Judges' Blog

There was a strong whiff of euphoria in the air after our shortlist meeting.  It was partly that we came up with what we believe, by and large, to be the right result.  It was also that it was easier than we had expected.  Booker lore is full of stories of panels who have been perfectly civilized until the shortlist stage, when there is blood on the walls.  We hadn't been in touch much over the summer.  (After the longlist meeting, we all disappeared off on our various summer breaks: some of us to glamorous far-flung corners of the world, in my case to a camping site in Dorset.)  So although we had a fair idea of each other's thinking, there was a small sense of trepidation - would this be the meeting when we decided we hated each other, after all?

What was immediately apparent, as we gathered in the wood panelled room, was that we had all got our cojones back, a bit.  The intense reading period in the run-up to the longlist meeting had been stressful all round; but this time we came to the table refreshed after the break and having enjoyed the re-readings of a strong and highly enjoyable longlist.  We were ready to get stuck into the entertaining business of arguing about why one good novel was better than another good novel.  

There was a large amount of consensus - I don't think it's giving too much away to say that five out of our six-strong list hopped onto it with relative ease.  Assigning the final place on the list was a trickier business.  There were four strong contenders for that last slot, each of them greatly beloved by their defenders.  Robust debate ensued.  Initially, sentences began with,  ‘Maybe it's just me but...' After a while, they started with,  ‘I'm sorry but I really think...'  It was mostly civilized, although there was the moment when one of my fellow judges told me he could envisage himself waking screaming from a nightmare in which he was married to me.  Said judge is a charming fellow and we agreed on most of the books - just not on one particular longlisted title, which just goes to show how wrong some people can be, eh James?  

So now the shortlist is out and a fine shortlist it is.  Ignore the moaners and vested-interest commentators who have read a fraction of what we have this year but still feel entitled to bellow at us about just how wrong we are.  They are all great books and I am I am really looking forward to re-reading them - what joy to be able to savour them.  Six books in as many weeks.  In comparison with what we were up against earlier in the year, it's a luxurious schedule. 

It's been a little too taxing, after the hard graft of getting to this year's longlist, to work out whether I'm poacher-turned-gamekeeper or vice versa. It's one or the other, in any case, and quite a strange situation to be in.

Let me explain: for many years, as a literary journalist working on the books desks of newspapers, I've had a series of big scrawls, in red, in my diary, to remind me of all the way-stations of all the major literary prizes. And when a longlist, shortlist or final winner loomed, it was time to go into action - to mug up on the writers who had inescapably passed us by and to make sure that there was enough space for us to deliver our verdict, complete with appropriately sonorous pronouncements, tips for the winner and, if appropriate, head-shaking bewilderment at the judges' idiocy.

If one thing has become painfully apparent to me in the time since we published our longlist, it's that it's not as easy as it looks and certainly not as easy as I thought it was when I sat at a desk having my two penn'orth. The comments, both positive and negative, that have appeared in newspapers and online in the last couple of days have hardly taken me by surprise - in fact, I think they've been largely well-informed, interesting and engaged, with only occasional moments of bilious ill temper - but there is one obvious sacrifice that being a judge entails: you don't get to answer back. In other words, as much as any of us might be itching to explain precisely why book x was omitted or book y included, what we admired about this novel and found disappointing in another, we must simply keep our mouths shut.

Discretion, though, is the better part of valour - although valour is a rather self-aggrandizing word to describe what has been an exhilarating ride. Exhausting - often, particularly those last couple of weeks, when we all felt that we'd hit a wall. Nerve-wracking - even more frequently (the sense of people's careers in one's hands doesn't make for decisions lightly taken). Painful - occasionally, though I specifically think of reading a really long book while propped at an awkward angle and having to send out for extra supplies of Deep Heat. But exhilarating - always.

During a snatched break from reading recently, I was cruising the channels in search of a bit of mindless entertainment. It's always when you're in search of Pretty Woman or some such frivolity that you come across something serious that you can't stop watching, and so it was that I found myself glued to a documentary about VS Naipaul. It has rarely been said that the great man suffers fools gladly and it was no surprise to hear him grumbling about the lack of attention he received when he was awarded a Nobel prize in 2001. It wasn't, the media moguls apparently told him, as if he had won the Booker.

That perception alone, along with the reflection that we were engaged in choosing the winner of a prize that had indeed been won by Naipaul, not to mention Iris Murdoch, J.M. Coetzee, William Golding and two of this year's longlisted authors (John Berger and Salman Rushdie), is enough to send one scurrying back to one's looming piles and ever-increasing notes. And to make sure that, whatever people's opinions of the final winner are, that last thing the prize ever becomes is a lottery.

