If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a terrific piece in Saturday’s Guardian Book Review in which forty Booker Prize judges look back on the controversies and compromises of their year as a judge. The headlines are predictable — Brendan Gill threatening to throw himself off a balcony in frustration, Saul Bellow making a lethargic pass at Antonia Fraser in a taxi cab, then promptly falling asleep (or pretending to) when she took too long to respond — but the real story they all tell is about the absurdity of a committee trying to pick the best novel off the year. As usual, James Wood puts it concisely:
[I]t 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. I remember that one of the judges phoned me and said, in effect: “I know that you especially like novel X, and you know that I especially like novel Y. It would be good if both those books got on to the shortlist, yes? So if you vote for my novel, I’ll vote for yours, OK?”
That is how our shortlist was patched together, and it is how our winner was chosen. It is how every shortlist is chosen, whether the premises are as explicit or not.
Ruth Rendell confesses to not having read every word of the 140 books under consideration that year (“I am a judicious skipper”), leaving one on a train in the hope that the passenger who found it would like it better than she did. Several judges note the idiocy of publishers, either as a general principle or for the specific idiocy of sending letters “supporting” books on their list which were full of spelling mistakes or ridiculous claims. Others confess that they ended their year on the prize panel disillusioned with the contemporary novel and more interested in reading nonfiction. Many grieve for the wonderful books that didn’t win, or even make the shortlist. The “Booker of Bookers” was announced this year — Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the public vote for the second time — but most of these judges have their own candidates for best book of the past forty years: the titles that come up most frequently are JG Farrell’s The Seige of Krishnapur (which won in 1973) and Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower (which failed even to make the shortlist in 1995). As ridiculous a process as it might be to choose a winner each year, the Booker does serve to bring books and writers to wider public attention, sometimes — ironically — by omission. I haven’t read Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, but now it’s next on my list.