Diary – 18 October 2008

Louise Doughty, one of the judges of this year’s Man Booker Prize and a fine novelist herself, said it best. Novelists, she remarked, are generally shy-ish, observing sorts of people; pushing them on stage, or under a spotlight, is a bit like asking a badger to tap-dance. My tap-dancing badger moment began ten weeks ago, when at a computer in an internet café in a remote Swiss valley I discovered that my novel The Northern Clemency had been longlisted for the Booker. The badger went into double time when it got on the shortlist, and now I’m writing on the afternoon of the dinner itself. (I feel quite safe sucking up to Louise, by the way, since by the time this comes out, it will be far too late for sycophancy to make a difference either way.) I might win; I probably won’t: but all in all, I feel like the wrong sort of creature to be under anyone’s gaze. If only there were a proxy I could nominate.

Months ago, we decided to go to Syria for ten days at the end of September, and in the end didn’t see why a little thing like the Booker shortlist and the schedules of publicity should get in the way of that. Unexpectedly, Damascus has the most divine hotels, converted from old Mamluke courtyard houses — the Bait Al Mamlouka, with only eight suites, must be one of the most beautiful hotels in the world, and without a taint of that curiously demoralising ‘luxury’ which is turning up in the most improbable parts of the world. Though not exactly undiscovered, Syria has so few tourists doing the sights that we kept bumping into the Russians we first met around St Simeon Stylites’s basilica at Damascus’s Umayyad mosque two days later, and the coach full of foul-tempered Italians at Basra turned up again, still scowling, at the waterwheels of Hama.