Dinah Birch, literary critic, editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature and Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool.

Amanda Foreman, historian, broadcaster and writer, best known for her biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

Bharat Tandon, academic, writer and reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement and The Daily Telegraph.

…and the actor Dan Stevens, who played Nick Guest in the TV adaptation of The Line of Beauty and is now one of the stars of ITV’s posh-fest period drama Downton Abbey. He is also ‘Editor-at-Large’ of the online magazine The Junket.

Chairing their discussions will be Sir Peter Stothard, editor of The Times Literary Supplement. On his appointment Sir Peter said that he looked forward to “a year as a reader and critic within its great traditions.”

Ah good! The ‘great tradition’ of the Booker Prize being lots of controversy, yes?
*Rubs hands together*

Sameer Rahim in the Telegraph notes that Dan Stevens studied literary criticism under Bharat Tanon at Cambridge University and asks whether this is the first case of one judge having previously taught another. Could be. Another question that would take more research than I can be bothered with, is whether that Dan Stevens is the youngest judge ever, since he will only turn thirty a few days before the panel choose their winner on October 16th. *Tuts* I’m also tempted to suggest that, judging by the cover of The Line of Beauty DVD, he might also be the prettiest…

I will keep a list of eligible novels here. Feel free to let me know what I’ve missed.

In an infamous 1987 article about the Booker Prize in The London Review of Books, Barnes had written that “the only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo. It is El Gordo, the Fat One, the sudden jackpot that enriches some plodding Andalusian muleteer.” However, in a recent interview he was more equanimous: “I’ve had reasonably long experience of not winning – and I think I’ve exhausted all the ins and outs of that, so I wouldn’t object to a change.”

I am pleased that, 27 years after he should have won, Julian Barnes is finally a Booker Prize winner, especially as we are now spared the possibility of a ‘Best of Barnesy Booker Prize’. Personally I was somewhat nonplussed by some aspects of The Sense of an Ending but maybe, like his uncomprehending narrator Tony Webster, I just didn’t get it, and a second reading will help. Also my comment that there was no great literature on the shortlist may have been too glib.

Chair of the judges, Dame Stella Rimington, said that “The Sense of an Ending has the markings of a classic of English Literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading.” Gaby Wood, also one of this year’s judges, points out that “the title is taken from a seminal piece of literary criticism written in 1965 by the great Frank Kermode, who died last year (and who, incidentally, was a judge of the inaugural Booker Prize in 1969)”.

Dame Stella also provided one of the quotes of the year in reponse to some unkind and unecessary barbs: “People weirder than me have chaired the Booker,” she said, “A previous chair was Michael Portillo.”

“People said to me when they heard I was in the judging panel, ‘I hope you pick something readable this year’ [...] That for me was such a big factor, it had to zip along.”

That was Chris Mullin’s mission statement. It reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke: “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”

On the announcement of the shortlist, the chair of the judges Dame Stella Rimington said: “We were looking for enjoyable books. I think they are very readable books” and previously, when the longlist was announced, she said it contained “books people would read and enjoy reading.”

Yes, but what sort of people? Judging by the leaning towards political themes and the lack of humour, perhaps the sort that listen to Radio 4 all day, only switching it off for half an hour when a comedy show is broadcast.

In Ali Smith’s There but for the a character on a train surveys what his fellow passengers are reading:

“A girl reading Women in Love. A Man reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – still (!!). A woman reading Death in Venice. A woman reading Heat and Dust. A man reading The White Hotel. A young man, very good looking, reading a novelization of Chariots of Fire. A girl, looks like a student, reading Slaughterhouse 5. Now he’s past the buffet, now he’s through first class, where nobody is reading anything but the Daily Telegraph (!).”

