Ask a friend to name the authors on the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. Likely responses include incomprehension, embarrassed apology, and the sort of blagging honed by the tutorial system. It’s a sad state of affairs for one of the world’s most prestigious awards for fiction.
Is it simply the case that our passion for books is significantly weaker than our interest in music and film? Certainly there’s less glamour, and this year’s Booker judges seem to have deliberately avoided celebrity writers. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, both titans of modern British fiction, were nowhere to be found on the longlist. Then, the best-selling new novel from David Mitchell, one of the few household names remaining, didn’t make the shortlist. Sir Andrew Motion, chairman of the judges, said simply ‘we didn’t like it enough’. This will have hurt Mitchell’s pride, but not necessarily his sales. His earlier novel Cloud Atlas sold well off the back of a Booker nomination and – more importantly – the recommendation of the Richard and Judy Book Club. Novels need all the publicity they can get, but it seems a sorry indictment of British culture that daytime TV hosts have become literary kingmakers.
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The Booker prize has recently tried to slow the erosion of its stature. This year it has given out over 18,000 books to freshers at Imperial College, and the universities of Newcastle, Liverpool, St Andrews and East Anglia. The choice of universities is surely tactical. With a New College alumnus tipped to win with a dense, avant-garde exploration of human and technological communication, the prize must be careful not to appear merely the self-affirming instrument of literary high society. Despite the naivety of expecting freshers to settle down with a book within their first few weeks, it is without doubt a worthwhile initiative. Lorna Hutson, Head of the School of English at St Andrews, is effusive in her praise. Discussion groups were filled with students from all subjects; one could hardly hope for a better advertisement for the novel.
We all do enough reading for our subjects that the thought of another page of text is understandably unappealing, even if it is fiction. This saturation must be responsible in part for the low profile of the Booker prize at university. So too the bubble in which student life can exist. Perhaps there is also a countercultural element – just how fresh and vital is the talent put on display by the judges? Depending on one’s perspective, an unprecedented third victory for Peter Carey could be cause for dismay or for delight.
The Booker prize shouldn’t be criticised too quickly, however. Parrot and Olivier in America, Carey’s meditation on friendship and politics, has the makings of a modern classic. The Finkler Question finds one of Britain’s finest Jewish writers at full tilt. Jewish writers have been hugely influential in shaping modern American fiction, and a victory for Howard Jacobson could have real significance here.
When asked about the prize one Jesus English student said, almost seriously, ‘I only read dead authors’. It is true that literary prizes can fall prey to passing fashions. That was the appeal of the recent Lost Booker competition: forty years later, it was quite clear that JG Farrell’s Troubles had stood the test of time. Many writers – not least Philip Pullman – have bemoaned the recent pred ominance of present-tense narration in Booker shortlists. The author of the Northern Lights trilogy calls the technique ‘an abdication of narrative responsibility’. You’ll have to read the novels to decide whether you agree. That is the enduring beauty of literary prizes.
