The Guardian view on Margaret Atwood and the Booker: a testament to fiction
It is easy to deride awards, especially if you haven’t won one. And good fun too. Edward St Aubyn, snubbed by Booker judges in 2006 for the finale to his Patrick Melrose series, At Last, took revenge with the 2014 satire Lost for Words. That novel depicted clownish judges deciding which book, from a terrible shortlist, should win a thinly veiled version of the Booker.
This week’s decision by Booker judges to shortlist The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s much-anticipated sequel to her 1985 feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, might seem similarly worthy of derision. The book hasn’t even been published yet. Apart from 800 copies leaked to Amazon in the US, what takes place between its covers will be kept from most readers until its global release on 10 September – her publishers having broken with convention by not bringing the publication date forward once the novel was known to be in the running. Atwood, shortlisted for the Booker six times and winner with The Blind Assassin in 2000, is one of the most feted living novelists, so hardly needs the award’s imprimatur or £50,000 prize money.
The novelist Amit Chaudhuri argued last year that the Booker is not fit for purpose. “The idea that a ‘book of the year’ can be assessed annually by a bunch of people – judges who have to read almost a book a day – is absurd, as is the idea that this is any way of honouring a writer.” Aesthetic judgments are subjective, which is one reason why prize organisers are right to see diversity on judging panels as important. Individual tastes aside, Chaudhuri argued that literary value has increasingly become subordinate to commercial considerations. The Testaments can certainly be expected to succeed on these terms. Thanks in part to the Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, but also in light of political developments in the US and elsewhere, Atwood’s novel has become newly pertinent. Offred’s white bonnet and red cape have become real-life symbols of feminist resistance from Northern Ireland to Argentina.
But while it is a pity that keen readers have not yet been able to read The Testaments, this year’s contest remains an exciting prospect. First won 50 years ago by PH Newby with Something to Answer For, the Booker has changed with the times, and in recent years has come in for a good deal of justified criticism after changing its rules so that American as well as Commonwealth and Irish authors can enter.
Concerns remain about the increased difficulty, for non-US English-language novelists, of accessing what remains a vitally important shop window. But for now at least the signs are good. Last year’s deserving winner was the little-known Northern Irish writer Anna Burns. On this year’s short
list, along with Atwood and another former winner, Salman Rushdie, is Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport – a novel rejected by her regular publisher before being taken up by a tiny independent – and with most of its 1,000 pages taken up by just eight sentences.