Chair's Blog

The Man Booker judges have completed their work and dispersed. We have a winner. Aravind Adiga's "The White Tiger" has aroused widespread interest and is now selling well in the UK. It has been a best seller in India for a while. No choice is free from controversy. I see that one Indian publication says that I steered the judges to select the most right wing book to appear in years. It beats me how an angry book about poverty, that is devastating in its onslaught on the rich and the establishment, can be thought of as right wing.

All the judges felt lucky to have been required to read so many good books. There were many excellent ones that did not make it even to the long list. Every one on the short list was a potential winner, although in my mind there were three main contenders: "The White Tiger", Sebastian Barry's "The Secret Scripture" and Steve Toltz's "A Fraction of the Whole". In the judges' deliberations, Toltz did not have broad enough support to prevail but I would like to mention an incident during our discussion. James Heneage recalled the scene where Jasper's father dies on a boat carrying illegal immigrants towards Australia. Just refering to the passage - without even reading it out - James brought tears to his own eyes, and to mine, while Hardeep Singh Kohli began to blub. It must have been one of those things that divides guys from chicks because Alex Clark and Louise Doughty remained composed! I mention the incident because you may have heard that Toltz's book is zany, off-the-wall and painfully funny. You might not have picked up how well it is written.

The most beautiful book is Barry's. It is a glorious piece of writing with not a word misplaced. It was painful to all of us that it did not win. It was a close call, anyway. If I had to describe why it lost out to Adiga's, it was because there were more questions about Barry's plot. Had every part of it been convincingly told? Was its denouement plausible? Adiga won out too because his angle seemed so fresh, writing about India from the viewpoint of a village boy who makes his way to the city where he and his master are corrupted.

The judges made it through without "blood on the floor" (to the media's disappointment) but we were not unanimous, except in the sense that everyone accepted the choice once made. I am entirely happy with our decision, but Barry is entitled to be disappointed.

I want to pay tribute to all those who expose themselves to our scrutiny by writing fiction in the English language. Many of them are producing excellent books in delightful prose, demonstrating thorough research and tackling challenging subjects; or, like Philip Hensher, making the mundane compelling.

My thanks go to Ion Trewin, the prize's literary director, and to the judges, who took their job so seriously and expended substantial emotional capital. I wish we had recorded the discussion that led to our decision, which could perhaps then have been lodged in the archive of the prize. It did great credit to those four's understanding of the novel as a genre, and to their commitment to reason and fairness.

The Man Booker prize judges received the first books to read in January and we need to decide a longlist of 12 or 13 books around the end of July. On past form that will involve us in reading about 115 books. They began to arrive in earnest in March and April, literally by the sackful, the Post Office sending out a van each time as the loads were too heavy for its foot soldiers. 
 
To help the judges keep our notes in order, each novel is numbered in the order in which it was dispatched. We are now up to the low 80s. I'm not attempting to read them in numerical order. The unread ones are in a pile from which I pluck at random, except that I choose paperback proofs when I'm setting out on a plane journey. Even so my hand luggage has doubled in weight. 
 
Having to read so many books has completely changed my attitude to travel. I relish the prospect of a long train ride, and look forward to having to hang around at airports. Recently I was on a cruise ship from Rome to Alicante, hired to make a speech to its passengers. But that left me a good 36 hours for reading, hidden away in my cabin or on its stern-facing balcony. Right now I'm staring out of a high storey of a Barcelona hotel towards the Tibidabo, thinking that if I can get this blog polished off quickly I could fit in three hours of reading before lunch. 
 
When I've finished a book I review it for myself. I write a paragraph that will recall the plot and characters, and another that will remind me what I thought of it. If I'm travelling I type it up on my Blackberry and send it to myself. Once or twice I've left it until I have read another book or two and that's been a big mistake, because in the case of not very memorable books, I soon forget the plot. 
 
However, the only thing we judges need to decide right now is whether we think a book should be on the longlist. Is it in the top ten per cent? There is no doubt that some titles just stand out. You could discuss criteria and put ticks in boxes against 'plot', 'characterisation' etc but it would miss the point. Some books have a combination of qualities that make them special and that is evident. 
 
I don't want to give anything away, but this year's judges feel privileged because there are some excellent titles published this year. Our task is made delightful because we are reading so many good books. 
 
It is quite amusing to detect themes of the year. At first it seemed that almost every book was going to be written from the point of view of a child.

Another big topic this year is Islam, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan feature quite a bit too. Novels set in the UK often have middle-class characters who reveal their disappointment with Tony Blair. So far so predictable, but I would not have guessed how popular auto-erotic asphyxiation would be as a topic. Three novels that I've read so far have featured it. 
 
