Two winners, so which one is best?
Awarding a pair of Booker Prizes creates confusion
Perhaps envious of the Nobel committee, which recently named two winners — Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke — the Booker Prize committee broke with precedent and announced a shared award.
The Booker went to both Margaret Atwood for “The Testaments,” her sequel to “The Handmaid’s Tale,”and “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernardine Evaristo.
Technically, the Nobel was sticking to its rule of awarding one prize per year: Tokarczuk won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature a year late because of a sexual abuse scandal within the Nobel committee. On the other hand, the Booker Prize had no rules — or rather, according to after-thefact reports, there were rules until it was decided to abandon them so two people could receive the prize.
The scuttlebutt suggests that there was a desire to honor Atwood because of her distinguished career for a book that seems important in a particular political moment. Writing in The Guardian, one of the prize’s five judges, Afua Hirsch, said as much, citing Atwood’s “titanic career” and “contribution to culture” as criteria worthy of consideration.
But unlike the Nobel, which is a career achievement award, the Booker is for individual books, so this reasoning makes little sense.
In an emotionally raw post-awards essay in The Times Literary Supplement, Sam Jordison, the U.K. publisher of one of the other finalists (“Ducks, Newburyport” by Evanston native Lucy Ellmann), questions a process that seems to have no rationale beyond whatever the judges decide to do in the moment. It’s a contest without rules.
I feel Jordison’s pain because it’s clear how much the prize would mean for a book published by a small press such as his, and hearing that your author’s book didn’t seem to have a shot because of external criteria — like Atwood’s long and distinguished career — should result in some hard feelings.
While I love big book prizes — I put their announcement dates on my calendar — and it is a big deal to win a prize, the contretemps over this year’s Booker reveals that underneath the pomp and circumstance, these awards have very little meaning.
I’m not saying awards are a lottery. It’s not as if every novel has an equal chance or deserves equal consideration for a major prize, but prizes are, to a significant extent, arbitrary. When you get down to a short, or even long, list of finalists, every single one of those titles would be a deserving winner. It’s kind of like how Harvard University could fill another freshman class with the valedictorians they reject.
I have witnessed the capriciousness of book awards during my time as a color commentator for The Morning News Tournament of Books, which will begin its 16th installment in March. It’s a March Madness-style tournament in which pairs of books are assessed by individual judges, advancing through a bracket toward a final showdown. It’s a perfectly rational exercise in irrationality that makes plain the absurdity of weighing the merits of one book against another.
In one round, a judge may declare a book a masterpiece, while in the next it may be turkey.
Which judge is right? Both? Neither? The point of the Tournament of Books is to debate and discuss what different people experience when they read different books. Perhaps the Booker Prize judges who threw the rules out the window have done us a favor by requiring readers to grapple with the reality of what it means to declare a single book the “best.” I think Mary would enjoy the storytelling tension of Keith Lee Morris’
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