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Storm over the Man Booker Prize

Hasan Suroor

The history of the Booker Prize is full of bad choices.

BRITAIN'S MOST prestigious and keenly-awaited annual literary event, the £50,000 Man Booker Prize, is in disgrace after a rank outsider, who had been written off by critics and bookies alike, walked away with it this week plunging the literary world into a collective fit of anger.

John Banville, the Irish writer who won the award for his melancholy novel The Sea, is not exactly a marquee name even in Britain let alone the rest of the English-speaking world whose literature the Man Booker Prize is meant to recognise.

Critics were surprised that Mr. Banville was chosen over such strong contenders as Julian Barnes and Kazuo Ishiguro both whom had been the critics and bookmakers' favourites.

There was a sense that he had been rewarded for simply having "hung around too long," as he himself candidly put it in his acceptance speech.

Shock to winner

Indeed, Mr. Banville looked — and sounded — surprised when he was declared the winner at a glittering ceremony in London's Guildhall on Monday night— and addressing an equally surprised gathering he admitted that it had come as a "shock" to him.

Recalling that he had been shortlisted once before, 16 years ago, Mr. Banville suggested that sheer persistence appeared to have paid off.

"I do say to my colleagues, just hang around, it will come. I hung around for many years and it did come," he told the defeated contenders.

Within minutes of the announcement, the word was out that Mr. Banville had not been the unanimous choice of the judges, and had won on the strength of the casting vote of the chairman John Sutherland, a feisty literary figure, who back in 1999 was at the centre of a huge row over accusations that he had leaked secret details of that year's judging process and "distorted" the views of fellow judges.

Prof. Sutherland admitted that the choice of Mr. Banville was "by no means a decision by acclamation," and that the judges were so deeply divided that the "discussion could have gone on for three days."

Apparently until the last minute, there was no unanimity and Prof. Sutherland then reportedly exercised his prerogative as the chairman and ruled in favour of Mr. Banville by giving him his casting vote. He said it had been an "extraordinarily closely contested last round" and any of the six books on the shortlist could have won.

"No one would have been dissatisfied had any of the books won," Prof. Sutherland said prompting critics to ask: "Why then Banville, the least impressive of the lot?"

Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of The Independent and a former Booker judge, described it as "possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest." In a year when the shortlist was "packed with a plenitude of riches and delights" the choice of Mr. Banville was "nothing less than a disaster" for the reputation of the Man Booker Prize.

Another novelist and former Booker Judge, Toby Fischer, said Mr. Banville was an intelligent and gifted writer, but The Sea was not Booker stuff and its selection "won't do the Man Booker's reputation much good."

"I reviewed The Sea three months ago, and I'm afraid I can't remember anything about it, apart from the fact that it was set by the sea and that I was impressed by the vocabulary ... I certainly haven't read all the submissions for this Booker, but for my money Julian Barnes has produced the best read of the year as a novel (I read it three months ago and remember rather a lot)," Mr. Fischer wrote in The Guardian.

The Times' literary editor, Erica Wagner, was equally sceptical calling Mr. Banville's book "not the best of the novels on this shortlist" even though "elegantly written." In a swipe at the judges, she said that having sat on many juries herself she knew "how prizes sometimes get awarded."

Some believe that the fuss is, in fact, an indirect attack on Prof. Sutherland who is not the most popular of figures in London's literary circles. Critics such as Mr. Tonkin (he has clashed with the professor publicly on many occasions) had been waiting for him to make a mistake and this was their chance to get at him.

Yet, the fact remains that Prof. Sutherland and his fellow judges have made a bad choice but then the history of the Booker Prize is full of bad choices. There was a time — in the early years of the Prize — when the more obtuse and inaccessible a book the greater were said to be its chances of winning.

The Sea, hailed by Prof. Sutherland as a "masterly study of grief, memory and love," is the story of an art historian overwhelmed by memories when he returns to his seaside home after the death of his wife from cancer. The other five books on the shortlist were: Julian Barnes's Arthur & George; Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go; Zadie Smith's On Beauty; Ali Smith's The Accidental; and Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way.

Ironically, barring a mild flutter over the exclusion of Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan from the shortlist, it had been the quietest ever run-up to the prize this year. But just when it seemed that fun had started to go out of the Booker, Sutherland and company put the fizz back into it.

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