Tonight:
5°c
Today the Man Booker shortlist is announced once again. How much respect should we pay it? A lot, a little or none at all?
At the weekend, there was ever such a useful article that could help answer that question. A judge from each of the past 40 years of the Booker Prize looked back on the experience from a safe distance. And many of the more candid freely admitted the whole thing had been a frightful bodge.
“A dispiriting experience,” said one. “The judging process was pretty much a waste of time,” owned another. “How very arbitrary it seems, in retrospect,” was the general gist. Versions of the word “compromise” appeared repeatedly. To his credit, one judge, Anthony Quinn, put it more bluntly: “We chose the wrong book” (Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss won in 2006, instead of Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk).
There was another matter on which these assembled judges agreed, interestingly. The best book not even to have been shortlisted for the prize remains Penelope Fitzgerald's lovely novel about the German poet Novalis, The Blue Flower. “I hope the judges for 1995 are blushing now to be reminded of their grotesque oversight,” Paul Bailey said.
Fitzgerald could hardly have slipped anonymously through the net, having been previously shortlisted three times and having won the prize in 1979 for a lesser book, Offshore (one of these judges now explained that result frankly too: “We'd spent the entire afternoon at loggerheads, and in the end compromised by giving the prize to everybody's second choice”). But her last novel, now widely acknowledged to be her masterpiece, was ignored.
The reviewers that year did not make that mistake. More chose The Blue Flower as their book of the year than any other title. In due course, The Blue Flower went on to win the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize in the US, beating such competition as DeLillo's Underworld and Roth's American Pastoral.
So how come the Booker judges got it so wrong? The truth is that The Blue Flower requires too much thought, perhaps. Fitzgerald admitted she deliberately left a lot out of her novels, thinking it an insult to the reader to explain everything. Therefore, quite a lot needs to happen in the reader's mind, between the words on the page. Not a cunning plan with the average panel of hard-pressed judges.
Not that Fitzgerald would have been surprised. She was a Booker judge twice herself and she found the second stint, after she had turned 80, tough-going. In her recently published Letters, she tells an old friend: “I drop off to sleep almost immediately when I start to read them — it's becoming an automatic reaction.”
Now there's a Booker judge really telling it like it is.
