Wednesday, October 15, 2014

As Man Booker Prize day dawns, anything is possible

The great thing about a literary prize is not who wins, but that there is so much to admire

A breeze blowing through the art of writing: Joshua Ferris, short-listed for 'To Rise Again at a Decent Hour'
A breeze blowing through the art of writing: Joshua Ferris, short-listed for 'To Rise Again at a Decent Hour' Photo: Rex Features
The winner of the Man Booker Prize will be announced at 10pm tonight. It’s supposed to be the moment we’ve all been waiting for. But why? Winning is, on the whole, quite boring. I suppose it’s nice for the winner – though even that is questionable, since a few recent Booker Prize winners have accepted the award by saying something along the lines of “about time” – suggesting a public flowering of stubbornness and resentment rather than a triumph.

For anyone interested in reading novels, a single winner is an inevitable anticlimax, a reduction of choice to one. After I helped to judge the Man Booker in 2011, I received a confusing number of emails pronouncing the shortlist to have been “wrong” but the winner to have been “right”. I don’t particularly wish to stir up memories of that list, which comprised some very good books and was much-maligned. We were all certainly very proud of the winner, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. But the notion of right and wrong in this context is just odd. If there’s one bad thing about prizes, it’s that they invite such un-nuanced declarations. 
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