oh, yeah. It’s amazing.

James Walton:

I think it’s probably fair to say that she’s slightly faded, has she, from the-

Jo Hamya:

Cultural imagination.

James Walton:

Yeah, whatever it is you fade from. Yeah, that’s exactly the cultural imagination. Yeah. Bernice Rubens is one of the big post-war writers I don’t think would necessarily spring to people’s minds anymore, but this is a terrific book.

Jo Hamya:

I think that’s a fair assessment. She impressed herself as a woman and as a writer on me in a similar way to Muriel Spark, who we covered earlier in a previous episode with Loitering of Intent. Those interviews of her saying that the mistake of most writers is to mythologize their work as though it wasn’t a job which could be done by anyone else, or this idea that she didn’t have enough to do, so she just started writing novels.

James Walton:

Right at the start.

Jo Hamya:

It’s fantastic energy. I love her. I think I could listen to her talk all day, and I’m probably going to go pick up more of her books after this.

James Walton:

I think this might be a book that you would press into the hands of most bookish friends of yours and say, “Look…” I think you mentioned me, Muriel Spark, I think me Muriel Sparks has begun to fade a bit, but she’s still got The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie on its side, which will be around forever. I think Bernice Rubens is further on in the fading process, and I would like to press this book into people’s hands and say, “Look, this woman should not be forgotten.”

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I agree with that. Also, I think it’s universal in the sense that if you’ve got a parent-

James Walton:

Yeah, that’s what she says.

Jo Hamya:

You’ll just sob reading this book anyway.

James Walton:

Well, that’s all. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s her idea is that the Jewish families are like other families, only more so. Anyway, that’s-

Jo Hamya:

Take that, Rebecca West and your comment about the zoo.

James Walton:

Indeed. Well, that’s it for this week. If you haven’t already followed the show, please do and remember to leave a rating.

Jo Hamya:

You can find us at thebookerprizes.com and on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack at the Booker Prizes.

James Walton:

Next week, we’re starting an occasional series where we look at books that are on school syllabuses, which we hope will save students a bit of work and possibly even teachers too. We’re going to be starting that with Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Until then, goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Bye.

James Walton:

The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Meolo, and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht production for the Booker Prizes.