1991

 

Someone recommended that I have a look at the first chapter of Malcolm Bradbury’s Doctor Criminale. Just as promised, it’s a pretty funny parody of the Booker award ceremony, and a real slap at blue-rinse female novelists. Published in 1992, it’s hard not to think Bradbury is pointing at the 1990 ceremony, the year A. S. Byatt won and Beryl Bainbridge and Penelope Fitzgerald were short-listed. Bradbury makes it very clear that the press and readers really don’t care about the short-listed books. It’s all about winning.

 

I didn’t read beyond the book’s first chapter but it’s obvious the book was going to be another literary-theory academic-conference novel. Why is that such a big tradition in UK novels? Or am I just missing it in Canadian and American novels? Can you name some? I asked my Booker readers and they came up with a few:

 

Robertson Davies—The Rebel Angels

Carol Shields—Swann

David Arnason’s—King Jerry

Lynn Coady—Mean Boy

Earle Birney—Down the Long Table

 

Not a long list.

 

Speaking of my Booker readers, I got complaints about my 1990 report. Imagine! Complaints. Honestly, what a tough group. What annoyed my gentle readers was my soft touch with Possession. I didn’t think I was that kind, but here’s another stab…

 

Possession is one of the most self-indulgent novels I’ve read during this exercise, and at 20+ years into the Bookers I have quite a few under my belt. It’s showy in the worst way. I don’t believe the novel would have been published in any other country than the academia-obsessed UK. Offered to a Canadian or USAmerican publisher a good editor would have insisted on a major rewrite. Possession is a glaring example of a writer’s and publisher’s abuse of a big name in favour of quality literature.

 

***

 

The following is from my 1985 report:

 

In a recent chat with Patrick Crean, Publisher and Editor Thomas Allen Publishers, we talked about the current messy state of publishing in Canada. Patrick says that Canada is one of the most difficult book markets in the world. The country is large, the population by comparison is small and there is just no economy of scale. Patrick believes that:

• There are too many books being published. He was recently on the CC jury for publisher book grants and suggests we could afford to lose half the existing book publishers without any huge loss to the industry. Karl Sielger at Talonbooks agrees.
• There’s too much emphasis on growing talent and not enough effort made to connect books to readers! The monies poured into grants to emerging writers and publishers who publish them are creating mediocrity. We have more talent than we know what to do with and not enough people wanting to read the books.
• The sales and marketing departments in the big houses want to cherry pick,* which results in lists with no personality. Patrick says he has never seen a time in publishing with so much risk aversion. He believes the corporate nature that has taken over is destroying book publishing.

 

Rolf Maurer of New Star Press sent the following response:

Patrick claims that Canada is one of the most “difficult” book markets in the world. I don’t know what he means by this: that it’s one of the most competitive?

 

Canada is, in fact, one of the most desirable places on earth to publish. It’s one of the richest countries in the world. A very high percentage of the population has a post-secondary education. We have, relatively speaking, a lot of leisure time, and per capita we buy, and maybe read, a lot of books. What’s not to like about that? Everybody in New York, London, and Paris knows this, which is the only reason we are blessed with their presence.

 

Canada’s population is small in relation to the US, to Russia, to China, to India, to Indonesia; but it’s not particularly small compared to the other 150+ nations on the planet. And did I mention that it’s a relatively wealthy 34 million people we have here?

 

Canada is large if you count the entire landmass. But it’s a moderate-sized country, if you think of it as being 3,000 miles wide and 200 miles high. And within that belt it’s not particularly sparsely populated either.

 

Much is made of the supposed difficulty of distribution in Canada, as if it really is a problem that it takes 4 to 6 days for a parcel to get from Vancouver to Toronto—or, maybe it’s the other way round, Toronto to Vancouver—that’s the problem? About a week, either way. The size of the country doesn’t seem to be a problem for Amazon.

 

Patrick, and Karl, and seemingly just about every other member of the book trade seem to think “there are too many books”. Never mind the fact that there have *always* been too many books. Let’s re-pose this question a couple of different ways. (a) Compared to what? (b) If we’re publishing the wrong number of books, what’s the right number?

 

In 2004, the Literary Press Group attempted to raise some consciousness around this issue (an attempt that seems to have been abandoned). At the time, Stats Can kept comparative statistics about book publishing activity around the globe, and from them we were able to find out how many books are published in a given country for every 100,000 people in the population. Out of 62 countries where data about this was available — and, for this reason, the sample was skewed towards wealthier western countries — Canada ranked 19th. This was ALL titles, regardless of nationality of author: the Raincoast editions of Harry Potter counted, for the purpose of this survey, as Canadian-published books. Canada was tied for 58th in the world in terms of the percentage of books defined as literary out of the total number published. (Presumably, the “too many books” is primarily about literary publishing: poetry, fiction, short stories, that sort of thing.)

 

The study publishing in 2004 relied on 1994-96 stats, which has to be kept in mind. Whatever the situation is now, there’s certainly no evidence that in the mid-1990s Canada was anything like awash in books, not compared to the rest of the world, anyway. There is no reason to believe that the increase in book publication in Canada since 1994-96 has outstripped that in the rest of the world.

 

If there *is* a problem, what’s more likely the cause: the Penguin / HarperCollins  / Random House-Doubleday / et al., and their ten- twenty-fold increase in title output over the last generation, or the smaller domestic houses, which might have doubled their output? Funny, but when Patrick and Karl or whoever goes on about the “too many publishers” problem, why do I get the feeling that it’s presses like New Star, publishing exactly the same number of books as we did in 1990, that are the superfluous presses?

 

Let’s dwell for a moment on this question of “too many books”. Patrick thinks there are too many books, and Karl seems to agree. Maybe you do too. Likely, in fact. It sometimes seems that way to me. Let’s say that we all agree there are too many books: 6 billion people on the planet all agreeing on the same thing. Trouble is, there is no agreement on which are the superfluous books. Chicken Soup For The Timid Publisher’s Soul? i bleev iv ritn ths n bfor, by bill bissett? The thing is that when you aggregate all those individual too-many-books notions into something approximating a global market snapshot, you get the opposite result: the market says there are not enough books.

 

Everybody in the book trade knows this, or ought to. Average sales per title have been in steady decline for decades. That’s why most publishers increase their title output every year: otherwise, their sales would go down. Do you think these companies are run by idiots? I don’t. In fact, if I had the capital, I would be increasing New Star’s title output by two-, or five-, or tenfold too. Because that’s what the market is in fact demanding: more books, not fewer of them.

 

Not sure why Patrick would complain about government money to develop new literary talent. Somebody has to. It’s a well-known fact that the branch plants, and the quasi-branch plants, the Thos. Allens which rely on the sale of Chicken Soup For the Soul series to keep the lights on, almost never develop new talent and are the ones cherry-picking from the presses that take the trouble to do so. Patrick is a good one to talk — Fawcett’s Virtual Clearcut, for instance, began life as a New Star title. Atwood and Ondaatje were initially published by Anansi, not by a foreign branch plant. Liz Hay was originally published by Mosaic and Thistledown, not by Random House-M&S. David Bergen, same thing: Turnstone. Etc., etc., etc., etc. There are a few exceptions, but that’s what they are.

 

And isn’t it the publisher’s job to promote the writer anyway? If a publisher like Thos. Allen isn’t spending enough to persuade people to read Virtual Clearcut, why is that the Canada Council’s fault?

 

In his third point, Patrick is talking about his own employer, and their ilk. I presume he realizes this. There is nothing risk-averse about anything I do, or that my colleagues in the LPG do.

 

With Rolf’s permission I sent his rebuttal out to a few Booker report readers and received the following from Gordon Lockheed:

While I generally agree with the points Mr. Crean makes about the state of Canadian publishing, I have some disagreement with Rolf Maurer’s rebuttal, which at several points seems at odds with the specifics of bookselling in 2010, and at one or two other junctures, little more than wishful thinking. For both publishers, there’s an 800-pound gorilla in the room that they’re not willing to talk about directly. It is Chapters/Indigo, which currently holds roughly 70 percent of the Canadian retail book trade. Its trade practices, which include charging publishers for prominently displaying their books, large initial book orders coupled with equally large and quick returns, capricious and often messy book return procedures, have bankrupted at least one major Canadian publisher, and has made life miserable for nearly all the others for almost a decade now. Its sheer size has decimated the independent bookselling sector in Canada, and has changed the way that books are sold in this country, the kinds of books that get published, and even the way that books are valued by the reading public. No country in the world has this degree of market concentration in bookselling and while it has made the proprietor of Chapters/Indigo, Heather Reisman, famous and even more wealthy, it’s hard to find any other positives.

But neither Crean or Maurer can talk about the 800-pound gorilla, and neither can any other publisher without risking a blacklist by the notoriously vindictive Reisman and/or the three or four risk-averse marketing graduates who now control, in a de facto sense, not just what books get presented to readers in Canada, but also what Canadian publishers bring into the book market: if they can’t get Reisman’s buyers to carry their titles, their books aren’t going to get to readers. This situation has given an ostensible advantage to the country’s larger publishers, simply because they can afford the large print runs a single buyer demands, and they can afford the unconscionable fees Chapters/Indigo charges for prominently displaying a book.

The virtual monopoly that Chapters/Indigo enjoys has enabled it to secure a number of competitive advantages that regularly endanger the large publishers, and have created a bizarre kind of merchandising monoculture that has sharply curtailed their publishing options. One advantage Chapters/Indigo has is a discount level that exceeds the one given to independent booksellers, and that has reduced the profit margins of all publishers. But a much more telling advantage for Chapters/Indigo was negotiated during the liquidity crisis that ensued during Indigo’s takeover of Chapters earlier in the decade, which allowed it 110 days to pay for books instead of 30 days. Under these terms, Chapters/Indigo was permitted to return books before it was obliged to pay the publishers for them, resulting in a situation in which virtually all the books in Chapters/Indigo being there on consignment, and paid for only after they’re sold. Chapters/Indigo manipulated this advantage mercilessly, frequently returning books that haven’t sold within the first 60-90 days, and often more swiftly than that. That particular advantage has lapsed, but its spirit remains.

To be sure, Canada is a lovely country, but it is country in which its indigenous literary culture lives under permanent threat. We are, along with Australia, a small player in the world’s largest and most dominant language group, and we are working in an increasingly deregulated international market system where the larger players constantly attempt to destroy the smaller players by dumping in their market below cost. Maurer would be better to see cultural publishing within the WalMart model, in which the U.S. is Walmart. That tilted playing field is why a cultural exemption was negotiated in the Canada/U.S and North American Free Trade Agreements, and it is why various subsidies have been granted Canadian book publishers and writers for the last 40 years. If those subsidies weren’t in place, we would have no book publishing industry in Canada, and he knows this. We would have a few book distributors wholesaling books written by American and British authors, and the few Canadians who escaped the local wasteland.

I’m not sure why Maurer ignores the reality of Canada’s geographical distances, and its culturally dispersed populations. He must be fully aware that the cost of shipping has quadrupled in the last 20 years, and that a package of books sent from Vancouver costs notably more if is going to Newfoundland or Toronto from Vancouver than if it’s being shipped up to the Chapters Store in, say, Kamloops. The postal subsidy Canadian publishers once enjoyed has been removed, and it now costs nearly the equivalent of the cost of the book to ship it across the country. This is particularly damaging to smaller publishers, since the per-unit cost of shipping small quantities is vastly more expensive than it is to ship 50 or 500.

Maurer’s argument that Canada is “not particularly awash in books” and that it is middle-of-the-pack in relative terms with respect to the number of book titles published per capita is similarly specious. That he counts, somewhat vaguely, Canada’s position as somewhere in the “low 20s” of 31 countries surveyed when it comes to books authored (or was it published?) by Canadian nationals ignores the statistical nuances that need to be established before we start high-fiving one another. We don’t know what the per capita gap is between the top ten and the bottom ten we’re in, for one, and we have no idea what kinds of books we’re talking about (Harlequin Books is a Canadian publisher) or whether we’re talking about large percentages of our current sales having been written by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Similarly, his argument that we’ve overproduced for years is specious in that it ignores the fact that the Canadian book market was much more complex and profitable 15-20 years ago than it is now, before Chapters/Indigo and its marketing graduates gained a near-monopoly and a built-in censoring apparatus. And, anyway, if someone has been, say, shooting themselves in the foot monthly for 30 years, it doesn’t follow that continuing to do it is a good idea, even if the shooter has become desensitized to the pain.

When Maurer acknowledges that “average sales per title have been in steady decline for decades,” and suggest that this is “why most publishers increase their title output every year: otherwise, their sales would go down” he’s ignoring the fact that there are now actually fewer titles in print than in 1975 in the English language. This is because of tax law changes, which tax publishers on their backlist, and that, along with Chapters/Indigo’s merchandising strategy of holding progressively fewer titles in backlist has book publishers manufacturing books the same way Maple Leaf foods manufactures those stale-dating cello-packs of pressed ham: More books, smaller print runs, shorter in-print duration. For the larger publishers, the prize culture that is the primary means of merchandising books has made publishing formally unorthodox books virtually suicidal. If Maurer can find a way to put a positive spin on any of this, good luck. His plan of going with the flow and producing more titles in smaller volumes falls apart when it arrives at the 70 percent of titles being bought by the buyers at Chapters Indigo. The chain has sharply reduced the number of titles they carry in the last decade, and most small press titles these days are simply being turned away.  Maybe these extra titles he’s talking about are going to be cunning disguised as candles or CDs of children’s inspiration music, because that’ll be his best shot at getting them into Chapters/Indigo.

Finally, Maurer’s argument that Thomas Allen & Sons, Crean and the other large publishers are cherry picking their talent from small publishers like New Star isn’t nearly as cut-and-dried as he makes it out to be. Crean and Thomas Allen in particular have an unusually good record of publishing writers off the street, despite the risk. And when Maurer cites Brian Fawcett’s Virtual Clearcut as his example of how large publishers steal books from smaller ones, he’s putting his foot in one he created himself. Fawcett informs me that indeed the book started out as a project for Terry Glavin’s Transmontanus imprint, which New Star publishes, and was meant to be an environmental expose on the 53,000 hectare Bowron Clearcut in Northern B.C.. But when the book began to morph into something well beyond Transmontanus’s 100 or so page limit, Rolf admitted that he couldn’t handle it, and Fawcett took the book to Crean, who did have the resources to develop it fully—and then lost a pile of money on it because it was too unconventional. It’s also worth noting that Fawcett continues to publish with both New Star and Thomas Allen, and that he has done this for 20 years.  This sort of situation is far more common than Maurer cares to admit.     

You can begin to see how complicated the world of Canadian publishing has become.

***

Jury: Jeremy Treglown—“Much of Jeremy Treglown’s work has been linked by a biographically-based concern with the relations between social history and literary high culture, especially in the twentieth century, including the practicalities of authorship and the nature of the ‘literary establishment’” In the 1980s he was editor of Times Literary Supplement. Penelope Fitzgerald, novelist. Jonathan Keates, biographer, novelist and critic. Nicholas Mosley, novelist and whiner, see below. Ann Schlee, author of that whimpy book short-listed in 1981.

 

Martin Amis—Time’s Arrow VPL

The bookjacket blurb says, “Tod T. Friendly, now living in a peaceful American suburb, is a doctor who once worked in the medical section at Auschwitz. Narrating Dr. Friendly’s story is one of the strangest and most original creations of modern literature: a doppelganger imprisoned within Dr. Friendly, sharing his every sensory impression, a separate consciousness that is literally living the doctor’s life moment by inverted moment, backward from death to birth.”

The backward aspect upsets conventions and expectations:

The women at the crisis centers and the refuges are all hiding from their redeemers. The crisis center is not called a crisis center for nothing. If you want a crisis, just check in. The welts, the abrasions and the black eyes get starker, more livid, until it is time for the women to return, in an ecstasy of distress, to the men who will suddenly heal them.

Or:

Never watching where they are going, the people move through something prearranged, armed with lies. They’re always looking forward to going places they’ve just come back from, or regretting doing things they haven’t yet done. They say hello when they mean goodbye.

Think about the implications for eating and defecating. Or the Holocaust. The doctors at Auschwitz bring people back to life, connect them with family, provide clothing. The Nazis find them homes. And so on.

Category: Smart Novel. Well-written and probably fun to write because of the backwardness. It forces the reader to work since the first-person narrator doppelganger is completely reliable but also totally unaware of world events since they haven’t happened yet. So, the reader is forced to think, for sure. But in the end, it seems rather facile.

Martin Amis—Reading Turgenev VPL

Guest report from George Stanley:

Mary Louise Quarry, née Dallon, is discovered in the first chapter of William Trevor’s short novel Reading Turgenev at breakfast in some kind of institution. She is ‘not yet fifty-seven.’

 

In chapter two, she is twenty-one, a farmer’s daughter in rural Ireland. She marries Elmer Quarry, a small businessman who owns a ‘drapery’ in a village sixty miles from Wexford. Elmer is thirty-five, living with his two older unmarried sisters. The year is 1955, and the drapery business, which Elmer’s father and grandfather ran before him, is in decline. All these people are Protestants.

 

Protestantism in Ireland, apart from Ulster, has been in decline since the late nineteenth century. Like W. B. Yeats’ ‘romantic Ireland,’ it’s nearly ‘dead and gone.’ The old ascendancy has been supplanted: ‘All over the county wealth had passed into the hands of a new Catholic middle class, changing the nature of provincial life as it did so.’

 

But neither commercial nor confessional decline much affects the composure of the Quarry household: ‘Why should the status quo in the house above the shop, and in the shop itself, be disturbed? Quarry’s would sustain the three of them during their lifetime, withering, then dying, with the Protestants of the neighbourhood.’ But Elmer disrupts this idyll by marrying — he wants a son.

 

Mary Louise’s reason for marrying Elmer? To get away from the farm. ‘I wanted to be in the town.’

 

The novel’s crisis arrives early. It’s a matter of what doesn’t happen rather than what does. Mary Louise’s girlish figure never swells with pregnancy. ‘[W]omen would glance down her body, the movement of their eyes briefly halting when it reached her stomach, then swiftly retracted. She knew what was in their minds.’

 

Back at the farm, Mary Louise’s parents ‘wondered more often why they were not yet grandparents.’ And the reader wonders too. The reader, I think, suspects (correctly, as it happens) impotence on Elmer’s part, particularly since Mary Louise confides in her young cousin Robert that her husband had passed out drunk on his wedding night, and that the marriage was ‘unconsummated.’ But the townspeople tend to blame Mary Louise’s ‘seemingly barren state.’

 

This cousin, Robert, is the catalyst of the novel, a delicate invalid whom Mary Louise went to school with but has not seen since childhood (somewhat implausible, since he only lives a few miles away). Cycling one day about the countryside, Mary Louise comes unexpectedly upon the gate to her Aunt Emmeline’s house, is invited in, and meets Robert again. Or rather, she is spiritually and emotionally reunited with him, since it turns out (each admits) they were in love at age ten, and are of course still in love. They meet for romantic rendezvous in a nearby abandoned graveyard (Protestant of course) and Robert reads to Mary Louise from the novels of Ivan Turgenev. ‘She believed she had never listened to a voice as beautiful. Delight caressed each word he uttered, gentleness or vigour matched phrase and sentence. If all he’d read was a timetable she would have been entranced.’

 

But Robert does not have long to live, and indeed Trevor kills him off so abruptly that the reader wonders if he has read the sentence right: ‘He put his arm around his cousin’s waist [he is dreaming] and as they walked on the strand they talked about his father. In that moment Robert died.’

 

After Robert’s death Mary Louise mainly lives in a fantasy world. She dips into the Russian novels ‘opening the books at random.’ All that is real to her is the memory of Robert and his beautiful voice. She becomes increasingly distracted, neglectful of household duties, and unavailable, particularly to Elmer’s sisters, who now blame her too for her husband’s immoderate drinking. So off they go to visit Mary Louise’s parents, and everyone agrees (the parents more unwillingly than the sisters) that if would be better if Mary Louise were sent to ‘an asylum for women who were mentally distressed.’

 

But now we learn (flash forward) that in 1991, the institution where Mary Louise is to be confined will close, and those residents who still have family living will be returned ‘to the community.’ ‘The community’s where you came from,’ one resident explains. At this point the novel looks fearfully in two directions: towards the asylum, and to what will happen when Mary Louise is let out. I think I’ll stop recounting the plot at this point.

 

Mary Louise’s marriage may not have been consummated, but William Trevor is a consummate storyteller. The reader hardly notices he is an ‘omniscient narrator,’ so unobtrusively does he move from mind to mind. As from Mary Louise to Robert, at the graveyard:

 

‘”He has begun to drink,’ she said. “And I deceive him after only two years by coming here on Sundays.”

 

“But I’m your cousin, Mary Louise. Doesn’t he know you come here?”

 

“Nobody knows.” He imagined her in the house, the spinster sisters resenting her presence, hating her even . . .’

 

Trevor creates characters whose sensibilities are made up of recollections, expectations, and especially, dreams:

 

“Toward dawn, Mrs. Dallon slept. She dreamed, but afterwards remembered nothing, aware only vaguely that Mary Louise, as a baby and a child and a bride, had passed from her waking consciousness into a muddle of fantasy.’

 

The narrative is marked by precise Chekhovian detail. Elmer’s sister Rose and Mary Louise’s mother are observing Mary Louise ride away on her bicycle: ‘She still held the edge of a curtain between her fingers, and Mrs. Dallon approached the window to see for herself.’

 

A thoroughly absorbing tale, the realism of the human situation conveying a sense of sociological accuracy as well. Mary Louise reflects on leaving the institution: ‘You pick and choose among the dead, the living are thrust upon you’ . I don’t see her as being “mentally ill,” just a person who made different choices of what to think about.

 

In many regards I agree with George’s read of the novel, though I didn’t like it as much as George. In part it’s probably the project and not enough variety in my reading (Back in the good old days, before the Booker project, I would have 4 or 5 books on the go at any one time. A history. A biography. Novel. Short story collection. Etc.) I found much of the book to be Stage Irish; the town and its inhabitants are claustrophobic, and I didn’t see much “choice” available to Many Louise or any of the other women. What interested me was how Trevor managed to create a tale that is both horrifying and sentimental. “People think the worst of you.”

