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TL;DR
Something to Answer For (1969), the first Booker Prize winner, is a disorienting, dreamlike meditation on British imperial decline. Set during the Suez Crisis, it follows the unreliable Townrow through a surreal and morally ambiguous Egypt, where nothing is as it seems. The novel’s atmospheric writing and shifting reality reward attentive readers who appreciate unresolved questions and symbolic weight. Ideal for fans of The Outsider and post-colonial fiction.
First Thoughts
My original reading experience of Something to Answer For was one of intriguing dislocation: I felt swept into a dreamlike Suez, following Townrow’s confused footsteps as the events of colonial decline closed in around him. The book’s moodiness—its blend of surrealism, moral ambiguity, and imperial unease—echoed strongly with me. I read it deliberately as part of a Booker Prize journey, expecting perhaps a tidy narrative, but found instead something more elusive.
Townrow’s presence lingered with me: an anti-hero not out of choice but by circumstance, drifting, con-artist in one moment, reflective in the next. His head injury—the accident that fractures his grip on reality—felt as much symbolic as physical. I recognised echoes of The Outsider and even Burroughs’s playful surrealism, yet Newby’s style was less flamboyant and more quietly formidable. Read aloud, it would reveal itself as a deliberate, careful construction that’s atmospheric, not showy.
While parts of the structure felt opaque—I admit I didn’t fully understand everything—I never felt robbed of meaning. There were comic flashes, desert-dream ambiance, and a sense that the murder-mystery blurb was a ruse: this is something deeper. It felt “worth it”. For a reader of Booker winners, this first selection did not disappoint—even if I’d need a slow re-read to chart every nuance.
About the Book
Something to Answer For was published by Faber & Faber in 1968 and won the inaugural Booker Prize the following year. The novel is set in Egypt in 1956, as Britain reels from the Suez Crisis. Jack Townrow, a somewhat shady British fund manager, travels to Port Said at the request of a widow whose husband has died under mysterious circumstances. But what begins as a murder mystery quickly dissolves into something more fragmented and strange.
Newby, who had lived and worked in Egypt, uses his intimate knowledge of the setting to evoke a vivid sense of post-colonial decay. The narrative slips into unreliable territory soon after Townrow is assaulted and begins to suffer from head trauma. Readers are no longer sure what is real, what is dream, and what is memory—and that ambiguity lies at the heart of the novel’s moral inquiry.
The book isn’t a procedural or detective story. Instead, it explores complicity, guilt, and British decline through Townrow’s increasingly fractured lens. Its critical reception has always been mixed—some praising its ambition, others struggling with its opacity—but its place in literary history is secured by its status as the first Booker winner.
What Others Think
Karen at BookerTalk reflects on Something to Answer For’s strangeness, describing it as “not what I expected” and admitting to being left unsure about how much of the narrative was real. She describes the novel as “a curious experience” and “often confusing”, ultimately concluding that it’s a book best read more than once—if only to untangle its shifting perspectives.
Goodreads reviewers echo the confusion. While many admire the prose and the bold structure, others find the story frustratingly vague. A number of readers comment on the novel’s surreal quality, calling it “dreamlike,” “odd,” or “disjointed.” Some are won over by the post-colonial themes and unreliable narration, while others express irritation at the lack of clarity or resolution.
The consensus seems to be that Something to Answer For is a novel that divides opinion: ambitious, bold, and atmospheric, but not an easy or traditionally satisfying read.
Themes, Style & Impact
Newby’s novel is ultimately about collapse—both personal and national. Townrow is an unreliable narrator not just because of his head injury but because he stands in for Britain itself: confused, morally compromised, and unsure of its place in a rapidly changing world. His drifting presence and sense of passive inevitability mirror Britain’s disorientation during the Suez Crisis and its broader post-war decline.
Stylistically, the prose in Something to Answer For is restrained but evocative. He doesn’t indulge in flamboyant modernist flourishes—this isn’t Burroughs or Self—but instead crafts a narrative where the surreal emerges organically from confusion and contradiction. This makes the novel’s atmosphere more subtle, but no less compelling.
Themes of colonialism and complicity loom large. Townrow’s conversations, particularly one early on about Britain’s historical crimes, hint at a deeper reckoning. He is not a man on a noble mission; he is evasive, morally questionable, and at times dishonest. The landscape itself mirrors this disquiet: Port Said and Cairo are dusty, half-dreamt backdrops full of heat, suspicion, and entropy.
Something to Answer For also toys with genre expectations. What begins with the trappings of a political mystery dissolves into something closer to allegory or psychological study. Townrow isn’t changed by events so much as he is consumed by them—swallowed by a place and a history he never fully understands.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t a mystery in the traditional sense—it’s a moral odyssey. Townrow is not heroic; he’s scruffy, confused, and sometimes dislikable. But his disorientation feels essential to the work’s central question: What does responsibility mean when your world shatters?
When Newby wrote this novel, Britain was in the midst of a deep identity crisis. The loss of Empire, economic decline, and the humiliations of Suez left lasting scars, and Something to Answer For explores that rupture through personal disarray. The result is a novel that feels both specific to its historical moment and strangely timeless.
It’s not always an easy read, but Something to Answer For is an interesting one—layered, atmospheric, and full of slow-burn revelations. For readers who enjoy ambiguity, literary experiments, and morally slippery protagonists, this is a novel worth picking up. As the first stop on a Booker reading journey, it sets a tone of ambition and complexity that few prize-winners since have quite matched.
Further Reading
- The Quiet American by Graham Greene — another post-colonial narrative set abroad with political and moral entanglements
- The Outsider by Albert Camus — philosophical novel featuring a similarly detached and morally ambiguous protagonist
- The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson — multibook fantasy series centred on an anti-hero which took me through my teens
- The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens – the Booker Prize Winner of the following year, another tale of someone falling apart.