‘Respect for the book grew on closer acquaintance’
Howard Davies’ speech at the Man Booker Prize 2007
This proved to be a difficult year to Chair the judges for the Man Booker Prize. That is not because the other judges were difficult. They were not. Nor, however, were they easy. This year the jury had very diverse views, which they advanced tenaciously – though not quite to the point of violence. It was simply that the choices we faced were not at all straightforward.
The conclusions we reached, whether on the longlist, the shortlist or the winner, were of course not necessarily those which we would have individually have made. That is almost inevitable in a collective judging process. We all had to compromise, sometimes painfully. But there is a chance that we will speak to one another again. Eventually.
Before I come to the usual teasing review of the shortlist, when I will try my best to mislead you as to the identity of the winner, it is conventional to offer a few general reflections on the state of the novel, in the manner of a ‘best man’ or ‘father of the bride’ speech. Chairs normally maintain that the novel in English is resurgent or moribund, or as dead as a Norwegian Blue.
I confess I am reluctant to offer such firm general observations. I doubt that I am well qualified to do so. But it must be possible to draw some conclusions from the process of being force fed a hundred and ten novels over four and a half months. That part of our brains most receptive to emotional and imaginative stimuli must surely now be like the liver of a Perigord goose. (A rather uncomfortable image on which I do not recommend you to reflect for long).
In most of the day jobs I have done through my somewhat picaresque career, I have been encouraged to begin by analyzing the data. So I can tell you, in case you are interested, that we read 35,029 riveting pages, so the average length of this year’s 110 submissions was 318 pages. The longest came in at 838 pages: the shortest a mere 117. Both the longest and second shortest are on the shortlist. I have reflected on that fact and concluded that it is of no significance whatsoever.
The range price was from £6.99 to £18.99 – the latter generous price was for a Scottish author. 39 of the submissions were from women authors and 32 from authors from outside the United Kingdom. 14 of the submitted novels deal with the Second World War. Basil Fawlty’s famous injunction is ignored by novelists today.
I can also tell you that the characters do a lot of drugs, and also drink quite heavily, but perhaps more the former than the latter. They are worried about infertility. They have a reasonable amount of conventional sex, except for Adolf Hitler, though usually not very explicitly described. The judges were grateful for that. And they are distressingly prone to violent deaths, and particularly suicides. An article in the British Medical Journal a year or so ago analysed in some detail the mortality experience of characters in British television soap operas over several decades. The authors concluded that a character in a television soap was a more dangerous occupation than a steeple jack or a diver on a oil rig-traditionally regarded as the most hazardous of professions. Featuring in a Man Booker Prize submission is a similarly dangerous activity. “And they all lived happily ever after” is not a common ending in the contemporary English novel.
Nor do the characters seem to work much. Two of the shortlisted novels, both by authors from the Indian sub continent, do treat business themes in a fascinating way. I will come on to them in a moment. But the British novel is not much engaged with the business world. That is unfortunate. As Robert Brawer says in his book ‘The Fictions of Business’… “intelligent managers can profit at least as much from reading distinguished novelists who have taken business people as a literary subject, as they can from reading any number of management hand books offering panaceas for beleaguered companies.”
I was incautious enough to make a similar point in an article in the Financial Times a couple of months ago. I asked, rhetorically, where the great Hedge Fund novel was, and why we did not find British writers engaging with the City, as Tom Wolfe, for example, did battle with Wall Street in ’The Bonfire of the Vanities’.
Since then, I have been inundated with novels about the seamy side of life in the financial markets. Mostly, it should be said, privately printed and accompanied by letters explaining that publishers seemed to show no interest. They have titles like ’My Word is my Bonus’ or ’Naked Option’. For any of the literary folk here who may feel puzzled at this point, I am sure there will be someone on your table from the Man Group ready to explain what a naked option is, or even the more mysteriously named naked shorts.
In another respect I was not disappointed. There was one novel, by Hari Kunzru, which described life among the political activists on the far left at the LSE in the 1970’s. I am hoping that few of my current students find time to read it. It might give them ideas.
