Pistols at dawn?
The judges will be getting together on Tuesday to hammer out their longlist for this year's prize, so what will this year's Man Booker menagerie include? A cruel bird? A binary dog? Jive cats? Mr. Fox? A rabbit called God? The king of the badgers? Or even the last werewolf? Well, maybe a couple of those, but what else?
As I
tweeted a few days ago, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Paul Bailey's lovely book
Chapman's Odyssey, and I take heart from
Susan Hill's "
no comment".
Susan has also reported that one particular book has caused a rift between a couple of the judges which may result in "pistols at dawn". I hope it is included - a book that gets people agitated can't be bad...well, it could be bad, but it can't be boring - unlike some of those doorstep historical novels juries often feel obliged to include.
Some of those long - but not necessarily boring (especially if you like that sort of thing) - historical novels that may well be in the running this year include Andrew Miller's
Pure,
Gillespie and I by Jane Harris and Amitav Ghosh's
River of Smoke.
There are also heavyweight historical tomes from previous Booker winners Barry Unsworth (
The Quality of Mercy is a sequel to
Sacred Hunger) and Alan Hollinghurst (
The Stranger's Child). There's been a small bandwagon rolling behind The Stranger's Child recently, but the same was true of David Mitchell last year, and the wheel fell off that one.
In total there are six previous winners of the prize with novels out this year. The other four being Aravind Adiga (
Last Man in Tower), Anne Enright (
The Forgotten Waltz), Michael Ondaatje (
The Cat's Table) and Graham Swift (
Wish You Were Here).
I had a real love-hate reaction to
Wish You Were Here. You can read my review - in which I felt it necessary to use the word 'griefful' -
here. Suffice it to say that, although it is a very powerful novel, it must not win. It might put people off reading literary fiction forevermore. One reviewer on Amazon said that Swift "writes unerringly" - yes, he does: as unerring as a steamroller slowly - oh, sooooo slowly - crushing your will to live.
Going back to Alan Hollinghurst, I will be happy to see him on the longlist, but I would be really delighted to see James Hollingshurst on the list. James Hollingshurst being the main character in
David Nobbs' new novel
It Had to Be You. It's unlikely that Booker Prize judges have ever had Nobbs on the table in front of them, but there's always a first time.
Certainly, the way the world is at the moment, we could all do with cheering up, and two of the best novels I've read so far this year are also laugh out loud funny: Shehan Karunatilaka's contender for the title of Great Sri Lankan Novel:
Chinaman, and the bone-dry cynical wit of Edward St Aubyn's
At Last, which (whisper it) is my tip for the prize.
But what about the annual argument about Booker judges ignoring genre fiction?
Wittgenstein said that "to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life". I know this because I read it somewhere in relation to
Embassytown, the latest cosmic display of linguistic pyrotechnics by China Miéville, the omission of which - assuming the judges fail their Stadt Dyadic Empathy Test by leaving it off the longlist - will provoke the inevitable fury of SF lovers on the immer and in the out. (No, I'm not going to try to explain that, I'm not an SF writer.)
And what of crime-readers: are they to be disappointed as usual? "
The literary writers are seeing lots of people reading us and relatively few people reading them, and they're cross about it," said Lee Child, winner of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award last week. Well, maybe not. Considering the literary output of some of this year's judges, it is reasonable to suspect that there may be a thriller or two on the list. Two contenders stand out: SJ Watson's
Before I Go To Sleep and
Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes. Indeed, the ratings for Elizabeth Haynes' debut novel are extraordinarily high.
There are always some unknown unknowns that slip through the net, books from smaller publishers that have gone unnoticed and unreviewed until the judges bring them to our attention. Nevertheless I have compiled a list of nearly two hundred novels from those mentioned on the discussion forum at the official Man Booker Prize website and various other websites and blogs. You can see it
here.
Also, GoodReads members can vote for their favourites on this list:
http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/9854
But remember the wise words of literary agent and novelist
David Miller, whose book
Today could also sneak onto the longlist: "
A prize is not a way to judge a writer. It's a way of judging a jury."
Labels: Adiga, Booker, Booker Prize, hollinghurst, Karunatilaka, longlist, mieville, nobbs, Peculier
White Tiger wins 2008 Man Booker Prize
Aravind Adiga has won the £50,000 Man Booker Prize for 2008 with his debut novel The White Tiger.
Michael Portillo, who chaired this year's judges, compared it to Macbeth, being about "ambition realised through murder ... with a delicious twist". He also praised its "originality".
Earlier, one of the other judges, Louise Doughty, had criticised male academics for avoiding readable books when judging literary prizes.