Rohinton Mistry—Such a Long Journey VPL

I don’t understand the fuss about this novel. It won the 1991 GG in Canada, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award as well as being short-listed for the Booker. To me it seems a pretty straight-forward narrative Victorian-type novel. Political information is provided in lengthy and sometimes trudging paragraphs, a device often poorly used in historical novels. When Leon Rooke was on Canada Reads as a panelist while many of the other jurors said they looked for a good story that was accessible Leon said he looked for “technical wizardry.” There’s none of that in this novel. As if modernism never happened.

“His words were cold fingers tracing shivering lines down Gustad’s spine.”

“His style is precise, deceptively simple. It’s writing in which the author doesn’t seem to want to call attention to the writing itself,” says editor Ellen Seligman. “The writing is there to serve the story and the characters, so it always reflects those two things.” Yes, Mistry is interested in story and characters not in language. But I don’t think it’s deceptively simple in the way, for example, of Al Purdy’s poetry. This prose really is simple. Any complexity is in the plot and characters, and I wasn’t terribly persuaded in those areas, either.

The Plot? It’s 1971. Prime Minister Indira Ghandi controls a corrupt government with an iron fist. Gustad Noble is a bank clerk who finds himself caught up in a political scandal while he watches his family and neighbourhood fall apart. Gustad is a Parsi and the novel dabbles in explaining the Caste system along with politics, different religious beliefs, hangover from colonial rule and the usual things to be expected. And I guess that is the heart of my problem. It’s all so expected, the complexities don’t go much beneath the skin and there is a heavy-handedness to the symbolism. Partly it might be the nostalgia that we so often see in writers in exile.

But I did learn a new word—Indo-nostalgia.

Roddy Doyle—The Van UBC. The novel is available at VPL in a collection with 2 other Doyle novels. But there were 3 other requests in front of me, each able to keep the book for 3 weeks which would really throw off my reading schedule so I got it from UBC. But that’s a first, a waiting list for a Booker short-listed book.

This is the final novel in the Barrytown trilogy, set in Dublin. Jimmy Sr. and Bimbo, both on the dole, buy a chip wagon. And that’s about it. We see some strain of the unemployed. Doyle makes much of the camaraderie among men, who only want to share a few pints and tell stories. But this is mostly stage-Irishmen. A nice little story, told in a straight-ahead fashion, working hard to capture the authentic speech of Barrytown. For the most part the characters are oblivious to the rest of the world, though there is an occasional toss-off line; “Saddam Hussein was still acting the prick over Iraq.” Funny if not profound.

Timothy Mo—The Redundancy of Courage UBC

If you believe in the common creative writing adage to “show, don’t tell” then this novel scores badly. Adolph Ng, the first-person narrator, tells us about the politics of a nation in crisis, the fictional Danu, which we are to understand is East Timor. The bad and obvious title sets the tone for the novel. Mostly it’s like reading a history book; this happened, then this happened. The first-person narrative makes the point of view limited and, for me, monotonous. This may be a brilliant novel, as many claim, but it didn’t work for me. I read 120 pages, scanned a bit or the rest, then packed it in.

“During that first week we kept our heads down. In the first forty-eight hours you hardly dared breathe. There was a curfew. Redundant regulation! No one wanted to be about after sundown. But no one! The Danuese scampered indoors, like Transylvanians in a Dracula movie. At 8 p.m., midnight, and 4 a.m. malai patrols would move through the town, kicking store doors (long since looted) and smashing with their rifle-butts any windows through which the merest chick of light might show. Food fuel, and news were in short supply. Of work—unpaid—there was no scarcity. All the fires, except the one at the oil tanks, had gone out, but rubble and splinters infested the roads and town, worse than the time of the IP coup. On the third day there was an explosion in the park near the Marconi Centre. Idiots that we were, we all came rushing out, having learned nothing from experience. Curiosity was stronger than fear. The malais came rushing, too. It was an unexploded shell which one of the labourers had hit with a pick. Fortunately, no soldiers were killed, only two Danuese. They’d have put a few of us against the wall, otherwise.”

Ben Okri—The Famished Road UBC WINNER

Category: African magic realism, kind of. Our narrator, Azaro, is a spirit child who keeps being born to the same mother but quickly returns to the spirit world, to keep away from the pain and suffering of this world. But he has decided to stay on earth after this birth, for the sake of his mother. The novel is also a complex metaphor of Africa, specifically Nigeria, on the cusp of independence.

I was captured by the first 50 pages or so, the complex multi-layering of mysticism, black magic, Christianity, goddesses, superstitions, myths, as Azaro is pulled back and forth from world to world, as the spirit world seeks to have him return and honour his oath to them. “Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer” but the book provides none of those, merely insisting instead that there is always more than the eye can see. Everywhere is menace. Like the Rushdie novel, I wasn’t familiar with the myths and stories and the novel didn’t enlighten me—though unlike Rushdie, Okri doesn’t seem intent on blasphemy.

The novel captures the bustle of poverty, the hand-to-mouth existence, bad food, disease, bad water and no sanitation, with the occasional celebration for which you pay and pay, for long after. After 50 pages or so, after Azaro’s celebration of his return to life, my interest lagged. The writing just isn’t very interesting. And the numerous split infinities were irritating.

Again, like Rushdie, repetition of the same characters in the same situations is part of Okri’s method. By page 100 I knew the next 400 pages would be more of the same. It really is more about atmosphere than plot, or even character. “Mesmerized by the cobalt shadows, the paradoxical ultramarine air, and the silver glances of the dead, I listened to the hard images of joy.”

One thing that did interest me is the large context that Okri creates for the present situation of Nigeria. He does not take the familiar post-colonial approach—translation, bad white guys. Rather, he points to larger and deeper patterns:

All around us voices were raised in laughter and in pain. We passed a patch of bushes behind which resonated the singing and the dancing of the new church. They sang with a frightening vigour, with terrifying hope, great need, great sorrow. They made me feel that any minute the world would end. The signing from the church made me afraid of life. We passed them and could hear them long afterwards. Further on, behind a grove of trees, the earth throbbed with more chanting, dancing, singing. But this was different. The chanting was deeper, the dancing more virile, making the earth itself acknowledge the beating on its doors, and the singing was full of secrets and dread-making voices. They sounded like the celebration of an old pain, an ancient suffering that has refused to leave, an old affliction renewed at night. They were the worshippers at the shrine of suffering and we listened to their cries for the secrets of transforming anguish into power. We could hear the incantations, the money-creating howls, the invoked names of destiny-altering deities, gods of vengeance, gods of wealth, womb-opening gods. They too made me afraid of life. They too had come from the hunger, the wretchedness, of our condition…

I could feel the intense gaze of an ancient mother who had been turned into wood. She knew who I was. Her eyes were pitiless in their scrutiny. She knew my destiny in advance. She sat in her cobwebbed niche, a mighty stature in mahogany, powerful with the aroma of fertility. Her large breasts exuded a shameless libidinous potency. A saffron-coloured cloth had been worn round her gentle pregnancy. Behind her dark glasses, she seemed to regard everything with equal serenity. She gave off an air of contradictory dreams. I was mesmerized by the musk of her half-divinity.

It could have been done in 250 rather than 500 pages.

It’s strange to me that Okri is hailed as “one of Africa’s greatest writers”. He wasn’t born in Africa, and was educated and spent most of his life in England. But that’s about PR, I guess.

1991 Nicholas Mosley from The Guardian

I was asked to be a judge probably because I had just won the Whitbread the previous year. This had itself been a surprise, because it seemed I was out of favour with the literary establishment, having been labelled a “novelist of ideas” while what was in favour was “style”. And style seemed most easily to be exhibited in stories that were outlandish, or grim, or quaint. I looked forward to judging the Booker because I thought I might give a boost to “ideas”. There were five judges, and we had to choose six books out of 100 for the shortlist. I thought – well, surely, with this set-up I’ll be able to squeeze in one choice of mine. But, in the event, I got none of my choices on to the list, because of the inflexibility of the voting system and of the other four judges, who were devotees of “style”. So I resigned, partly in a huff, but also because I thought that by so doing I might still be able to strike a blow for “ideas”, as I might be asked to explain myself in the press – which I did.

The winner chosen by the remaining judges was Ben Okri’s The Famished Road – a beautifully written (yes) story of a boy in a west African village who goes to and fro between his family and the local witchdoctor. My choice would have been Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Father, which confronted the issue of what was possible or impossible if the child of a notorious ex-Nazi and the child of a Jewish victim fell in love after the second world war. What could be forgiven, and by whom, and what could not. But these are controversial questions, and thus conventionally to be avoided.

 

Martyn Goff, long-time administrator of the National Book Trust and The Booker says, “Over the years one of the things I’ve learnt to understand is that the chemistry of the personalities of the judges is more important than anyone believes. People don’t understand when I say to them how could they have chosen this or that because x actually couldn’t stand y and it was y who wanted such and such a book. They don’t realize that as the judging goes on they develop interpersonal relations which can just as well be interpersonal dislike—Nicholas Mosley and Jeremy Treglown for instance in 1991 couldn’t stand each other and this led to Nicholas walking out.”

 

Am I correct that the administrator of the Booker is publicly declaring the decision is based more on the personalities of the jurors than the quality of the books?

 

6549 w. October 25, 2011

1990

1990

 

I bought a bunch of Booker nominated books for a recent trip so I wouldn’t be hauling library books. The other day I took a bunch of them to a used book store, along with some other things George is thinning from his library. They didn’t want any of them. The owner explained that just because a book is nominated for the Booker Prize,  or wins, doesn’t mean that once the dust settles anyone wants to read it.

 

***

 

How much does it cost to administer prizes, and are the costs any of our business? It’s always interesting to know how these budget items line up, money to writers versus the expenses involved to run the award. As noted previously in the James English book, sometimes the expenses involved seem steep compared to the dollars that go to prizewinners.

 

In Canada, in the instance of the Griffin, for example, I would suggest that since the Griffin Foundation, funded by Scott Griffin, pays the entire amount that the only responsibility is to the board of directors. If Scott wants to throw the best party in town, then why not? And apparently he does—late in the evening at the 2006 awards I was sitting beside John Ashbery. According to English, Ashbery has won more literary awards than any other writer. Ashbery was gently shaking his head. He said he had been fortunate in his life to win many awards and attend many celebrations but he’d “never seen anything like this.” The painter John Boyle was also there that night, “You never see anything like this for the visual arts,” he lamented. So good on Scott Griffin for making poetry a first-rate event in this country, second to none.

 

I asked the Canada Council for budgets for the past few years related to the Governor General’s Literary Award which the CC administers. I am in full support of national arts awards, but it is public money so I’d hate to see an 80% administration expense. Here are the numbers for 2009-10:

 

Program Grants/prizes                                    448,000.00

Program services—Assessors (peers)                        203,399.89

Prize presentation                                             99,257.13

Professional service fees                                   59,748.64

Staff travel costs                                                    204.52

Professional service contracts                                420.08

Postage and distribution                                   10,919.66

Courier                                                                2,301.26

Catering on premises                                             126.75

Other meeting costs                                               158.93

Printing supplies                                                      24.31

Salary expense                                                259,107.52

 

Total                                                            1,083,668.69

 

Some clarifications on these numbers:

 

Program Grants is the money given to writers and includes no other travel or accommodation expenses.

 

Program services includes all expenses related to juries including accommodation, transportation, etc. I asked for a breakdown. The amount paid to jury members is $158,873.

 

Professional services fees are for publicists. All printing costs for posters and bookmarks are identified under Prize Presentation. The CC are now putting more emphasis on web promotion so both printing expenses and distribution costs are declining.

 

The salary line does not include Rideau Hall staff, or the Rideau Hall related expenses.

 

To be as fair as possible in the ration of administration expenses to money paid to artist, I’ll include the fee paid to the bookbinder that for 2009 was $19,182.

 

So for 2009 the total paid to writers (winners), writers (peer jury) and artists (bookbinder) was $626,055 or near 58% of the budget. Keep in mind that does not include Rideau Hall expenses.

 

The prize program at The Writers’ Trust is streamlined. Emphasis is placed on treating writers well, but the celebration does not stack up with the GG winners’ trip to Rideau Hall or the lavish party of the Griffins, nor should it.

 

In 2008-2009 The Writers’ Trust gave $449,304 directly to 99 writers. That includes workshops, lectures, the Woodcock Fund and all the other programs. Here’s the budget for the nine prizes:

 

Prize to winners                      159,000

Finalists                                    34,200

Juries                                         60,150

Travel                                        30,000

Office costs                                 6,177

Promotional Costs                    38,942

Staff costs                                 69,624

 

Total costs                              $398,093

 

The Trust receives $224,900 in direct sponsorship support for the awards and prize programs. The budget doesn’t include overhead like rent, photocopier etc. But neither does the GG budget. After direct sponsorship revenue is counted the rest of the money for these prizes comes from other fundraising, primarily the Writers’ Trust Gala in Toronto and the Politics and the Pen dinner in Ottawa.

 

But the financial sponsors often contribute in other ways that are not reflected in the budget. Rogers Communications through its publications arm gives the Trust in-kind advertising in Macleans Magazine specifically for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.  This is worth about $45,000 for the full-page ad.

 

Walrus Magazine contributes about $50,000 of in-kind advertising support for the awards. The Globe and Mail also provides in-kind support for the awards both in print and on-line.  The value is about $75,000. The Trust gets discounted hotel rooms for writers travelling from outside Toronto and this varies each year but is equivalent to about $600 on average. The organization is trying to get airline sponsorship. It also gets some small discounts on beer, wine and food for the Writers’ Trust Awards event but the amounts are negligible.

 

The total to writers is $253,350 or about 64% of the total budget.

 

***

 

1990 Jury: Sir Denis Forman, was Director and later Chair of The British Film Institute, Chairman and Managing Director of Granada Television, and also for nine years the deputy chairman of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden in London. Susannah Clapp, editor, theatre reviewer and one of the founders of the London Review of Books. A Walton Litz, US literary historian and critic, and Rhodes scholar. Hilary Mantel, writer and winner in 2008. Kate Saunders, British author, actress and journalist.

 

Beryl Bainbridge—An Awfully Big Adventure VPL

 

Unlike the main female characters of Bainbridge’s previous Booker short-listed novels Stella isn’t feckless. Disaster follows her, but she’s full of feck. Stella is 16, an abandoned child being reared by her aunt and uncle. The local Liverpool theatre company has agreed to take her on as assistant stage manager. The novel is so tightly written it will make your head spin. I’ve already given away too much information. It is fast, focused and sharp. The atmosphere is tense from the first two pages. Bainbridge has huge confidence in her reader. You get the sense that she threw 90% in the trash and kept only those elements that were vital. Pay attention. Don’t blink.

 

Attraction, love, and betrayal explored through the staging of Caesar and Cleopatra and Peter Pan. And that is the intrigue of Stella, like the lost boys, stuck somewhere through no actions of her own. It’s a short novel, 193 pages. When I finished I shook my head, muttered “what just happened?” and immediately read the first 40 pages again. Plus I want to find Peter Pan and read it again. Every theatre and book reference links, and pulls—well, the ones you catch do.

 

John McGahern—Amongst Women VPL

 

Someone online calls William Trevor and his gang “potato laureates.” Yes, this is another lament for Ireland. Michael Moran is the foul-tempered father who rules his house with iron will. An ex-IRA man, he is disgruntled by what has become of Ireland, the country he fought for. He remembers his IRA days, “the war was the best part of our lives. Things were never so simple and clear again.” Moran is easily enraged by anything—“an air of friendliness” or things seeming too much at ease.

 

His second wife, Rose, tip toes around his moods, as do the rest of the family, except for the oldest son, who has escaped to London. Moran is a tyrant with his family, and the women allow him to continue. Regardless of the severity of his verbal (or sometimes to the boys, physical) abuse, they make excuses for him, “Daddy didn’t mean anything.”

 

The only good thing about Moran is his rugged goods looks and the fact that he doesn’t drink. The moral: live in the present and learn to forgive.

 

Penelope Fitzgerald—The Gate of Angels VPL

 

Another tightly written little gem from Fitzgerald. Pre-war Cambridge, a young scientist in an all-male college literally falls for an young woman not of the “marriageable class”—their bicycles collide and they end up in bed together since the woman who rescues them assumes they are man and wife. The book considers many tensions of the changing times including the suffrage movement, class discrimination, superstitions, legal systems, medical assumptions including attitudes toward mental illness, religion, etc. As I’ve said before about Fitzgerald, the book sweeps you quickly along and it’s only on reflection that the complexity really hits.

 

Brian Moore—Lies of Silence VPL

 

The writing style of Moore to provide background information about the characters seems very contrived, particularly following on the minimalist clarity of Fitzgerald. This is a thriller set in Belfast, complete with IRA hostage taking and bombs. The thriller style pulls you along, creates tension and does make the book difficult to put down. But the characterizations are simple or cliché. It’s a rip-roaring good read but great literature it ain’t. It helps if you can ignore the Irish sentimentality and melodrama. It gives the pretence of thoughtful examination of the issues but it doesn’t get beyond the shallow.

 

Michael Dillon runs a hotel in Belfast, his hometown he has earlier escaped to take a job in London where he meets then marries the bulimic Moira who only want to return to Belfast. Michael is having an affair, has decided to leave Moira and head back to London with his new love. Then the IRA intrudes on their lives. All of the characters are snivelers.

 

Mordecai Richler—Solomon Gursky Was Here VPL

In my head I can hear Richler saying, “Magic realism, eh? Okay, Rushdie, watch this.” In my opinion, the most ambitious and successful of Richler’s novels, Solomon Gursky Was Here makes Illywhacker look bungled. Huge, romping, funny, irreverent, goofy and utterly readable—and that doesn’t mean easy. Often in Richler novels the characters seem carbon copies from other novels, and cliché. Not here. Shaman/Raven Ephraim and Bad Boy Solomon versus money-grubbing Bernard. The scope of the novel is huge, from Gold Rush, formation of the North West Mounted Police, Franklin expedition to the arctic (yesterday in the newspaper was the announcement that they’ve found M’Clure’s boat HMS Investigator!), London theatre scene, to penal Australia. And unlike Rushdie, Richler builds and crafts the story rather than repeating and repeating. The narrative is not chronological, bouncing from 1920 to 1960 then back to 1940, but always with a new twist.

It has often been suggested that the Gurskys are thinly disguised Bronfmans. And although the novel zooms the characters over the surface of the globe, bumping into anyone of note in the process from George Bernard Shaw to Golda Meir to Jackie Onassis, this novel is completely Canadian, particularly the humour. Richler infuses Canadian history with the Jewishness of the Gurskys. Eskimos mysteriously wearing Jewish sashes. Mystery, comedy, and who-done-it.

This novel received no nod in Canada. It was not short-listed for the GG. (The Giller did not begin until 1994 and The Writers’ Trust award for fiction began in 1997.) The novel was published in Canada in 1989, which means it would have qualified for either the 1989 or 1990 GG. The fiction jury for 1989—Robert Harlow (chair), Sharon Butala and Kent Thompson—selected the following books as the short-list The Golden Thread by Ann Copeland, Whale Music by Paul Quarrington and A View from the Roof by Helen Weinzweig with the win going to Quarrington. The fiction jury for 1990—Leon Rooke (chair), Sandra Birdsell and Henry Kreisel—selected the following books as the short-list Disappearing Moon Café by Sky Lee, Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro, On Double Tracks by Leslie Hall Pinder, Lives of the Saints by Nino Ricci, and Man of My Dreams by Diane Schoemperlen with the win going to Ricci. The absence of Richler’s novel is a mistake.

A S Byatt—Possession VPL WINNER

I suspect this novel was written to prove, or perhaps to be fairer to explore, a literary theory. Two young, lonely academics stumble upon work that will change the scholarship about two Victorian poets. Roland Michell works in the “Ash Factory” furthering the scholarship about Randolph Henry Ash, a respected Victorian poet who reminds me of Robert Browning. Dr. Maud Bailey labours away in the Women’s Resource Centre of Lincoln University working on Christabel LaMotte—Maud is a descendant of LaMotte. LaMotte (an Emily Dickinson type) does not have nearly the reputation of Ash but has recently become the darling of feminist scholars. It is believed that LaMotte had a fulfilled lesbian relationship with her housemate Blanche but Roland and Maud discover LaMotte had a passionate though brief affair with Ash.

The delights of the book include the send-up of all things academic, and US clichés:

“Honestly I’ve lost interest in all his footnotes and things and all those dead letters from dead people about missing trains and supporting Copyright Bills and all that stuff. Who wants to spend their life in the British Museum basement? It smells as bad as Mrs Jarvis’s flat up there, full of cat piss. Who wants to spend their life reading old menus in cat piss?”

“Nobody. They want to spend their lives in lovely hotels at international conferences…”

Complex, challenging and highly ambitious, the book considers mating rituals, feminism (both in theory and in practice), the nature of independence (actions and thought), modern versus Victorian thought, morality, and on and on. But primarily this is a book about reading, and writing. And lots of discussion about those two activities:

No, I have not told it like Gode. I have missed out patterns of her voice and have put in a note of my own, a literary note I was trying to avoid, a kind of prettiness or portentousness which makes the difference between tales of the Brothers Grimm and La Motte Fouque’s Undine.

The writing is sure and clever, but it may be too clever. I found much of the first half pretentious and contrived. The structure forces the reader to go through the same path of discovery as the sleuthing academics that results in some tedious and long-winded sections. The book discusses the “ponderous obfuscation” of C19th poetry, and then inflicts exactly this style of poetry on the reader. Pages and pages and pages of it. Byatt writes poetry (the invented poetry of Ash and LaMotte) that is every bit as overwrought as the argument insists. Great if you like that sort of thing, but so much of it.

Ellen Ash, the long-suffering virginal wife of the poet, seems by all reports (letters, Ash’s journals, etc.) to be a rather dull person. The academic who is supposed to be editing and publishing Ellen’s journals has never completed the task. She feels tricked somehow, that Ellen is deliberately withholding information in her dull journals. Byatt supplies us with about 30 pages of the journal.

