Same again … repeated image of Eleanor Catton. Photograph: Maja Moritz/Corbis
I had an awkward moment during this year's deliberations over the Man Booker prize. We had just trudged through 151 novels (I actually read a few more than that – 183 in all to be precise – but that's a tale for a different time) and we began the process of re-reading the longlist. As I re-cracked a spine, like some kind of literary Bane, it struck me that I don't re-read that often. I re-read classics most: Scott and Dickens, Eliot and Woolf, Melville and Zola most often. I've read Ulysses more times than I can remember (but sometimes just sections), and Perec's Life: A User's Manual certainly more than thrice. But contemporary novels? It was an embarrassing blank. I've certainly read Midnight's Children more than once, and I've read Golding's Rites Of Passage and Byatt's Possession twice. Occasionally, with a cold, I've re-read The Mouse And His Child by Russell Hoban. I've dipped back into many books, from Finnegans Wake to The Recognitions by William Gaddis to Christine Brooke-Rose's Textermination. But actually re-reading? Less than a handful of modern novels.
The Man Booker judges are always in a strange situation, provided they do the work as assigned. We will have read the winner more frequently and more stringently than the so-called average reader. I should, for the record, say that no reader is average. Each has a unique engagement with a text, and every one of those responses is valid, if not right. But let's face it, not many of the slightly fictitious reading public are going to read any Man Booker winner three times.
When we came to re-re-read the shortlist, certain things became evident. A crime novel would have to be more than just a crime novel to survive the second "re". It might be impressive first time round, and the second time one could be impressed by the precision with which the solution had been placed and patterned. Third time? A comic novel will struggle too: is there any joke that's funny the third time you hear or read it? I loved Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, and have recommended it to many people, but haven't actually re-read it (even though bits of it, in memory alone, make me laugh).
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The Man Booker judges are always in a strange situation, provided they do the work as assigned. We will have read the winner more frequently and more stringently than the so-called average reader. I should, for the record, say that no reader is average. Each has a unique engagement with a text, and every one of those responses is valid, if not right. But let's face it, not many of the slightly fictitious reading public are going to read any Man Booker winner three times.
When we came to re-re-read the shortlist, certain things became evident. A crime novel would have to be more than just a crime novel to survive the second "re". It might be impressive first time round, and the second time one could be impressed by the precision with which the solution had been placed and patterned. Third time? A comic novel will struggle too: is there any joke that's funny the third time you hear or read it? I loved Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, and have recommended it to many people, but haven't actually re-read it (even though bits of it, in memory alone, make me laugh).
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