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Peter Stothard's blog on the Booker
Too many reviewers adopt a reverential tone for books that barely deserve a
review, let alone recommendation, the chairman of the 2007 Man Booker Prize
said last night.
Sir Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics, used last
night’s awards ceremony as a platform to mount the attack on the art of book
reviewing before announcing that Anne Enright had won this year’s £50,000
award for her novel The Gathering.
Enright, 45, a little-known Irish author who began her career as a television
producer, was considered the rank outsider but she saw off competition from
the two favourites, Ian McEwan, for On Chesil Beach, and Lloyd Jones, for
Mister Pip, as well as the other outsiders, Nicola Barker, Moshin Hamid and
Indra Sinha.
She won for The Gathering, her fourth novel, a bleak story of a dysfunctional
Irish family.
Sir Howard Davies described it as “a powerful, uncomfortable and even, at
times, angry book . . . an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough
and striking language”.
That a relatively unknown author won this year’s Man Booker Prize added
strength to his argument that novelists who reviewed books by established
authors often went overboard in their praise . He said: “I think a little
more distance, and critical scepticism, is required by our reviewers,
together with greater readiness to notice new names.”
He stopped short of accusing authors of back-scratching, though he said he was
well aware that such practices went on, and he called for “more diversity in
the sort of people who review novels”.
He was speaking at Guildhall in the City of London, where he said the five
relatively unknown shortlisted authors, and McEwan, had been whittled down
from 110 entries spanning more than 35,000 pages. He told The Times that too
many reviewers praised “every effort” by established writers while ignoring
the newer talents.
The latest books by Jeanette Winterson, Ben Okri and J. M. Coetzee received
glowing reviews even though the works did not live up to their previous
writings. “There appear to be some novels where people leave their critical
faculties at home. They decide ‘so and so is a great novelist’ or ‘an
up-and-coming novelist’, and give them the reverential treatment,” he said.
Recalling reviews for Jeanette
Winterson’s The Stone Gods, he said: “Jeanette Winterson’s book is
an odd book, unlike anything she’s written before and, in my view, doesn’t
come off. Yet it was treated with absolute kid gloves by pretty well
everybody.”
Too many critics, he said, shied away from real criticism. “The only way you
can detect that the reviewer doesn’t like the book is when they spend the
whole time simply describing the plot. They’re not brave enough to say, ‘It
doesn’t work’. [They] are tolerant of untidy novels. They don’t care whether
they’re readable or not.”
He added: “Novels are not academic works where you need to know everything
about George IV to review the latest biography. Greater diversity would be
better.”
He added that a number of commentators had been gracious enough to say that
the judges had drawn their attention to worthwhile books that might
otherwise have passed them by: “We did not deliberately set out to exclude
established writers. Indeed we perhaps slightly surprised ourselves by our
choices. But we simply did not think that those books we excluded were as
well crafted, as engaging, or as inspiring as the novels we chose.”
And quoting from Wyndham Lewis’s attack on indulgent critics in Men without
Art in 1936, he suggested that this had perhaps always been the case: “A
hundred books of fiction every month are referred to by eminent critics in
language of such superlative praise that, were it the work of Dante that was
in question, it would be adequate, though a little fulsome.” He added: “Many
reviews this year, which I looked at after my reading, were not a good guide
to the quality of the books on offer.” He was also disparaging of the “sins
of omission”, noting that one of the authors shortlisted by Man Booker was
completely ignored by the national press.
Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People — “a powerful imaginative creation”, he said —
was reviewed only in the New Statesman when it was published. After its Man
Booker recognition, the newspapers caught up and gave it good reviews.
Sir Howard’s criticisms followed a meeting lasting 2½hours, in which the
judges — Wendy Cope, the poet; Giles Foden, who wrote the Bafta
award-winning The Last King of Scotland; Ruth Scurr, the biographer and
critic; and Imogen Stubbs, the actress — made their choice.
Erica Wagner, The Times’s literary editor, said: “One has to be careful in
calling a very sophisticated book old-fashioned but, with its focus on a
large story and what happens in the minutiae of people’s lives, I imagine
[The Gathering is] a book that — once people find it — will speak to people
clearly, however different their situation might be.”
Collecting the prize, Enright thanked “the love of her life, Martin Murphy”,
and their “two fantastic children”, as well as her parents, her siblings,
her agent and her publisher. She also singled out her friend, the author
Colm Tóibín, “who always told me my ship would come in”.
Sir Howard vs the critics
The Stone Gods Jeanette Winterson
What
The Times said: “It places narrative endeavour at the heart
of personal identity: through telling stories of who we are, where we came
from and how our world evolved, we reinvent that world and constantly
refashion it. Change the shape and format of the story – unravel alternative
threads of our storytelling inheritance – and a whole new world is born . .
. It is impossible to read this novel without being at least subconsciously
aware of the metaphor of life as a journey” Matthew Dennison
What Sir Howard said: “Jeanette Winterson’s book is an odd book, unlike
anything she’s written before, and, in my view, doesn’t come off. Yet it was
treated with absolute kid gloves by pretty well everybody”
Starbook Ben Okri
What
The Observer said: Okri’s first novel in five years stands in
the grand tradition of myth-making exemplified in One Hundred Years of
Solitude and Midnight’s Children, although the book has a vision and voice
uniquely its own . . . Ben Brown
What Sir Howard said: “Ben Okri’s [latest book] is again experimental.
Why shouldn’t a novelist with his reputation experiment? But critics should
be prepared to say, ‘This has just not worked’. It’s more or less
unreadable, but you would never catch that from the reviews because of the
status that Okri has achieved”
Diary of a Bad Year J. M. Coetzee
What
The Times Literary Supplement said: “ Diary of a Bad Year
proves that Coetzee remains the master of the brutal, the unpoetic, the
relentlessly real, in the modern sense, unfailingly setting up an equation
between the form of the prose itself and the desolation of the experience it
describes . . . Coetzee has always been able to work against the limitations
of spareness by developing the other dimension of language, its
suggestiveness. In its deployment of characters who have a rich significance
beyond their individual function, its wry exploration of the failures of
reciprocity between the self and the other, and its examination of
philosophies of community, atonement and sacrifice, this generic crossbreed
stands up well next to his previous books” Elizabeth Lowry
What Sir Howard said: “There was a lengthy review in The Times Literary
Supplement of the latest Coetzee, which is a strange novel. I’m an absolute
nut about Coetzee, but this is a strange construct which I don’t think comes
off as a novel. Yet it was treated with exaggerated deference by many
reviewers, perhaps most notably in The TLS”
