ANTI-PRIZE
In 2007, Robert Harris, the great thriller writer, denounced the Man Booker Prize as “evil” — quite a claim from a man who has written so extensively about Nazis. One of his complaints was that the shortlisted books “are all written in the same way. They are elegant, elegiac, but dull and dry. They do not connect with their readers.
“They are just deadening to read.”
The idea that the Booker has been responsible for a proliferation of reader-unfriendly books is somewhat reinforced when one watches the prize-giving ceremony, on those occasions when the BBC troubles to broadcast it. Watching those slightly identikit novelists in their finest attire, politely applauding the speeches of the corporate sponsors, you would be forgiven for forgetting that the qualities for which the Englishlanguage novel is most celebrated are rollicking comedy, turbulent passion and subversive satire. When Timothy Mo was shortlisted in 1986 for his novel An Insular Possession, he left the dinner before the prize-giving started, feeling that “If I’d stayed behind, I might have misbehaved, pulled out the tablecloth or something like that . ... It’s such a humiliating ordeal for the poor, trembling authors, who have to sit there with their tongues hanging out.”
Some of today’s shortlisted writers must feel like Mo at least some of the time. But they are aware that Booker-blessed books hog the sales of the kind of novel they write.
And these days, they are contractually obliged to publicly support the prize if shortlisted. So no tablecloths are pulled, and the ceremony is always boring.
The problem with the Booker is the deadly pall of worthiness it casts over “literary fiction.” However good the shortlisted books are, the Booker imprimatur ends up giving us sanctioned satire or pre-approved passion, and what’s the point of that?
Science fiction, crime and other genre fiction, however good, rarely get near the long list, with the result that, as Harris put it, the Booker “encourages and fosters the difference between supposed ‘literary’ novels and other perfectly good books.”
One supposes that, as a genre writer, he was complaining about a prize that refused to take his excellent work seriously.
And, yet, now it seems that this artificially created divide is working against literary fiction, with sales falling as readers continue to buy genre fiction in ever greater numbers.
The prize has done a fine job of boosting the sales of (some) literary fiction. But it is now starting to look as though the Booker, along with such other mid-century inventions as plastic and nuclear weapons, was a quick fix that has caused more problems than it has solved.