Chairing the Man Booker Prize
John Carey on chairing the Man Booker Prize twice
By John Carey
This article first appeared in the specially commissioned publication for the Man Booker Prize’s 35th anniversary in 2003. As part of the 40th anniversary www.themanbookerprize.com will be publishing selected archived writings which demonstrate the prize’s rich history.
Chairing the Booker Prize judges a second time after a 20-year gap brings home how literature is constantly reshaping itself. Because the changes are gradual they are easy to miss year by year. But when you look back they are suddenly big and glaring, like the effects of geological upheavals on the landscape. Why they happen, what it is that changes literature, what determines fictional and artistic fashion, are questions that, if we could answer them, would bring us closer to the secret life of our culture.
It is not enough to say that old writers die and new ones are born, though that is true of course. Twenty years ago the dominant novelists of the mid-20th century, William Golding, Iris Murdoch and Kingsley Amis were still going strong. The Booker was not quick to honour them, but got round to it in the end. Murdoch won with The Sea, the Sea in 1978, Golding with Rites of Passage in 1980, Amis with The Old Devils in 1986. By the same token writers who now seem like permanent features of the literary terrain were hardly heard of in 1980. Julian Barnes published his first novel in that year, Peter Carey in 1981, Peter Ackroyd in 1982. Salman Rushdie was virtually unknown until 1981 when he won the Booker with Midnight’s Children.
Nor is it just a matter of individuals. Schools and movements that would figure in even the most cursory survey of contemporary fiction had not germinated 20 years ago. There was no Scottish novel as we now know it. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, published in 1981, was the first seismic shock. Thirteen years later James Kelman won the Booker with How Late it Was, How Late. It would have been inconceivable, a couple of decades before, for anyone to write such a novel, let alone win a major prize with it. Canadian writing took off in the same period. For decades Robertson Davies had ploughed his lonely furrow, and then, quite suddenly, there was an outburst of talent - Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Alistair McLeod and, following them, a gifted second generation including Lynne Coady, Michael Crummey and Yan Martell, who won the 2002 Booker with Life of Pi.
Even more mysterious in their origin than these national flowerings are the changing fashions in form, style and subject that show up when you cast an eye over the last 20 years. Why, for example, has the historical novel become so popular? John Arden’s Silence Among the Weapons, short-listed in 1982, seemed a curiosity, out of key with current sensibilities. Then, all at once, history was a spur to creativity as it had not been since Walter Scott. As if in response to the new challenge, Beryl Bainbridge, already an established writer, changed direction in mid-career, producing a string of ingenious historical fictions, among them the powerfully eccentric Crimean War novel Master Georgie, short-listed in 1998. Particular historical periods quickly became frequented fictional quarries, notably the First World War, imaginatively relived by 1995 Booker winner Pat Barker.
Magic realism is another distinctive ingredient in the modern fictional mix. Admittedly it is as old as the Odyssey. But Anthony Burgess’s The End of the World News, also on the 1982 short-list, seems, looking back, to have heralded a new phase. Magic realism reprieves the novelist from the job of verisimilitude. In that respect it fits in with other refusals of the story-telling art, often vaguely marshalled under the banner of postmodernism. The most frustrating is the open ending, which leaves reader to decide what happens. Justifications of the device generally hinge on solemnities about the essential fictiveness of all narrative. But truisms of that kind are a poor substitute for a story. Besides, logically pursued they would put novelists out of business altogether. Of recent open-ended novels, Ian McEwan’s Atonement caused the highest degree of exasperation among its readers since, unlike many modern novelists, he had made his characters engaging enough for you really to care about their fates.
Then there is science - or rather, there is not, for it has been curiously slow to enter the mainstream novel, perhaps because science fiction developed early on into a separate art form with different rules, or perhaps because you need to learn about science to write scientific novels, and most English novelists have not bothered to. A.S. Byatt, who won the Booker with Possession in 1990, is the exception. Her quartet of novels culminating in A Whistling Woman (2002) reflects two decades of interest in scientific research into the brain and the nervous system, and sets an example that others are now following.
But the most prolific growth in the last 20 years, and one that spans all these different forms and fashions, is the Moral Indignation Novel (MIN). It has been nourished by feminism and post-colonialism, but spreads far beyond the boundaries of these powerful movements. Its characteristic is to dwell on past atrocities and injustices. The iniquities of the slave trade, or the extermination of native peoples - the Red Indians, the Australian aborigines - are the kind of subject that it relishes. Floggings, brandings, rapes, massacres, and women giving birth far from medical aid are among the customary set pieces. The native victims are portrayed as eco-friendly and endowed with delicate modes of consciousness beyond the scope of depraved Europeans. The villains, on the other hand, are always white and usually English. From the viewpoint of origin, class and education they closely resemble the readers whom the author can most realistically expect to buy his or her wares.
Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger, joint winner of the Booker in 1992, and Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers, short-listed in 2000, were full-blooded MINs, but less distinguished specimens are plentiful. They are a curious phenomenon since the author implicitly places him or her self on a moral eminence, while encouraging readers to feel guilty and ashamed about historical ills that they are powerless to remedy. The closest parallel, in past ages, seems to be the hellfire sermon, in which the preacher, from a position of sanctified righteousness, would bring home to his cringing auditors the dreadfulness of original sin, for which they all merited eternal damnation. Obviously both congregation and preacher must have enjoyed these harangues, otherwise they could not have been so popular. Presumably the congregation felt that they were morally improved by the ordeal, and that seems to be the case with MINs also. Readers feel better, because they have the illusion that they have taken the side of the oppressed.
How, finally, has the Booker responded to the MIN phenomenon? Critics of the prize claim that the kind of people chosen as judges are precisely the kind who favour MINs, and it shows in the books they select. That seems an overstatement. It is true that Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, which won in 2001, was an MIN of an unusually simple kind (good criminals, bad policemen). But there are plenty of counter-examples. Thomas Keneally’s 1982 winner, Schindler’s Ark, took the holocaust as its subject but was redemptive, not indignant. Kazuo Ishiguro, 1989 winner, has always specialized in innocence, not indignation, though his situations are ones that less intelligent novelists might have built MINs around. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which won in 1997, is undoubtedly an MIN. But, like Dickens, Roy directs her indignation at features of her culture - specifically the caste system - that still cry out for change. Used in this way the MIN becomes politically responsible, not just a pretext for bloodthirsty fantasy and self-gratifying moral outrage. These qualifications suggest that the Booker has not succumbed to the MIN as supinely as its enemies claim. On the other hand, a list of the novelists who might have been expected to win the Booker but have not - Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, William Boyd, Vikram Seth - reveals that they are short on moral indignation. That may be why the prize has eluded them - so far.