If Ali Smith will forgive me for concocting a new euphemism from her words, I suspect some of this year’s judges are past the buffet. They didn’t want books that would sit unfinished on the shelf, so they have chosen books that will be left behind on the train instead. Maybe some of them don’t see any real value in novels unless they are based on real events. Maybe to them fiction is just story-telling and therefore unimportant compared to the news in their broadsheets. Maybe the snobby elitists who think otherwise needed taking down a peg or two. Maybe I’m being unfair, but then maybe they have been unfair to some excellent novelists by implying that their books are less good than some quite ordinary ones by mere rookies.

Snowdrops, for example, is a perfectly good debut novel, but why on earth it is in the running for a literary prize? It is the sort of book one might buy in WH Smith. That said, it does zip along and it involves Russia. As Kevin from Canada says “you can only conclude that this was a jury whose members simply don’t read very much.“

I do quite like all of the shortlisted books, but there is no great literature there, and better books have been ignored. I don’t think there is any criteria by which Half Blood Blues isn’t bettered by Chinaman, for example. Also, since one thing that several of the jury’s preferred books have in common is the theme of being betrayed – either by people or by one’s own memory – I imagine that, years from now, each of the judges will blame the others for the inexplicable absence of At Last by Edward St Aubyn.

They have achieved their objective though, it is a very readable, book club friendly, list – to the disgust of many Booker aficionados. It is a nice list. Such a nice list that I’m surprised only one of them (Jamrach’s Menagerie) has been chosen for Richard and Judy’s book club. Maybe the others weren’t good enough.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for a bit of accessibility. I’m no elitist. I went to a comprehensive school, the name of which I still have trouble spelling. I dislike authors writing purple prose full of highfaluting references aimed above the heads of the vulgar rabble, and I like a good plot as much as the next man. (Unless, that is, the next man is Lee Monks who called the shortlist “a deplorably story-driven selection.“) And, yes, I’m perfectly well aware of how snobby some of the things I’ve said here sound, but if you didn’t laugh at the WH Smith line then, like the shortlist, you are short on humour. However, we do have a right, and are right, to expect something more challenging from the Booker Prize, something more original.

Yes, ideally the books chosen should be ‘readable’ by the average reader, but that does not mean anything difficult should be tossed aside. Nor should books be passed over for other, non-literary, reasons – such as personal feuds, or prejudice. Sadly that is not always the case.

In a barely coded attack on one particular judge in The Guardian, Paul Bailey has pointed out that as well as Alan Hollinghurst’s omission from the shortlist, accomplished novels by other gay writers were also absent. He mentions Ali Smith (There but for the) and Philip Hensher (King of the Badgers), others will point to Adam Mars-Jones (Cedilla) and Paul Bailey himself (Chapman’s Odyssey is still my favourite book of the year). Obviously, an author’s sexuality should be totally irrelevant, but there are suspicions floating around that at least one judge has previously had ‘issues’ in that respect. Although I suspect that the “bossyboots” judge he alludes to is unlikely to be concerned by Bailey’s broadside because, after all, it is in The Guardian, and why would anyone ever take any notice of The Guardian on anything whatsoever?

So what will they choose as their winner? Ion Trewin, Literary Director of the Man Booker Prize, has said that “a third reading in the space of months is tough on any novel, particularly those that are plot driven. When from the first reading you learn the denouement it becomes essential at subsequent readings that other ingredients come into play: the quality of writing, of dialogue, of characterisation.“
I wish the judges the best of luck with that.

Julian Barnes – The Sense of an Ending
(Jonathan Cape – Random House)

Carol Birch – Jamrach’s Menagerie
(Canongate Books)

Patrick deWitt – The Sisters Brothers
(Granta)

Esi Edugyan – Half Blood Blues
(Serpent’s Tail)

Stephen Kelman – Pigeon English
(Bloomsbury)

A.D. Miller – Snowdrops
(Atlantic)

It is one of the most accessible shortlists ever, with all six books likely to prove popular with reading groups. The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced at London’s Guildhall on Tuesday 18th October.

