It’s a glittering evening. The Royal Festival Hall, London, is about to announce the Oscars for literature, billed as the Booker of Bookers, the Golden Man Booker.
Outside the hall, in the midst of the Sunday evening crowds that throng the South Bank, is an elderly gentleman sitting alone on a stone bench wearing a shabby cream linen suit. There’s a faint whiff of the subcontinent about him, a residual mixture of rose-scented paan and aniseed that he has chewed earlier in the afternoon. He wears round wire-rimmed glasses. The last rays of the sun hit the glass-fronted panes of the city’s famous skyline. They bounce off the rotating London Eye. One ray stabs the slim figure of the old man.
“Tick Tock! Tick Tock!”
As he turns his head, I can clearly make out the date engraved on the surface of the opaque lens. August 15, 1947.
“Saleem Sinai, I presume? This is magical!” I stammer. “Magical Realism on the South Bank of London.”
Orphaned by time
There’s a roar of applause from behind us. The name “Ondaatje! Michael Ondaatje! Winner of the Booker of Booker 50 Golden Years award” echoes through the glass walls of the Festival Hall.
The warm evening air is saturated with the scent of candyfloss, popcorn and the sharper exhalations of body odours masked by deodorants and mouth fresheners. The South Bank crowd walks on stilts, turns somersaults, pauses to exchange passionate hugs,
and crams mouths with French fries, katti rolls, burgers and mayo-filled rolls of cheese and salami. They barely pause to glance at the figure of Saleem Sinai, a relic at 71, from another age.
When I turn to look at him again, Saleem Sinai has vanished. The hero of Midnight’s Children , which had created a storm when it won the Booker for its author Salman Rushdie in 1981, has been orphaned by time. Never mind that Midnight’s Children went on to win the Best Booker of 25 years in 1993. There were three well-known names in the chair at the time — Malcolm Bradbury, David Holloway and W.L. Webb. As Rushdie said on that occasion: “This is the greatest compliment I have ever been paid as a writer.”
Later still, as the Booker marked its 40th year as an arbiter of literary eminence, Midnight’s Children was again nominated to the top slot. This time the judges were Victoria Glendinning, biographer and novelist; Mariella Frostrup, writer-broadcaster; and John Mullan, professor of English, University College, London. Mullan was candid enough to say at the time: “The annual Booker winners weren’t necessarily the best novels published that year. One or two novelists won for novels that weren’t their best.”
Cinematic success
Anyone who has even glanced at the shortlist for this year’s glittering prize event will not just mutter “hear, hear”, they may want to shout it out from the rooftops. Despite the crowning of his 1992 Booker Prize winner The English Patient as the Golden Booker, Ondaatje was modest enough to admit that, “Anthony Minghella is no longer with us but I suspect he has something to do with the result of this vote.”
Ondaatje was probably not referring to divine intervention by Minghella, who has passed on, but to the cinematic success of the
A still from The English Patient
film made by him. With the exquisitely tormented Ralph Fiennes playing the wounded pilot, and luminous Juliette Binoche with her Slender loris eyes, the complex structure of Ondaatje’s novel — that posited questions about war, sacrifice, race and nationalism as highlighted by World War II playing out in the North African desert — became just another love story. It was, of course, the reason we loved it, maybe even the reason why reading Ondaatje all over again, against the scenes of doomed love throbbing in the desert sands of the Sahara, set our pulses racing.
Let us presume that the judges of the Golden Booker event are not to be faulted. There were five of them. They were allotted a decade each. They then decided on the best book from their given 10 years. So, we have Robert McCrum, the Observer ’s former literary editor, for the 1969-1979 decade. He chose V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State , the 1971 winner.
We shall leave this choice with the observation that the book is a piece of journalistic writing for which Naipaul is justly celebrated. But like the image of the poisonous snake entombed in a glass vial and spitting venom, which appears on the cover of his other book, Half a Life , this would fit Prof. Mullan’s category of “not one of his best.”
Poet Lemn Sissay was the judge for the decade starting 1980. He picked Moon Tiger , a splendidly recounted nostalgia piece set in Egypt, by Penelope Lively. It’s impossible to not love those English officers in their starched white uniforms going helplessly to seed while the mosquito coil whose name is celebrated in the book’s title slowly turns to ash.
The next decade (1990-1999) had Kamila Shamsie, novelist, choosing Ondaatje’s The English Patient , while the first decade of the millennium was represented by the excellent historical novel Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, picked by Simon Mayo, the broadcaster. The last decade starting 2010 had Hollie McNish, a poet, choosing the 2017 winner Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders.
By this time, the Booker had become the Man Booker award and included writers in English from across the Atlantic, that is,
North America. It is not an exaggeration to admit that reading Lincoln in the Bardo , Bardo being a Tibetan term for a realm between life and death, was a sore trial. It would have been preferable to swing with the devil than cohabit with Lincoln in Bardoland.
Given these choices, I can only imagine that when the list of five was thrown open to the public for a democratic vote, Ondaatje’s was glugged down with relief, no questions asked. Coca-Cola for the soul, rather than hemlock for good conscience, as even Plato might have said.
A bit of history
The curious aspect of this year’s award is that there was a moment in the past when Ondaatje’s name may not have made it to winner. That year, I recall that one of the judges had been curiously non-committal when I congratulated her on the choice of The English Patient . Lest you think otherwise, let it be said that like everyone else I too loved the hot sands and pale hands I held beneath the date palm trees. And still do.
This year, after the Golden Booker, I again messaged Harriet Harvey-Wood, among the judges the year The English Patient was nominated, to find out why she had been less than enthusiastic.
Her answer reveals that there were two winners that year — Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth. His Sacred Hunger is still one of the most searing accounts of the 18th century slave trade. Equally, it is an indictment of our own societies. Unsworth reminds us that if we deny people their rights on account of their ethnicity and perceived backwardness, we become no different from the slave traders. If the judges had chosen Ondaatje, they were duty-bound to include the co-winner of that year, Barry Unsworth, who died in 2012.
Arbiter of excellence?
“Yes, I was a judge in the year that Ondaatje was Bookered, and the short answer is that in reality he wasn’t,” says Harvey-Wood, head, Literature Department at British Council for 14 years, and well-known writer-academic.
“Our final (or what was intended to be the final) vote came out 3 to 2 in favour of Unsworth. This much distressed our Chairman, a strong Ondaatje supporter, who suggested that since the two top books were so close we should have another vote, taking second choices into consideration. We all agreed to that (on my part, I admit, somewhat reluctantly) and on that basis the two came even.
“The prize administrator, when consulted, said that there was no actual law against splitting the prize (it had been done once before), but that the Committee would not like it. So we did it, and he was right, the Committee disliked our verdict so much that they changed the rules at their next meeting to make splitting impossible in future.”
Harvey-Wood also underlines why the Booker Prize is so well regarded. “I still think that, of all our big literary prizes, the Booker is by far the best organised. All the judges read all the books, two or three times each in the case of those that get on to the long or short list; there is no preliminary weeding before the judges see them, as there is (or certainly was) with some of them, and marketing plays no part in the process: the smallest, poorest publisher has as good a chance of finding himself with a winner as the biggest, and there are strict rules on how many titles each may submit.”
The Washington Post has called the Booker Prize “the arbiter of supreme excellence”. Let us concede that maybe it is. For some of us, however, there will only be only one Saleem Sinai and the ringing clarity of his call to arms: “It is the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of multitudes, and to be unable to live and die in peace.” Not even the Golden Booker can hope to distil the nectar from that whirlpool of multitudes.
The Chennai-based writer is a critic and cultural commentator.