Much of the book is more argument than fiction. There are many things beyond the text. But some things that should remain beyond are included—Byatt supplies a chapter of the affair between Ash and LaMotte and given the structure she herself has created (you must have supporting evidence and text) how could she know? This reversion to the omnipotent narrator, I think, is a serious lapse. I also think the grave-robbing scene with the tree-toppling storm would make Daphne du Maurier blush. As would the ultra-sentimental final chapter that brings together Ash and his daughter (and again, a lapse in the narrative structure).

Yes, the book forces the reader to participate and think, if you are paying attention (I’m guessing many readers just scanned or ignored much of the poetry and journal writings). Yes, it levels postmodernism. But there is so much literary baggage (the book could as easily be titled Obsession) that at times this reader feels she is watching the author masturbate. It’s showoffy to a fault.

1990 Hilary Mantel, from The Guardian

Not a discourteous word was exchanged between the hardworking 1990 judges – much to the disappointment of the administrator Martyn Goff, who praised us to our faces and later whined that we were boring. Denis Forman ran the meetings with smooth expertise, and largely kept his own opinions dark until he cast the final vote.

Weeks before I was appointed a judge, I’d read John McGahern’s Amongst Women and said, reaching page 20, “This will win the Booker”. So I was disappointed, but AS Byatt’s Possession was a good book and a popular choice, and the discussion was fair. The process exhausted me, and I declined to do it a second time. What I despised was the leaking by the publicity machine of trivial non-stories to the press – I felt the prize had enough status and news value without that. I also believe the judges shouldn’t review the books under consideration or talk about them in public, and in 1990 we didn’t.

I’m glad I was a Booker judge relatively early in my career. It stopped me thinking that literary prizes are about literary value. Even the most correct jury goes in for horsetrading and gamesmanship, and what emerges is a compromise.

For me the best of the Bookers is The Siege of Krishnapur. I read it again a few months ago and its supple humour, its insight, economy and narrative drive make it an enduring delight.

 

I wonder if she remembered her own sage advice, that the prize is not about literary value, when she won in 2009?

 

2930 words, October 20, 2011

 

1984

I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations. As we become more experienced readers how much do our expectations affect our response to a novel? The rest of our lives ebb and flow with our expectations so why not reading?

George and I  lost our sea legs in Singapore, but it took a while, and not until George swayed his way through several museums. We had an early flight from Singapore to Beijing on Christmas Day so we knew Christmas Eve would be an early-to-bed night. Online I found a 5-star hotel at a great rate that offered an “oasis” in Singapore and the “most restful beds in town. With a distinctively majestic atrium soaring through 21 levels of the hotel, Marina Mandarin Singapore is imbued with a philosophy of providing Asian grace, warmth and care in an atmosphere of relaxed elegance.”

When we checked into our hotel we discovered it was a pretty modern and pretentious affair—a large open atrium that indeed did rise 20+ floors. Five elevators accessed the room floors—two moved inside while the other three rose up through the atrium allowing you to see across, and down, down, as the floors passed. Each time we rang for the elevator George would go wait near the two inside ones, hoping one of those would arrive first. If we did get the atrium view he would stand just inside the door, and stare directly at it for the whole trip, with his back to the view. Hallways ran around the atrium with doors on one side and the atrium view on the other. George always walked on the inside/room side, insisting that the floor was sloped.

Just outside our door on the 12^th floor was a huge net half full of white balloons. Looking up you could see other nets with balloons. Pretty early to be getting ready for New Year’s Eve, I thought. Over the following days we noticed hotel staff continuing to fill the nets. Once in a while a balloon would pop, and in that huge atrium the noise sounded like a gun going off. You get bad, bouncy acoustics in that sort of space.

Christmas eve we finished packing and thought we’d have a quiet game of cribbage and a drink before calling it an early night. As we crossed the bridge from the elevator to the lobby/restaurant/bar area (with its running stream) where we had played the night before, we saw that the whole seating area had been converted into linen-covered dining tables. We were stopped at the end of the bridge. Did we have a reservation? No, so we sidled up to the bar. Perhaps we should have connected the balloons with the silver lame dresses worn by the female servers that had replaced the traditional garb we’d been seeing for days. At the beginning of our second game the music came on—I use the term “music” lightly but there was nothing light about the decibel level. Uh oh, we thought.

Up in our room the noise level was still deafening. Around 10:30 the sound system switched to a lower level and we were foolish enough to think that was it. At 11:30 the “Christmas Eve countdown” began. Daytona Beach during March Break is not this noisy. What do they play on Christmas Eve in Singapore? Stayin’ Alive and YMCA. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and those thousands upon thousands of balloons were released to the heart-thumping disco rock version of Christ the Saviour is Born.

I had to look. Twelve floors down, four feet deep in balloons the revelers were now busting balloons. It took them 45 minutes to complete the task.

Every time I open one of these Booker novels I am expecting balloons and a party, rather than a restful sleep. It’s an unhealthy way to read. Instead of just reading and responding, lurking in the back of my brain is The Question—good enough to win a prize? Nasty.

Jean Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1964 but refused it, stating, “A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form.” I wonder what Sartre would say about the “poem” read at the Vancouver Olympic opening ceremonies; it was commissioned and paid for by Canadian Tourism.

1984 Jury: Professor Richard Cobb, British historian. Anthony Curtis lectured in English at the Sorbonne, and moved to literary journalism as Deputy Editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He was Lit Ed of the Sunday Telegraph (1960-1970), and of the Financial Times (1970-1990). He has written on theatre, on Maugham, Henry James and Philip Larkin. Polly Devlin, author, journalist, broadcaster, film-maker, art critic and conservationist, and Features Editor for Vogue. John Fuller, poet, novelist, critic. Ted Rowlands

Penelope Lively According to Mark purchased

Mark is a well-respected biographer who is researching his next book, a biography of Gilbert Strong. With good story telling and clean prose Lively examines the nature and challenges of biography, lost loves, stifled lives, the place of books in our lives, the curious course of love and how the life of the individual fits into the larger picture.

Your own doings were interwoven with the coarser and more indestructible fabric of history, to give the movement of time a grander name than it seems to deserve when one is part of it.

And yet how unspeakably much more so it might be—had been indeed for countless millions of people in this century. Mark, like any normally imaginative person with a grasp of world events, was frequently humbled by the fact that few demands of any significance had ever been made on him.

The novel has the usual cast of required eccentric characters—though the forgiving wronged wife is less than convincing—and is readable if not really remarkable. It gets a bit maudlin and overly philosophical at the end.

Julian Barnes Flaubert’s Parrot purchased

Guest report by Stan Persky

The eponymous parrot in Julian Barnes’ breakthrough 1984 novel, Flaubert’s Parrot  — or perhaps Barnes’ book should be called a jeu d’esprit since one of the things that it’s doing is calling into question the very notion of a “novel” — is a many-feathered literary creature.

It is first found in Gustave Flaubert’s conte, “A Simple Heart, or The Parrot” (1877), the story of a faithful servant, Felicity, and her pet parrot, LouLou, who she comes to envisage, while on her deathbed, as the embodiment of The Holy Ghost. While writing the tale, Flaubert allegedly kept a stuffed parrot on his desk for inspiration. The stuffed parrot was allegedly borrowed from a collection in Rouen, the provincial capital closest to Flaubert’s house in nearby Croisset. But in the little museum at Croisset, there’s also a stuffed parrot, whose curators claim is the real stuffed parrot that inspired Flaubert. At which point, readers of Flaubert will recognize that we’re clearly beyond the quotidean territory of Madame Bovary (1857), and well into the fanciful landscapes of Flaubert’s final work, Bouvard and Pecuchet (1880), a satiric paean to the futility of human knowledge.

The amateur scholar attempting to sort out the rival feathered claimants to literary authenticity is the protagonist of Barnes’ book, Geoffrey Braithwaite, a widowed, retired doctor visiting Rouen and environs, in search of Flaubert landmarks and relics. Barnes provides a very lightly sketched, but strangely touching, backstory that centers on just exactly how Braithwaite came to be a widower, but about 90 per cent of the book consists of the elderly Flaubertophile’s ruminations on literature, life, Flaubert, and the parrot(s). Which means that it’s not what most people thought of as a novel, circa a quarter century ago.

It begins with Braithwaite in Rouen, where a half dozen North Africans are playing boules beneath the town’s Flaubert statue:

“Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand dispatched a silver globe. It landed, hopped heavily, and curved in a slow scatter of hard dust. The thrower remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite unbent, and the right hand ecstatically spread. I noticed a furled white shirt, a bare forearm and a blob on the back of the wrist. Not a watch, as I first thought, or a tattoo, but a coloured transfer: the face of a political sage much admired in the desert.”

Those contemporary North Africans at the outset of Barnes’ book wear an image of Mao on their wrists, just as Flaubert’s North African soldiers in his Salammbo, as we eventually learn, bore the sign of, yes, a parrot. So, if Flaubert’s Parrot is not a “real” novel, it is, as you can see from its opening paragraph above, real writing.

As British critic Frank Kermode said in his enthusiastic review of the book (“Obsessed with Obsession,” New York Review, Apr. 25, 1985), “Barnes’ physician hero is in search of the crumbled, junky past, of the truth about Gustave Flaubert, which, like the truth about his own life, is on some views both unimportant and inaccessible.” Amid “the decaying rubbish that testifies to the existence of Flaubert” are those now bedraggled, ambiguous, stuffed parrots. In the end, the parrots gaze at us, as Barnes puts it, like “quizzical, sharp-eyed, dandruff-ridden, dishonourable old men.”

Whatever else it is, Flaubert’s Parrot is compellingly readable and pretty thoroughly succeeds in raising Barnes’ bookish challenges to the state of the novel. Its “winning” cleverness (two traits associated with Barnes himself) probably got it onto the Booker shortlist (i.e., it was hard to ignore), but it was unlikely to win (a little too unconventional).

In addition to its intrinsic pleasures, Flaubert’s Parrot was part of a “postmodernist” turn that writing was taking at the time. After the post-World War II magical realist novels of Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie (an attempt, I think, to reconnect the novel to the classical, picaresque “epic”), writers now attempted to disassemble (okay, “deconstruct”) the traditional novel in playful, self-reflexive experiments. Barnes’ book is contemporary with a wide range of kindred works that stretch from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler to, in Canada, George Bowering’s Burning Water, both of which also ask pertinent questions about the nature of writing, reading, and the possibility of knowledge.

Stan agreed to do a guest report before I read the book. I wrote my report below before I read Stan’s. And I’m fascinated. Here’s the reason.

About a year ago I saw a production of Romeo and Juliet. I’ve studied the play at grad school and have seen at least a dozen productions and maybe as many TV and film productions. But at the end of this production, when the stage holds the bodies of two dead children, watched over by grieving parents, I suddenly saw the play very differently.

When my daughter Bronwyn died in October 2006 I turned to reading and to projects. One result is The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning. I’ve made half a dozen quilts in a ridiculously short period of time (people spend years making one). I founded the Al Purdy A-frame Trust. And, in part, this Booker project and my obsession with the impact of prizes on the publishing world are part of what I am talking about. So what I saw in the character of Geoffrey Braithwaite was a fellow mourner, and one with a project developed from that grief. What Stan sees as the “backstory” was for me a full and reasonable explanation for the frontstory—the Flaubert research. I was going to edit my report after reading Stan’s to remove any repetition, etc., but I’ve decided to leave it as written.

What a romp. This is such an exciting and fun book to read. A brief report won’t begin to capture the energy and inventiveness.

Geoffrey Braithwaite is a doctor and amateur Flaubert expert (can you be an amateur expert? He is not a scholar and does not publish his extensive research) who is trying to determine which of two stuffed parrots in two separate museums is the one that was on Flaubert’s desk while he wrote Un Coeur simple. Like many of the recent Booker novels it is part exploration of the past and how people fall over it “trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process.” And also the role of biography and the uncovering of information about the dead. My favourite parts are the romp through the absurdities of academic life and research. This novel should be read just for the list of novels that should be banned.

Many critics would like to be dictators of literature, to regulate the past, and to set out with quiet authority the future direction of the art. This month, everyone must write about this; next month, nobody is allowed to write about that. So-and-so will not be reprinted until we say so…let’s play. I’ll go first.

1. There shall be no more novels in which a group of people, isolated by circumstances, revert to the ‘natural condition’ of man become essential, poor, bare, forked creatures…

4. There is to be a twenty-year ban on novels set in Oxford or Cambridge, and a ten-year ban on the university fiction. No ban on fiction set in polytechnics (though no subsidy to encourage it). No ban on novels set in primary schools’ a ten-year ban on secondary-school fiction. A partial ban on growing-up novels (one per author allowed). A Partial ban on novels written in the historic present (again, one per author)….

7. No novels about small, hitherto forgotten wars in distant parts of the British Empire, in the painstaking course of which we learn first, that the British are averagely wicked; and secondly, that war is very nasty indeed.

8 No novels in which the narrator, or any of the characters, is identified simply by an initial letter. Still they go on doing it!

Barnes takes the novel, turns it inside out, flips it on its head and forces reconsiderations of the genre and criticism. Get a copy and jump in, but don’t read anything on the book jacket. It might give away something.

While we have been on this trip The Heart Does Break has been published. As I’ve mentioned before, I think, this anthology is in part the response to the death of my daughter, now more than three years ago. In the first few months I was struck by the bad language that is used about grief, as if it were a disease, something to “get over.” The anthology contains 20 commissioned pieces by creative writers about how they responded to the death of a loved one. We picked creative writers because language matters, particularly in such circumstances, so I believe.

At the heart of Flaubert’s Parrot is grief, how to respond to the absence of a beloved, a particularly difficult and unfaithful beloved.

And then it happens to you. There’s no glory in it. Mourning is full of time; nothing but time…I’ve tried drink, but what does that do? Drink makes you drunk, that’s all it’s ever been able to do. Work, they say, cures everything. It doesn’t; often, it doesn’t even induce tiredness: the nearest you get to it is a neurotic lethargy. And there is always time. Have some more time. Take your time. Extra time. Time on your hands.

Other people think you want to talk…Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don’t; it makes little difference. The words aren’t the right ones; or rather, the right words don’t exist. ‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’ You talk, and you find the language of bereavement foolishly inadequate. You seem to be talking about other people’s griefs…

‘It may seem bad, Geoffrey, but you’ll come out of it. I’m not taking your grief lightly; it’s just that I’ve seen enough of life to know that you’ll come out of it.’ The words you’ve said yourself while scribbling a prescription…And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

Anita Desai In Custody purchased

On the book jacket Salman Rushie is quoted as declaring this novel “magnificent.” I read most of it in India, and I still don’t get it. Cultural differences I suppose. One day in Singapore to escape the heat and get a cheap lunch we ducked into Hooters. This might be the only Hooters in the world with no cleavage. A sign on the wall said, “Danger, Blondes Thinking” but there wasn’t a blonde to be seen. Some cultural things don’t translate well.

About 50 pages in I realized this novel must have been the basis for a movie George and I watched a while back. A young aspiring poet named Deven goes to visit an Urdu poet whom he has revered since childhood. Deven is an irritating weakling and the Urdu poet turns out to be manipulative has-been. The poetry is bad and sentimental. The plot is also melodramatic and manipulative, obviously so. It’s an examination of what happens when a revered guru turns out to be a grubbing asshole.

A few days after we watched the movie George and I looked at each other, “Do you think it was a comedy and we just didn’t get it?” I’m still not sure.

David Lodge Small World purchased

Sometime in the late 80s I read Lodge’s early novel about the creaky world of English departments, Changing Places. This novel goes over much of the same territory, and with some of the same characters. Category: university professor novel. Barnes would disapprove.

This time rather than teaching exchanges the focus is the whirl of literary academic conferences. It’s full of clever literary allusions (a set of twins are left in a jet, adopted and later reunited with their parents—a deft theft from Oscar Wilde) from a rather smug know-it-all viewpoint particularly targeting English pomp and inefficiency. If you happen to be a graduate student—as I was when I read the first novel—Lodge is a wonderful giggle. But does anyone else care? Are the British more concerned with academia? Is this a novel for the university community that Lodge slams to read and nod their heads agreeingly and say, “Yes, bang on.”

There are sure to be lots of further in-jokes, guessing that most of the characters—professors and writers—have some basis on real people.

J. G. Ballard Empire of the Sun purchased

Ballard might be best known for this autobiographical novel, made into a movie by Steven Spielberg with film script by Tom Stoppard, and Crash also made into a movie, this time by David Cronenberg. After I read the novel, we watched the Spielberg film and it’s pretty good, except for the over-the-top music.

Jim is a 10-year-old boy with well-to-do British parents living a privileged life in before-war Shanghai. Jim is obsessed with planes. When the war begins Jim and his parents get caught in the melee of the attack, are separated and Jim will spend the war, alone, in various camps.

Like many coming-of-age novels Jim has a series of surrogate fathers. Basie, an American seaman who is a scavenging survivor, using the war to amass desirable products. A doctor with more advanced morality which doesn’t help him deal with the harsh day-to-day realities.

In some ways the novel is reminiscent of Treasure Island, even sharing the name of the title character. Like Jim Hawkins, Jim becomes an Everyboy. He is a symbol of all children caught in war. And also like Jim Hawkins he learns the pirates (in this case the Japanese) are not always the bad guys and are often better examples of courage than the good guys.

But this is no straight-ahead fable. Jim’s coming of age is a complicated and twisted maturity. The war and world of this novel have nothing to do with bravery. It’s a mean and selfish survivor. All are left scared. There are no clear victors.

No recognition of Chinese war effort, and Ballard suggests that will haunt the 20^th and 21th centuries.

The only forces not to be celebrated were the Chinese communists, but they had been cleared out of Shanghai and the coastal cities. Whatever contribution their troops had made to the Allied victory had long been discounted, lost under the layers of newsreels that had imposed their own truth upon the war.

What really sets this novel apart is the way the world is viewed through the eyes of a child, without anything childish. Perhaps it is Ballard’s experience with sci-fi, his ability to portray other worlds that lends the power, but power it does have. At the end as the world settles into peace, Jim settles into his new reality—he is living WWIII.

Anita Brookner Hotel du Lac purchased WINNER

This win caused a big stink, many believing the Brookner to be a much inferior book to Ballard. Malcolm Bradbury called the novel “parochial.”

Her friends have sent Edith Hope packing after a no-show at her wedding. Don’t be a spinster, and the alternative isn’t any better. The novel is a slow examination of the lives of a dull, uninteresting woman. The book uses the small painful canvas so popular with some female British novelists (Elizabeth Taylor is another) during this time. It’s slight, and contrived. And humourless. That is beat out the Ballard and the Barnes is absurd.

1984 John Fuller from The Guardian

This was the year when the hot favourite, JG Ballard (Empire of the Sun), was passed over for a relative newcomer, Anita Brookner (Hotel du Lac). Hardly a scandal, but in a strong year we had already discarded some big names (Burgess, Golding, Spark, Bainbridge, two Amises, etc) before reaching the shortlist, so that journalistic antennae were twitching, and the outcome was felt to be a further surprise. The judges got on pretty well together. We were somewhat exercised by the question of whether Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot was really a novel, while in the final judging session Anthony Curtis continued to argue for David Lodge (Small World), and Ted Rowlands stuck out for the Ballard. I thought that the Brookner was, in its economy and elegance, a small triumph of moral insight worthy of the tradition of James and Forster to which it belonged. I was relieved to have support from Polly Devlin and the somewhat eccentric Richard Cobb in this, and pleased at the nudge to her career that the prize must have given.

January 3, 2011,  3812 words

1980

I think it’s now time to have a closer look at the Booker prize rules and see how they might be affecting the outcomes. Over the years the GG and Giller have had multiple—and different kinds of—winners  and the prize administrators have changed the rules. That is also true of the Booker, which now has a rule that the prize cannot be “divided or withheld.” This rule must have been a response to 1992, when the prize was split between Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth. Every book that is on the Booker short-list “must have the full support of at least one judge in whose opinion it is a valid contender.” So no putting a book on the short-list unless at least one juror is prepared to champion it as the winner.

That presents a problem, in my view. How can the Booker have a short-list of 6 books when there are only 5 jurors? Plus the chairman doesn’t vote unless there is a deadlock. There’s a joke about literary prizes that goes like this: If you win, someone says, “Congratulations, you were everyone’s second choice.” Behind the statement is the understanding that the best book never wins and the winner is always a compromise. I think it was Phyllis Webb who once described prizes as exercises in juror compromise.

A few years ago there was a kerfluffle about the Giller. Some reactionist was trying to argue that the Giller has an entry fee, which it doesn’t. What the Giller does have is a policy that any publisher submitting a book must agree to contribute $1500 to advertising if the book makes the short-list. Considering the claims the Giller makes about book sales resulting from being short-listed that doesn’t seem unreasonable. But get a load of this rule—for the Booker publishers must agree to contribute 5000 pounds to publicity for a short list and a further 5000 pounds for a winner. At today’s exchange rate that is roughly $9,000 Canadian for a short list and $18,000 for a win. I wonder what the reactionist would say about that?

The 2008 winner was The White Tiger. Before the Booker nomination it had sold fewer than 1,000 copies. After the long list was announced and prior to the short list the sales had increased to 1,852. Pre-win the number increased again to 5,188. As of July 2009 the book accounted for 957,000 British Pounds Sterling in sales for the publisher, who I doubt is complaining about the 10,000 committed to publicity. Fora small and relatively new publisher, it was a windfall.

Now here’s the kicker. That wonderful opportunity isn’t likely to happen for most small Canadian publishers. The Booker rules specify that the book must be written by a citizen of the Commonwealth, Ireland or Zimbabwe; that the writer must be living at the time of the award; and finally, that the book must be “published in the UK.” So despite the insistence that the Man Booker is an international prize it is not inclusive. Outside of the UK it is open only to “big” books rather than best books.

