This Year's Booker Rumpus: Just As Ridiculous As Every Other Year's Booker Rumpus

Monday, 17th October 2011

The annual tiff about the Man Booker Prize is a reassuringly perennial feature of the British autumn. It is also almost always ridiculous. This year, apparently, the prize has been "dumbed down" as the judges (including the Spectator's Susan Hill) neglected a number of fashionable names in favour of a shortlist that, Julian Barnes excepted, features relatively little-known authors. Worst of all, it seems, the judges are said to have treated "readability" as an important factor when considering their favourites. Crivvens!

This, it is further alleged, is part of longer-term trend favouring "accessible" novels above those of so-called genuine literary merit. Some familiar - even trendy - authors now say they want to establish a rival to the Booker that will reward "real" (that is to say, little read) novels of the kind readers are supposed to pretend to enjoy (for this marks them as sophisticated types, you see) but rarely actually finish. All of which is all very well and good.

Except that if the Man Booker really has taken to favouring "readable" novels in recent years then one wonders how it was that in the last six years John Banville and Anne Enright each took home the prize despite writing novels that only a few brave souls could consider entertaining or, in many cases, even readable.

Nor does the prize's history suggest unreadable novels have usually fared well. That is, dangerously-readable novels have often prevailed. Consider Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (1995) or Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) or Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989). Go further back and you find such readable books as Paul Scott's Staying On (1977) or JG Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur. Whether you actually care for their work or not, I doubt many fair-minded readers would consider any of these books anything other than readable. Something similar might be said of JM Coetzee, Peter Carey, Yann Martel, Graham Swift, Ian McEwan, Hillary Mantel, Margaret Atwood and Anita Brookner who have ten wins between them.

All that the Man Booker does is identify a favourite novel (from those entered) as chosen by one small group of readers in one given year. Since the judges change every year it is absurd to expect consistency across the years. Absurd and not something the Booker is designed to do. It is a snapshot and little more than that and only a fool expects it to be anything else. some years the judges like a "popular" novel; other years they depress booksellers by choosing Jim Kelman.

For what it's worth, I imagine that if the judges had selected a shortlist comprising former winners (Hollinghurst, Swift et al) and those frequently short-listed then they would have been criticised for being too predictable and failing to "uncover" or promote new or fresher voices. That's the nature of the Man Booker however: a ridiculous rumpus every year. So, for obvious reasons, I recommend this uncommonly sane piece published by the Daily Telegraph.

Filed under: Books (177 more articles) , Britain (738 more articles)

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Beefeater

October 17th, 2011 8:09pm Report this comment

Puh-lease. This "readability" thing is yet another example of the elite using other people's money so that they can pretend not to be snobs.
The MB should be kept exclusively for those of us with literary pretentions. Dinner-party goers; journalists; friends of the writers. My reading circle needs to know it is keeping up standards.
Pulp fiction has its own prizes - romance, sci-fi, fantasy, detective, thriller - promoting even fatter royalty checks. It's all about money. Pulp is for people who want to consume stories. Mac-literature, full of fat. Cheap, fast reads for the lower class and for the upper class only when it wants something on the plane or on the loo.
The upper market must have its remainders of the day. But the judges of the MB can stifle their elitist guilt by the comforting thought that the hard-to-chew prize-winner will sell film rights. The masses can get a taste of quality without having to read the novel.

Jenny Haddon

October 18th, 2011 12:39pm Report this comment

What would be really nice would be if, one year, the organisers included a graceful tribute to the authors whose backlist made the prize feasible in 1969, after Jock Campbell, the Chairman, had Booker McConnell buy the copyrights of works by Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming and Georgette Heyer.

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