Books eligible for the Man Booker prize must be written in English, but not by an author from the USA. So Australians, Indians, Irish, Canadians and Caribbean authors, amongst others, are eligible. Past winners are automatically considered, as are those short-listed in the past tenyears.

On top of that list, each publisher can submit two books. 
 
In addition, publishers can suggest other titles - that were not submitted - which the judges can 'call in'. The judges are obliged to call in between 8 and 15 extra titles. That is not easy, as we have to rely on publisher's blurbs, supplemented by reviews and the 'on dit'. 
 
I'm sorry to say that overall we were not impressed by the publishers' attempts to persuade us to call in titles that they had not chosen to submit in the first place. For example, a publisher sends us pleas written in fairly extravagant language extolling the virtues of five or six novels, and they are all signed by the same senior editor. How were the judges to draw any guidance from 'recommendations' that are not well discriminated? Are the publishers just covering themselves with their authors so as to be able to say, without lying, that they pressed their merits with the Man Booker judges? 
 
Also, sometimes more can be less. If a publisher tells you that a book was the most anticipated of the late 20th/early 21st centuries, yet that publisher did not see fit to submit it, the hyperbole is unimpressive. Publishers also seem to spring too easily to grandiose comparisons. If the novel is written from a child's point of view, you guessed it, 'it has been compared to To Kill a Mocking Bird', and if it is full of sex, then naturally the author is an English-language version of Houellebecq. 
 
Those over-written pieces certainly provided entertainment for the judges but they did not further the causes of their authors very much. 
 
Publishers need to be braver. Not every author can be put forward for the Man Booker, even though large publishing houses may have many fine writers. A large publisher who recommended only one or two titles for call-in would be more likely to be taken seriously. 
 
Finally, a word about the social side of things. Hardeep Singh Koli brings many qualities to the panel of judges, and one is that he is a wizard cook.

He demonstrated his skills at a dinner for the judges at my house a few weeks back and now we are invited round to his place for a second feast. Doubtless, that will help with the team-building, bonding and all those good management objectives with which a chairman should be concerned. However, mainly it adds to our pleasure. 

Chairing the Man Booker judges this year is both an honour and a burden. It is a very prestigious prize that arouses great interest and even passion. The winner - and other books that appear on the long or short lists - can benefit hugely from additional sales. So it is marvellous to be associated with something that has such a good reputation, but the work is serious and has to be done thoroughly and conscientiously. 

We expect to have to read approximately 115 books, and to make matters worse most of them pour off the presses over quite a short period of months, so that at the height of the process we have to reckon on reading a book a day on average.  The trouble with a novel is that if you do not finish it you may miss the twist or the ending that makes it remarkable and memorable. On the other hand, if you cannot bear the first hundred pages you are unlikely to feel that it is the outstanding novel of the year. Every judge is intent on reading every book thoroughly. 

I would not say that I am a particularly good reader - neither especially well read, nor fast at reading. So I had to think carefully about taking this duty on. I could do so this year only by arranging well in advance to leave most of my days (but not evenings) free to read. My particular job is to ensure that the judges work to agreed guidelines and that we reach our decisions in a timely way. Our various meetings to decide the long list, short list and winner are all governed by strict deadlines. We need decisions, and the judges must feel that we reached them in a coherent manner.

I am delighted with the choice of my fellow judges. Together they bring expertise and breadth of outlook. We have met a couple of times already and the atmosphere is good, though it is perfectly clear that we have very different outlooks on life. Will we have such difference perceptions of books?

It is extraordinary how differently people react to novels. At the Costa Awards I was discussing a previous Booker winner Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin" with Mariella Frostrup. I loved it and she did not. How is that possible?

Even if the judges do agree broadly on which books are excellent, how do you decide which is the outstanding novel of the year? How would you compare a massive work like Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" with a short book like Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach"?  That may well be the sort of choice that we have to make.

We are fortunate this year that a trickle of books has already been steered our way.  They are titles that we know we will have to consider because they are written by authors who have been short-listed or who have won the prize before.  We are bound by our rules to include them in our reading.  So that has enabled us to make an early start. It has given me a taste for the business of reading books attentively, and making notes that will, I hope, make perfect sense to me when I read them back before our meeting later in the year to decide the long list. In due course publishers will nominate other works and the judges are obliged also to "call-in" extra books that have come to their attention. That is how that huge total number comes about.

I will blog from time to time. As the process develops I hope to have some thoughts worth sharing. What I cannot do, of course, is give a running commentary on what I think of the books that I am reading, much though I would like to.  If I feel enthusiastic about a title I love to share that with others, but this year I must observe a vow of silence. I will read your blogs with interest, hoping that the Man Booker Prize will once more demonstrate the public's huge appetite for good fiction.