So I would argue that the most inclusive and international prize in the Anglophone literary scene is the Griffin Prize for Poetry. Initially publishers were restricted to three books but that changed in the third year. Scott Griffin explains, “some publishers had more than three good poets and others only had one or two mediocre poets. It seemed unfair on those serious poetry publishers not to allow some of their good poets to compete.” That means that unlike the GG or the Booker, publishers have little influence on the Griffin. There are no restrictions about place of publication or citizenship, either. The jury is always one Canadian and two international jurors.

As I read many of these Booker short-listed novels I wonder if there is some preference within the British publishing industry or British readers for certain types of books. It seems to me that the BBC has a passion for period costume dramas. Many of these novels are nostalgic, looking back to a time when Britain was still a major world power and immigration wasn’t an issue.

I should mention that when I was tracking down 1980 books, for the first time there were books that were owned by VPL but were checked out.

Jury: Professor David Daiches, a Scottish literary historian and literary critic, scholar and writer, editor of many literary anthologies and guides. Ronald Blythe, writer and editor, for 20 years editor of Penguin Classics. Margaret Forster, writer and broadcaster probably best known for Georgy Girl. Clare Tomalin, literary editor of the New Statesman and of the Sunday Times, and author of several noted biographies including one on Charles Dickens. Brian Wenham, controller of BBC 2 from 1978 to 1982. This jury reflects the trend to more critics and literary people and fewer novelists—for 1980 only one novelist.

Anita Desai—Clear Light of Day UBC

Not long ago there was a conference that had some, if not all, of its focus on ethnicity. A dear friend of Japanese heritage had been one of the participants. We were trying to sort out a time to meet for drinks and this friend was unable to attend because of a prior commitment to a debriefing about the conference, “Which is annoying because the only reason I was asked to participate is because of the way I look.”

I don’t want to jump too far into the conundrum of white supremacy or post-colonists’ rewriting of the canon. For many years the GG seemed to go mostly to white guys. As more women became members of juries, more women won. The same was true as more non-white writers became jurors. These are all good things, I think, but only if the first concern when the winner is picked is the quality of the book.

A few years ago a significant award for a writer in mid-career was given to a youngish writer who at that point had published only two books. When it was gently suggested to the jury that the prize might be premature, the jury members said they had decided, firmly, that the prize would go to a woman of colour and that was that. In other words, they were using the award to make a political statement rather than following the rules.

I mention these things because I can’t help but wonder if the main reason Clear Light of Day is on the short-list is the ethnicity of its author. The action, such as it is, takes place around the time of Partition. There are some glimpses of the political stresses of the larger community but for the most part the novel’s focus is the nucleus family of four children. One review at the time of publication called the novel Chekovian, I assume meaning that it has some concern about the difficulty of communication. Perhaps. But it is the trap of domesticity in a patriarchal world that is the core of the novel. The traps here exist because of cultural expectations for those who generally live cut off from the larger world.

I didn’t really learn much about ethnicity from Desai: the novel mentions Muslims, Hindus, etc., and the relief that Gandi had not been murdered by a Muslim, but doesn’t explain or explore the trials of Partition, and that isn’t really the point of the novel. This is a novel about the domestic scene in India, not the larger political world. What I most object to about the inclusion of this novel on the short-list is the poor quality of the writing.

“Then Baba, shaded and sequestered in his own room, played ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ once too often. It was what Bim needed to break her in tow, decapitate her with anger. Clutching at her throat, she strode into his room and jerked the needle-head off the record and twisted back the arm. In the silence that gaped like a wound left by a tooth that has been pulled, she said in a loud, loose voice, ‘I want to have a talk with you, Baba. You’ll have to leave that off and listen to me,’ and sitting down in a canvas chair by his bed, she rattled down a straight lien aimed at Baba, shocked and confused before her, like a train racing down a line, driven by a made driver.”

Okay, you might be saying to yourself, Jean has spent a lot of time looking for a paragraph with too many similes. A few pages later:

“Out on the lawn Badshah was following a suspicious scent laid invisibly in the night. His paws made saucers of colour on the page dew drawn across the grass like a gauzy sheen.

“Teacups clinked on the saucers, tinnily.

“The sunlight spread like warm oil, slowly oozing and staining the tiles.”

George and I have been wondering about Indian languages. Is there something inherent in Indian language or culture that, when translated (not the right word when Indian writers are writing in English) seems to our ear to be excessive, too flowery? I couldn’t dig my way into Rohinton Mistry for the same reasons. Too many similes, excessive description. A friend who did read the book said he was fine once he “got past the language.” Hmmm.

A bright young graduate student from Istanbul told me she found language in Vancouver difficult, and rather flat. She’s now in NYC at Brown, where a faculty member read some of her poems and was “quite severe in pointing out how my use of language was ‘very poetic’ somewhat being too rich for 2009 . He said ‘we don’t talk like this’, and so we talked about who that “we” was. The we of the New York school or the we of North America etc.

“More to the point he provoked me into looking at the whole thing again to see why I was pushing the exaggeration in a (according to him) needless or unnecessary way. I have since rewritten the poem and teased the one point that I think it wanted to make by taking out parts of the high language which were there to explain, describe what is unfamiliar to a particular language activity in the native tongue and ear (saying things you don’t necessarily mean in Turkish, saying I’m dying of thirst rather than I am thirsty, saying I’m going to cut your balls off and throw them at your mother when you get angry at a man catcalling at you, or even in terms of syntax; where the personal proverb is only referred to at the end of the sentence hidden inside the verb as a suffix, (so there is exaggeration but also sometimes a diffused subject or a syntax that sounds over emphasized because of the placement of object and verb) all which when ‘directly’ or rather only semantically  translated (continuously in the writer’s mind)  into English sound very plastic and overstated.”

I have been told by juror members on the Griffin prize that the foreign judges have difficultly understanding the humour in Canadian poetry. They don’t get it.

Anthony Burgess—Earthly Powers UBC

In 2006 The Guardian conducted a poll, asking writers and critics etc., to identify the best novels of the last 25 years. Note that A Bend in the River would not be included since it was published in 1979 and only novels from 1980 on qualified.

The best then are, in order,

Disgrace (1999) JM Coetzee. Coetzee became the first writer to win the Booker Prize for a second time.

Money (1984) Martin Amis. This book received no Booker nomination

Earthly Powers (1980) Anthony Burgess, which lost in 1980 to Golding’s Rites of Passage., and Atonement (2001) Ian McEwan. Short-listed for the Booker but lost to Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang. (tied for 3^rd)

The Blue Flower (1995) Penelope Fitzgerald. Frequently cited as her masterpiece, the novel received no Booker nomination.

The Unconsoled (1995) Kazuo Ishiguro. Likewise no Booker nomination. 1995 went to The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

Midnight’s Children (1981) Salman Rushdie. Winner 1981 Booker.

(tied for 8^th) The Remains of the Day (1989) Kazuo Ishiguro. Winner 1989 Booker; and Amongst Women (1990) John McGahern. Short-listed for the Booker.

That They May Face the Rising Sun (2001) John McGahern. No Booker nomination.

So out of ten books, only three were Booker winners and three others received nominations. If, like all prizes, Booker juries are trying to anticipate what will stand the test of time I suppose that isn’t bad, but it does suggest some serious misses, and gaffes.

In 1980 both Anthony Burgess and William Golding were literary superstars. It is often suggested that the competition of this year is what really put the Bookers on the map and moved it from just another prize to the forefront of international prizes in English. You will note from the above list of 10 books that the Burgess makes number 3 and the Golding doesn’t appear at all, though it won the 1980 Booker.

Here’s the Dust jacket synopsis: “Earthly Powers is Anthony Burgess’s supreme achievement as a novelist. An enthralling, epic narrative that spans six decades of history, that spotlights some of the most vivid events and characters of the twentieth century, it is a novel about the nature and the origins of evil.

“As told by the central character himself, a distinguished British writer in his eighties, Earthly Powers is the life of Kenneth Marchal Toomey – from the First World War to the final years of sun-drenched idleness in Malta. A homosexual unable to reconcile his nature with the teachings of the Church, Toomey opted as a young man for a life of loneliness and exile – first in the Paris of James Joyce and Ezra Pound and later in Hollywood at the height of its glamour and corruption.

“His travels, his many assignments and, indeed, the affections of his heart, bring him face to face with the most savage manifestation of evil in the modern world; the murder by witchcraft of a beloved friend in Malaya; the brutalities of Mussolini’s fascists; a Nazi death camp; mass suicide in the name of love in California. Breathing the stench of Buchenwald, Toomey sees finally that evil comes from man himself, it is inborn; for his brother-in-law Carlo, the saintly but sybaritic priest destined to be Pope, it is a force at large in the world that must be challenged constantly in all its guises.

“Despite the darkness of its theme, Earthly Powers is a rewarding entertainment – full of invention, of dazzling word-play, of humour and compassion, of brilliantly sustained portraits of the famous, the infamous and the unforgettable. It is a magnificent accomplishment by one of the most prodigiously gifted of contemporary writers.”

The novel begins, “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” Wow, how’s that for an opener? The only bad writing in this book is the blurb on the book jacket, but it is also absolutely correct. I’ve read a fair amount of Burgess and this is the best. Well, that’s not entirely true about the bad writing—there’s lots of it in the novel, but it’s intentional, for example, this ditty from a musical comedy:

Waking and sleeping

It’s always the same,

Sleeping and waking

I call on your name.

Sleeping I cry,

Waking I sigh,

Knowing there’s no reply.

Or this, from Toomey’s rewrite of the Garden of Eden story (originally the lonely Adam was given a male mate but after the apple business God punished Adam by turning Yeded into the woman Hawwah): “’This.’ And the boy took his lover like a beast, thrusting his empurpled royal greatness into the antrum, without tenderness, with no cooings of love, rather with grunts and howls, his unpared nails drawing blood from breast and belly, and the sky opened for both of them, disclosing in blinding radiance the lineaments of a benedicent numen.”

So ends Chapter 29. Chapter 30 begins: “’Benedicent numen my arse,’ Ford Madox Ford pronounced.

Often when I’m reading one of these whoppers (this novel clocks in at 607 pages) I make notes as I’m reading, knowing I won’t be able to hold it all in my little brain. And I can’t figure that out, either. This novel is so huge in its scope, and meticulous in its examination I don’t know how Burgess could have held it all in his head at one time. But there is no sloppiness, no repetition, no chunks when you think, “this could have been edited down.” I was too drawn in by the reading of it to want to make notes.

As well as the events mentioned in the above blurb the novel examines Catholism, gay and lesbian lifestyles and rights, Nazism, black magic, Chicago gangsters, prohibition, and the general state of British literature in the C20th—there are hundreds of stories, and parodies. Toomey is a popular novelist, not a great one, and he knows and regrets the difference (Toomey is based loosely on the life of Somerset Maughan, some P G Wodehouse). I have no disagreement with this novel placing 3^rd on the list. I’ll have to revisit that assessment after I’ve read numbers 1 and 2. Highly subversive, including parodies and attacks on Burgess’s own work, particularly A Clockwork Orange.

J L Carr, A Month in the Country VPL

As a little treat, and to give a different viewpoint, following is a guest report from Jim Ison, a long-time friend, and long-time English teacher:

“When I toured Canterbury Cathedral in 1974 I learned that the faces carved into the ornate ceiling of the cloister actually captured the appearance of the many stone carvers involved in the project. There must be ten or twelve faces, each about six inches across, and each is a different carver, unless my guide was having me on.

“In A Month in the Country J.L. Carr creates a first person narrator whose task it is to uncover a fresco on a church wall, dating from the time of those carvings, but in a modest little church somewhere in rural Yorkshire.

“The narrator is 84 years old, writing in 1978 about his time in 1920, fresh from the horrors of trench war in Europe, when at 26 he is a master restorer hired to uncover the mural, depicting well known scenes of guilt and damnation, virtue and redemption. This memoir is about his month in the country. He is shell-shocked. His face twitches spasmodically and he stammers badly when he speaks, a trait that disappears later when he delivers a sermon. He works alone on a scaffold, day after day, uncovering what proves to be the most brilliant piece of medieval fresco painting he has ever seen. He, too, discovers the artist’s face. In the process, we find out who the narrator is and what he has become. The work, therefore, is a device, the man, a familiar type of Englishman, the plot, a journey of discovery. We don’t know how he has spent the years between 1920 and 1978, but that summer was the best and happiest of his life, in spite of an unfaithful wife away in London, a beautiful and unfulfilled parson’s wife with whom he falls in love, and a fellow worker whose life is even more tortured that his own.

“All the clichés are there: bucolic peasant types speaking an incomprehensible dialect which Carr gives us phonetically as an amusement; an uncharitable vicar poorly matched in marriage; his frustrated wife unable to declare herself but obviously in love with our narrator; precocious children speaking truths; a day of harvesting taken right out of a Hardy novel; and all the trappings of class divisions, education, frustrated ambition, and The War. It’s well written, and contains enough ambiguity both of character and action to make it memorable. A lot happens in only 110 pages, and once we accustom ourselves to the clichés, what Carr does with them is original and effective.

“It is likely that England in the late ‘70’s felt nostalgic about a time lost forever, although many writers had dealt fully with that idea before Carr came along. Apart from nostalgia I can’t think why this slim novel was chosen as a competitor in the Booker Prize sweeps. It’s a nice little read, and the dénouement between the vicar’s impossibly gorgeous wife and the narrator is well done, but it has little else to recommend it.”

What a contrast from Earthly Powers. Even presentation. I estimate the Burgess book at approximately 650 words per page. The Carr is a little slip of a book, 250 words per page, at most, and a quick afternoon’s read at a mere 135 pages. I agree with Jim’s assessment. Mrs. Ellerbeck is straight out of The Secret Garden, the all-wise Yorkshire farm woman. Nostalgic, for sure, and sentimental, particularly in the ending. And I must say, though this may be a quibble, that the title bothers me. Unless a month has 8 or 10 Sundays—and since the main action takes place in a church you can’t help but notice.

But considered by some to be a masterpiece. The Spectator review of the time says “unlike anything else in modern English Literature.”

Julia O’Faolain No Country for Young Men VPL

Criminies. Right after the half-title page is a genealogical tree titled “Three generations of O’Malleys and Clancys.” You know what that means.

O’Faolain uses a split narrative technique—Kathleen and Judith Clancy in the 1920s, and their descendents plus Judith as an elderly and rather mad nun in the 1970s. Politics. Women’s rights, or more to the point, the lack of them. But mostly the endless rollercoaster of Irish politics and religion—one hope being that the Pope-fearing and therefore procreating Catholics will eventually out-populate the Protestants and thereby win the vote and the ability to govern. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the two narratives are tied by the unsolved murder of the American Sparky Driscoll come to Ireland in the 1920s with money raised from the US. Judith, and her memories—disturbed and submerged by violence, threats, forced confinement in a nunnery and electric shock—provide the link. To complete the parallelism is an American named James Duffy, in Ireland in the 1970s to make a documentary film about the IRA, who has an affair with Grainne, the grand daughter from the Clancy side married to the drunken Michael, grandson of the fabled Owen O’Malley. James gets pretty frustrated with the Irish, and Grainne”

“’Words! The Irish are great with words!’ he exclaimed. ‘But they don’t mean anything,’ he roared. ‘They obfuscate. They play about with. They lie and deny. They skirmish and ambush. All your whole goddamn literature is about evasion. The exile who had to go away. The lover who lost his lass. I bought a book of popular love songs to fill my empty hours—I told you I’m like a kept woman. I have to fill the time. And I see now what you meant by negatives. Renunciation. Dig my grave both deep and wide. Laments. Goodbyes. No commitment to anything but giving up. The system is the way it is and ochone and mavrone and leave me alone and I’ll sing a song about it.”

I’ve read a lot of Irish novels, in part because of my graduate work on Edna O’Brien. I wouldn’t put this one near the top of the pile. The plot is so contrived and the ending is pure melodrama. In my thesis defense the Irish specialist in the department said the Irish talk about the potato famine as if it happened last week. The novel does explore that urge to hold onto pain and perceived wrongs but the melodrama undermines that analysis.

Alice Munro—The Beggar Maid VPL

This book was first published in Canada in 1978 by Macmillan as Who Do You Think You Are? . The UK edition came out in 1980 with Allen Lane as The Beggar Maid. The Canadian edition acknowledges that some of the stories had been previously published in Ms., Weekend, Redbook, Viva, Toronto Life, and The New Yorker. Man, has the publishing world changed in the last 30 years. Other than The New Yorker are any of these mags still publishing short fiction?

This book won Munro her second GG and has all the familiar Munro concerns—shame, class, have and have-nots, and private tortures.

I asked Michael Mathews, a huge Munro fan who has taught her work for years, to provide a guest report on Munro:

“Too Much Happiness.  Oh yes, slurp, slurp, lick, lickitup. Her last book crowned by this ‘novella’ as they call it, as if she’d never before written a story forty or fifty pages long. They’ve now given her a Booker prize for lifetime achievement; it is not certain that she has a novel, a book-length story in her armoury. Well, what shape, what sequence should govern a book-length fiction? Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women was a, oh, let’s call it a kunstlerbildungsroman, a fictional account of the growth and develop of an artist, a young woman on her way to being a writer, a storyteller. The offering considered for the Booker in 1980, Who Do You Think You Are (Americans called it The Beggar Maid), could be seen as the same kind of story, though looser in chronology, more divergent in themes. We remember that novels, from Gil Blas and Tom Jones to Duddy Kravitz have tended to cover a span of time, often follow a main character through the major part or the crucial part of a life span. Edgar Allan Poe, who had a thing for strong effects, told us that a story should hit us with a strong effect, an effect to be delivered at one blow, in one sitting. This idea suggests that a story should be nearer to two dozen pages than two hundred.  Munro’s stories are long ones by current standards, often closer to forty pages than fifteen. The point is that we sit through them, or we come back to them pretty fast next sitting or next morning.

“But now we have the story—is it a story?—‘Too Much Happiness,’ this ‘novella’ first published in the current (August 2009) Harpers. Twenty pages there, and about fifty-eight in the book. We’ve had many Munro stories that go to that length, and we’ve had sequences of stories, such as the first three in Runaway, that are clearly, explicitly related in character and situation, that are an account, history if you like, of a family or group of related characters. But this story? Is it a story? Let alone a novella or any such challenging term. The note at the end of the Harper’s piece identifies the material of the story as coming from a biography and other writings about Sophia Kovalesky, mathematician and novelist. This time it is Nineteenth Century Russia, and Europe beyond, and a meander through the last years and death of Kovalevsky. Munro continues to be gaga for history, history of her own family as presented in The View From Castle Rock, but also history more broadly, history of other folks’ ancestries, really just any seedy old history. What makes this story (I use “story” to refer to a written narrative, whether fictional or not) a story? Aw, it’s a narrative; we follow Sophia through a large part, and particularly the latter part of her life. That’s all.

“What makes it an Alice Munro story? That is the harder part of it. ‘Too Much Happiness’ has characters and events, even a “dramatic” event if you like, the heroine’s fateful journey home with worsening pneumonia that might have been alleviated if the doctor hadn’t warned her (Why did he? Huh? Why?) away from Copenhagen, urged her to take the long way home. What the story does not have is Munro up close and personal, Munro breathing in our ear, breathing the names with a sigh. Point of view. We always know, in Munro’s great stories, like “Powers” in Runaway, or in “Hateship, Friendship…” or in “The Love of a Good Woman” who is looking at whom, sensing whom, hearing whom, smelling whom, whom. There is always that power of the sensing in Munro. We, courtesy of the author, are in the story. Not so in “Too Much Happiness.”

“How good is Munro when she is doing what she usually does? Well, she is good enough, if a mere storyteller, if not an unerring storyteller, that when Jonathan Franzen in The New York Times so enthusiastically described her as “bold, bloody, deep, and broad,” and stated that she might claim to be “the best fiction writer now working in North America” (Franzen himself the author of The Corrections, North America’s finest unbildingsroman in a very long time), I decided, even before I read Franzen’s wonderful The Discomfort Zone and discovered a growing-up-as-a-North-American-male so precisely in emotional if not factual tune with my own growing up, that he surely is a very intelligent reader indeed.

“What is great in Munro isn’t just the stylistic particulars, the remarkable microtexture of Munro’s writing, like “widespread sunshine” in the story “Simon’s Luck,” or an invalid nursed by his wife cursing her with “quite foul names, thickened by his misfortune but always decipherable to her” in “Face.” It isn’t just the zillion mots juste, the quietly right words, in story after story, everywhere. It isn’t the lovely elastic zapping of time back and forth and around again, time now, time then, time sent away and brought ringing back again, times gathered to a summary chorus at the end of stories. It isn’t that Munro wastes little time on idle chit-chat, employing a high proportion of narration, uninterrupted storytelling, to dialogue, like Kafka or Borges. It is something that makes jaws drop, throats tighten, eyes get big.

“There is much to gob-smack us in the new collection. If, for example you want to know what it would have been like to actually drown that other kid, read “Child’s Play.” If you think you might have missed something important when you did not give in to that sex pervert, read “Wenlock Edge.” Maybe you did miss something. Munro herself goes back, seeking “something further, a tone, a depth, a light,” as she confesses near the end of Who Do You Think You Are. And please notice that I do not call this her last collection.  There are the eight stories we’ve enjoyed in The New Yorker and Harper’s over the last few years, and the title story, and….

“On my bookshelf next to my collection of Munro’s books, stands a single issue of The New Yorker, November 24, 1980. Almost thirty years ago. The cover of that magazine depicts a city skyline and a railway station with a crowd of people. Inside, in the fiction slot is an Alice Munro story, in the tiny type used in that era, a story set in rural Ontario and featuring, characteristic of Munro, a very high proportion of narration to dialogue. I’ve kept that issue of The New Yorker on my shelf all these years because I had never seen that story, “Wood,” in any collection of Munro’s fiction until yesterday, when I hiked out to horrible old Chapters and looked around, uselessly, for the new Munro. I found an employee who showed me to their “Fiction and Literature” shelves, alphabetical by author, just where I should have been looking. There it was: Too Much Happiness, and in it the story “Wood” again, and in that story, twenty-nine years later, such a breathtaking evidence of the author’s growth of appreciation for the possibilities in her story. It is now a little bit bigger, and it is immensely wider and subtler in its social and psychological reach, and in its achievement. When they come to their senses and hire me to teach their fiction writing classes, I shall say not a word, but simply point students to these two versions of this one story, and to the two dates of publication.”