That was the plan anyway, but then in the middle of one of the books, I just got angry. In no way, I thought to myself, is this as good as Chinaman. Did Shehan Karunatilaka make a mistake by writing a book set in the Sri Lanka he knows rather than being the eighty-seven-millionth writer to imagine what life was like under Nazism or Communism? I’m so tired of books that use those eras as handy, off-the-peg, dramatic backdrops for their stories.

“Not the best Halocaust book I’ve read” (sic) was how one reader’s review of Far To Go began, and the blurb: “When Czechoslovakia relinquishes the Sudetenland to Hitler…” just made me groan. There are Nazis in the background of Half Blood Blues as well, while Snowdrops is set in Moscow.

In future I would like to see no more than one politico on the judging panel.

As David Sexton pointed out in the Evening Standard, the choice of judges always makes the Booker “a bit of a toss-up”. Or indeed a punch-up. Inevitably, the literary human centipede continues to grow ever more legs as Philip Hensher, whose latest novel King of the Badgers didn’t make the longlist, this week took a sideswipe at the “atrociously bad” “faltering” thrillers written by Dame Stella Rimington, who is chairing the judges this year.

He also pointed out that four of the five judges have written thrillers, and about a third of the longlist could be considered thrillers. (Although only if by ‘thriller’ you mean ‘has a plot’ and takes place against a background of mild jeopardy.) The thrust of his complaint being that, like flying ants, thrillers seem to be everybloodywhere you look nowadays. He also took up the cause of science fiction. “The liveliness and extravagance of current genre writing in fantasy and science fiction, such as China Miéville’s remarkable novels,” he said, “make the field a much more plausible candidate for literary exaltation than the rule-bound thriller.”

Yes, but doesn’t China Miéville’s reputation rest on his earlier novels rather than his more recent output? From what I’ve read of Embassytown so far, it doesn’t seem any more remarkable than, say, most of Iain M. Banks ‘Culture’ novels.

Anyway, on the new-weird front, the judges may have found some gold in them there hills. According to one review, The Sisters Brothers “contains perhaps literature’s funniest overweight narrator on horseback,” which suggests Eli Sisters could be another Ignatius J Reilly – or (dare I say it?) another Vernon God Little. Could a Western win the Booker? Over one judge’s goddamn dead body I suspect. (Pistols at dawn, eh, Susan? Nice clue!)

The judges will announce the shortlist on September 6th, and choose their winner on October 18th, well after high noon.

As is now traditional, the Guardian are giving everyone that isn’t happy with the Man Booker longlist the chance to be unhappy all over again with their Not The Booker Prize. I nominated Chapman’s Odyssey, and I hope I won’t be the only one to vote for it, but I fear the rule changes this year will merely play into the hands of those authors with an ebullient online fanbase.

Finally you might like to know that BBC Radio 4 are serialising Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending next week. It’s the fourth of the longlisted titles to be broadcast so far this year – following Snowdrops, Pigeon English and Half Blood Blues – making Book at Bedtime the best predictor of this year’s longlist. Not that I am suggesting any of the judges may have listened to some of these books on the iPlayer rather than reading them. Who could even think such a thing?

These are the 13 titles in the running for the £50,000 prize:

Julian Barnes
The Sense of an Ending
(Jonathan Cape – Random House)

Sebastian Barry
On Canaan’s Side
(Faber)

Carol Birch
Jamrach’s Menagerie
(Canongate Books)

Patrick deWitt
The Sisters Brothers
(Granta)

Esi Edugyan
Half Blood Blues
(Serpent’s Tail – Profile)

Yvvette Edwards
A Cupboard Full of Coats
(Oneworld)

Alan Hollinghurst
The Stranger’s Child
(Picador – Pan Macmillan)

Stephen Kelman
Pigeon English
(Bloomsbury)

Patrick McGuinness
The Last Hundred Days
(Seren Books)

A.D. Miller
Snowdrops
(Atlantic)

Alison Pick
Far to Go
(Headline Review)

Jane Rogers
The Testament of Jessie Lamb
(Sandstone Press)

D.J. Taylor
Derby Day
(Chatto & Windus – Random House)

This year’s judges are chaired by Dame Stella Rimington,
former Director-General of MI5 and writer of spy thrillers.
Her co-judges are the politician and author Chris Mullin;
the writer and journalist Matthew d’Ancona;
Daily Telegraph’s Head of Books Gaby Wood
and author Susan Hill who, bravely, is on Twitter (@susanhillwriter).

