Edward St Aubyn’s new novel is a jauntily malicious satire on literary prizes in general, the Man Booker Prize in particular and, it may be presumed, the 2011 Man Booker Prize in especial particular. That was the year of the great ‘readability’ brouhaha in which — as every reviewer will point out — among many unexpected omissions from the longlist was Edward St Aubyn. He afterwards told an interviewer that ‘the Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the World Heavyweight Championship, which I’m not going to win either.’
Anyway, here’s this: a short little book about the ‘Elysian Prize’, whose sponsors are a ‘highly innovative but controversial agricultural company’ whose GM experiments are variously claimed to have ‘caused cancer, disrupted the food chain, destroyed bee populations, or turned cattle into cannibals’. Elysian are best known to the public, though, for their association with this prize, whose remit is ‘the Imperial ash-heap of the Commonwealth’.
The panel of judges (under a board run by a man who is identified in the first words of the book as ‘a Cold War relic’) consists of a cashiered backbench MP, a good-looking actor who can’t be bothered to turn up to any of the meetings, a ghastly woman newspaper columnist who wants the winner to be ‘relevant’, a token academic whose tedious high-mindedness endears her to no one, and an old girlfriend of the Cold War relic called Penny Feathers, who used to work in the Foreign Office and now writes thrillers.
Penny — whose very thought processes are narrated in free indirect passages riddled with cliché — gets the most thorough kicking, presumably because she most thoroughly resembles Stella Rimington, who chaired the 2011 Man Booker panel. When judging the prize, instead of reading the books she listens to them in her car using computer text-to-voice software — which is exactly what, astonishingly, Rimington did in real life.
She likes to use software to write her own novels, too. When you type ‘refugee’ into Gold Ghost Plus, we learn, ‘several useful suggestions popped up: “clutching a pathetic bundle”, or “eyes big with hunger” .’ Penny has the key quote from a ‘smashing review’ of her second novel in the Daily Express — ‘Feathers knows her stuff’ — ‘blown up, framed and hanging in the guest loo of her cottage in Suffolk’. ‘Rimington knows her stuff’ is — would you believe it? — exactly what the Mail on Sunday said of Stella Rimington.
There are some nicely placed barbs throughout. A literary agent — aiming to cultivate an air of prescience — imagines himself telling Vanity Fair: ‘Sometimes you have to read the judges rather than the books.’ One judge makes a bold stand against dreary novels about marriages breaking up in Hampstead, without ever having actually encountered one. And there is a loquacious French theorist of cherishable awfulness.
Plus, the best of it, there are parodies exhibiting varying degrees of jadedness and restraint: a disciple of Irvine Welsh (‘Death Boy’s troosers were round his ankies’); a back-to-nature novel (‘As spring returned to the frozen land, the great thaw began. It bewildered Gary with its clamour and its swiftness’); a historical novel about Shakespeare (‘“Speaking of strumpets,” said Thomas, “is that not Mistress Lucretia that comes hard upon us?”’) and, naturally, Feathers/Rimington’s own fiction:
Jane closed the glove compartment. She was about to face Ibrahim al-Shukra, one of the world’s most dangerous and ruthless men, responsible for the horrific, cowardly, tragic and completely uncalled for deaths of countless innocent members of the public, and she was unarmed.
‘Uncalled for’ made me snort with laughter.
But as satire Lost For Words is only semi-effective because it cartoonishly sends up what’s already a cartoon version of the prize. The fish are vaporised; the barrel is shot to splinters. The judges barely read any of the books, the judging is presented as a mixture of spite, pomposity and political horse-trading and — thanks to a mix-up at the publisher — a cookbook ends up being submitted by accident in place of the new work from an esteemed literary novelist and instantly makes its way onto the shortlist, being mistaken for a bold metafictional experiment or some such.
St Aubyn — aiming, I guess, for the extravagant grotesquerie of early Waugh — often hits more of a Tom Sharpe note. At the far extreme of cartoonishness is ‘Sonny’, an Indian nobleman with a ludicrous sense of entitlement who — astonished and outraged not to be longlisted — immediately plots to have the chairman of the judges killed. His self-published 2,000-page novel is called The Mulberry Elephant — which might be an opaque reference (a dig? A tribute?) to my colleague Philip Hensher’s The Mulberry Empire.
The trouble is that with satire to the fore, narrative comes second. The main human story is that of the promiscuous but affectless novelist Katherine Burns, whose place on the shortlist has been taken by the cookbook, but that story feels peripheral and cursory. Sub-plots and background material — Penny’s difficult relationship with her daughter; the depression of Katherine’s abandoned ex-lover; the half-hearted murder plot — more or less fizzle out.
So this is great fun to read but not, in the end, all that much of a novel. In sending up a prize that’s of more interest to gossip columnists than serious readers, St Aubyn has written a novel that’s going to be of more interest to gossip columnists than serious readers. Man Booker’s best revenge would be for St Aubyn to win the 2014 prize, which he won’t. In the meantime I’m looking forward to his follow-up about the World Heavyweight Championship.
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