Man Booker judge Frances Wilson reveals what went on behind the scenes, and how the winner wasn’t even entered by his publisher.
By Frances Wilson
Forget reading for pleasure: reading is a high-risk activity, at least it is if you are doing it properly. This is what I learnt from the 139 books submitted for the Man Booker prize this year: good books take you to strange places. I opened each novel as I would enter a party, with the expectation of emerging either sated or frustrated but certainly changed. The title of Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room reflected the whole experience of judging the Man Booker: since Christmas, when the novels began to pile up like pillars in my tiny study, I found myself inhabiting, along with Sir Andrew Motion, Tom Sutcliffe Deborah Bull and Rosie Blau, a number of strange rooms, including, of course, the 11 sq ft space described by Emma Donoghue in Room.
For the past eight months the judges have met up with one another on a regular
basis. Our meetings, which were always witty and rewarding, were also a
reminder of the risk involved in reading. We did not always come back from
the same book having had the same experience; some journeys were better than
others. Strong books, like strong people, are divisive – a sentence that
moved one of us to tears would leave another dry-eyed, a character one of us
thought empty, another would find full – and we each fell for novels that
did not make the long list. I loved the eerie poise of Neel Mukherjee’s A
Life Apart; Tom Sutcliffe loved Joseph Connolly’s Ghostlight, Rosie Blau
championed Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, Deborah Bull adored Tom
Connolly’s The Spider Truces.
How did each book measure up to the next one? Was the book we were discussing,
in the words of Harold Bloom, the Simon Cowell of literary criticism, better
than, worse than, or equal to the one before? Once reading becomes a
competition between novels, each one takes on an energy of its own and we
watched as they not only destroyed one another but occasionally destroyed
themselves.
It became apparent that the best books have a will-to-power, and can elbow the
others out of the way by sheer aesthetic force. Never did we feel this
literary muscle more than in the appearance, at the eleventh hour, of Emma
Donoghue’s Room. Not formally submitted by her publisher, one of the Booker
committee was at a party where Room was being praised; the next day we all
took a look. Through sheer strangeness, both in language and imaginative
intensity, Room wrestled the competition out of the ring and placed itself
firmly on both the long- and the shortlists. My 12-year-old daughter, who
has read it five times, will never forgive me that it did not win; Room, she
says, is the most perfect realisation of what it is to feel safe and then
not safe.
Another novel we called in from its publisher, Bloomsbury, was the eventual
winner, Howard Jacobson’s wildly funny, desperately sad virtuoso
performance, The
Finkler Question. Here was a book, we all felt, which wore its
strength lightly, which had absorbed the very best of what has been thought
and said, while retaining a unique identity of its own. We soon found that
Jacobson, who uses language exactly, had also enriched our vocabularies: we
heard ourselves talking about “Finklers”, and it is a word that is clearly
here to stay.
In the final battle, where The Finkler Question was pitched against Peter
Carey’s epic Parrot and Olivier in America, we were struck not by the
differences between the two books, the first a historical novel set in
post–Revolutionary France and America, the second a contemporary tale of
London life, but their similarities. Each dealt with friendship and freedom,
the weight of the past, and the burden of the future. Each was magnificent,
but in putting us in a strange place and then daring us to laugh, we agreed
that Howard Jacobson had taken the greater risk.
No comments:
Post a Comment