As Mike mentioned, Munro has walked away with the International Booker. 1980 was her only nomination for the Man Booker. Her collections of short stories do not qualify for the prize. The Booker is for novels only.

William Golding—Rites of Passage UBC Winner

If this book were not written by William Golding I suspect most jurors, faced with the daunting task of reading more than 100 books in a matter of months, wouldn’t bother reading past the first 50 pages.

The book begins with first-person narration, in the form of a journal, of Edmund Talbot, a blow-hard member of the upper social classes, in part because of his godfather to whom the journal is addressed. Talbot is on his way to Australia to take up some government post acquired through his connections. It’s nearing the end of the Napoleonic wars and the ship is populated with an odd mix of people. The first part is Talbot’s observations about his shipmates. Eventually the focus becomes a parson, Mr. Colley. Colley has unintentionally aggravated the captain who has a vicious hatred for members of the clergy. The captain humiliates Colley, a signal to the rest of the crew that Colley is fair game and as a result, Colley is bullied without mercy.

When Colley takes to his cabin and begins to starve himself and die of humiliation, Talbot is forced by another shipmate to accept some responsibility for the situation. When Shakespeare uses this same device with Malvolio, the audience feels complicit. In the early acts we laughed at Malvolio. In Rites of Passage that device didn’t work for me since Talbot is such a weazly character.

The final part of the novel is a letter written by Colley to his sister that shows him to be a well-meaning innocent who suffered even more than Talbot was aware, including sexual humiliation when he was inebriated thanks to the ship’s crew.

The novel has a large reputation. Golding himself insisted the novel was highly comic. I found it neither comic or brilliant and rather dim compared with Earthly Powers.

Barry Unsworth—Pascali’s Island abebooks

This novel was short-listed for the Booker, and there is a movie of the novel starting Ben Kingsley and Helen Mirren but I had a devil of a time getting my hands on a copy. Nothing in libraries and no bookseller in BC had a copy. Finally I found information tha the novel was published in the US under a different title.

It’s Graeme Greene. A version of Our Man in Havana, except it’s Basil Pascali on an island in the Aegean writing reports to Constantinople. It’s the crumbling end of the Ottoman empire, a world full of corruption and deceit. Pascali, who makes up most of the information in his reports, doesn’t trust anyone and himself isn’t trustworthy. There is an undercurrent of violence (the island goats are always being sacrificed) in the daily life of the island that erupts in the end. I found the rambling first person narration—the novel is one of Pascali’s report—irritating, which might be the point. Some critics have argued that this is Unsworth’s best novel but I don’t see it.

1980 Claire Tomalin from The Guardian

“I was determined that Alice Munro should be on the shortlist, and stuck my heels in to get her there. There were two real contenders for the prize, I believed, Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers and William Golding’s Rites of Passage, and the night before the final judging session I lay awake debating with myself: the Golding beautifully written and constructed, but with a slightly musty feel about it; Burgess a magnificent entertainer, overflowing with good humour, sometimes tipping into the slapdash. Both books thoroughly deserving. The next morning David Daiches, our chairman, began: “We’ll go through the list in alphabetical order. I take it no one consider Burgess a possible winner?” Silence from the others. I exploded into a eulogy of Burgess’s energy, invention and comic gift. I saw I had convinced no one, and felt that left only Golding. And so it was. Burgess sent a message saying he would not come to the dinner unless he won. I don’t blame him. I saw a tear trickle down Golding’s cheek when the announcement was made. I have re-read neither book, and I have rejoiced to see Alice Munro win the recognition she deserves.”

6119 words, October 11, 2010

1977

1977

A recent survey that received a lot of press indicates that only 53% of Canadians surveyed could name a Canadian writer. A follow-up piece in the National Post had a full-page, front cover of the Culture section with pictures of 7 Canadian writers (like a test, can you ID these people); Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Lucy Maude Montgomery, Leonard Cohen, Alice Monroe, Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies. Hmmm, of  these seven writers, three are dead and none are under 65. Houston, we have a problem—a problem with the media.  More on that later.

In the meantime, there’s another source of this problem. For decades we have been graduating students from high school who have never read a Canadian novel as part of their schooling. For as many decades we have been graduating high school English teachers who are not required to take a CanLit course as part of their undergraduate degree or teacher training. Given this, why would anyone expect adult Canadians to be able to list any Canadian writers at all?

This just in from The Globe and Mail:

“Calgary judge dropped from book-prize panel after husband nominated

JAMES ADAMS

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

“In what’s being called an “extraordinary precaution,” the London-based Commonwealth Foundation has withdrawn a Calgary academic and writer as judge from a panel that this week included her husband’s novel as a finalist for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Canada/Caribbean region.

“The foundation’s decision to remove Pamela Banting from the three-member jury was announced yesterday – a day after The Great Karoo, a novel by her husband, Fred Stenson, was named one of six finalists for 2008-09 best book from Canada and the Caribbean. Ms. Banting is a published poet, critic and professor of English at the University of Calgary. Mr. Stenson is a former nominee for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor-General’s Literary Award. For its book prize, the foundation divides the world into four regions – Africa, Canada/Caribbean, Europe/South Asia, Southeast Asia/Pacific – and appoints a three-person panel to determine a shortlist of five to seven titles in the categories “best book” and “best first book” for each region. Each regional winner earns almost $2,000 while the overall best-book laureate receives close to $18,000; the best overall first-book winner $9,000. Last year’s overall best-book winner was Burlington, Ont., author Lawrence Hill for The Book of Negroes.

“In a statement, the foundation said “at no point was there any breach of ethics surrounding the nomination of [the Stenson] novel.” Contest rules say a judge can’t nominate a book by a spouse or family member to any shortlist. If the relative’s book makes a shortlist, “the judge should not take part in deliberations” for that book. If the book goes on to win, the foundation and regional chair have to explain that “the judge had no part in the deliberation and that the book was chosen based on literary merit.” The other judges on Ms. Banting’s panel are from Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.”

Here’s what I don’t understand—if your husband has a book out, why would you agree to be on the jury in the first place? And, doesn’t the very presence of the wife/husband have an automatic influence on the other jury members?

Recently I had a lengthy conversation with Alberto Manguel. He has extensive experience as a jury member for English language prizes but also in other languages including Spanish and French. Before we talked specifically about prizes, he said it was important to understand the context in which prizes are now happening—the changed world of publishing. Manguel argues that in the last 5 to 10 years the publishing world has changed enormously and those changes have had catastrophic effects. The publishing world now conducts itself on the supermarket industry model. The publishing market is run by conglomerates and the market rules—market sellability, not quality of books. Books have a short shelf-life, like this summer’s pair of shorts. Since the federal government began taxing publisher’s on their backlists, most keep no backlist to avoid taxation and stockage expenses. Manguel argues that when you are publishing without publishers (in the traditional sense) then we are heading for something very bad.

Manguel recalls receiving a letter from his long-time friend Doris Lessing about 6 months before she won the Nobel prize for literature. She had a completed novel but her English publisher wouldn’t publish it. She was no longer considered hot.

Traditionally,  literary publishers understood that part of their role was developing writers, and they understood that failure is part of the process. These days one failure can virtually end a writing career.

Manguel says that one challenge with prizes is that they don’t take enormous risks. In other words, the books that win tend to be “commercially safe”—i.e. not experimental or controversial. A few years ago the Canada Reads competition was won by Next Episode by Hubert Aquin, a book translated into English by Shiela Feishman. The CBC organizers were not pleased. The book was too difficult so in subsequent years they’ve been more careful to vete the books before the jurors get them.

Manguel suggests that the awards that most support writers are those done in secrecy. A foundation identifies a writer who has great potential. It gives that writer money so she/he can have time to go off and write, to learn the craft. In other words, organizations that are really supporting writers are not interested in publicity or branding.

He says his recent experience with the Booker International was very positive and points to a number of reasons;

-jurors are well-paid so they take the responsibility very seriously

-jurors are well-paid so the organizers have access to better quality jurors

-the prize is well-organized and promoted

In order for a prize to have real authority, he argues, the jurors must have time for in-depth reading and discussion.

Manguel is not in favour of academics being placed on juries. His experience has been that academics have some area of specialty they wish to promote, or theory they wish to illustrate by supporting a specific type of novel or writer. He thinks populist juries—movie stars, actors, etc—denigrate a prize and that the Booker is in danger of losing its prestige because of the types of juries that are now being put together.

He asked that I don’t mention the specific prizes but he did tell me about several jury experiences that were not favourable. Some are badly organized. One was a mail-in ballot, numerical, no discussion format. He said if he’d known which book was going to win he would have resigned from the jury—he was embarrassed to be thought to have supported that book winning. When he found out how the win had come about he realized he’d been Callaghaned—my term, not his.

1977 Jury: Philip Larkin, Beryl Bainbridge, Brendan Gill, David Hughes, Robin Ray.

Philip Larkin is GB’s favourite poet. Bainbridge, novelist, and previously short-listed for the Booker. Brendan Gill, American, is best knows for false accusations against Joseph Campbell and for chairing the Andy Warhol Foundation. David Hughes—I’m assuming this is the British novelist and friend of Gerald Durrell. Robin Ray, British actor and broadcaster.

Caroline Blackwood—Great Granny Webster UBC

Lady Caroline Blackwood was an heiress to the Guinness fortune, an acknowledged beauty of her day and one-time wife of Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell—she must have been attracted to brilliant, tortured men.

Apparently this novel is as much autobiography as fiction. And you think your family is dysfunctional! Great Granny Webster is the family matriarch. She makes Miss Havisham seem all sweetness and light. Then there is Aunt Lavinia who reminds me of Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous. She goes through men as if they were socks, loves to party and dress but has a suicidal streak—we first meet her fresh out of the asylum. The young, nameless narrator is the granddaughter of GGW. Her mother is also in an asylum having tried to drown her grandson at his christening. The family seat in Ulster (where all 3 butlers wear Wellingtons at all times because of indoor puddles from the leaking rooves) is where the young girl grows up as her mad mother haunts the halls, before she is eventually committed by GGW.

Now, this may sound grim, and it is, but it’s also hilarious. The narrative tone, partly because of the young age of the narrator, is more reportial than judgmental. This novel is not parodying rural life as does Cold Comfort Farm. It’s closer to the novels of the Mitford sisters. A good hoot but it doesn’t belong on an award list.

Paul Bailey—Peter Smart’s Confessions VPL

Peter Smith is a young actor who is obsessed with Hamlet, and not surprisingly, has suicidal tendencies. We are first introduced to him as he is emerging back to consciousness after his most recent attempt. Hmm, I see a pattern developing here.

This is a romp of painfully larger-than-life characters: Peter’s mother who always calls him “you;” Peter’s father who speaks in two or three word sentences. Peter’s mother housekeeps for a libidinous doctor/writer (though his autobiography is a dismal failure) after the death of his father—she attends to all of his wishes. And Nancy, the woman Peter marries, has been seeing a psychiatrist—Peter meets Nancy when he saves her from jumping off a bridge, the very bridge he was approaching so he could jump off. Nancy clearly has some serious problems but Peter marries her anyway, or in spite of the obvious. Nancy has a child, Stephen, but has no interest in the boy. She won’t even prepare meals for the child, so Stephen becomes the sole responsibility of Peter.

The novel is at its best when it parodies theatre and the theatre scene. There is a wonderful poke at Eliot’s The Cocktail Party. Peter’s friend Neville, also an actor, loves champagne and having sex with his most recent pick up with Wagner blaring away. The review of Hamlet (Peter stars as Reynaldo) is hilarious—the reviewer is smitten by Reynaldo and reviews the play without mentioning the character of Hamlet.

And there is a sense that the novel would be best on stage, as farce, where the witty and quick comebacks and dialogue would work well. In one scene Peter and his mother are at the funeral of the recently departed doctor. The widow, a woman neither has seen before accuses Peter’s mother:

“’You shameless creature! You were my husband’s bit of fluff, were you? You were his kept woman?’

“Mother smiled. ‘He did say once that I put all other women in the shade.’

“’You were his fancy piece? You were his mistress?’

“’I was.’

“’You’re not exactly glamorous.’

“’Neither are you.’”

It turns out the deaf widow is at the wrong funeral. Her husband’s funeral is next.

So it’s funny, and gets off some good swipes, but it doesn’t go much beyond that. Well, that’s not entirely fair. The first half was going someplace, as a bildungsroman, young talented though sarcastic young man surrounded by loonies. But the second half falls apart and the end is a cop out. Oh, and remember back to Ludovic in Mrs Paltrey? Apparently Paul Bailey was Elisabeth Taylor’s inspiration for the character of Ludovic. Perhaps this book is on the short-list because Bailey had previously won the E. M Forster Award and an Arts Council Award for the best first novel.

At the weekly meetings/lunch of The Club (of which I refuse to be a member) when Willy starts an item from The List George will frequently interrupt and demand, “What’s the category?” Partly, George does this to see if he can make Willy forget the item, forcing him to rewind the tape machine and listen again. But often Willy will respond with the well-established categories, Delayed Hilarity, The Talented Linguist, Guy Against Technology, The Amazing Modern World, What I Want to Know Is. (If you really want to know more about Willy, George and The Club I refer you to George’s new-but-still-untitled work that his agent says is “X-rated Stephen Leacock.”) I’ve decided that many of the Bookers almost demand to be put in such categories so I’m going to start that tradition. Saville—Long-Winded Family Saga. Peter Smart’s Confessions—Dysfunctional Family/Dysfunctional Life.

Penelope Lively-The Road to Lichfield UBC

A few years ago I read Moon Tiger (Booker winner for 1987) but don’t remember anything about it at the moment. I’m most familiar with Lively as a writer for young people—The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, A Stitch in Time and The Revenge of Samuel Stokes. Lively won the Whitbread Prize for Children’s Literature for A Stitch in Time (that’s probably not often done, winning major awards for both children and adult writing). In her children’s books Lively often has characters learn about their present by examining the past—sometimes ghosts, sometimes time travel.

This novel is interested in the past/present connection, too. Anne is a part-time history teacher at an elementary school safely married to a boring lawyer (Category—Mid-Life Crisis Affair As the Result of a Marriage to a Boring Professional, remember that poor Irish woman from The Doctor’s Wife?). Her father who lives a distance away has moved himself into a retirement home and has declined rapidly. Anne heads north from her quaint village to visit her dad, sort out his house and during her visits has an affair with a neighbor and fishing buddy of her father.

Anne is fired because the new headmaster believes that history is an outdated concept. Well, to be more precise, Narrative History. This does not stop Anne, the narrator, from narrating her narrative. She struggles with how to reconcile past with present as she fights to save a heritage cottage in her village (lost cause—the developer pulls it down in the middle of the night). One member of the committee believes historical things need to be adapted to contemporary use. Another uses past objects as decoration.

“It’s just I feel worried about indiscriminate hanging onto the past—in the form of buildings, or—anything else. Sometimes I think we’re not too sure why we’re doing it—and we may not even be quite clear what it is we’re hanging onto. But at the same time I think it’s very important to know about it—but to know properly, not just to have a vague idea or even to adapt it to suit your own purposes.”

She’s muddled. So is the reader. This novel isn’t about resolution.

It’s an okay book. Readable. Competent. What bothers me most is the internal monologue of the dying father. Anne discovers that years before her father had an affair, one her mother never found out about. The father has sent monthly cheques to the daughter (not his) of this woman, and still does. Anne’s curiousity compels her to search out this woman and visit her. That’s fine. But the narrator takes us inside the head of the father character, in a home, barely aware of the real world, usually unable to recognize his own daughter or others. We are told that on his death bed this man is yearning for this earlier lover. Hmm. The affair stopped years before. I’m not persuaded. It’s only there to serve the past/present theme. Oh, secondary category: Rosebud.

Paul Scott—Staying On UBC WINNER

Scott is probably best known for The Raj Quartet. The story in this novel takes place after the events of the quartet, post 1947 when the Brits are pulling out. But not all the Brits do leave, which is the focus of this novel. Category: Obnoxious Know-It-All Brits Abroad.

As in Scott’s earlier The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith there are those issues of voice, stereotypes and caricature. Ibrahim, the servant of the Smalleys (who have stayed on, in part, because retirement in England would be less affordable) doesn’t trust Indian doctors to treat a white man. “At a pinch a Muslim doctor would do, but a Hindu doctor never.” He skulks around, gossips (and sleeps) with the other servants and is constantly trying to outmanipulate the Smalleys.

Mrs. Smalley has a rich internal life, either further shaping her fantasy lover Toole or conversing with non-existant visitors from England, reliving the glorious days of British occupation to quiet her discontent with her present. Her husband, Tusker, is the brutish but (sometimes) loveable retired army man. And so on goes the list of characters.

My favourite is Mr. Bhoolabhoy, a small virile man married to the enormous Lila:

“His morning had begun in a peculiar way. He woke to find himself in bed with Lila, stark naked, his mouth and nose half-smothered in her immense breasts, his shoulders clamped in the iron embrace of her arms and his legs pinioned between hers. She seemed to be blowing playfully on the top of his head.

“What puzzled him was to find himself in bed with her at all. He could not actually recall being summoned. He wondered whether while he slept she had crept into his room and carried him over her shoulder to her own bed, stripped him of his pyjamas and then lowered him on top of her. Since he had daily waking evidence that he probably spent most of his sleeping hours in a state of readiness, he supposed it would have been quite possible for her thus to have availed herself of the opportunity to enjoy what otherwise went to waste without his having to wake up and consciously co-operate. After all, she had the strength.”

The novel has such moments of humour, more often than not with sexual overtones. But I remember watching the television version of The Jewel in the Crown years ago. I think those characters had a complexity that is lacking in this book. Yes, Scott tackles the challenges of the situation, change of power, lost loves and dreams. But it seems, somehow, stale. Not really interesting. A sameness.

Okay, I am going to jump off this cliff—Salomon Rushdie’s works depend on the clichés set out in these novels. This is Scott’s last novel and is on the list and won because of the other books, not this one.

Brian Fawcett is visiting. He says he read The Siege of Krishnapur because of my reports, but didn’t really like it. I’ve told him I won’t send more report until he submits his report for Seige, so stay tuned. But, I’m a bit nervous. Really. Things happen, eh? For example, when you are teaching a first year university course with several hundred students and the first term essays hit your desk, and you start marking, after dozens and dozens and dozens of C-, D and C papers your heart misses a beat when you read something bright. Relief alone wants you to give the essay an A or more. You must catch yourself.

Yikes. I am verging on the What is Greatness problem. Do I really want to tackle that one? On and off this week I’ve been checking in on Canada Reads. There are lots of discussions there about Big Books, Important Books (hey, there’s a category) Books You Should Read Because They Are Good For You (same category??) Oh, I know, I’ll just morph back into another book…

Jennifer Johnston—Shadows On Our Skin UBC

Back to Ireland, and its troubles. Joe Logan, the younger of two sons, hates his father, the fallen hero—and is an aspiring poet. Joe is his Mam’s favourite and as a child she kept him by her every second, in part to avoid the drunken, abusive lout who is her husband. The older son Brendan who adores his father and his “fairy tales” returns home from England with, we suspect, thoughts of joining The Movement. Category: Dysfunctional Families.

Ah, that’s unfair; the book is more complicated than that. Isolation. Being caught in the web of historical battles. The challenges when guns and violence become part of everyday life. Being a foreigner in your own land. Not surprisingly, it all goes terribly wrong in the end.

Oh, and like the brutish young hero (or anti-hero) of Saville, Joe writes bad poems.

Barbara Pym—Quartet in Autumn UBC

Brian Fawcett foolishly had too much wine with dinner his first night here and said “Sure” when I suggested he do a guest report on Quartet in Autumn. Here it is:

“Well, Marcia,” Lettie said, wondering if she might have lemon in her tea later in the afternoon—and only a half teaspoon of sugar, “Should we move the doilies from the far end of the davenport closer to the window?”

Marcia paused to reflect, but her mind was empty. In a field somewhere nearby, a pheasant pecked at the grain spilled by a careless Nigerian immigrant. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Or perhaps we should ask Norman when he comes back from vacation.”

“Oh, what do men know of such things?” Lettie said, her lips twisting in a derision that didn’t penetrate far. Meanwhile, the years dissolved into one another, a grey and indistinct brocade that wasn’t quite monotony.”

*             *               *

“If a large segment of the novel-buying market is made up of elderly people too boring to do anything more vigorous than read, does it follow that novels should be written about elderly, boring people sinking deeper into physical and emotional incapacity? Quartet in Autumn is a poster child for what you get when literature settles for this.”

I don’t think he liked the book much.

From the Guardian– Beryl Bainbridge

“Making a choice was very difficult – because it was this great prize of the world, one had to be very careful. Since I was published by Duckworth, it was very peculiar to have a Duckworth novel – Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood – included in the vote. I put my vote forward – for Blackwood – but the discussion on it lasted only about three minutes, because it was such a short book. So nobody was really interested in that. All I can remember of the final meeting is that I got terribly tired, I literally sank lower and lower under the table. Brendan Gill, who I thought was American, went towards the balcony saying he was going to throw himself off, he was so fed up. Philip Larkin was completely silent most of the time. Nobody dared say a word to him and he never said a word back. The only one who was in total control of everything was Robin Ray. He was so clever that we all went along with whatever he said, and he wanted Staying On by Paul Scott to win. Poor Scott was too ill to collect the prize.

“I’ve been shortlisted for the Booker five times and never won. I’m just very pleased to have been noticed.”

I have great sympathy for Brendan Gill. But wait—in a book published by the Booker administration in celebration of its 35^th year it says, “Chairman Philip Larkin threatened to jump out of the window if Paul Scott’s Staying On didn’t win.” Who’s a girl to believe?

In that same book David Hare is quoted as saying, “Everything that’s best in British and Commonwealth literature is in the performing arts—theatre, television, and films, are all light years ahead of the poor old British novel, which seem stuck in the 1950s,and which nobody I know bothers to read.”

