OVER THE YEARS, I had rather lost interest in the Booker Prize. During the 1980s I watched the prize-giving on the BBC, and most years I would read the winning novel. But both experiences were increasingly disappointing: the coverage of the event itself got bitchier and bitchier, with a panel of TV pundits criticising each of the shortlisted books in turn, while the winning book seldom gave lasting satisfaction.
I was then a university lecturer, and was fond of remarking what an impoverished period for the novel we were living in, and how badly the esteemed novelists (and Booker winners) of our time — Kingsley Amis, Murdoch, Atwood — compared with their counterparts from, say, the 1920s: Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Forster.
Since then, though I have sometimes read (and usually been disappointed by) the Booker winner, I have seldom watched the TV coverage, which now resembles a literary Oscars night, with various author-celebrities in attendance. So when I came to be asked “if I might consent to becoming a Man Booker judge for the 2005 competition” you can imagine my response. I was delighted.
There was more than a little sour grapes in my response to the annual prize-giving, and my underlying attitude was simple: if somebody has to do the judging, why can’t it be me? Surely, if one could participate in the process, we might be able to choose books better than the eminently forgettable Vernon God Little (winner in 2003) or the frankly bad Amsterdam (winner in 2001)? Something distinguished.
From the beginning, I was clear about my criteria. I was looking for a book that would repay sustained attention, that was worth reading for the quality of the prose itself, that took tenacious hold of one’s imagination. I was hoping to find something that would still be admired in 2075: a book worthy of the honorific description “literature”, rather than just another good novel.
I read 109 books, and got a lot of pleasure from many of them. But it wasn’t until I read Sebastian Barry’s A Long, Long Way — about halfway through the pile of submissions — that I had a eureka moment, for this account of an ordinary Irishman serving in the trenches in the First World War is a harrowing, yet surprisingly affirming novel, lyrically memorable. A similarly acute experience was soon provided by John Banville’s The Sea, a first-person narration in the tradition of Nabokov and Beckett, a sustained meditation on loss, memory and the nature of the self. It was one of the few submitted novels worth reading for the quality of the prose itself, which both demanded and repaid re-reading, spreading out in implication and richness the more one contemplated it. By the time of our final meeting, I had read it five times, and enjoyed it more (and understood it better) each time I revisited it.
I had a satisfying shortlist meeting — all of my choices getting through the process — but it was clear that not all of the judges shared my admiration for, particularly, the Banville. And I found it hard to share the intense enthusiasm for Zadie Smith’s campus novel, On Beauty, which is funny, engaging, and smart, but without abiding distinction. There was strong feeling, too, for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a haunting story of cloned children, destined to be used for organ transplants but brought up (farmed?) in a humane, free-range environment. Ali Smith’s The Accidental is numinously memorable, and has an intensely likeable and irritating 12-year-old character, though I am still unsure, after three readings, quite what happens at the end, and why. The clear bookie’s favourite, and a novel admired by all of the judges, Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George, is an elegant resurrection of the story of an appalling miscarriage of justice put right through the intervention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I enjoyed it, without ever becoming convinced, quite, that the story on which it was based was sufficiently complex, morally and psychologically, to sustain a long novel.
The five judges left the shortlist meeting with each of us supporting a different book. “What fun!” as my fellow judge Josephine Hart was fond of saying.
The process of making the final decision, so often embattled in Booker history, couldn’t have been more respectful, though the discussions and disagreements were passionately expressed. In the end it came down to a debate between The Sea and Never Let Me Go, and we made the right choice. The Sea was the best book of the year. It is not going to be the most popular, and after the award was presented I was immediately bearded by an irate bookseller from one of the big chains, who told me that it was a “disgraceful” decision, and that The Sea would be impossible to sell. I don’t know if that is true, and I don’t care. Banville has written a complex, deeply textured book, with wonderful, sinuous and sensuous prose. You can smell and feel and see his world with extraordinary clarity. It is a work of art, in the tradition of high modernism, and I’ll bet it will still be read and admired in 75 years.
Might I offer a single piece of advice to those who read The Sea and find it difficult, or uncongenial? Read it again, slowly and carefully. If you still don’t like it, fine, that’s a matter of taste. But it seems to me impossible that you could deny its distinction.
The experience of being a judge has been immensely enjoyable, utterly memorable, and we have been lucky enough to come up with a terrific winner. It’s rather restored my faith in the Man Booker Prize.
