St Aubyn turns his 'restless wit' to a gorgeously vicious dissection of the judging of a book award
Edward St Aubyn: his 'ear for fakery never falters'. Photograph: Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images
In an interview with the Guardian in 2011, when Edward St Aubyn was, unaccountably, not longlisted for the Booker for his brilliant novel At Last – the last of his Melrose books – he said: "I'm not going to spend a lot of time thinking about a prize I can't win. The Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the world heavyweight championship which I'm not going to win either. It is irrelevant. What I have to do is start writing a new novel." He presumably did not know his new novel would be doing what he claimed to have no time for – thinking about a version of the Booker prize. And the irony is St Aubyn has the discernment of a born critic. His intricate satire, written with restless wit, overrides fiction, holding what passes for literature up to the light.
The "Elysian prize" is funded by an agricultural company that specialises in "radical herbicides and pesticides" which one idly supposes might come in handy. The judges are Malcolm Craig MP, bored backbencher, Jo Cross, a bulldozer of a journalist who writes a column complaining about her family; Vanessa Shaw, an Oxford academic who, when not marking Tennyson essays, oversees a druggy son and anorexic daughter (anorexia is a subject on which St Aubyn writes with such insight it sits queerly in this satire). We observe Vanessa with amusement, in her college rooms, puzzling over a sub-Irvine Welsh effort: "wot u starin at".
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The "Elysian prize" is funded by an agricultural company that specialises in "radical herbicides and pesticides" which one idly supposes might come in handy. The judges are Malcolm Craig MP, bored backbencher, Jo Cross, a bulldozer of a journalist who writes a column complaining about her family; Vanessa Shaw, an Oxford academic who, when not marking Tennyson essays, oversees a druggy son and anorexic daughter (anorexia is a subject on which St Aubyn writes with such insight it sits queerly in this satire). We observe Vanessa with amusement, in her college rooms, puzzling over a sub-Irvine Welsh effort: "wot u starin at".More
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