Brit literary judges gone wild: the Man Booker edition

Although it apparently comes as a surprise to some sensitive souls in this country, British literary types tend to be fairly plain-spoken; no less so when they are sitting on an award jury. Almost two weeks to the day after 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize judge Victoria Glendinning complained in the Financial Times about “the muddy middle” of CanLit, a juror for another prominent literary prize has gone on record with his feelings about the books he read.

Micheal Prodger, the literary editor of the Sunday Telegraph, and a juror for this year’s Man Booker Prize, yesterday used his pulpit to opine that although this year’s Booker shortlist “has been widely received as the strongest for years,” there was no shortage of “competent and/or dull novels” that made him “begin to lose the will to live.”

Decrying what he sees as a tyranny of competence, Prodger says that the “endurance test” of reading as a Booker juror “prove[s] that some authors can genuinely write while others merely string words together”:

Partly, I suspect the omnipresence of the competent is the result of the numerous creative writing courses offered by universities. There is a quickly recognised type of novel that results: adequately written, with a workmanlike structure, a serviceable plot, and so on. What can’t be taught are daring and originality and it was the lack of these qualities that was too often immediately obvious. There is, after all, nothing more dispiriting than a mediocre literary novel.

Although there is a bit of hyperbole here, it is nonetheless interesting to observe a literary culture that allows vibrant critical discourse to flourish without inciting a backlash of bruised egos.

2009 Man Booker Prize longlist announced

The 13 longlisted titles for this year’s Man Booker Prize were announced today:

• The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
• Summertime by J.M. Coetzee
• The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
• How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall
• The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey
• Me Cheeta by James Lever
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
• The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
• Not Untrue & Not Unkind by Ed O’Loughlin
• Heliopolis by James Scudamore
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
• Love and Summer by William Trevor
• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

James Naughtie, chair of the judges, commented on the longlist:

The five Man Booker judges have settled on thirteen novels as the longlist for this year’s prize. We believe it to be one of the strongest lists in recent memory, with two former winners, four past-shortlisted writers, three first-time novelists and a span of styles and themes that make this an outstandingly rich fictional mix.

Gaiman to headline Luminato literary programming

The Toronto-based Luminato arts festival has announced its 2009 lineup, and fanboys the city over will be pleased to know that the theme for the literary programming is “fantasy, horror, and Gothic.” They’ll likely be even more pleased that fantasy icon Neil Gaiman is the headliner. He’ll be flying into town for a night billed as “An Evening With Neil Gaiman,” in which he’ll reveal some of the hidden corners of his “darkly fantastic imagination,” according to the Luminato press release.

Meanwhile, Globe and Mail scribe Russell Smith will host an event featuring three authors of psychological suspense: Patrick McGrath, who’ll kick off the Canadian launch of his latest novel, Trauma; Sarah Langan, winner of the 2007 Bram Stoker Award, who’ll read from her novel The Missing; and Quebec author Monique Proulx, who’ll read from her newest novel, Wildlives. Later in the fest will be “Gothic Toronto: Writing the City Macabre,” which will feature six writers – including Ann-Marie MacDonald and Andrew Pyper – concocting ghoulish tales set in Toronto.

There’ll be some non-fantasy-related programming, too: 2008 Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga will headline “World Voices in Fiction,” an evening with new or rising international literary stars. And Canadian children’s authors and illustrators will be feted at readings across the city in partnership with the Toronto Public Library.

For the full details, click here.

Man Booker also-ran Sebastian Barry “entitled to be disappointed” … says Booker juror

Horse-trading, you say? Compromise? The acceptable third choice? This would appear to be what adjudicating a major literary prize comes down to. Little more than a month after the Guardian published its exposé covering 40 years of Booker deliberations, Michael Portillo, the chair of this year’s five-member jury, explains on the Man Booker website that the eventual winner, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, was not a unanimous choice to take the prize.

Two other books appeared closer to certain jurors’ hearts, according to Portillo. Steve Toltz’s comic novel A Fraction of the Whole apparently split the jury along gender lines, with the men being moved to tears by one passage that was read aloud to them, while the women remained stoic. Portillo himself calls Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture “the most beautiful book” on the list, and calls it “a glorious piece of writing with not a word misplaced.” Why, then, did Barry not win? Portillo claims that there were concerns about the book’s plot.

The final decision saw the jury presenting a united front, but Portillo still seems to feel that Barry got the shaft:

The judges made it through without “blood on the floor” (to the media’s disappointment) but we were not unanimous, except in the sense that everyone accepted the choice once made. I am entirely happy with our decision, but Barry is entitled to be disappointed.

In the end, Portillo says that “Adiga won out too because his angle seemed so fresh.” Not everyone agrees with this assessment, however. Writing in the Telegraph, Sameer Rahim says the book “reads like the first draft of a Bollywood screenplay (no romance or songs sadly),” and blogger Nilanjana Roy takes issue with the freshness of Adiga’s novel, saying that “as anyone in India who reads widely enough knows, he’s not ‘the first to go where no other Indian author has gone before’ as reviews in the west have proclaimed.”

