Strange moments during the judging process
Louise Doughty on judging the Man Booker 2008
This article first appeared in The Guardian's Review, section on Saturday 18 October 2008.
"There were many strange moments during the judging process for this year's Man Booker prize, but the strangest for me came when I and my fellow judges - Michael Portillo (the chair), James Heneage, Alex Clark and Hardeep Singh Kohli - were having lunch after the longlist meeting. Thanks to Michael's firmness, the decision-making had been quick - 40 minutes to select our favourite 13 books from 116 entries. Before the meeting, he had asked us all to submit our lists of top 10 favourites to him, without collusion. This process produced nine titles that received votes from the majority of the panel - in other words, three judges or more. Michael proposed that those nine had won their places on the longlist without further ado. That left only four places on the list to be debated.
The two novels on my personal list that didn't make it were People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks and Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay, both of which I loved, but I had to accept my enthusiasm was not shared. Books in the running for those last four longlist slots were ones that were voted for by one or two judges, but also partially admired by others who had not found room for them in their top 10. One such was Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, which scraped its way on to the longlist despite our shared reservations because of its evocative portrayal of a post-9/11 New York.
Netherland was first out of the blocks as bookies' favourite, and in the following weeks its author was splashed all over the papers beneath headlines that declared him "hotly tipped" to win. Not by us, he wasn't. The person this was most unfair on was O'Neill, who could have been forgiven for filling his ice box with champagne and rushing his tuxedo down to the dry cleaners. Next up as favourite was Salman Rushdie with The Enchantress of Florence, who had bunny-hopped on to our longlist with ease, only to be excluded from the shortlist four weeks later with equal unanimity. Booker judges snub Rushdie, or similar, was the headline in the papers. No, we didn't. We just thought the six books that did make it were better.
I went into the final meeting thinking that, although I would be happy for any one of our top six to take the prize, there were three that had nudged ahead for me, one of which was our eventual winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger. I was also entranced by Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture, a beautiful novel about an old lady in an Irish asylum reflecting back on her life. It wasn't that I didn't want The White Tiger to win, just that I didn't want The Secret Scripture to lose. At one point during our discussions, we double-checked with Ion Trewin, the chair of the prize committee, if we could split it. No, we couldn't. In the end, it came to a tense secret ballot and The White Tiger, a superbly executed novel about poverty and corruption in modern India, inched ahead of its competition. At which moment, we all paused to draw breath and blink at each other, suddenly silent after hours of impassioned and, at times, tearful debate."
Reproduced by kind permission of Guardian syndication.