I think he’s being generous. Much of what I’ve been reading is closer to the 19^th century and mid-20^th. Closer to Jane Austen than Joyce. It is often suggested that 1981 is the turning year, so I’ll soldier on. Those of you paying close attention will recall that John Fowles was on the jury in 1971. But he would not let any of his books be nominated to the Booker. Neither would John le Carre. I’d much sooner be reading Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy…

1976

When I approach a book, particularly by an author I don’t know or haven’t read, I pay attention to the book jacket. I read the blurbs, and the publisher’s description of the contents.Books found in university libraries have usually been stripped of this information, and thus an element of their personality. A book has lost part of its history when it gets a generic cover. Of course, I know this is done to preserve, etc., but it does mean something is missing.

From Frank Davey: “In the 1975 installment you ask (not rhetorically, I assume) “How can one juror or one jury decide to change the perimeters of the prize? ” One way one juror can manipulate the outcome is by simply being underhanded. In the 1980s Judith Fitzgerald, Barry Callaghan, and I were the poetry jury for the National Magazine Awards. We were asked not to consult with one another, but rather to read each of the roughly 70 poems submitted and independently assign each one a number on a scale from 1 to 100. The NMA staff would tally the numbers and declare a winner. When the results were announced, Judith and I were both puzzled because a poem each of us had rated somewhat low was the winner. So we contacted one another to try to figure out what had happened. That made us even more puzzled, because what we found was (a) that we had both followed the NMA’s's instructions dutifully, and (b) that we had both given a Robert Kroetsch poem our high score of 100. Judith then contacted the NMA, and was told that Callaghan had given a ranking of zero to every poem except his #1 choice, to which he had given 100. I think the NMA should have disqualified such ‘judging,’ but it either was too surprised to act or didn’t have the nerve.

“I think that both Judith and I assigned numerical values to the poems as if we were grading essays — except that 100 was a possible top mark. So 50 would be a bare pass, 40 pretty dismal, 25 dismal, and 0-10 hopeless. 60 would be mediocre, 70 not bad, 80 good, 90 outstanding etc. So by “relatively low” I meant a C+ or so.”

Thus,  the Kroetsch poem scored 200 from two judges and 0 from the third for a total of 200. The poem that won would get 100 plus maybe 65 from each of the other two for a total of 230. So, one judge is able to nullify the other two.

I’ve heard similar stories from many other writers. On a Canada Council jury one judge gave all the grant nominees she wanted to get awards 10 out or 10, and all the others 1. The nominees she was supporting always got the grant effectively nullifying the other jurors.

What this underlines is the importance of the jury selection. It’s arduous. More often than not, it is unpaid. So, why do people do it?

I’m sure some senior writers do it with some sense of obligation, of paying back to the community. Others might see it as a feather in their cap. And, unfortunately, others take it on to throw their weight around (whether they have weight or not).

My partner, George Bowering, cares deeply about poetry. He keeps up with the journals, follows new publications and because he travels widely with readings and has for years, knows many people in the poetry world. He also taught for nearly 40 years and has been a dogged advocate for Canadian poets and poetry, both in English and French. But sometimes when the GG announces the short-list, and he looks at the list of jury members there are names he doesn’t recognize, names he’s never heard of or seen in print.

Here’s the announcement for the 2009 Booker jury members:

“The judging panel for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction is announced today, 17 December 2008.  The line-up consists of Lucasta Miller, biographer and critic; Michael Prodger, Literary Editor of The Sunday Telegraph; John Mullan, academic, journalist and broadcaster and Sue Perkins, comedian and broadcaster. James Naughtie, one of the country’s best-known broadcasters, was announced as Chair of the Judges in November.”

Not a single writer in the bunch. Interesting, eh?

I received an email recently from a writer who has been on juries for both national and international prizes. We were musing about the psychology of prize juries and if there is a difference at the national and international level: “International versus national. Yes, very different I believe. At the national level, I’m of the view that the prevailing literary hierarchies are of great importance. The prizes function as a systemic part of the whole literary ordering. This works in tacit and explicit ways. In other words, while some jurors may work the levers without apology, others merely enact and reinforce the hierarchy through their at-times unconscious allegiances and loyalties. You could think of these prizes as a moderated esteem distribution system, the working parts of which (jurors, invited guests) don’t necessarily see the role they are playing.”

Susan Musgrave says the publishing industry is training readers to look for prize stickers. Susan suggests an underground sticker movement. Writers would sneak into bookstores and put stickers on their own books. “WINNER; Writer’s Choice Award.”

1976 Jury:

Walter Allan, literary critic and novelist, also worked in journalism, being at one time literary editor of the New Statesman. Mary Wilson, wife of the prime minister, and not a novel reader—see the note from The Guardian below. Francis King, novelist, short story writer and poet.
The 1976 ShortList

Andre Brink: An Instant in the Wind, W H Allen; R C Hutchinson: Rising, Michael Joseph; Brian Moore: The Doctor’s Wife, Cape; Julian Rathbone: King Fisher Lives, Michael Joseph; David Storey: Saville, Cape; William Trevor: The Children of Dynmouth, Bodley Head

R. C. Hutchinson—Rising VPL

The blurb on the front cover, “R. C. Hutchinson is a born novelist…a real creative writer, and we must cherish him.” J. B.. Priestly. On the back, “R. C. Hutchinson will be read fifty—perhaps a hundred—years hence.” C. S. Lewis. Well, I’ve read lots of Priestly and Lewis but this is my first Hutchinson.

Hutchinson was a best-selling novelist, first book published in 1930. He had a lengthy career in the military and often used his experiences and his travels in his fiction. This novel is set in South America. It’s meandering and arduous, as we slug through complicated family relationships, juggles, and mines.

The writing goes over the top on a regular basis. “When the voice of a hermit finch broke out like a practiced soloist’s from the muted hubbub of the undergrowth he surmised that dawn could not be far away.”

Or, “The mist has been enfeebled by the maturing sun, it hung its flaming curtains which a fresh gust of wind abruptly pushed aside.”

The dust jacket says Hutchinson was writing the final pages on the day of his death, but this novel is clearly unfinished, “Objectless, he turned and wandered back towards where a home of sorts, a wife, a family, had once been constantly awaiting him…” Then a postscript, presumably by Hutchinson’s wife explaining the extensive notes he left for a large final chapter.

These are stock characters, and offensive by today’s standards. No zip. No Borges here. It seems right to assume that this book made the short-list as a tribute to Hutchinson’s career not on its merits. I won’t be searching out his other books. Actually, I didn’t quite finish this one, but then neither did he.

William Trevor—The Children of Dynmouth VPL

Timothy Gedge is the town nuisance, and consciously so. He has huge potential for evil (so do many of the other characters though they are more socially aware to avoid being so obvious). Even the local pastor can’t have any compassion for him. He wrecks havoc in many homes by telling people the truth. Well, sometimes it’s the truth and other times it is what Timothy would like to be the truth.

The novel is better than the other one by Trevor on a previous short list but you could be in the middle of a Victorian novel—but then that is true of many of these books. Sigh. This one really falls apart in the highly romanticized ending where Trevor explains what has happened, and why. It’s sappy and unsatisfactory—and also suggests that the novel hasn’t done its job.

A guest report from George Bowering:

Julian Rathbone,–King Fisher Lives VPL

“Here is why I read this book. Jean and I went to Nuevo Vallarte for a week, and I had thought that three books would get me through, but I finished them before we got to the airport for the trip home. So she gave me Rathbone’s book for the plane. I think that she wanted to see my reaction to it. She said that I could borrow it (though of course she had borrowed it from the library) only if I wrote a report on it.

“What were the books I took with me, you ask. The first was Don’t Touch the Poet, Jersey City, 1998, by Lyman Gilmore. This is a biography of the US poet Joel Oppenheimer, by a faculty member of the small college in New Hampshire to which Oppenheimer had escaped from a life below 14^th Street in NYC. The writing is hardly professional or scholarly, being peppered with repetitions and errors. Lyman says, for example, that Margaret Randall left NYC and lived in New Mexico before going to Cuba. It was Mexico City, actually. Still, as a consumer of writing by and about the poets of the Allen anthology of 1960, I enjoyed the details of Oppenheimer’s life. I used to correspond with him back in the day.

“The second book was Strange Pilgrims, Toronto, Knopf, 1992, a group of twelve short stories by Gabriel García Marquez. This is only the third book by the Colombian “magic realist” that I have read. I picked it up for 50 cents at the Vancouver Public Library toss-out sale. The stories are various in length, point-of-view, and a lot of other things, but held together, or so the author hoped, by the fact that each is about a character who has come at some time in the past from the Caribbean to a European place such as Barcelona or Paris. In translation, at least, the stories of García Marquez are highly readable, and you find yourself racing through them. I should have brought a book by Michel Butor. But you know, I have to confess that I ate these stories up, they were so enjoyable. When I had finished the book I left it at the towel shack next to the pool, where some thick paperbacks by pop writers lay untouched. An hour later it was gone.

“The third book was Gary Snyder’s most recent book of talks and essays, Back on the Fire, Berkeley, 2007. Because many of the pieces in the collection were talks given to groups interested in ecology or Japan, there is quite a lot of repetition. For example, about eight times you find out that Snyder is now opposed to the forest service idea that all forest fires have to be fought against. In among the forest/mountain pieces you find stuff about other poets, such as Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen and Ko Un. I liked these bits the best.

“Jean took six books down with her, I think. But she has to read a lot because she is assembling her famous Booker Report. I know, as I suggested, why she loaned me the Rathbone book. Normally, you have to bribe me to read a novel by an Englishman of the past half-century, unless it is John Berger or B.S. Johnson. But it was either this Rathbone or the Air Transat magazine for four and a half hours.

“Rathbone is, apparently, author of several exotic thrillers of the sort that the Brits have always liked, Mr. Midshipman Easy and all that. Romances in which some Brit of either sex goes to Tangiers or Bangladesh to risk all instead of growing old in stodgy Blighty. There is a chassis of that in this novel, but it looks as if Rathbone wanted to write something that the university crowd would accept without a plain brown wrapper.

“The title character is a American writer who comes to a Brit university as artist in residence, misbehaves in the sixties manner, produces a bare naked version of Timon of Athens, scoops up a local academic novelist’s half-sister, and becomes a naked caveman in a secluded Spanish valley. Along the way, Rathbone makes sure that we get the parallel to Timon as well as Lord of the Flies, and we think also of Heart of Darkness. Along the way we get homosexuality, incest, drugs, alcohol and cannibalism.

“This is apparently Rathbone’s regular fare, but here, as I said, he tries to dress it up with literary theory of the avant-garde, even having it spelled out in the second-to last section, when a Spanish professor in Unamuno country goes on about narrative and reality. One good feature of the book, and the likely reason for Jean’s lending it to me, is the multiplicity of approaches—we get questionable narratives from several sources, plus TV interview transcription, scholarly introductions, letters, journals, notes, lecture.

“So with the unreliability, can we accept what appear to be two problems with Rathbone’s offering? He seems to know little about the academic world: one scholar signs her name as a professor at “Milton University, Indiana,” while we know that she would supply the city, and she claims that her thesis is about the comparison of twentieth-century life and twentieth-century fiction. Oh, please!

“The other problem? Do you remember those British movies in which would appear an “American” character played by an English actor who only thinks that he has to get the accent right? The badly-behaved American writer here seems to this reader to resemble nothing more than a middle-class self-involved Brit trying to appear wild. He also refers to a two-week period as a “fortnight.”

That will teach him not to pack enough books. You’ll love the comments below from The Guardian regarding Mary Wilson and this novel.

Brian Moore-The Doctor’s Wife UBC

Sheila (the doctor’s wife) is married to the demanding and rather boring Kevin and takes off for a second honeymoon, by herself because Kevin doesn’t really want to go and takes a job at the last minute. A stopover in Paris with an old girlfriend allows her to meet the much younger American Tom who will become her passionate lover and ends up going with her to the honeymoon location. Tom wants her to go with him to the US. Kevin shows up to try and convince her to return home to Ireland—his argument technique; he rapes her. In the end she does not go with Tom and does not return home to hubby and her 15-year-son. It’s rather like a romance novel with a sour ending. Although much is often made of Moore’s understanding of women (most cited is Judith Hearne) I found the “understanding” pretty contrived. The novel does capture some of the stress and horror of living in Ulster in the mid-70s.

David Storey-Saville UBC WINNER

I read the first sentence of this hulking, fat novel, “Towards the end of the third decade of the present century a coal haulier’s cart, pulled by a large, dirt-grey horse, came into the narrow streets of the village of Saxton, a small mining community in the low hill-land of south Yorkshire,” and my heart dropped. It’s going to be one of those sweeping stories about the generation that didn’t want to go down the mine and only a matter of time until I’m told the colour of the stripes on the tea towel. Then I check my list and discovered it is the 1976 winner. Egad. Here I go, again.

I made a rule a while ago—I can give up on a short-listed book but I must read the winning books right through. What a dumb rule.

I’m about half way through. The main character Colin Saville is now about 11. I’ve sat with him through vicious attacks from the masters at his school. I’ve sat with him on the hour-long bus ride to school. I know a lot about the kind of food he eats, how big the tarts are, how much milk goes in the tea, but I know practically nothing about what he thinks about any of these things. It’s like an unopinonated omnipotent narrator. In D.H. Lawrence the loins of the characters are in constant turmoil, responding to this and that (speaking of loins, have you watched the YouTube smash hit, Jizzed in My Pants?). This book is almost completely the opposite. So far there is nothing remarkable, nothing that adds to the Victorian tradition to which this book belongs.

Somewhere around page 40 when Colin Saville is born the narrator starts to exclusively refer to Saville’s father as “his father” and to Saville as “he.” Far too often the “his” or “he” seems to refer to the male character just mentioned but actually refers to Saville.

Trudge, trudge, trudge.

Suddenly, or so it seems to me, on page 331, three quarters of the way through, Colin and his friend Stafford start talking about the Big issues in life; what’s it all about? Class issues. Civic rights. What comes after death? None of these issues are explored in much depth, just the wanton musings of young men. A few pages on and Colin is having similar conversations with his girlfriend Margaret but now the discussion includes women’s rights, independence, job equality and social and class responsibility. It’s like a flood after years of draught.

Colin, who we have watched grow up, but know little of what he thinks or feels starts talking. He’s an arrogant, rude jerk. And although we know in painstaking details the story of his growing up it doesn’t make this reader sympathetic.

This is territory that has been gone over again and again. I don’t see that Storey adds anything new. The book is devoid of humour or irony. The ending drags, as does much of the book.

Andre Brink-An Instant in the Wind—purchased abebooks

No library in BC owns a copy of this novel. I purchased it through abebooks.

Adam Mantoor, an escaped slave and Elisabeth Larsson, the abandoned wife of a Swedish traveller, find themselves together in the interior of the Cape of Good Hope. This might be my Literary Fairy Godmother playing me a nasty trick for mentioning that the Storey novel is almost devoid of knowledge of the inner workings of the characters. No so here. Page after page after page of inner turmoil, recollections, terrors, and so on. When Mantoor first sees Elisabeth, he thinks, “And there you’re standing with your shadow against the canvass. You’re not even aware of it, unless you despise me so much that you don’t care?—brushing your hair, moving your shoulders and arms. If you turn I can see the points of your taut nipples. You: the ultimate thou-shalt-not, the most untouchable of all, you: white, woman.”

Yup, it’s a bodice-ripper, and you know it’s just a matter of time, and scenery, until Adam and Elisabeth are lovers.

In 1976 South Africa this may have been a situation of heightened political incorrectness, and apparently the book was banned for a time. Perhaps politics drove the publication, too. It certainly isn’t the writing. It’s overblown and overwritten. “Purple prose” was the phrase I used to mark in the margins of first-year students.

Keep in mind as you read the following passage that the story (apparently based on real people) takes place in 1749. Elisabeth’s husband has wandered off into the bush and hasn’t been seen for days. She is alone and knows the escaped slave (of whom she is supposedly terrified and concerned he will rape her) is not far away. She has just gone for a swim:

“She has no desire to get dressed again; the day is still warm in the late sun. On the flat rock glowing with inner warmth she stretches out, her body pressed against the burning stone, cleansed and glistening wet, strangely moved, and moaning with urgent passion; turning on her back and tense, with knees drawn up, touching herself, caressing herself, opening, moistening, leaving, assuaging the violence of her need, swaying her head from side to side, bringing herself to ecstasy, hearing her own voice crying out, subsiding into silence with a final sob.”

I, too, feel like sobbing. I’m not sure which is worse—Brink’s condescending portrayal of the hormone-driven black man or his condescending portrayal of the libidinous white woman, unfulfilled by her white husband. This stuff would make Daphne du Maurier blush.

There is a sense of time passing, though we’re never sure whether it’s days or weeks or months. They spend several weeks in a village while Elisabeth recovers from a miscarriage. Several more weeks are spent following the river, trying to get to the sea. A raft is lost, all of Elisabeth’s possessions and one of the two oxen they had from the original expedition of Elisabeth’s husband. After some time, at least a couple of months, and 102 pages: “Now I’m sitting here on my own, trying to occupy myself. Today he has gone hunting. He left early in the morning. It is nearly five now and he still hasn’t returned. It’s almost like the day E. E. [those are her husband’s initials] disappeared. I mustn’t think of it, it will drive me mad. If only he returns before dark.”

It’s 1748. She’s in the wild interior of South Africa, has lost all her possessions except her husband’s journals (but that’s another story), and has been soaking wet for a great deal of the time. And there’s my problem. Time. How does she know it’s “nearly five”? Did she check her Rolex? The novel is full of such sloppiness.

“She thought: for all the others I’ve been no more than a woman, a game, a toy. You’re the first to whom I am a person. That is why I dare be a woman to you. And yet there’s something in me I cannot grasp and which I fear.”

The novel is a few notches up from a Harlequin, but only a few.

1976 Francis King-from The Guardian

“There is a vast difference of scale between the prize as I experienced it as a judge and how it is now. Then the prize money was far less generous, and the fee for the judging was an honorarium. There were only three judges: our chairman Walter Allen, an admirable novelist and critic, then confined to a wheelchair, so that I had to read out his presentation speech for him; Mary Wilson, the wife of the prime minister; and me. Despite his failing health, Allen was, unlike me, immensely conscientious in reading every submission from cover to cover. Mary Wilson, a lover of poetry and herself an artless but often touching poet, was at the disadvantage of having read few novels in the course of her life – so that she was clearly puzzled when I referred to one of the submissions as “Kafkaesque”.

“My sister Elizabeth looked through the piles of books awaiting my reading, and eventually held up David Storey’s Saville. With a colleague, John Guest, she had already put in a lot of robust work as one of its two editors. “This will be the winner,” she announced. It was, she explained, an epic about a north country mining community and was therefore exactly what would appeal to Allen, a lifetime socialist, and to the wife of a Labour PM. She was right. I battled for Julian Rathbone’s King Fisher Lives, to no avail. Mary Wilson was obdurate: “I couldn’t be party to giving the prize to a book about cannibalism.”

“For me far and away the best Booker winner in the whole history of the Prize is JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. The best of all the novels that ought to have won the Prize but failed to do so is Penelope Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Blue Flower.”

It is starting to seem that I should check out The Blue Flower. I guess I will add it as an extra if I ever get to 1995.

Had I been a judge for the 1976 Booker I would have declared No Winner. Maybe even No Short-list.

4096 words May 27, 2010

1975

1975

I’ve been at this project now for months, reading the shortlisted and winning books. In order to meet the demands of a prize that requires reading 100 or more books, considering the time allotted, jurors must be reading 5 or more books a week. I’m not convinced that is possible—or desirable. How do judges figure it out?

In the interview from the 1974 report Christian Bok gives a detailed account of his involvement with the CC poetry jury. Is that same approach doable when a novel list includes books of 300 to 600 pages? I don’t think so.

But before I head off in that direction, let’s look at some comments I received about Bok’s interview, from George Stanley. “I liked Eunoia – but it’s hard to understand Bok’s critical (I guess) language.  E.g., George or Fred or Erin’s books “are far more lyrical than they are radical” – are these opposites?  “They represent a more readerly practice…”  Is there something else to do with poetry than read it? The work by Darren Wershler-Henry as described–it seems quite reasonable that the CC would have to decide whether it qualified as “poetry” or not–who says it is? Bok calls it a “conceptually sophisticated artifact,” which no doubt it is, but is surely pushing the envelope when he refers to “the collective brilliance of people writing on the Internet–the inadvertent poetry.” Why not just call it art? Did Duchamp call his Fountain (urinal) sculpture?”

These comments reinforce for me the need for jurors to discuss books.

Charlotte Gray; My own view of awards is that they are useful, and the books that are shortlisted are ALL good. Who gets to take the big prize is a crapshoot – the conclusion of a long (and sometimes fiery) negotiation. And the shortlist itself reflects not just good books, but also the judges’ tastes. When Vincent Lam won the Giller, with his very first book of short stories, it was a political decision on the part of the judges (one in particular, who wanted new voices recognized.)

Over the years others have told me it was the ex-GG throwing her weight around that created that Giller shortlist and winner, but who knows if that has any basis in reality or is just part of the wild conspiracy theories that surround prizes. Another theory is Atwood manipulated the prize that year—a nifty feat since she wasn’t on the jury. But how can one juror or one jury decide to change the perimeters of the prize?

Charlotte mentions the importance of discussion and negotiation and again I wonder about those prizes when that is discouraged or doesn’t happen at all. A frequent judge for the BC Book Prizes reports, “I’m trying to be as objective as I can in my judging. I read a few chapters of every book and assign them to one of three categories: No/Maybe/Yes. The nos are definitely out usually on the basis of poor writing skills. The maybes are readable but usually lack some quality that would make one want to read the book all the way through. The yeses are well written, readable and engaging. Apparently we are permitted to consult eventually with the other two judges in our category but in two previous stints as a judge in the Roderick Haig-Brown category I haven’t bothered with any consultation and have just chosen the books that I thought were the best written and most interesting on my own.”

