The Man Booker Prize reminds us that fiction fosters an understanding of ourselves
Iris Murdoch: an incomparable
writer we should feel obliged to celebrate Photo:
Camera Press
The Telegraph - 12 Oct 2012
Let’s talk about the party conference season… no? Enough, already? OK. Let’s
talk about one of those gifts particular to the human mammal, one of our
attributes that makes you glad that you’re not, say, a cat, even when you’re
tired, and it’s early and still dark outside, and you have to leave the house
for work, while the cat gets to roll about on the bed for as long as she wants.
Let’s talk about novels.
The Man Booker Prize is announced next Tuesday. I pride myself that I do all
right on novel-reading, for a statistician anyway, so I looked up the shortlist
with anticipation. It turns out that the book I’ve most enjoyed this year, The
Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, was on last year’s longlist, while
another one I enjoyed, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending, actually won in
2011.
So much for being up to date. It pains me to admit that of the six books in
the running this year, I’ve read only one (Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies –
and I struggled with it) and have heard of only one other author, Will Self, who
is nominated for Umbrella.
But the Booker still pleases me. The mere fact of the prize legitimises
reflection on the words we’ve drunk in over the past 12 months (and reading
books on a Kindle means it becomes easier to keep track of what we’ve been
reading recently), and on why some of us need fiction.
Neither the quality of any particular shortlist, nor your exposure to it,
matters, so long as the event encourages people to read – what we might call the
“JK Rowling” defence for the prize; though in Miss Rowling’s case, all those
articles enthusing about the way in which Harry Potter encouraged boys to read
felt like damning with faint praise to me.
From this perspective – encouraging people to read – the Booker is an unalloyed success (compare with the Turner Prize: does its existence provoke you to visit the Tate? Me neither). The call to a book must work even at a subliminal level, hence the fact that I did, eventually, read the novel that won last year.
My favourite author won the Booker only once. Iris Murdoch took the award in 1978, for The Sea, The Sea, a novel – by definition, a fiction – in which the central character tells lies to himself about the nature of his love. (Murdoch also appears – in suitably spectral form – on the longlist of books from “The Missing Booker”, held in 2010 to make up for the fact that no prize was awarded in 1970.)
More at The Telegraph
From this perspective – encouraging people to read – the Booker is an unalloyed success (compare with the Turner Prize: does its existence provoke you to visit the Tate? Me neither). The call to a book must work even at a subliminal level, hence the fact that I did, eventually, read the novel that won last year.
My favourite author won the Booker only once. Iris Murdoch took the award in 1978, for The Sea, The Sea, a novel – by definition, a fiction – in which the central character tells lies to himself about the nature of his love. (Murdoch also appears – in suitably spectral form – on the longlist of books from “The Missing Booker”, held in 2010 to make up for the fact that no prize was awarded in 1970.)
More at The Telegraph
