The Booker Prize longlist is perennially accused of pandering to the masses and to publishing publicity departments in particular. Heaven forbid the award might encourage reading or even book-buying. This year highbrow eyebrows shot up even further at the inclusion of titles so obscure they made current front-runner DJ Taylor, put forward for Derby Day, look like, well, Thackeray. Even the efforts by more famous nominees have been deemed under-par.
We wonder if this disregard for critical opinion could have something to do with the fact that Booker chairwoman Stella Rimington, former head of MI5 and now departure lounge novelist, is no stranger to bad reviews herself.
Can you guess which Booker nominees these critics are badmouthing?
(A) “Damaged … There is a certain amount of slovenly plotting … curiously uninterested in history … too often [the author] overburdens his conversations with stultifying commentary.” Jonathan Beckman (Literary Review)
(B) “The novel feels as if it has been written expressly for exam assessment.” Anthony Cummins (Telegraph)
(C) “Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves. You aren’t a passenger, you don’t care about that destination, and the whole train rumbles on without you.” Jane Smiley (Guardian)
(D) “Period fiction has its pitfalls; few are avoided here. The dialogue is bogus and the similes work overtime” Anthony Cummins (Telegraph)
(E) “… clogged with sentimentality and purple prose ...” Edmund Gordon (Literary Review)
(F) “… too clever by more than half … A novelist so insistent on staying one step ahead may find himself without readers to follow him.” Leo Robson (New Statesman)
Answers: (A) The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst; (B) The Testament Of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers; (C) The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt; (D) Far To Go by Alison Pick; (E) On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry; (F) The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes
And for a bonus point:
“… to be honest I find her blend of chick-lit and dated intelligence procedural increasingly wearisome … [Her] MI5 is incorrigibly white Anglo-Saxon middle class, her characters called Charles, Edward, Judith, Joanne — nothing as plebian as “Stella” — and surnames such as Wetherby, Armstrong and Carlyle. God help us, maybe it still is like that! She also, with less excuse, gets her geography wrong, suggesting that the Army HQ at Holywood is north of Belfast, rather than east (hardly preserving a strategic secret: it has its name on the gate).” Peter Millar (The Times)
Fleur Macdonald is the editor of the Omnivore.
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