Events
The 2006 longlist
MUKUND PADMANABHAN
|
Never mind the controversies and the so-called consumerist hype. The Man Booker Prize has always drawn the attention of the public to good English fiction.
|
"A PILE of crooked nonsense," A.L. Kennedy seethed in her famous censure of the Man Booker Prize. The novelist, herself a member of the 1996 panel that judged the Prize, complained that while she read 300 novels, "no other bastard [on the panel] did." The winner, she complained, was invariably determined by "who knows who, who's sleeping with who, who's selling drugs to who, who's married to who, [and] whose turn it is."
Controversies over the muddled and capricious nature of the Booker judging process habitually hark back to 1983. Fay Weldon was in the chair and the panel of judges was tied 2-2 between Salman Rushdie's Shame and J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K. When Weldon was asked to make the casting vote, she allegedly dithered for a while before choosing Rushdie. Martyn Goff, the administrator of the Prize, claims he was actually in the process of phoning through the verdict when Weldon urged him to "hold it." Following a brief consultation with the panel, which remained tied 2-2, she declared: "Then I vote for Coetzee."
During a meeting with Weldon, just days before the 2000 Booker Prize was announced, I haltingly raised the 1983 matter. She simply laughed: "I don't think he [Rushdie] has ever forgiven me."
Literary brawls
There has hardly been a year when the Man Booker Prize is free of controversy. The brawls are not merely about who deserved to win. They could be over why someone lost, how someone was overlooked, whether the judges were eccentric and whimsical.
Some react to the lively literary spats, the stream of high-quality invective, the irresistibly foul-mouthed rants as if they reflect everything that is wrong with the Prize. I have heard it said that the din and the clamour are just what you would expect from a Prize of this nature. The Man Booker, on this account, has vulgarised the process of evaluating literature, reducing it to a kind of horse race. A crass annual event where art is confused with commerce, where luck is mistaken for literary merit and where sobriety and thoughtfulness are enveloped in a blizzard of consumerist hype. In short: an overly hyped up event that has inveigled itself into becoming the most prestigious literary prize in the Commonwealth.
This view is hardly new. When John Berger won in 1972 (for his novel G), he used his acceptance speech to run down literary prizes. "The competitiveness of prizes, I find distasteful. And in the case of the prize the publication of the shortlist, the deliberately publicised suspense, the speculation of writers concerned as if they were horses, the whole emphasis on winners or losers is false and out of place in the context of literature." At the same time, Berger (grudgingly) conceded that prizes do act as a stimulus to publishers, booksellers and readers. He didn't think it benefitted authors, but Berger won when the Prize, instituted in 1969, was only three years old and much less influential. Nowadays, being on the longlist (19 novels this year) is enough to get you widely noticed. Being on the shortlist of six is a guarantee of a marked increase in sales. As for winning, it could alter a writer's life. If the Booker has done good things for publishers, booksellers, readers and authors — who arguably make up the stakeholders in the world of literary fiction — then it is hard to see what the complaint is all about.
Shaping reading habits
The Booker has shaped reading habits in most parts of the English-speaking world. Ever since Salman Rushdie won the 1981 Prize for Midnight's Children, the Booker has acted like a handy guide of mine. Had they not won, I may not have read A.S. Byatt's polished and erudite detective yarn, Possession, Peter Carey's rousing tale of inequity and defiance, The True History of the Kelly Gang or Yann Martel's fabulist yarn that is underpinned by a surprisingly gritty unforgiving realism, Life of Pi. Had they not been shortlisted, I may not have discovered a whole host of novels, including Matthew Kneale's wonderfully witty, warm and entertaining The English Passengers and David Mitchell's audacious and architecturally complex Cloud Atlas.
The good thing about the Booker, and its attendant controversies, is that it raises the general awareness about good English fiction. Not making the shortlist doesn't necessarily mean not being noticed. For example, in 2000, Zadie Smith's precociously intelligent White Teeth received the media attention it did, partly because it was outrageously omitted from the shortlist. Every year, the animated debates about the judging process — the biases and the prejudices — have the unintended result of drawing public attention to books.
What about the judging itself? Given that the Prize aims to award the best novel of the year, rather than a body of work, it is inevitable that it will be heavily influenced by personal taste. Some of the decisions — particularly some recent ones — have been greeted with derision and incredulity, and deservedly so. For instance, it is baffling how D.B.C. Pierre's Vernon God Little could have emerged at the top of the 2003 pack. Or for that matter how the judges could have passed up Cloud Atlas in favour of Alan Holinghurst's gay novel, The Line of Beauty the following year. Could it have something to do with something as mundane as the fact that Chris Smith, the openly gay member in Tony Blair's cabinet, headed the panel?
This year too, the judging process has raised many questions. Bumped off the longlist were a clutch of established writers including David Mitchell, Peter Carey and Barry Unsworth. Mitchell, whose Cloud Atlas and Number 9 Dream were earlier shortlisted for the Prize, was runaway favourite for Black Swan Green. Set in an English village, this story about a year in the life of a young 13-year-old boy represents a radical shift in fictional register for a novelist whose three earlier works were stamped by the magical flight of his imagination.
Five of the six shortlisted novelists are first-timers; only Sarah Waters (The Night Watch) has been there before. The fate of Kiran Desai's elegant and meditiative The Inheritance of Loss will be watched keenly in India. Chairperson Hermione Lee's statement that the judges were looking, among other things, for "storytelling and historical truthfulness" may have imposed its own dynamic on the selection process, but the list is something of a surprise. Whether it signals "a turning of the literary tide" as an article in The Independent suggested, or represents yet another fascinatingly quirky judging process is not clear.
In a way, perhaps it doesn't matter. The winner, which will be announced on October 10, is likely to trigger another round of heated discussion about a Prize that has always been attended by celebration and controversy. And has been the better because of it.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