Episode 2: the panic sets in

With just over 23 weeks to go until the Man Booker dinner, I've stopped playing the numbers game.  76 books have arrived so far - around 50 still to come.  11 weeks until the longlist meeting.  Oh dear.  Did I say I've stopped?  

Art gets reduced to numbers all the time.  Novelists sell their books to their publishers in return for an advance against royalties, and whatever your agent may tell you, the size of that advance is a direct reflection of how much your publisher wants your book - or doesn't want someone else to have it - and how many copies they think they will sell.  Novelists like to claim they are above the numbers game, but I doubt there is a single one who doesn't do what I do at the end of each working day - a word count.  Yesterday, I went to a café and wrote 2,016 words.  Afterwards, I skipped home clicking my heels in the air like Charlie Chaplin.  It was the 16 that did it.  1,984 would have felt like a far less satisfying day, even though the difference would have been thirty two words: four sentences, perhaps.  If you think this sounds strange or shallow or even slightly Aspberger's-ish, then try writing a novel.
As Booker judges, though, we are playing the numbers game with other peoples' art, not our own, and although we are doing our best to avoid it, with the pressure mounting it is hard not to feel that size matters.  At a judges' meeting this week, as books were mentioned round the table, it was often with a guilty ps,  ‘...and it's short' or ‘... but it is rather long.' 

Neither of these remarks were reflections on quality but the fact that they felt pertinent at all is a measure of how the pressure is mounting.  Given what we have to read, how can we ensure that each novel has a fair crack of the whip? asked one respondent to the last blog.  Good point.  I'm not sure that any literary prize can claim to be ‘fair' in the way that a relay race or football match would claim to be - there is too much gut instinct involved.  I think most judges would probably admit that you get a strong feeling from the very start of a book about whether or not it is in the running, although you press on valiantly with the ones you dislike until you are absolutely one hundred per cent sure.  The most problematic books are the ones that have great merit but don't necessarily feel so startlingly special that you would, to use a phrase from The Godfather, go to the mattresses for them.  They have to be read with great care and you have to ask yourself why, if this is a good book, it isn't quite catching fire for you in the way some others do.  With some books, though, there is an undefinable magic, a feeling from page one that they are doing something wonderful - it is a feeling that defies numerical definition.  The hairs on the back of your neck rise but you couldn't possibly say how many.

Deadlines are there to be broken.  All writers know that.  My favourite quote about deadlines is from the writer Douglas Adams, notorious for virtually faxing his books to his publisher page by page while the printing presses stood ready and waiting.  ‘I like deadlines,'  he reputedly said,  ‘I like listening to the whooshing sound they make as they fly past.' 

When you judge the Man Booker Prize, the deadline is inexorable.  On Tuesday 14th October, we have to make an informed choice, having read all the entries.  Like most people with freelance careers, I'm a big fan of advance planning.  There's nothing I enjoy more than flicking through my diary and making notes in it about how many weeks of the year are left - putting lines through the ones when my kids are on their school holidays, writing ‘NOVEL????' in the ones when I think I might be able to get some work done on my book.  After I've done that, I feel like I've almost done the work already and it's time for a coffee.  So this morning, I leafed through the fancy red moleskine that a friend gave me for Christmas, and worked out that, school holidays included, I have just over 30 weeks of judging the prize.  Oodles of time, I thought.  Then I thought about the (roughly) 120 books we will have to judge.  Even my rudimentary maths skills can work out that's four books a week.  Except we don't have 30 weeks to read them all because the longlist meeting is in July, which means... at this point, I stopped doing the maths. I had come over a little faint.

Up until now, it's been a breeze.  As our chair of judges said in his blog, there are certain books we already know will be entered - previous winners and anyone who has been shortlisted in the last ten years - so (with apologies for the mixed metaphor) a few big guns are already under our belts.  In addition, other entries have started to trickle in, mostly from the small presses who seem to be the only publishers with the good sense to enter books early.  This has created the illusion that trickling is what the entries will do, whearas once the official deadline for entries is passed, the trickle will turn into a flood. I look forward to the whooshing sound

Despite some nervousness as this date (April 1st) approaches, we seem to be a pretty cheerful bunch.  We had a very pleasant dinner before Christmas.  We joked along with each other nicely at the judges' photocall in January.  ‘You must be very pleased we all get on so well,'  I said to Michael.  ‘Ask me again in October,'  he replied.