I’m gobsmacked at the omission of Aravind Adiga and Edward St Aubyn,
and I will never forgive you for leaving Paul Bailey off the list, Susan!

]]> http://pjesbookerblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/2011-man-booker-prize-longlist/feed/ 0 PJE http://pjesbookerblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/pistols-at-dawn/ http://pjesbookerblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/pistols-at-dawn/#comments Mon, 25 Jul 2011 15:37:21 +0000 PJE http://pjesbookerblog.wordpress.com/?p=154 ]]> 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.“

Beryl Bainbridge won the Man (How Patronising Is This) Booker Best of Beryl Prize for Master Georgie and Philip Roth won the International Man Booker Prize, prompting Carmen Calil to quit as a judge after being outvoted 2-1 by the blokes on the panel (Dr. Rick Gekoski and Justin Cartwright). Calil felt that Roth “goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe“. I sort of agree (apart from the sitting on your face thing). Rightly or wrongly, probably wrongly, Roth is on my list of one-track-mind writers who only seem to write books about American-heterosexual-sex-obsessed-men-having-sex-and-mid-life-crises-and-more-sex. Then last year’s winner Howard Jacobson weighed in against the Roth-denier (with whom he has some less-than-happy history) using more of his brilliant satirical wit than was apparent in The Finkler Question, and suggesting a Carmen Callil “Is He Sitting on Your Face” Prize.

Elsewhere, Margaret Atwood’s Booker-winning novel The Blind Assassin became the first selection for an international book club on Twitter – a choice that wouldn’t impress another Booker-winner, VS Naipaul, who recently announced that he considered no female writer to be his equal. This provoked another Booker-winner, Keri Hulme, to call Naipaul a “misogynist prick”. “Many thousand women writers both outrank, and will out-survive, this slug,” she said. Hulme herself hasn’t published anything since winning the Booker in 1985 with The Bone People. She may still be waiting for us all to read it. Shame on us.

Sometimes though, when the judges and the winners queue up to shaft each other like this, I can’t help seeing the Booker Prize as a human centipede of controversy.

Meanwhile, The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht won the Orange Prize, offering the unlikely possibility of Tea winning the Orange and Coffee winning the Booker – should The Coffee Story by Peter Salmon triumph. I think that’s unlikely, but I wouldn’t bet against another feline winner. If we count Richard Parker in Life of Pi, tigers have won the Booker three times so far. This year’s tiger features in Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch which I would love to see on the longlist next month. Here’s one quick excerpt that made me laugh:

“Watney Street was all market. It smelled of rotten fruit and vegetables, strong fish, the two massive meat barrels that stood three doors down outside the butcher’s, dismembered heads of pigs sticking snout upwards out of the tops. Nowhere near as bad as Bermondsey, which smelled of shit.”

Which brings me to the important question round these parts: what are the contenders for this year’s Man Booker Prize? The early favourites included yet another feline title: Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, which is due in August, along with Dermot Healy’s first novel for over a decade, appropriately entitled Long Time, No See.

Personally I will be very disappointed if the book I have most loved so far this year – Chapman’s Odyssey by Paul Bailey – doesn’t make the longlist, although I fear it may be too delicate to withstand the rough and tumble of the jury room – or me jinxing it.

I also loved Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman – a must read for any cricket lover. It’s a very funny debut novel riffing on the whole history of cricket and Sri Lanka. It reminded me of Steve Toltz’s debut A Fraction of the Whole, which was shortlisted in 2008. Its chances may hinge on whether the judges love or loathe the game. I’m not sure that a reader with no interest in cricket will appreciate the innumerable references to past cricketers both real and delusive.