Charlotte, again, “But it’s like democracy – infuriating, until you consider the alternatives. There is no way of making the process “better.”  It all depends on the quality of the books and the independence and good judgment of the judges. And all the organizing institutions (GGs, Writers Trust etc.) do their darndest to get the best judges. The GGs is a problem because the volume of books that the judges must consider (over 200 for non-fiction) deters established writers with projects underway from volunteering.”

I think one way to make prizes better is to encourage discussion. How else do you know if the other jurors have even read the books, or cracked the spines. That happens. Another way is to make the process more transparent. If you can maneuver the GG site you can find lists of all the books submitted for prizes for any given year. That does not happen for the Giller—the Giller doesn’t post such lists because publishers don’t want writers to know which books have been submitted (remember a publisher can only submit 3 books to the Giller).

Merilyn Simonds suggests that the Trillium prize is also a problem for readers since it is open to books in any genre: fiction, non-fiction, drama, children’s books and poetry—often 300 books are submitted. Her system—go through and eliminate non-qualifying books (I would think that weeding out non-qualifying books should be the job of the prize administration but jurors say it is common for such books to show up). She reads the information on the dustjacket, some from the beginning, middle and end of the book. Then she sorts into yes/no/maybe piles based on the quality of the writing. Next she starts reading the yes pile. If she isn’t engaged by page 100, out it goes. Merilyn errs on the side of generosity. She makes a list of books she thinks are worth discussion, in order of preference. All this happens before discussion with other jurors. She says that only once did the first book on her list win the prize, though she always fights hard for her first pick.

Frank Davey, from an unpublished essay in response to a kafuffle on the Canpoetics list:

“Should there even be awards? – awards recurrently tainted by suspicions of corruption, incompetence, and literary nepotism. It’s quite possible that the cumulative results since 1936 [of the GG] would have been equally credible if juries had been confined to drawing up shortlists and the awards had been made drawing the winner’s name from a hat. ‘Nothing to do with lasting influence or impact on national poetic consciousness’ wrote Robert Kasher in the first hours of the Canpoetics discussion – presuming, perhaps rashly, that there is a “national poetic consciousness” beyond a grubbing for awards. The awards have always been a lottery anyway, governed by the chance of who else publishes that year and who the council happens to pick as jurors. Probably no other poetry book could have won in 1986 once Purdy’s collected had been printed. Miki’s book would have had difficulty winning had his book been judged by the 2003 jury of Marilyn Dumont, Gary Geddes and Phil Hall, and Tim Lilburn’s book, the 2003 winner, would have been unlikely to win under the 2002 panel. At dog shows – a venue in which I have had exponentially more success than in poetry competitions — one at least has the opportunity to select which panel of judges one wishes to compete under. With the GG it’s impossible to hold a book back until a propitious panel appears.”

Tom Chatfield in Prospect:

“It is a central paradox of writing that true greatness only becomes apparent over time, and yet that the judgements of the future are substantially dependent on what the present chooses to publish, publicise and preserve. Viewed from the pinnacles of hindsight, literary history looks like a stately procession of great texts. A snapshot taken at any particular moment, however, reveals a far messier business; one clogged with readers, writers, commercial obligations, prejudices and misconceptions. Everything we might call the canon of literature—those enduring works that collectively form a standard we judge others by—is busily being forged or maintained within that snapshot. And somewhere close to the heart of this business lies one of the most ancient and contentious of all artistic institutions: the literary prize. Prizes are an attempt to mould, and to preempt, posterity. Their answers rarely satisfy; they seem, sometimes, to possess an astonishing capacity for ignoring talent. Yet they occupy an increasingly crucial, and volatile, position amid those imperfect processes by which writing is turned into literature….”

Chatfield also looks at the impact on sales:

“By the 1990s, winners could regularly expect to shift over 500,000 copies. Within hours, this year’s victor, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, was topping online British fiction charts. Before being shortlisted, it had sold fewer than 1,000 copies. During its time on the shortlist, it sold around 2,600. Now, post-victory, there are predictions of global sales of over a million.”

I find this particularly interesting since administrators of prizes will insist that being on the short-list impact sales. Perhaps, but clearly it’s winning that usually counts.

Chatfield continues: “While big-selling popular fiction can afford to take its awards with a pinch of salt, prizes such as the Booker are increasingly vital to the field that likes to think of itself as quality literature. Along with the book clubs—among which Richard and Judy are in Britain what Oprah is to America—their influence on booksellers can determine entire publishing house budgets. Which leads to a question that’s weighing increasingly heavily on the shoulders of critics and prize-judges alike: in an overcrowded field, over-reliant on its relatively few hits and sporadic PR injections, might ambitious literature lose the big audience, as poetry and classical music have done?

“If a panel is too exquisitely tailored to match media and public expectations, the context of lasting literary value begins to look rather distant. At what point does a jury become a focus-group, or jury selection begin to look like a popularity contest? And just how significant is any award when there are so many of them that most literary CVs boast at least one gong? It’s an unwritten part of the contemporary media deal that, in exchange for PR and banter and sales, everyone is expected to be either a good sport or a calculated curmudgeon.

***

“Simply decrying the populism and commercialism of modern times, however, won’t make these problems go away. And it’s also to miss perhaps the most important point of all: that literature is, among other things, a confidence game; and its health depends a lot on what one is and isn’t able to say and do in its service. Unlike a sporting contest, the notion of a literary winner is itself a kind of fiction: an act of propaganda and persuasion. If the current landscape of literary prizes is approaching deadlock, then, its problem is not so much over-extension as the sheer narrowness of the ground that’s being battled over—ground where the delicate balance between populism and underlying standards is increasingly warped by the need for easy headlines and safe sales. Even before it arrives, every controversy has a hollow ring to it. The sniping, the joke awards, the populist panels: these aren’t half as amusing or interesting as the media pretend. At a lean time for everyone in the print industry, it doesn’t do to bite one of the few hands that’s left feeding you. But the increasingly interchangeable (and arbitrary) feel of each literary event in the calendar cannot serve the long-term interests of a trade that ultimately relies on fresh talent, readers and ideas for its survival.

“It’s a troubling, self-destructive trend—and one that may yet see shopping for serious literature driven entirely online. Yet there is, too, a pale glow of illusion surrounding the wilder claims made for prize sales figures. Winners can and do sell big, but no victory guarantees vast sales, and the tail-enders of shortlists often fare poorly. Most importantly—and despite the wishful claims of some publishers—there is still no substitute for word of mouth. In 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid lost out to Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss in the Booker, but considerably outsold it, becoming one of the best-performing literary novels of the year (it was also, in my opinion, a far more ambitious and exciting book). Prizes grant opportunities, but their pronouncements remain at the mercy of the reading public. And the bottom line is that this public are ill-served by much of the current marketplace of overlapping awards and those “prize-winning” books manufactured to claim them—sensitive, trendy tracts of needlessly effortful prose whose elegant openings so impress some juries.”

On to the 1975 Booker nominees:

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Heat and Dust John Murray, Thomas Keneally Gossip from the Forest Collins

Yes, folks, that’s correct. This gutsy, or uppity (?) jury created a short-list of two books.

Jury: Peter Ackyrod, Susan Hill, Roy Fuller, Angus Wilson

Notes about these people appear in Susan Hill’s comments from The Guardian, below.

Thomas Keneally—Gossip from the Forest VPL

The dustjacket: “Compiegne, November 1918. A railway carriage waits in a siding in the dank forest.” The train is waiting for the odd group who have been designated to force the armistice to end WWI. It is often said that that armistice set the stage for WWII. The German representatives seem so unlikely, the appointments designed for politics rather than success at the task at hand (and interesting to be reading about these appointments while Stephen Harper appoints 18 new senators).

The structure of the book takes the reader right into that carriage, and into the minds of these characters, all with their prejudices and terrors. But ultimately the novel raises more questions than it answers. Keneally gives no credits or sources and you can’t tell what is fact and what are the fictions he has created to further his own narrative (and given the intimacy of some of the information it’s hard to believe it isn’t fiction). Either it is presumed that the reader will have a great amount of background information or that that information isn’t relevant to the narrative.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—Heat and Dust VPL WINNER

A young nameless woman, the narrator, is curious about the first wife of her grandfather, Olivia, and she trudges off to India to try and finds answers. Fifty years before Olivia has scandalized the British community by having an affair with the Nawab, aborting his child, then abandoning her husband to live with the Nawab. Jhabvala intertwines the two stories. This book has the same condescending attitude toward “natives” that has happened in other books on these lists. The writing if fine, if not really stimulating. The main problem, given the structure of the novel and its emphasis on generational things, is that we never find out why the nameless narrator has any interest in this wicked almost-grandmother. It seems merely a device. As does the narrator’s pregnancy at the end, from a brief affair with a “native” creating the promise of an Anglo-Indian baby. It’s contrived, and unconvincing.

It must have been a bad year for publishing if these are the only books the judges could muster up.

1975 Susan Hill—The Guardian

“Peter Ackroyd was the young, newly appointed literary editor of the Spectator. Roy Fuller was a distinguished older poet. Angus Wilson was in his years as founder of the creative writing course at UEA and one of the elder statesmen of the contemporary novel. It was a daunting experience to join them as a judge. I took the mountain of submitted novels on my honeymoon, and our first meeting was scheduled for the day I returned. I discovered that Angus had spent a holiday at the same Italian hotel a few weeks earlier. So we should all have been in mellow mood, and three of us were. But Roy Fuller was not the easiest man to work with. He was acerbic and disliked being contradicted, and when it came to choosing a shortlist he refused to join in, on the grounds that we had agreed on our winner, so a shortlist was superfluous. The Booker management committee was, rightly, having none of this and insisted.

“I had been shortlisted myself three years earlier, and it had given my career a huge boost. I fought hard. We all did. Fuller grudgingly agreed to allowing a shortlist of two – the winner and one runner-up. Otherwise, he was going to walk. It was tricky and it spoiled what should have been an enjoyable experience. I was very happy with our winner, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, but I wish we had stood up to Fuller and if he had walked out, so be it.

“My personal Best of Bookers is JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. The omission of Penelope Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Blue Flower even from the shortlist in 1995 I find quite inexplicable.”

I’ve heard that comment from many Canadian writers, I wish we had stood up to …

But seriously, folks, she took the books on her honeymoon? How dismissive is that—both of the novels and the new husband.

1974

Do publishers select books to publish based on literary merit or because the book might win a prize—which means more sales and more profit? Are publishers choosing authors—and then editing, packaging and marketing their books  strictly so they can win prizes?

When David Davidar took over as publisher at Penguin Canada in 2004 he was very vocal about his aim to get a Giller prizewinner for his publishing house. To date Penguin had been frozen out. The 2008 win was Penguin’s first.

A writer friend reports that his publisher would like him to do a major revision on his new novel so that “book clubs and even juries might like it.”  Imagine this:

Dear Mr. Joyce:

We are interested in publishing Finnegans Wake but our marketing department believes it will be too difficult for the average reader and therefore won’t do well in prize season. Please do a substantial rewrite to make the novel more accessible.

Regards

If it seems safe to assume that some publishers are aggressively searching out books to win these prizes, how often do they succeed and what are the implications for the industry and writers? Here is an article from TidewaterBooks.ca about the 2005 Giller shortlist:

Surprising Giller shortlist dominated by Random House – again. For the second year in a row, all but one of the books shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize are published by Random House imprints or McClelland & Stewart, 25% of which is owned by Random House.

Lisa Moore’s novel Alligator, published by House of Anansi Press, is the lone title not affiliated with the Bertelsmann-owned multinational. Random House’s three imprints and M&S each have one title the list: Joan Barfoot’s Luck, published by Knopf Canada; David Bergen’s The Time In Between, published by M&S; Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly, published by Doubleday Canada; and Edeet Ravel’s A Wall of Light, published by Random House Canada.

Moments after the announcement was made Wednesday morning in Toronto, Random House of Canada executive vice-president Brad Martin said he was overjoyed. None of Random House’s nominated books were the lead titles on their respective lists, so Martin thinks this will help with marketing. ‘On our list, if you look it, [the shortlisted titles] were second-level to the [Michael] Crummey, the [Jane] Urquhart, the [Sandra] Birdsell, and the Lori Lansens. Yes, this will give them a leg-up,” Martin says.

Moore is the only author on the shortlist who has previously been nominated for the Giller Prize – in 2002, for her short story collection Open. Anansi president Sarah MacLachlan couldn’t tell Moore the good news right away because the author was on a flight to Toronto for her launch Thursday night. Moore has already toured much of Canada for this book, but MacLachlan says the nomination will only help. ‘When we went into publishing Alligator, we were kind of determined towards marketing outside of the prizes,” MacLachlan says. ‘We were getting good reviews and coverage for her already – this is going to add to it.”

Ellen Seligman, vice-president and fiction publisher of M&S, said she was thrilled for Bergen, whose book she published. But she also thought there were some notable absentees. ‘I think it’s an interesting list, there are some obvious and surprising omissions. I think most people were expecting Joseph Boyden, Michael Crummey, and Jane Urquhart. So that was shocking,” she said. Urquhart, whose book A Map of Glass was published by Seligman, currently tops the Q&Q hardcover fiction bestsellers list but has received less than glowing review coverage.

Boyden’s first novel, Three Day Road, received generally positive review coverage and led Penguin Canada’s push to end the drought that has kept its titles off every previous Giller shortlist. When juror Elizabeth Hay read Gibb’s name, confirming that Boyden wasn’t on the alphabetical list, there was a noticeable gasp in the room. Shortly after the announcement was made, Penguin Canada publisher David Davidar said he was disappointed. ‘But you can never tell with juries. It is a very subjective assessment of the novels published this year,” he said. ‘There’s still the GGs to go. Let’s not forget that last year Miriam Toews didn’t get the Giller, but she’s the one author who kept selling and selling and selling. We’ve done very well with Three Day Road this fall”¦. I don’t see it as a setback at all. Joseph has another book to go. I think this is just the beginning.”

Brad Martin’s comment suggests that Random House had been backing Crummey, Boyden and Urquhart—in other words, RH editors didn’t pick the winner. Since publishers can only submit two books, they have fair amount of control over the list of possible nominees (more than two can be submitted if the books are by previous winners).

MacLachlan’s comments clearly acknowledge, at least for Anansi, that prize marketing is part of the agenda.

Susan Musgrave fondly remembers the days of Jack McClelland. “Jack published writers, not books.” McClelland was famous for nurturing writers and careers. If you had a book that had less than favourable reviews, so what? You moved on to the next book.

Steven Heighton thinks those days are over. “I agree with Susan M. one or two low-key prizes was/would be fine, but the proliferating glitter these days is blinding readers.  Book clubs–a major consumer of today’s fiction books–use prize lists as crib sheets.  if the prize lists didn’t exist, those same readers–thousands of them–would have to cast around, read reviews, listen to booksellers, try out books they didn’t know and maybe end up loving them and endorsing them to their club.  Word of mouth.  Books passed from hand to hand.  It would give good authors who don’t get nominations, as well as small press authors, a better chance.”

Merilyn Simonds concurs with this opinion. Merilyn does lots of readings at book clubs and libraries. Like Steven, she says these groups almost exclusively use prize lists to pick books, and to select writers for readings. If you don’t make the short lists you aren’t invited to reading festivals, aren’t invited to give readings and don’t get teaching opportunities, all of which are important sources of income for Canadian writers. In other words, no prize nomination equals no career.

Ken McGoogan suggests that prizes are a promotional tool for the publishing industry and without them things would seem rather drab. The alternative—no prizes—would “make everyone invisible.” He thinks they serve a useful purpose though he acknowledges the downside if your book doesn’t make the cut.

In these tough times, what will happen if publishers continue to pursue the golden egg mega hit?

Denise Bukowski, George’s agent, circulated the following message with the subject line, “It’s as if Dan Brown and The Gargoyle brought down Doubleday.”

December 4, 2008

Publishers Announce Staff Cuts

By MOTOKO RICH

In a day of especially grim news for the book business, Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, announced a sweeping reorganization aimed at trimming costs, while Simon & Schuster laid off 35 people.

The moves signaled just how bad sales have become in bookstores and followed

the news this week that the publisher of the adult division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the house that represents authors including Philip Roth and José Saramago, had resigned, presumably in protest of a temporary freeze on the acquisition of new books.

Industry insiders were already calling it “Black Wednesday” as news trickled out about further layoffs at Houghton Mifflin, a cut of 10 percent of the staff at Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest publisher of English-language Bibles, a freeze on raises at the Penguin Group unit of Pearson and a delay of pay increases at HarperCollins, the books division of the News Corporation.

The news at Random House, which included the resignations of the heads of two of its largest groups, followed months of speculation about the company. Ever since Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate that owns the publishing group, appointed Markus Dohle, formerly head of the company’s printing unit, to head Random House in May, most people assumed he would consolidate some imprints and make staffing changes.

In a memorandum to the staff on Wednesday, Mr. Dohle said that Irwyn Applebaum, publisher of the Bantam Dell Publishing Group, and Stephen Rubin, publisher of the Doubleday Publishing Group, had stepped down. In a separate message, Mr. Dohle said that he was in discussions with Mr. Rubin about “creating a new role for him at Random House.”

Bantam Dell publishes authors including Dean Koontz and Danielle Steel. Doubleday’s authors include John Grisham and Dan Brown.

Mr. Dohle did not announce any further layoffs on Wednesday. But in an interview, a spokeswoman, Carol Schneider, said publishers would be reviewing their staffs. “There may be some difficult choices that they’re going to have to make down the road,” she said.

In a message to the Simon & Schuster staff, Carolyn K. Reidy, the president and chief executive, said the 35 layoffs at the company resulted from “an unavoidable acknowledgment of the current bookselling marketplace.” Rick Richter, president of the Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division, also left the company. Ms. Reidy said Mr. Richter resigned to “explore other opportunities in publishing.”

Simon & Schuster, publisher of authors including Stephen King and Bob Woodward, is the books division of the CBS Corporation.

The shakeout in the industry comes during what publishers and booksellers have described as the worst retailing environment in memory. Recently, Leonard S. Riggio, chairman and largest shareholder of Barnes & Noble, predicted a dreadful holiday shopping season and wrote in an internal memorandum that “never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in.”

The deterioration in book sales appears to have come late in the year. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, sales for the year are actually up slightly. But several publishers said that sales in October and November had weakened drastically.

The industry was bracing for more layoffs. Last month, John Sargent, chief executive of Macmillan, whose publishing houses include Farrar, Straus and Giroux and St. Martin’s Press, said in a companywide meeting that he could not guarantee that everyone would have a job going forward. Mr. Sargent declined to comment. Macmillan is part of the Georg von Holtzbrinck publishing group.

“During good times, you can better absorb a variety of lines not doing well than you can when the economy is in this kind of condition,” Robert Gottlieb, chairman of the literary agency Trident Media, said.

At Random House, Mr. Dohle announced changes that elevated the roles of Sonny Mehta, head of the Knopf Publishing Group; Gina Centrello, head of the so-called Little Random unit; and Jenny Frost, president of the Crown Publishing Group, publisher of two memoirs by President-elect Barack Obama.

Mr. Mehta’s empire will expand to include the Doubleday and Nan A. Talese imprints, merging authors like Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Lethem with Knopf’s writers, like John Updike and Toni Morrison.

Ms. Centrello, who oversees the Random House Publishing Group, which includes the Ballantine division, will assume Bantam Dell, the Dial Press and Doubleday’s Spiegel & Grau. Ms. Frost will take over imprints including Doubleday Business, Doubleday Religion and Broadway Books.

Many people in the industry were not surprised that Mr. Applebaum was resigning from Bantam, considered Random House’s weak link. A significant part of its business is the mass market segment, the smaller paperback format of thrillers and romances, whose sales have declined over several years.

But industry veterans were surprised that Mr. Rubin, who is well regarded in the business, was being removed from his post and that the Doubleday Group was being dismantled, despite a particularly bad year.

Dan Brown, author of “The Da Vinci Code, failed to deliver his next novel, originally set for release in 2005. Jon Krakauer, author of the adventure hits Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, withdrew his book about Pat Tillman, the former football star killed in Afghanistan, originally scheduled for an October release.

To top it off, The Gargoyle, a first novel for which Doubleday reportedly paid $1.25 million, flopped, selling 34,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan. In October, Doubleday laid off 10 percent of its staff.

Interesting, eh? I wonder if the editor who brokered the Krakauer deal is still on staff?

Jury: Ion Trewin, AS Byatt, Elizabeth Jane Howard:

Ion Trewin was a journalist with The Times who later became editor-in-chief at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and is now the administrator for the Booker (that means he’s the one to pick the jurors). Byatt, the novelist. Howard was a model and actress before becoming a novelist. Her third husband, and the one at the time of this award, was Kingsley Amis.

The Books:

Beryl Bainbridge—The Bottle Factory Outing UBC

Another small canvas with two more feckless girls who work in a wine-bottling factory—these girls have even less feck than those in The Dressmaker. Laverne and Shirley, British style, but with black humour you’d never see on mainstream US television. The world of the Italian immigrants who work at the factory is so isolated. In the end, a death/accidental death is easily covered up because no one would miss her. Sad, but not in the least sentimental—no redemption.

C. P Snow—In Their Wisdom UBC

It’s like Bleak House for the 1970s—just how disastrous can a legal suit become? This world is about as far removed from the girls of the bottle factory as you could get—House of Lords and law courts. These characters are the intellectual and landed aristocracy, the movers and shakers concerned with money, position, power, and how to keep these things.

Snow has such a rich vocabulary, more than the other writers so far—“inspissated scorn”, “tenebrous room”. I spent more time with my dictionary reading this book than I have for more than I can remember.

My Ph.D. began with a minor in Shakespeare and a major in Modern British Literature, before it got derailed into bibliography. That meant my comprehensive exams were on modern British. I read a lot of C. P. Snow, but not this one. And frankly, not a lot of the other novels so far. When I was working on my doctorate in the late 80s/early 90s the influence of the Bookers had not penetrated the academic towers at McMaster. Murdoch, Spark, Naipaul and Amis were all there, but not because of the Booker. The reputation of these authors had been well established through what was the usual method for those times—book reviews, critical response and readers’ response.

