James Naughtie’s speech at the Man Booker dinner
“We’re proud to give it this prize”
James Naughtie was the Chair of Judges for the Man Booker Prize 2009.
The following text is from his speech given at the awards ceremony on Tuesday 6 October at Guildhall, London.
"This has been difficult, rewarding in a pulsating kind of way, and - in the end - decisive.
I said to my fellow judges the other day that after the last of our Herculean labours this afternoon we'd be able to change our: to turn to other books - thrillers, of less than 200 pages, short stories (!), perhaps even a lyric poem. Or perhaps we might just want to stare into space for a while. There are also things to be done around the house; reshaping the sculpture garden that consists of 132 volumes stacked higgledy-piggledy around the place, some bearing the unmistakable signs of having been thrown against the wall in a moment of passion. Across our living rooms we see nothing byt - as Wodehouse would have put it - a surging sea of authors. It's so good to see some of them here tonight. (And to be able to avoid some others, with whom the awkward pauses might stretch to infinity. Like the deathless prose in some of the books NOT represented here tonight.
But it is very good. I was able to say honestly after we chose the shortlist that we were looking forward to going back to read them again; and we were. It's an odd procedure, of course. How often do we read a novel three times in the course of six or nine months? How many books could take it? We can report tonight on the result of that effort; not I should say as examiners or academics or nitpickers, but as readers looking for the best of them.
This is about one thing: quality. And I want to thank my judges, especially, for their instinctive and unwavering commitment to that word, that belief. They have been a great bunch with a collective literary brain the size of Brazil, but also with flair and sparkle and confidence, which is what you need when on your journey you encounter a famous author who's produced a spluttering damp squib and you think - of course - that it's your fault that it's not bursting with fire. We were able to reassure ourselves, huddle together and press on through the clinging undergrowth to the sunlit uplands.
So let me thank Lucasta Mille and Sue Perkins, John Mullan and Michael Prodger for all their effort on that adventure, and for all the fun. And as for our guide and mentor along the way, Ion Trewin, we join the long list of those who have reason to be grateful to him.
Quality, you may think, is so obviously the object of the quest that it hardly needs saying. But there was a time when prizes were thought to be slightly artificial exercises... somehow distorting proper judgement and criticism in favour of the plucking out of some zeitgeist book, the random making of an instant star. That was what prizes were; the real world of books was different. The truth is that today it's the other way round.
Authors find that a novel is given a chance for a few weeks, and that's it. It swims away after the first dive, or left to drown. There is no second chance. The backlists shrink. Book covers become ever more derivative - "we must have one of those - it sold zillions - write a story to go with it" (look at Joseph Connolly's volume of Faber covers to see how classy and confident it once was). Marketing strategies become the spinal chord of the operation; the book sometimes appearing to be a mere limb that can be lopped off if it's causing trouble.
I know there are publishers - many among you tonight - who don't think entirely like that (or convince themselves, in the mirror each morning and evening that they don't); who treasure authors and give them time, and a chance; who worryabout how writers will make a living in times to come if they're not famous (or even, sometimes, if they are). I know - we all know - wonderful bookshops that care about their stock and serve their readers with real care, despite the pelting of the pitiless financial storm.
But we also know the problems. That contemporary lodestar, the groaning supermarket shelf, purports to represent choice, but delivers the opposite. The world of the warehouse, the oligarchy of centralised ordering. Savage discounting that has the perverse effect of narrowing the range of books that have a chance. And then there are the categories: children parcelled into age groups that don't make sense, an obsession with genres (even in schools, I'm afraid) that represents the novel as a set of fictional templates instead of an original adventure every time. There is also something we've noticed, as judges - too much sloppy editing: letting things run, letting the close line-editing of paragraphs slip away, as if it's too much trouble.
To all that, it's the job of this prize to say: no.
We shouldn't be flattening our cultural landscape, but enjoying its heights and depths and rough places.
The six books that have been lapping around in our heads in these last weeks - sometimes thrilling us and sometimes irritating us - shimmer with quality. Like Simon Mawer's glass room gleaming with its own kind of perfection in a disintegrating world, or John Clare's instinctive understanding of what poetry does in Adam Fould's Quickening Maze, or as A S Byatt's immersion in the idea of creativity in The Children's Book we've been reminded not only how it's done ... but why it matters.
That's why Hilary Mantel is right to say she isn't writing ‘historical fiction' ... but writing about people we recognise who happen to inhabit a different time; why J M Coetzee can play so seriously with the idea of autobiography and, in a way, break all the rules; how Sarah Waters can make you think uneasily about her narrator, on whom we depend for the story, and wonder...
And there you are: I've mentioned them all. In no particular order.
But the time for such diplomatic manoeuvres is nearly past. These were our six. We lost some lovely books along the way - lyrical, uproariously funny, profound. But that loss is our burden, and can't be helped. Those that are left are our way of describing quality, and of celebrating it. Perfection will never be available... but excitement, brilliance and style are all around us. In these volumes you find them all. It's been our privilege to get inside them and enjoy them.
And then there was one ......
We knew when we first encountered this book, many months ago, that it had a special quality. So were others. Judging this prize, we were passionate and committed. Each book that fell away at the very last end was lost with regret. They are all fine pieces of fiction.
And in the end, after we got to the shortlist, looking across an Alpine mountainscape at all the peaks, when the mist cleared, there it was: above them all.
For its ambition and boldness and for the challenges it offers the reader and therefore the rewards it brings, for beautiful prose, we're proud to give it this prize.
The winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2009 is Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall. "
A video of James Naughtie's speech can also be found in the video section of the website.