Currently there seems to be a bandwagon rolling behind The Stranger’s Child – Alan Hollinghurst’s first novel since he won with The Line of Beauty seven years ago. There was a similar buzz around David Mitchell last year, of course.

Then there’s another former winner, Graham Swift, who recently chose to promote his powerful new contemporary novel Wish You Were Here, by asserting that “there is no such thing as the contemporary novel” because of the time they take to write. I think that’s just semantics. As far as I am concerned, if it’s set within my lifetime it’s contemporary.

A fair chance then that there will be a second-time winner this year – although Susan Hill, one of this year’s judges, suggested on Twitter that she thought there ought to be a rule preventing authors from winning more than once. I disagree. The prize would be slowly devalued as, year by year, more writers became excluded. Imagine a year in which a number of previous winners publish excellent novels which are all ineligible – how would the judges’ choice of “best book” look then?

Anyway, I have collated a pretty big list of possible contenders for this year’s prize which you can peruse, and even vote for your favourites, here:

http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/9854

and I’m grateful to Susan for confirming on the Man Booker forum that about 65 titles on there are included on the list of more than 140 being read by the judges. A few more possible entries have been added since then, so it’s about half-right. Of course Booker judges usually surprise us, so – despite Susan’s comment on Twitter that the judges are “totally sick of reading bad novels” – I suspect that when they announce their longlist (on July 26th) they will have found a few more obscure gems to commend to us.

It may all be completely pointless though, since TV drama series have replaced novels “as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories” according to Sir Salman Rushdie. From which you may well surmise (correctly) that he has written a television series, and that watching DVD Box sets now counts as research…

Dame Stella Rimington, former Director-General of MI5 and writer of spy thrillers, will be in the chair. Her co-judges will be the politician and author Chris Mullin; writer and journalist Matthew d’Ancona; author Susan Hill; and the Daily Telegraph’s Head of Books Gaby Wood.

You might wonder whether Dame Stella is the first member of the security services to judge the prize. Obviously I could tell you, but then they might have to kill us…

The winner will be announced on Tuesday 18th October 2011 at London’s Guildhall.

He had never been shortlisted before, despite most of his previous ten novels being cited as possible Booker winners, and the announcement was clearly very popular with those in attendance at London’s Guildhall.

Former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion, who chaired the judges, described The Finkler Question as “a marvellous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize.”

His fellow judges were Rosie Blau (literary editor of the Financial Times); dancer, writer and broadcaster Deborah Bull (Creative Director of ROH2 at the Royal Opera House); the biographer and critic Frances Wilson; and broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe (presenter of Round Britain Quiz).

In a typically funny acceptance speech Jacobson, after listing the many previous years in which his acceptance speeches went unused, said: “Tonight, I forgive everyone – they were only doing their job those judges, every one of whose names I could reel off.”

I don’t think I can forgive BBC News 24 for the way they abandoned his speech though. They just *had* to cut to “extraordinary scenes” of the President of Chile giving a speech about the impending rescue of the trapped Chilean miners. The rescue operation will only take about two days, and therefore couldn’t possibly wait another five minutes. Sigh.

Ion Trewin, the literary director of the Man Booker Prizes, had described this year’s shortlist as “the funniest in the history of the prize” although The Finkler Question isn’t quite the first comic novel to win the prize, despite what everyone seems to think. Is DBC Pierre being airbrushed out of history now? Not to mention Kingsley Amis, Roddy Doyle and JG Farrell.

I’m delighted for Howard Jacobson, delighted that a comic novel has won a big award, and most of all delighted that a contemporary novel has won the Booker, which saves me a rant.

Howard Jacobson will be appearing at the Times Cheltenham Literary Festival on Saturday 16th, and speaking at the British Library on Thursday 21st October.