Big reads are edited out of the Booker shortlist
Judges say a brisk pruning would help long-winded authors
IF you have laboured through a novel wondering when it will ever end, the Man Booker Prize judges feel your pain.
The panel selecting the shortlist for this year’s prize have complained that many of the books submitted were too long-winded, and would have benefited from some brisk editing.
“We occasionally felt that inside the book we read was a better one – sometimes a thinner one – wildly signalling to be let out,” said Kwame Anthony Appiah, chairman of the judges.
“There were times when we felt the editorial role could have been ... more energetically performed.
“This is not a complaint against the very idea of a long, immersive read – one of the books on our shortlist is probably the longest book we read – but the chastening pencil has its role, and subtraction can be as potent as addition.”
That long book on the shortlist is The Overstory by Richard Powers, a 500-page “eco-epic” about the wonder of trees, taking in everything from faith, love, photography, gaming code and the culture of ancient China.
The other five books in contention for the £50,000 prize are Milkman by Anna Burns, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner and The Long Take by Robin Robertson.
Johnson, a 27-year-old debut novelist from Oxford, is the youngest author ever to be shortlisted for the award.
The judges’ comments should not be seen as a criticism of lengthy books, Mr Appiah stressed, but of books that should have been shorter.
“It is not simply the idea that the book can go on too long – though, God knows, they can.
“It’s that there are other signs of a kind of failure of the relationship between
editor and writer,” he said, citing repetitive phrasing and inconsistencies of voice.
Val Mcdermid, the bestselling crime writer and a member of the Man Booker judging panel, said authors’ egos could be to blame.
“As someone who spends most of my working life in the world of publishing, I think there are three elements involved in the problems with editing,” she said.
“Sometimes the situation is that a good editor doesn’t have long enough to spend on the book because of commercial pressures. Sometimes the editors are just not good enough – I think young editors coming through are not necessarily given the kind of training and experience-building
apprenticeship that happened when I was starting out.
“And the other element is that some writers won’t listen. So it could be any one of these three things or indeed a mixture of these three things, but it’s very visible when you read as many novels in as short a time as we have.” The panel read more than 170 submissions. Robin Robertson’s The
Long Take is written in verse, the first such novel to be in contention for the prize.
“It stretches the limits of what we think of as a novel,” said Jacqueline Rose, one of the panel, who described it as a “lyrical tribute to the power of writing”.