At last, Beryl Bainbridge has won the Booker Prize. What a pity it is won posthumously, because she deserved recognition in her lifetime. The Booker Prize, either out of sentimentality, self-promotion or a combination of the two, urged readers to pick the Best of Beryl to mark an influential author who had been overlooked by 5 different Booker judging panels, which led her to be known as the ‘eternal bridesmaid’ of the prize. Master Georgie, her novel about the Crimean War, won the public vote.
It’s all terribly nice. The Booker’s literary director, Ion Trewin, gushed:
“I have a feeling that, wherever she is now, she’ll be hugging herself and saying ‘gosh, how lovely’. Over the years when she didn’t win, she thought oh well, and had another puff on a cigarette and a drink. But to win – well, I can’t believe it would give her anything other than immense pleasure. She may have been known as the eternal Booker bridesmaid, but we are delighted to be able finally to crown Master Georgie a Booker bride.”
Not everyone is quite as enthused as Trewin: Robert McCrum and AN Wilson have had a tremendous set-to in the pages of the Guardian, with McCrum raving about these being the ‘antics of people for whom books are bingo’. McCrum has a point: the synthetic sweetness of it all does leave one feeling a little a ‘queasy’. However, the prize doesn’t matter. As AN Wilson says, ‘Beryl will survive and her reputation will grow, Booker or no Booker. I confidently predict she will be seen as one of the towering figures of our time.’
In other news, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad has won the Pullitzer Prize. What price Egan’s experimental novel will win the Orange Prize?
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