But I think I speak for the rest of the judges when I say that we were generally encouraged by our marathon reading experience. There were few very poor submissions which could easily be dismissed. We were entertained, amused, and moved. We also learnt a lot. About archaeological techniques in John Preston’s quiet but engaging novel “The Dig”, about minimalist music from Adam Thorpe’s “Between Each Breath”, which caused me to buy some strangely textured and fiercely repetitive CD’s which our dog does not like at all. About a fascinating and little known episode of nautical derring-do in Singapore in 1942 from Thomas Keneally’s ’The Widow and her Hero’. And about life among the sheep in the Welsh valleys from Peter Ho Davies ’The Welsh Girl’ and Owen Sheers ’Resistance’, both very atmospheric pieces of writing.
We read many excellent novels which we were sorry not to be able to find room for in our shortlist or in the new streamlined longlist, of thirteen, wittily dubbed the Booker’s dozen.
None of the thirteen longlisted titles would have been out of place on the short list. We were variously sorry not to be able to find room for Edward Docx’s ’Self Help’ and Michael Redhill’s ’Consolation’, a beautifully constructed tale about historical Toronto, which does not sound as enticing as it is. And Nikita Lalwani’s ’Gifted’ is an astonishingly assured debut. We also, to pursue my educational theme, learnt a lot about Wagner from A.N.Wilson’s beautifully written and closely argued ’Winnie and Wolf’.
We were generally pleased by the reactions to both the long and shortlists, which is probably where the judging process adds most value. A number of commentators were gracious enough to say that we had drawn their attention to what proved to be worthwhile books which they might otherwise have passed by. Such critical comment as there was tended to focus on the absence of some better known names whom the cognoscenti had expected to see. We reflected on that line of argument. We did not deliberately set out to exclude established writers. Indeed we perhaps slightly surprised ourselves by our choices. But we simply did not think that those books we excluded were as well crafted, as engaging, or as inspiring as the novels we chose. Indeed at times we were surprised by the reverential tone adopted by reviewers in relation to books which, to us, did not come off at all, and which we could not conceivably recommend to a broader readership.
Perhaps it was ever thus. In ‘Men Without Art’, published in 1936, Wyndham Lewis inveighs against indulgent critics. ‘A hundred books of fiction every month are referred to by eminent critics in language of such superlative praise that, were it the work of Dante that was in question, it would be adequate, though a little fulsome’.
While what we observed is perhaps not new, it is nonetheless unfortunate. Many reviews this year, which I looked at after my reading, were not a good guide to the quality of the books on offer. And there were sins of omission as well as commission. One of the short listed authors was completed ignored on publication by the Daily and Sunday Press. I think a little more distance, and critical scepticism, is required by our reviewers, together with greater readiness to notice new names.
If I ever had a plan to write a novel myself, clearly I must now abandon it. And I can even now hear the mouse clicks which will delete my details from the outlook contacts of literary editors all over London. So be it.
This experience encourages me to think that there is much value in prizes like the Man Booker. You may think I should never have doubted such a thing, having agreed to act as Chairman, but when you accept these things you don’t quite know what they entail. The judges are clearly not performing the essential functions of agents and publishers in unearthing brand new talent. But they can perhaps play a modest part in shuffling the pack, and bringing hitherto unconsidered authors to a broader audience. I emphasize that this was not our explicit attention, indeed I suspect that if one tried to do that one would fail, but I believe it is the outcome this year.
A far more interesting and thoughtful assessment of the impact of prizes, in both the literary and the film world, can be found in ’The Economy of Prestige’ by James English, a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He notes the nature of the dialogue which prizes establish between critical readers and the literature industry, if you like. Prizes establish a kind of hierarchy of esteem, which may sit alongside the hierarchy of the sales figures. He notes that, in the United States, these two hierarchies have diverged over the last half century. From the 1920’s to the 1960’s, roughly half of all Pulitzer winners were drawn from the top ten of the New York Times best seller list, only one of the last 30 winners has seen a bestseller in that scene? Should we be worried about that trend here, which is similarly observable? I think perhaps not. The best seller lists are hard to explain and include some formula and genre novels which do not sit comfortably in a literary frame of reference.
