With more than 140,000 votes cast, the BBC’s quest to find the nation’s best-loved novel has reached its final chapter. After an initial round of voting in April, the top 100 were announced in May. On October 18, the first of a nine-programme series will count down from numbers 100 to 22, before revealing the top 21 in random order. Each of the subsequent seven programmes will focus on three of the 21 books, all of them defended, Great Britons-style, by a celebrity advocate. Voting begins when the first programme finishes and ends after the last one has been screened. The winner will be announced in the final programme in December. Here, Clive Anderson, the host and chairman of the series, decodes for us the make-up of the top 100.
I was initially pleased to see a good balance of books in the list. There are some old classics and some more immediately fashionable ones. I sound like an advertising executive, but there is something here for everyone. Having said that, I can think of several books that I would like to be in there that aren’t. I’m not giving very much away by saying that there’s a Dickens in the top 21, but it’s not my favourite, which is Bleak House. Vanity Fair hasn’t made it to the top 100, but maybe it isn’t loved in that sense. Nor have Three Men in a Boat or Trainspotting, a big, successful book that is also a very enjoyable read.
Other strange omissions are Arthur Conan Doyle and P. G. Wodehouse, both of whom have entire societies dedicated to them. Fashions operate surprisingly strongly in something as erudite as reading: 20 or 30 years ago, Graham Greene was the epitome of the leading novelist, and he doesn’t feature at all in this poll. Nor are there many novels by contemporary authors such as John Grisham, Tom Clancey and Stephen King. Some of the time it’s for technical reasons: for people who have written lots of bestsellers, the votes are spread out. To use Jane Austen again as a neutral example, she wrote six or seven very well-loved books. If she had lived for another 20 years and written another ten, then maybe her votes would have been diluted.
Overall it’s mostly British books in the top 100, so I suppose it’s possible that we’re a bit inward-looking in our reading habits. Television and film adaptations have also had an influence. The only novel by Evelyn Waugh on the list is Brideshead Revisited, which was a very big television series, but a lot of people who like Waugh prefer his earlier, more comically satirical, novels such as Decline and Fall and Scoop.
There are a lot of fantasy authors, too: J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, Terry Pratchett. I don’t want to stereotype anybody, but the people who like those types of books tend to like them a lot and are highly motivated to vote, whereas someone who likes an agreeable read such as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin wouldn’t have that sort of passion. It’s the same as any voting system: there are people who will get up on a rainy day and vote for their candidate and there are people who don’t care. But they have applied a neat little rule that says an author is allowed only one novel in the final top 21, so it won’t be five Harry Potters against two Tolkiens.
It’s only when we get to a more narrow discussion, as we will with the final 21, that people really refine their views. You might decide that something written by Salman Rushdie is a great book, but you’re not going to put it as your best-loved book; you’re going to vote for a Jane Austen that you’ve read 20 times and you know you could read again if you were stuck on a desert island. Or you might think: “I haven’t read a few of these, so maybe I’ll go away and read them to see why they’re there.”
That’s not to say that they should hand out medals for worthiness; The Big Read is just a way of attracting an audience to a reasonably challenging subject by making it accessible. There are a lot of list programmes around at the moment (see box); there is a tendency that, once a format has been successful on television, it’s repeated. But if you had called Great Britons “The Documentary Strand with Somebody from History”, nobody would have watched it. You wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to watch Restoration, a programme about falling-down buildings, except for the fact that you could vote, and one building gets saved.
The series won’t save any books, except one or two from obscurity I suppose, but it must encourage somebody to read some. And, with luck, people will have learnt something: an expert might have mentioned about how the Brontës were all sitting round writing great novels in different corners of a room. This, I think, is the theory of education: if there’s something fun and interesting, you learn it anyway.
The Big Read, Saturday, BBC Two, 9.05pm.
Viewers can vote in four different ways: by calling 0901-522 9000 (calls cost 15p); by speed-texting 86200 (text the title of the chosen novel — calls cost 12p); at www.bbc.co.uk/bigread (the web vote will close before the other voting mechanisms); and through interactive TV by pressing the red button on your remote control
Next page: we quiz some of the children's and fantasy book writers on the list
()Just kidding?
Many of the books on the list are either fantasy, or for children. Why? We quizzed some of their writers.
PHILIP PULLMAN
Nominated for His Dark Materials
“Well, it’s flattering, but it would be a mistake to let it turn one’s head. If I could look 100 years into the future and find His Dark Materials still on a list of favourite books, that would be something to feel pleased about.
“I gather that some commentators are upset about some of the titles in the top 100. What they have overlooked is that the public weren’t asked to choose the best books, simply the ones they liked most.”
MICHELLE MAGORIAN
Nominated for Goodnight Mister Tom
“I was gobsmacked to find out I was on the list — you’ve got Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and then me. I think authors such as J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman have made a huge difference to the perception of children’s books. When I started there was this attitude of ‘now are you going to write a “proper” book?’”
NEIL GAIMAN
Nominated for Good Omens
“It proves the wisdom of co-writing books with Terry Pratchett! Good Omens is a peculiarly loved book -— copies arrive at signings held together with duck tape or moist from being read in the bath. It’s interesting: fantasy is only a small part of what I read, but when I think of the books I go back to again and again, they would be Diana Wynne Jones’s Archer’s Goon, or Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist.”
JACQUELINE WILSON
Nominated for Double Act, The Story of Tracy Beaker and Vicky Angel
“I think my books are little reads rather than big reads, but I am absolutely thrilled that they are included.”
