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Thursday 23 February 2012

All is not fair in an Orange world

What a pleasure to learn that the government plans to bring back competitive sport in state schools. Sport is the one area in life which should be competitive and at which all have an equal chance to excel at their own level and chosen sport. Not everyone can be an Olympian or play at Wimbledon but many people can be gold medallists in the sack race, as I was.  But enough of my youthful triumphs.

You need to look no further than all those cars bearing Engerland flags to know that the nation is behind competitive sport. But what about competitions in the arts?
 
I am a great believer in prizes for writers, painters, composers and instrumentalists because winning one is a massive encouragement, and often gives a much-needed financial boost at a critical stage in a career. People outside a narrow field sit up and take notice. But it is possible to award prizes without having a public competition and certainly artists should never feel they are in competition with one another, whereas sports players must. Prizes in any of the arts are really best awarded by judges who meet in private and decide to give  it to X or Y this year. No one knows who lost out because only the winner’s name is announced.  Quite a few literary prizes – the James Tait Black, the Hawthornden, the Somerset Maugham Award, for example – come into this category. Some others used to but have changed and become more openly competitive. Perhaps as a reaction to the PC ‘all have won, none have lost’ nonsense perpetrated by New Labour some book prizes began to acquire a higher profile when they started to announce shortlists and get up black-tie award ceremonies, with all the humiliating razzmatazz of a beauty contest.  Some of this does not much matter. Some people like going to black tie dinners. Some writers are competitive beings though I have never understood why.

Still, a prize is a prize and when it is a lucrative and highly publicised prize, it matters a lot in the book world. Not many affect sales directly and hugely but one which now does is the Orange Prize for women writers. I am ambivalent about prizes for women-only and I was ambivalent when I agreed to be a judge in the first year of the Orange, so perhaps I should have refused. I still worry about that, though not much. Anyway, sexist or not, there it is. Now let us take a look at the rules, or rather, at one in particular. 
 
‘The Orange Prize for Fiction is awarded to the woman who, in the opinion of the judges, has written the best, eligible full-length novel in English.’
 
Clear about that ? Read it again. Yes, you’ve got it. Not difficult to understand or to interpret I`d have thought and what are rules for if not to be abided by?

The Orange Prize judges for 2010 announced their longlist – a relatively new thing in prizes, duly causing the blood pressure of many writers and publishers to rise to no good purpose. Then came the shortlist and on this shortlist was, as indeed it should have been, the magnificent novel Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. It is probably the best novel written this century, it won the Man Booker Prize (and has just been awarded the first Walter Scott prize ) and has sold half a million copies in this country alone.
 
Now you could say that perhaps Miss Mantel’s publishers should not have entered her novel for the Orange prize so as to give someone else a chance. It is indeed tough on others when they come head to head with a book like that  but then, it is tough for someone seeded number 140 to come head to head with Roger Federer. It is a valid point of view even though I disagree with it. However, the publishers did enter Hilary Mantel’s book and once that had happened it should have been judged alongside and on equal terms with, every other entrant, right as far as the winning post. Obvious ? Of course. Just re-read that simple rule above if you are in any doubt.

Wolf Hall did not win the Orange Prize, another novel did, a novel nowhere near as good but then I was not a judge and I naturally presumed those who were had decided not to give Mantel the prize because they did not think hers was the best novel submitted.

I presumed wrong and one of the judges gave the game away in an interview later. This is what she said.
 
‘I'd be lying if I said that we were really able to put that [Mantel's Booker winning novel ] out of our minds... I suppose my feeling is that competitions like these really exist to bring the best books to the widest number of readers, and you might think that possibly all the people who've bought Wolf Hall have bought it already and maybe it's time to introduce another book to the widest collection of readers.'
 
 
But that is not why the Orange Prize exists. There is everything to be said for bringing ‘the best books to the widest number of readers’ but the rules say that the judges have to choose the best novel of the year in their opinion, when set against the other entrants. The rules do not stipulate that no author may win the prize if they have won another prize, or if their book has sold particularly well, or if the judges think it’s time to give someone else, even the writer of an vastly inferior novel, a turn. Yet that is what these judges did. It is clear that at least some of them – possibly a majority – believed Hilary Mantel’s novel to be the best. If so then they should have chosen it. All other factors are irrelevant because they are not in the rules. If those rules are changed, things will be different but it is not up to any particular set of judges to change them arbitrarily, to ‘give someone else a chance’ nor is it right to say that everyone who was going to buy Wolf Hall has bought it and they should now buy something else or that people should stop buying Wolf Hall because it has done quite well enough, thank you. This is a classic leftist argument.

Now turn this back to sport. ‘You, Federer, won Wimbledon in previous years and technically you’ve just won it again, but we’ve decided to give your losing opponent a turn and award him the trophy.’

‘You, England, won on penalties, but we felt so sorry for Germany after everyone has been nasty about them yet again that we are awarding them the match instead.’

‘You scored six goals, so you’re not allowed to score any more and if you do we will simply disallow them.’
In the words of Alice in Wonderland, ‘all have won and all must have prizes.’ But the Orange Prize is not the Caucus Race. The judges are required to decide what is the best novel in English written by a woman in that year. That is all. If it has been entered and declared eligible, it has a chance of winning, regardless of whether it has won every other prize in the world and sold a trillion copies.

If the 2010 judges believed Wolf Hall was the best novel but failed to award it the prize out of some sort of misplaced egalitarianism they are not fit to be judges of anything and they should be ashamed of themselves.
 

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