Bookmarks: awards, arts funding, and Boyden redux

• Telegraph columnist Sameer Rahim goes after the Man Booker winner: “The White Tiger reads like the first draft of a Bollywood screenplay (no romance or songs sadly).” Snap!
• Aleksander Hemon and Marilynne Robinson are among the National Book Award nominees in the U.S.
• Toronto Star columnist Brent Ledger celebrates Trinity College’s annual book sale.
• The election might be over, but don’t forget the arts (CBC Arts).
• Two weeks after CBC Arts profiled Joseph and Amanda Boyden, CBC News profiles … just Joseph.

Debut author wins Booker

In a surprise decision, the Man Booker jury chose yesterday to give this year’s £50,000 prize to a relative unknown, 33-year-old debut author Aravind Adiga. His novel, The White Tiger, is published in North America by Free Press/  Simon & Schuster, and it’s about a cocky young Indian man who rises from the slums of Bangalore to become a player in big business.

According to The Guardian:

Adiga … batted aside the claims of veteran writers on the shortlist such as Sebastian Barry and Amitav Ghosh.

He is only the fourth first time novelist to win the prize, after Keri Hulme in 1985, Arundhati Roy in 1997 and DBC Pierre in 2003 – and he is the second youngest after Ben Okri, who won in 1991 aged 32.

Michael Portillo, the chair of the judges, talked of a final panel meeting characterised by “passionate debate.” Adiga’s book won by a “sufficient,” but by no means unanimous, margin.

Backroom Booker stories

This came out a month back, but we’ll highlight it once more anyway in case anyone missed it. The Guardian has talked to one member of each Booker jury for the past 40 years, asking for the scoop on how each shortlist and winner was decided. It’s funny and fascinating reading, and since hell will freeze over before we see similar candour from Giller jurors, this will have to satisfy us here in Canada.

Quillblog’s favourite story is the one Ion Trewin tells about the 1974 prize. Juror Elizabeth Jane Howard pushed hard to get Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up onto the shortlist. Trewin and A.S. Byatt, the third juror, agreed, but with some misgivings, since Howard was in fact married to Amis. When it came time to pick the winner, Trewin writes, Howard “remained keen on Ending Up, but realising that neither Antonia nor I would countenance it winning, she concentrated on Stanley Middleton’s Holiday, a study of middle England that she saw as a ‘perfect miniature.’” (Holiday ended up tying for the win with Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist.)

If one overall theme emerges, it’s that few jurors’ minds are changed in the deliberations. As James Wood (1994) puts it:

But the absurdity of the process was soon apparent: it is almost impossible to persuade someone else of the quality or poverty of a selected novel (a useful lesson in the limits of literary criticism). In practice, judge A blathers on about his favourite novel for five minutes, and then judge B blathers on about her favourite novel for five minutes, and nothing changes: no one switches sides. That is when the horse-trading begins.

Hilary Mantel (1990) came out of her own experience equally skeptical:

I’m glad I was a Booker judge relatively early in my career. It stopped me thinking that literary prizes are about literary value. Even the most correct jury goes in for horse-trading and gamesmanship, and what emerges is a compromise.

2008 Man Booker Prize shortlist announced

The Booker Prize 2008 shortlisted novels have been announced:

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
• The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
• The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

John Sutherland of the Guardian writes that this year’s shortlist is “the least metropolitan, least up-to-the-minute, shortlist I can recall.”

Two first-time novelists, Aravind Adiga and Steve Toltz, survived the cut, while three-time Booker winner Salmaan Rushdie is absent from the list. Having heard the whispers that “‘Rushdie’s out’”, Sutherland comments:

But it does point to another black hole in the list. How many of these six names was the averagely literate novel reader aware of, before the longlist publication? This, one deduces, is a panel not afraid to throw big names overboard.

Other key words used to describe this list — “historical” and “page-turning” (not necessarily an oxymoron).

Man Booker 2008 longlist

The Man Booker Prize has released its longlist for 2008:

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
• Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
• The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
• From A to X by John Berger
• The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
• The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
• A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
• The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
• Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
• The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
• A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

No Canadians this year. And word has it that Rushdie has ordered vanity plates that read “MN BKR MN.”

Rushdie may put fatwa in the, er, crosshairs

From the BBC News site:

Sir Salman Rushdie says he may write a book about the fatwa imposed on him 20 years ago after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.

The author, who went into hiding for nine years, told BBC’s Newsnight he had found the experience “very difficult”.

“I guess there’s a story there,” he said. “Various people [are] encouraging me to tell it, and maybe I will.”

Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini imposed the fatwa over The Satanic Verses‘ reference to the prophet Mohammad.

Some possible titles for the book:

• Fatwa This
• Leaving the Safe House
• Death Proof
• That’s SIR Infidel
• Missed Me, Missed Me
• Jesus Wasn’t So Hot, Either
• Mullahs are Nothing, It’s the Reviews That Really Hurt