National Post (National Edition)
THE LONG READING LIST FOR MAN BOOKER PRIZE JUDGE.
Val Mcdermid reveals how she read 171 books
LONDON • On the morning of Oct. 16, five judges will meet in a secret location here to decide the winner of the Man Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards.
They will have about eight hours to pick a winner from the six-strong shortlist, which includes Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black. But the five — philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, crime writer Val Mcdermid, cultural critic Leo Robson, feminist writer Jacqueline Rose and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton — will have actually read 171 books over the last seven months to make their choice.
“We are paid, yes,” said Mcdermid when asked if she was compensated for such time-consuming work. “If you add up all the hours, I think it works out below minimum wage,” she added.
Why did she accept the offer to be a judge? For a simple reason: “Everyone said to me, ‘You have to do this. It’s an honour and you’ll enjoy it.’ They were right.”
But what is judging a major literary prize actually like, and how does reading so many books affect you? Mcdermid talked through the life of a Booker Prize judge in two recent interviews, although she gave no hints about her favourite for the prize (“I have a top three. That’s all I can say,” she said). These are edited excerpts.
Q: Were you surprised to be asked?
A: Well, yes. I’m not someone who instantly springs to mind as a judge of literary fiction. I write genre novels. I occasionally appear on slightly ridiculous comedy news programs on the radio. I don’t write 10,000-word essays for The London Review of Books. But it’s great that the Booker looks for a range of judges. It’s not narrow and self selecting.
Q: How many books do you normally read a year? A: Maybe 100.
Q: So did you think twice about reading 171 in seven months?
A: I thought it’d be tough. I thought it’d be hard work. But I also thought I’d be able to do it. I mean, I read quickly. But it was a huge ask. It did just swallow up my year. I got to a point where I was actually dreaming mash-ups of the books I was reading. I would wake up in the morning and go, “Did that happen?”
Q: Did you read all of them?
A: I would say we “assess” all the books. To be honest, there’s some when you’re not very far into it and you think, “This is not going to win the Booker Prize.”
Q: Where did you read them?
A: Where? I read them in bed. I read them in my office. In trains. In station waiting rooms. In airports. Not in coffee shops because I find coffee shops quite irritating. I actually read most of them digitally, so I was really reading as blind as I could. I wasn’t reading blurbs. I wasn’t influenced by covers or author bios.
Q: You re-read each book you longlisted, and you’ve just re-read the shortlisted ones. Does that repetition change anything? A: Yeah, your perspective changes, because you’ve listened to your fellow judges, and inevitably they see things in the book that you might have missed, or they have a different take to you. Certainly between the long list and short list, some books rose in my estimation and some books fell away a little.
Q: Shouldn’t you only read them once to capture the same excitement a reader will get? A: That is an argument. But a book that stands up to being read three times is a book that probably has a claim to being the best of the year, not just something that’s a magpie pretty thing. I mean, sometimes you read a book and it’s the glitter and the speed and the superficial charm of it that grabs you, but what you take away from it really is nothing, as a week later you couldn’t tell a stranger on a train what it was about or what it meant to you.
Q: How often did the judges meet?
A: The books come to us in number order so we all read them at the same time, then we had monthly meetings where we looked at 30 to 50. Any with advocates would stay in the run.
Q: Where did you meet?
A: Most of the meetings were held in backrooms of places like The Groucho Club or restaurants in Soho. There was coffee and bis- cuits and macaroons. It was very civilized.
Q: Was there alcohol?
A: No, we were stone cold sober. The booze came out afterward.
Q: Can one judge push a book through?
A: No, every book had at least four of us. We all agreed if any of us absolutely hated a book, we wouldn’t put it forward. But we’re there to find a winner, not personal taste. We’ve all lost books that we loved along the way — that spoke to us in a very personal way, maybe due to our experiences in life or the place where we were. But that’s not what we’re looking for.
Q: Most of the shortlisted books are dark, featuring everything from slavery to ecological collapse. How quickly did it become clear that’s the mood of today’s novels? A: Oh, before the first meeting. We all went in and said, “There’s quite a lot of dystopia around isn’t there?” That was an eye-opener for me as it’s not the sort of fiction I’d normally go for.
Q: You’ve said you liked the humour in some of the short list. Should more books be funny? A: Some of the books we read were very po-faced, and not in the best way. I’d say humour is a good strategy. When you’re delivering a very dark message, that leaven in the lump is like a moment where the reader can take a breath and then plunge back into the mire. But I’m Scottish. We tend to look for humour in every situation.
Q: Did you read reviews of the books?
A: I’ve been quite consciously trying to avoid reviews. It’d give you preconceived ideas of them. When we got to the later stages, I did read reviews of some that didn’t quite make it and you do ask yourself if you missed something.
Q: Isn’t that masochistic?
A: Well, yes. But we’re only human. We all kind of want to confirm our judgment.
Q: How has doing this affected your writing?
A: It has provoked a restlessness in me. I am thinking about how I can push my own writing in different directions and not do the same things again and again and again. If you’re a writer, everything you read gives you pause: You’re always looking for something you can steal or something you want to avoid. This has really taken me outside the usual tramlines of what I read.
One other thing I’d say is that if you’re a writer, you’re someone who very quickly becomes a critical reader. It’s not as easy to find unmitigated pleasure in a book. It’s rare I find a book so absorbing I don’t ever think about technique while reading it. That happens about half-adozen times a year.
Q: So would you do this again?
A: No. I think you should do it once. On Oct. 17, I’m going to sit down and read a book I have no obligation to read.