"I don't think it's a good idea to have academics as judges on these prizes. Academics always have their eye on their reputations and always have a vested interest to pick someone as literary and obscure as possible," she said, prompting some derision from those who have been underwhelmed by the judges' choices. I'm all for choosing books that are readable (as opposed to stultifyingly boring exhibitions of style over substance, say - no names no pack drill) but I think we have a right to expect more from a prize winner. After all, if readability was the be-all and end-all, the organisers could take a leaf out of Richard & Judy's bookclub and initiate a Beach-Booker prize.
Maybe the judges should be just as concerned with their chosen books' viewability, because yet again this year there was no proper coverage of the prize on British television. It's annoying enough that the BBC, with all its shiny new digital channels, refuse to give any airtime to my favourite band, but to ignore the Booker Prize as well? I mean, what the hell is BBC4 for? Whatever is wrong with you, BBC?
Labels: Adiga, Aravind, BBC, BBC4, Booker, Doughty, literature, Macbeth, Portillo, White Tiger
2008 Shortlist
The shortlist for the 2008 Man Booker Prize looks like this:
Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh - Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant - The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole
The £50,000 winner will be announced on October 14th.
So, as expected, a big disappointment for me with the omission of John Berger, and with Salman Rushdie missing the cut again (contrary to the popular belief that he always wins, he hasn't even been shortlisted since 1995) there will be a new name on the trophy this year, so to speak. I thought the omens were better for him this year because the Bookies, for once, didn't make him favourite, instead choosing to jinx Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. I say it every year, because every year it's true: the Bookies always get it wrong. Or, cynics might suggest, the judges always avoid picking the favourite. Psychologically, judges are predisposed to promote (relatively) unknown talent. Everyone's a truffle hound. After all, no-one wants to spend months reading over a hundred books, only for their chosen winner to meet with a response like: "well, that was the obvious choice, wasn't it?"
The only one I've read thus far is The White Tiger, and, although I found it a bit more substantial than The Reluctant Fundamentalist from last year's shortlist, I thought the conceit of the narrator writing to the Chinese president before a state visit seemed somewhat random.
The chair of the judges, Michael Portillo, described the books as "intensely readable [...] page-turning [...] thought-provoking [...] ambitious and approachable". I hope so because they have included the two longest books from the longlist: The Northern Clemency and A Fraction of the Whole, both weighing in at over 700 pages. I'm fifth in the library queue for a copy of the former, so I might not get it by Christmas, and, as for the latter, I'm afraid Steve Toltz's name isn't even in the library catalogue yet. For the record, the total number of copies of each longlisted book currently held by all of Nottinghamshire's hundred or so libraries are as follows:15 The Lost Dog
14 The Clothes on Their Backs
08 Sea of Poppies
07 Child 44
04 Girl In A Blue Dress
03 The Secret Scripture
02 The White Tiger
02 The Northern Clemency
02 The Enchantress of Florence
01 A Case of Exploding Mangoes
01 Netherland
00 From A To X
00 A Fraction of the Whole
That's not many to go around. But is it because there's no demand for literary fiction, because hardbacks are uneconomically expensive, or are libraries just slow to order new books?
It has been pointed out again this year that the sales figures for all the longlisted books combined were less than that of the latest novel by Katie Price aka Jordan. When you consider that, presumably, those sales figures must include sales to libraries, the total number of sales through bookshops of some of these finest of the fine literary novels must be vanity-publishing small.
Anyway I'm off to YouTube now to see if any footage of Professor Sutherland currying and eating his proof copy of The Enchantress of Florence has been uploaded yet...
Labels: 2008, Adiga, Booker, Ghosh, Hensher, Linda Grant, Netherland, Portillo, Rushdie, Sebastian Barry, Shortlist, Toltz
The A to X of the 2008 Man Booker longlist
The thirteen books on this year's Man Booker Prize longlist are:
Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger
Gaynor Arnold - Girl in a Blue Dress
Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture
John Berger - From A to X
Michelle de Kretser - The Lost Dog
Amitav Ghosh - Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant - The Clothes on Their Backs
Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency
Joseph O'Neill - Netherland
Salman Rushdie - The Enchantress Of Florence
Tom Rob Smith - Child 44
Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole
I couldn't love a jury more.
I knew John Berger had a new book coming out in September, but it never occurred to me that it might be in the running - I suspected he was blacklisted after his acceptance speech in 1972. King: A Street Story is one of my favourite books of all time, and I was terribly disappointed that it wasn't even shortlisted in 1999. I can't wait to read From A to X.
And a book about cricket as well! Marvellous.
(Although Susan Hill won't agree.)
Labels: Adiga, Amitav, Booker, books, Child 44, Gaynor Arnold, Hensher, John Berger, Kretser, Linda Grant, Man Booker Prize, Mohammed Hanif, Netherland, Rushdie, salman, Sebastian Barry, Susan Hill, Toltz
