Judges' Blog

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.