One other point English makes which might give us pause – even though it is more relevant in the films than in the literary world – is to draw attention to the prize inflation which has occurred in recent years. I am not talking about inflation of the prize money itself, which I am sure is welcome to authors, but inflation in the number of prizes. There are approximately four times as many prizes in the movie industry in the United States as there are feature length film produced in any year. In the 65 years since it was produced, Casablanca has won just 3 prizes, while Lord of the Rings part 3 has already won 79. in the book business things are not quite so bad, but there are now 100 literary events in the US for every 1000 titles published. Just as rampant inflation is damaging to the economy as a whole, as it confuses price signals and makes decision making harder, so incontinent prize inflation may diminish the powerful signaling value which prominent and well maintained prizes have. In effect, therefore, English produces an intellectual justification for the investment in promoting and publicising the prize which the Booker trustees, supported so generously by the Man Group, put in. It allows me, with a clear conscience, to thank the Man Group on your behalf for their sponsorship.
Which brings me, at last you may think, to this year’s shortlist.
First, in strictly alphabetical order, comes Nicola Barker’s ‘Darkmans’, a gothic breeze block. As an olive branch to the critics union, let me quote from Keith Miller’s review in the TLS. After a challenging, albeit meaningful reference to the book’s ‘metatextual armature’ he characterizes Barker’s approach to her characters in this way. ’she is like the head teacher at a failing comprehensive school: watchful, charmed occasionally in spite of herself, hoping for the best but expecting the worst’. A good and useful image. Her future readers, by contrast, may expect something very good from Darkmans, and get it.
In ’The Gathering’, Anne Enright has delivered an emotionally charged novel of family life, set largely in Dublin. Our respect for the book grew on closer acquaintance, as we appreciated its careful structure and powerful character development.
In ’The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, Mohsin Hamid’s second novel, the authorial voice is a young Pakistani wrestling with his personal reaction both to the World Trade Centre attacks and to his experience working at the cutting edge of American capitalism. In a spirit of full disclosure, which the FSA would advise, I should mention that Hamid worked at McKinsey, as briefly did I. This is a challenging and at times uncomfortable novel of our time.
’Mister Pip’ is Lloyd Jones’s 7th book but the first to be published in Britain. Set in the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville in 1991 it explores the consolation of literature to people in desperate circumstances. The dialogue between tropical Bougainville and Dickensian London is just one of the fascinating dimensions of the book.
Ian McEwan’s ’On Chesil Beach’ is an exactingly written exploration, both formally neat and terrifyingly imagined, of the mirrorings, transfigurations and violations of our modern sexual roles and identities. Some of you may have suspected that that last sentence is too well structured and too literary to have tripped from my functional word processor. If so, you were right. It was crafted by Malcolm Bradbury, in his tribute as Chair of the Booker judges in 1981, to ’The Comfort of Strangers’, shortlisted in that year. It is better than anything I could produce, and relevant enough.
Lastly, we chose Indra Sinha’s ’Animal’s People’, a book which was reviewed only in the New Statesman when published. The events it describes clearly derive from the Bhopal chemical plant explosion some years ago, a disaster whose terrible consequences continue to blight many lives. But it is a powerful imaginative creation in its own right.
In a few moments I will disclose the winner we have chosen from this excellent list. Even now, I am sure the Man Group representatives, with the trader’s instincts in their blood, are adjusting the bets they have made on the outcome, seeking to cover their exposed positions and find hedges for their naked shorts. To the rest of you, I would just say this. If there are, by chance, any of you who happen not to have read the whole shortlist yet, I would strongly encourage you to do so, and not only to scoop up the winner. If you do so, that would be some modest consolation to the five disappointed authors. To them I can only say sorry, and on behalf of my colleagues thank them for the hours of pleasure they gave us when we read, reread and rereread their wonderful novels.
Howard Davies, Chair of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction judges 2007, speaking at Guildhall London shortly before the winner announcement
To read Howard Davies final blog click here
