PRIZE COMIC

St Aubyn’s satire on literary awards is great comic writing. By Michele Magwood

Lost for Words ★★★★ ★

Edward St Aubyn (Picador, R269)

THERE’S a distinct tang of relish about Lost for Words , the glee of a writer who has concluded a long series of novels and is freed up to turn his acid eye on a personal peeve: literary prizes. Edward St Aubyn is known for his superb Patrick Melrose novels, a cycle of five elegant books about a poisoned aristocratic family that won him great acclaim and an ardent following, but which failed to win any major literary award. The books are largely autobiographical: St Aubyn comes from an ancient, pedigreed and famously appalling family.

Lost for Words is widely believed to be a satire of the Man Booker Prize, for which he was once shortlisted and the odds-on favourite to win. Supporters were aghast when he didn’t. Here the award is called the Elysian Prize, sponsored by a dodgy agricultural company which is “a leader in the field of genetically modified crops, crossing wheat with Arctic cod to make it frost resistant, or lemons with bullet ants to give them extra zest”.

One of the judges is a ringer for Dame Stella Rimington, the former MI5-headturned-spy thriller-author who chaired the Booker in 2011 and who horrified the literati by saying she was looking for “readability” and books “that zip along”. St Aubyn lampoons her in the figure of Penny Feathers, newly retired from the Foreign Office, who writes execrable books with the help of a software programme called Ghost. “When you typed in a word, ‘refugee’ for instance, several useful suggestions popped up: ‘clutching a pathetic bundle’, or ‘eyes big with hunger’; for ‘assassin’ you got ‘ice water running through his veins’.”

Another judge, Jo Cross, writes newspaper columns complaining about her husband and children and is in search only of “relevance”. A louche repertory actor Tobias Stevens, selected because he’s been “a fa- natical reader ever since he was a little boy”, never makes the judging sessions but throws his weight, naturally, behind a book titled All the World’s a Stage.

If St Aubyn has fun with the judges, he takes delirious enjoyment describing the books submitted. There’s an Indian cookbook entered by accident, which the judges insist is a “lucid, postmodern, multimedia masterpiece”, and a Scottish novel called wot u starin at, a “sub-Irvine Welsh” story set in a Glasgow housing estate: “Death Boy’s troosers were round his ankies. The only vein in his body that hadna bin driven into hiding was in his cock.”

A Year in the Wild, meanwhile, is about an ex-banker trying to find himself in the wilderness. “As spring returned to the frozen land, the great thaw began. It bewildered Gary with its clamour and its swiftness.” The author, Penny Feathers decides, “clearly has a bad case of the Dr Doolittles”.

And so the judges argue and horse trade, not so much corrupt as incompetent, circled by characters like the posturing critical theorist Didier and a noble Indian novelist who’s followed around by his manservant.

Whipped along with elements of broad farce — wrong books are submitted; judges get stuck in the lift when they’re supposed to be announcing the winner — the action builds to the hilarious awards banquet.

St Aubyn must have laughed all the way to the stage recently when Lost for Words won the prestigious Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. It will be interesting to see how it fares in this year’s Man Booker lineup. — @michelemagwood