Booker Prize must prove it hasn't lost the plot

At last, the judges can pick a popular winner, says Michael Prodger writing in the Telegraph.

The Man Booker Prize is 40 years old on Tuesday, and this year’s judges have a venerable tradition to uphold: picking the wrong winner. The past few years in particular have made this as much a duty as a choice. In 2005, the announcement that John Banville's The Sea had won ahead of Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith was met with bemusement.

In 2006, Kiran Desai's loweringly worthy The Inheritance of Loss was unfathomably given the nod over Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, and last year Anne Enright's stygian The Gathering beat Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach.

While there is no such thing as objective judgment, both hindsight and the mood at the time suggest that the judges got it wrong. Perhaps at those awards dinners I was seated at particularly cynical tables, but the response to the announcement of the winners seemed spot on.

Banville's name produced exclamations of "What?", Desai induced eye-rolling, and Enright, once the whoops of the Irish contingent died down, elicited a muted groan.

This doesn’t mean that these novels haven’t gone on to garner a huge readership but that is almost inevitable: if you are looking for an officially sanctioned novel, the Booker imprimatur is the equivalent of a royal warrant. The prize, however, is not about sales – at least in theory; it is supposed to identify the best British, Irish or Commonwealth novel of the year – not the most eye-catching, not the most popular, and not the worthiest. The winner, therefore, should stand the test of time.

Of course, truly memorable books don’t come along every year, but even in good years the judges have a knack for the worst selection. In 1984, for instance, they plumped for Anita Brookner’s miniaturist Hotel du Lac rather than Julian Barnes’s ambitious Flaubert’s Parrot or J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. Martin Amis’s Money and Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory weren’t even on the shortlist.

The following year, when Keri Hulme won with The Bone People – a novel few people read at the time and even fewer since – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Brian Moore’s Black Robe and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit didn’t make the shortlist. And so on.

Other aberrations include ever-the-bridesmaid writers (Beryl Bainbridge, shortlisted five times); the lack of a genre novelist winner (no John le Carré on any shortlist); and split decisions (1992’s prize, awarded jointly to Barry Unsworth’s laudable Sacred Hunger and Michael Ondaatje’s overblown The English Patient).

Then there are the cases of right novelist, wrong book. Having previously been shortlisted for Perfect Strangers and Black Dogs, Ian McEwan won in 1998 with his skit Amsterdam; Penelope Fitzgerald won in 1979 with Offshore, but not for the superior The Blue Flower; Pat Barker picked up the prize for The Ghost Road, the last and most tired episode of her First World War trilogy, but not for the first in the series, Regeneration. Meanwhile, some substantial novelists – Martin Amis with one nomination and Howard Jacobson with none – have just been cold-shouldered.

Why is the judging process so hit and miss? Tibor Fischer, a judge in 2004 and a shortlisted novelist in 1993, points to the calibre of the panel: "While I was impressed by the conscientiousness of my fellow judges, I wonder if that’s the case every year."
Miriam Gross, a judge in 1998, put it a different way: "Some judges simply don’t have very good judgment."
Indeed, she wonders whether "it might be better to have one judge". This would do away with the horse-trading that is the main reason for compromise books winning ahead of better ones.
Victoria Glendinning, who helped sift the 39 previous prize winners for this year’s Best of the Booker shortlist, agrees that compromise is the main culprit: "Novels with strong support can quickly cancel each other out."
Read the full story at the Telegraph online.