Kingsley Amis—Ending Up UBC

Through fiver geezers who live in a small cottage—Tuppenny-hapenny—Amis explores the nasties of aging. No wisdom and mellowing with this lot. They are both monstrous and petty. Even the cat and aged dog are cranky and incontinent. Loss of memory. Loneliness. Physical decline. Misogyny. But it is the nastiness, and our lack of sympathy for any of this crew that really gives the novel its edge.

Just recently, before I began this crazed Booker project (ah, the good old days) I read The Biographer’s Moustache. It’s better than this novel. So are Lucky Jim and The Green Man.

Stanley Middleton—Holiday UBC WINNER (shared)

Here’s a piece from The Sunday Times:

January 1, 2006

Publishers toss Booker winners into the reject pile

Jonathan Calvert and Will Iredale

THEY can’t judge a book without its cover. Publishers and agents have rejected two Booker prize-winning novels submitted as works by aspiring authors.

One of the books considered unworthy by the publishing industry was by V S Naipaul, one of Britain’s greatest living writers, who won the Nobel prize for literature.

The exercise by The Sunday Times draws attention to concerns that the industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent.

Typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of Naipaul’s In a Free State and a second novel, Holiday, by Stanley Middleton, were sent to 20 publishers and agents.

None appears to have recognised them as Booker prizewinners from the 1970s that were lauded as British novel writing at its best. Of the 21 replies, all but one were rejections.

Only Barbara Levy, a London literary agent, expressed an interest, and that was for Middleton’s novel.

She was unimpressed by Naipaul’s book. She wrote: “We . . . thought it was quite original. In the end though I’m afraid we just weren’t quite enthusiastic enough to be able to offer to take things further.”

The rejections for Middleton’s book came from major publishing houses such as Bloomsbury and Time Warner as well as well-known agents such as Christopher Little, who discovered J K Rowling.

The major literary agencies PFD, Blake Friedmann and Lucas Alexander Whitley all turned down V S Naipaul’s book, which has received only a handful of replies.

Critics say the publishing industry has become obsessed with celebrity authors and “bright marketable young things” at the expense of serious writers.

Most large publishers no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts from first-time authors, leaving the literary agencies to discover new talent.

Many of the agencies find it hard to cope with the volume of submissions. One said last week that she receives up to 50 manuscripts a day, but takes on a maximum of only six new writers a year.

Last week, leading literary figures expressed surprise that Naipaul, in particular, had not been talent spotted. Doris Lessing, the author who was once rejected by her own publishers when she submitted a novel under a pseudonym, said: “I’m astounded as Naipaul is an absolutely wonderful writer.”

Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, who teaches creative writing, said: “It is surprising that the people who read it (Naipaul’s book) didn’t recognise it. He is certainly up there as one of our greatest living writers.”

While arguing that the best books would still always find a publisher, he added: “We need to keep the publishers on their toes as good books are as rare as hens’ teeth.”

Middleton, 86, whose books have a devoted following, wasn’t surprised. “People don’t seem to know what a good novel is nowadays,” he said. Naipaul, 73, said the “world had moved on” since he wrote the novel. He added: “To see that something is well written and appetisingly written takes a lot of talent and there is not a great deal of that around.”

“With all the other forms of entertainment today there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is.”

So, here is my report on a novel that would not get published in today’s publishing industry.

In this novel Edwin Fisher leaves his wife 18 months after their two-year old son dies. He goes on a holiday to the seaside where he had vacationed as a child. What happens during that time is superficial and of little importance to the novel. It’s about Fisher, inside his head as he slowly examines, then reexamines the events of his life.

In October 2006 my daughter died in a car accident. George and I are coediting an anthology that Random House will be publishing fall 2009 called The Heart Does Break; Canadian writers on grief and mourning. Right now George is working on his introduction. He describes my behaviour in the moments and days after Bronwyn’s death as too “normal.” With very subtle handling, this novel explores the thin lines between “normal” and madness, how grief dulls, and our inability to grieve and connect during mourning.

If I were under time constraints—in other words, if I were a judge and had to read 120 books—this is one that I might put aside at 100 pages. And be wrong to do so. Tip: if you want a better shot at winning a prize you must grab the reader’s full attention at the beginning and not rely on a brilliant ending.

Nadine Gordimer—The Conservationist VPL—WINNER

For a time I was considering doing work on Gordimer for my Ph.D. I read a lot of her novels and decided I was too apolitical to take it on. Well, apolitical is an overstatement. But I was keenly aware that every word in a Gordimer novel is charged with the political situation in South Africa.

Half way through the novel I’m wondering if this is the one I didn’t finish years ago—if this is the novel that convinced me not to do graduate work on Gordimer. I’m finding it a slog.

Mehring is a rich man from pig-iron, and his position at birth, i.e. white. He buys a farm, in part as a seduction plot. The comparison of his life in the city and on the farm illustrates in painstaking detail his total alienation from what is going on around him. His wife, mistress and son desert him. I wish I could. But, no, there you are, right inside his head. This is not easy reading. At times you plod on because you know “this is important” stuff.

1974 Ion Trewin—The Guardian

We were three judges – AS Byatt, Elizabeth Jane Howard and me. At the shortlist meeting, Jane remarked that she thought Ending Up by Kingsley Amis (then her husband) was his best book and should go on the shortlist. I looked first at Antonia, and then at Martyn Goff, the prize’s administrator – both remained impassive. We broke for a breather. Martyn said that as chairman it was up to me. Antonia liked the novel (as did I). On literary grounds neither of us had problems about shortlisting it, but what would the press say?

The Booker was already familiar with controversies. Martyn, I know, was not averse to the publicity that our decision would inevitably bring. (This was to centre around a vituperative correspondence in the Times.) But would the burgeoning reputation of the prize be damaged? He thought not. More important was our choice of winner. Antonia and I spoke up for Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist, but Jane was less impressed. She remained keen on Ending Up, but realising that neither Antonia nor I would countenance it winning, she concentrated on Stanley Middleton’s Holiday, a study of middle England that she saw as a “perfect miniature”.

With only three judges, it seemed important to me that we did not compromise or produce a two-one verdict. Might we split the prize between Middleton and Gordimer? Martyn said he knew of no reason why not. We were vindicated by The Conservationist being selected this year for the Best of the Booker shortlist.

My favourite Booker winner remains Schindler’s Ark (1982) by Thomas Keneally (but I must declare my interest and say that I was its editor).

What would Andre Alexis say about this situation?

It is unusual in Canada for jurors to be open and transparent about the jury process. In private and in confidence jurors may tell you what transpired, but not publicly. Here are two exceptions.

First are some excerpts from an interview with Christian Bök. Interviewed by Owen Percy (PhD student at the University of Calgary), originally published in Open Letter 13.3 (Summer 2007): 113-131.

The Politics of Poetics:

Christian Bök on Success, Recognition, Jury Duty, and the Governor General’s Awards.

OP: What do you think of the concept of national prizes or recognition—for example the Governor General’s Awards, which purport to speak for “Canadian Literature.” What do you think of an award which claims to be ‘national.’

CB: Oh, well I think that any prize that aspires to be “national” is probably more concerned with propaganda than aesthetics. All the prizes, of course, claim to pick the most meritorious work. To me, assertions about merit have to address the innovation that a work  might have to offer literary history—not simply for one minor nation, but for our whole planet. Nevertheless, nobody creates a prize saying ‘We’re going to pick only the most conservative, most recognizable, work.’ Every panel of judges is going to say that their choices for winners represent the cutting edge of all contenders. But from my perspective as an academic looking at the history of literature on a planetary scale—the shortlists for these prizes often seem very pathological. The jurors are supposed to be selected from among your peers—but when I see the results of their deliberations, I always  ask myself: ‘What the hell are my peers thinking?’ How is it possible that they can call themselves writers, aspire to greatness, know something presumably about literary history, and yet nevertheless pick mediocre work—work likely to be forgotten within fifty years?

OP: I’d like to have a conversation about the jury experience and specifically how jury members can and do influence the awarding of a prize. You have recently had a unique experience as a GG jury member. I’d like you to explain or give me a quick narrative about your experience on and subsequently off the GG jury. I would also like to know how you ended up on this year’s GG jury in the first place, and how your subsequent experience altered your perception of the awards process.

CB: Of course. Perhaps I should contextualize my anecdote by talking about my other experiences on juries prior to this one. I’ve been on numerous juries for both prizes and grants. I have found each of those experiences very interesting and they have taught me a great deal about the social politics of the awards process. What pleases me is that my experience has been, for the most part, very collegial and relatively uneventful. However I have noticed that some jurors come more prepared than others or less prepared than others, that some come to the process with unreasonable expectations about their influence on the jury. Others come with more reasonable expectations. I think that some jurors have greater or lesser expertise than you might like to see in such a context. Nevertheless, I think that my experience has been pretty normative, and I have generally been very happy with the results of my work on juries. I think that merit has generally prevailed. I don’t think that I have ever had to make unhappy concessions. I have never felt that I have somehow compromised my own sensibilities. What I’ve noticed about the fundamental psychology of the process is that, for most people on a jury, a vote for the winner is actually a kind of vote for yourself. You are hoping, in a certain sense, to see yourself either reflected or embodied in the winner. I think that this fact alone may account in large part for the mediocrity of many prizewinners. I think that, if you are a mediocre assessor , you are going to have difficulty advancing the cause of your betters at the expense of your own career.

OP: Or of your own ego?

CB: Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that, in the history of art, consensus never explains who the best people are in the short term. Really, I think that any statements about the future importance of an author for posterity’s sake are generally made as wagers by charismatic individuals staking an expert claim against history. I had never been on a jury for the GG prize, and typically you have to be nominated by your peers, and you have to fill out paperwork indicating that you’re willing to participate in future committees. In this case, I was called directly by the Governor General’s Committee, which is a branch of the Writing and Publishing Section of the Canada Council. The representative asked me whether or not I would be willing to participate, and I said ‘Certainly!’ Nobody with my expertise from my generation had ever been asked to participate on this jury, and despite many other competing priorities, I felt obliged to do this community service. As a young writer, you never really imagine that can ever get your hands on the levers of cultural control, you know? So when you’re given an opportunity like this one, I think that you’re obliged to take it. I received a description of my responsibilities in the mail —paperwork outlining conflicts of interest, guidelines for assessment, and a schedule of obligations. I had to reserve about five months in order to read about 125 books. I got them in increments, as they were received by the GG Committee. I had to generate a longlist of ten books that would be subsequently submitted a fortnight in advance of any deliberations so that other jurors could see what we would be discussing. I was pretty assiduous about my performance, and read all the books completely. I ranked them all with notes to remind myself about my rationales for each evaluation.  I felt pretty confident that I had a very good longlist of ten books. Now the Canada Council did offer a description of what constituted a conflict of interest, and I thought that it would be very difficult to be an informed committee member without having some reason to comment upon a potential conflict: first, by being involved in an intimate relationship with a poet; second, by being financially obligated through cultural institutions to another poet; and third, by being an artistic collaborator with other poets. The community is very small despite the number of people writing in Canada, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that I would have to fill out some sort of paperwork. Now, I’ve been on grants and juries where I’ve had to face very serious conflicts of interest: I participated in a jury for the Toronto Arts Council, which called for blind submission, and my girlfriend at the time had submitted a proposal, not knowing that I was a juror, because, of course, I had to be confidential about it. I recognized the work immediately, and so I informed the administrators, not the other judges, because even they couldn’t know about my involvement—and I was basically told that any deliberations around the work required that I remain mum, without making any commentary. At the end of the process, when the identities of submitters was revealed, jurors were quite impressed with my objectivity upon discovering that my girlfriend had been a contender. She didn’t get the grant, and the other jurors were somewhat dismayed that I had followed the rules so scrupulously even though I could have tried to argue on her behalf. I have been involved in many other  analogous situations—and in each case there have been very deliberate rules of governance around the handling of these problems.

OP: Your personal experience recently on the GG jury in terms of conflict of interest…?

CB: Right. This last year, my best friend Darren Wershler-Henry published a book called Apostrophe with his good friend Bill Kennedy. Apostrophe is a work of poetry written almost entirely by machine. In the 1990s Bill Kennedy wrote a very whimsical poem called “Apostrophe,” which consists of a whole series of non-sequiturs, each of which begins with the phrase “You are.” He read from it quite frequently in Toronto when Darren and I were apprenticing as poets, and it was always a crowd-pleaser. Darren and Bill wanted to collaborate on a project, so they decided to design a piece of software that would hijack a Google search-engine, inputting individual non-sequiturs from this poem and returning results from the Internet, collating the random results from these requests. The engine would spider any websites returned from these searches, looking for subsequent predicates that began “You are,” and then the software would concatenate these sentences into a new poem. The machine is quite brilliant. It constitutes an amazing use of the Internet as a means for writing poetry. And it shows something about the collective brilliance of people writing on the Internet—the inadvertent poetry lingering in these beautiful synecdoches linked across the network. The book is a very conceptually sophisticated artifact, and it has some important influence now upon any millenial conception of our relationship to the Web. This book, to my misfortune, came out this year, when I had agreed to be on the GG jury. I did not receive the book among any of the boxes that had been sent, and about six weeks into the process I wanted to be sure that it was in fact being submitted so that I could fill out the appropriate paperwork about any conflict of interest. I felt obliged to say, ‘Look, this is my best friend, I have a tremendous amount of intellectual influence upon him and vice versa, and it’s important for any jurors to know about my relationship with him because, chances are, if this book appears on the reading list, I would want to discuss it with the judges.’ It wasn’t in the first salvo of boxes. I phoned the people responsible for managing the logistics of the GG and asked if the book had been submitted. I, of course, couldn’t phone my friend, and I couldn’t phone ECW, the publisher, because I had to maintain confidentiality. The rep at the Canada Council told me that, yes, the book had been submitted, but that it was being held back. So I needed to say ‘Look, I just need to know if it in fact qualifies for submission so that I can fill out the appropriate paperwork about a conflict.’ But they were being very cagey about telling me whether or not the book was going to be submitted to the judges, and I was a bit concerned by this behaviour. I, of course, wouldn’t have cared about some sort of bureaucratic snafu—such as the book being submitted after deadline, etc. But the rep at Canada Council seemed to be intimating that the office couldn’t decide whether or not the work was actually a legitimate book of poetry, and they wouldn’t tell me why. I tried to make an argument that we on the jury, should be judging its poetic merits, and I really did need a statement from them about whether it was being submitted or not so I could actually declare a conflict to the other jury members. I also wanted to ask about the protocols around handling any conflict, because they weren’t actually made explicit in any of the received paperwork. No document outlined my duties in the case of a declared conflict. If we ended up discussing the merits of this book, I wanted to know how I had to behave. On juries for other grants and awards, I would have been permitted to discuss all other works except the one for which I might have declared a conflict. and sure enough the officer in charge explained to me that, if this book should be shortlisted, I would be excused from any subsequent discussion to pick the winner. Given that the other two jury members were Evelyn Lau and Mary Di Michele, I felt that I was very unlikely going to delegate any of my authority to them, so that they would choose a winner on their own. If the book were to be shortlisted, I would probably bracket any discussions around it and suggest that the book itself be excused from any consideration so that I could actually participate in the selection of another winner. The protocols of the award seemed perfectly consistent with my own experience on other juries, so I didn’t question the officer further about the issue. So I proceeded to finish my readings over the next four months or so. I then received a phone call on the very day when I had to submit my list of ten books. I had received an email that very morning requesting my longlist, and I hadn’t yet submitted a response to it, but a few hours later I received a phone call from Writing and Publishing indicating that I was excused from my responsibilities due to my conflict of interest declared several months earlier. This was, of course, an extraordinary surprise, especially since I had just received a request for my top ten list that morning and I hadn’t even submitted it yet. No one had even seen my selections. The rep explained to me that my friendship with Darren and my questioning of the committee about Apostrophe excluded me from my duties. So I got into a very heated argument with the rep—a very prolonged and impolitique argument over the course of about a week. I was constantly in discussion with this bureaucrat in hopes that I could, in fact, be reinstated as a juror. I was stonewalled throughout the process. The rep felt that expressing my interest in the book to somebody outside of the jury process, indicated that I would be disqualified from any objectivity. Now this excuse seemed to me to constitute a real Catch-22 given that, if I wanted to discuss the protocols around any conflict of interest, I would have to actually do what I did. I felt that I was being punished for demonstrating good judgment, and I wanted to know what the rules of governance were for handling this process because it seemed extremely arbitrary. The administrator told me that in fact I could not be allowed to excuse myself from any deliberations around a winner. And in fact, the earlier rep in charge had given me misinformation about all the protocols for such a process.

OP: But there are protocols in place?

CB: Well, actually, there are none. That’s what is so galling about the whole experience. As is the case for any other jury on which I have participated, I did all the work on the assumption that there are actually very formal rules of governance written down, to which the jury members and the award managers must conform. Apparently there are none for the GG prize. The woman to whom I first spoke was responsible for managing the logistics of the prize, and she apparently gave me information that was completely incorrect. I would in fact not be able to participate. When I asked for the formal documentation indicating what the protocols were. no one could provide it because it simply didn’t exist. Members of the committee had decided quite arbitrarily to excuse me from duty at the last minute, in effect for no good reason. They had made up the protocols as they went along. For whatever reason, they felt a lack of confidence in me after several months of work. I don’t know why— the excuses of the Canada Council seemed absurd to me. The committee had suddenly decided (months after my initial enquiry) that I had exceeded my duties as a juror and that it would be impossible for me to judge any application objectively by virtue of having made inquiries about the book’s submission to the prize.

OP: Now, you say that you were dismissed for ‘no good reason,’ but I would imagine that someone had to have formulated some definitive reason somewhere along the line…

CB: Well, the ‘no good reason’ has to do with the fact that there are no rules of governance—so they’re making up the reasons as they go. And to me that’s unconscionable for a prize that’s supposed to be this important. Throughout the process, the woman responsible for managing the GG in Writing and Publishing was saying that she was trying to “protect the integrity of the award.” This justification seemed to me completely bogus. As you have already noted, there have been many occasions in the past when the committee has not really cared about the integrity of the award—and without written rules of governance, there is no standard by which we might judge the integrity of the process. It seemed to me that the rep at Canada Council was poorly informed about the history of Council’s relationship to experimental writers. I felt outraged that, as an experimental writer on a jury, I was being excused, despite being a PhD with a long history of involvement in similar juries.

OP: Well presumably, had your poetics and your personal avant garde sensibilities been an issue, you wouldn’t have been invited onto the jury in the first place…

CB: Yes, but my personal history with the Canada Council has always been somewhat vexed. The rep was very surprised when I reminded her, for example, that my book hadn’t been shortlisted for the GG. The very fact that people didn’t know that I might have some concerns about being personally involved in the process was disconcerting. It seemed that the GG committee had taken this opportunity to redress what was a very long oversight in the past and now, suddenly, were rescinding all of it. I could not believe that members of the committee could just make up these rules as they went along and then say that they were protecting the integrity of the award, when in fact there were no rules of governance around its management. If you can make these kinds of arbitrary decisions on a whim, then there is no integrity to the process. I don’t see what you’re protecting. I think that they could have demonstrated their integrity by adhering to the protocols that they had initially given me rather than making me do all the work after the fact, only to change their minds. I should have been having these arguments four months earlier, not on the very last day when they requested my longlist. So this brouhaha only highlighted for me the bureaucratic incompetence in the Canada Council; the process simply undermined my already-failing confidence in the institution—

OP: What’s the solution in terms of an administrative fix at the GGs or at the Canada Council in order to prevent this from happening again?

CB: Obviously they have to have a set of rules of governance in place. The Council has admitted to me that there are none,[1] and I have said that this situation is unconscionable. I am dismayed that an institution like this can run for 40-odd years without some protocols formally in place. I don’t know how that’s even been possible. I don’t know how the Canada Council can suggest that this award is well-managed, when in fact it actually has no governance. In any other organization of this scale, there would be written protocols in place, produced through consultation with the literary community—protocols that would have been assessed by a board of governors of some sort, and that would have been generated like a constitution. The very fact that the Council doesn’t even have these basic structures in place undermines the credibility of the award.

OP: The results of this year’s GG deliberations have obviously come out now—you were replaced by Cyril Dabydeen and—

CB: Yes, I was actually required to return all of the books, all 125 books, on short notice. I had to box them all up and send them back. I spent four or five months of dedicated time reading those books. I had to read a couple per day in order to maintain the pace required, and they insisted that whoever replaced me on the jury would in fact read all of the books and make an objective assessment about their merits. In less than two weeks. I think that’s impossible. There’s no way that anyone could’ve done a respectable job reading that many books and assessing their merits in less than two weeks. Now, they certainly paid me for my time of course, and I did receive letters of apology. I did make sure that some sort of recognition was paid—

Have changes been made to CC selection policies because of Christian’s situation? He reports, “The new protocols (such as they are) are toothless, and from my

perspective, unenforced.”

And a piece by Brian Fawcett written for the Toronto Star a few years ago:

JURY DUTY

If you’re fond of literary bloodsports, you’ve probably been tracking the fall book celebrity prizes, and you know that Margaret Atwood won the Giller Prize (AKA the Downtown Toronto Prize), that John Ralston Saul won the Governor General’s award for non-fiction and that Guy Vanderhaeg won the GG for fiction.  That means you’ve probably also noticed that there’s been an awful lot of whining over the Governor General’s awards over the last several years, and that this year has been no different.  Some is the predictable complaining of wounded losers or publishers bickering over administrative foul-ups, along with a few loudmouths along Toronto’s Queen Street who noticed that the now-more prestigious Giller Prize nominees were very well dressed while the GG fiction short listees have straw sticking out from under their collars.

If you’re really nuts about these kinds of things, you may even be aware that in the last few years, jurors themselves have been doing their share of whining and bickering about the GGs.  Last year, Bronwyn Drainie carped that there were too many books for a busy woman like her to read and that publishers weren’t being selective enough with what they submit–meaning that she didn’t want to have to read all those hayseed autobiographies and scholarly monographs about transformational representation of acne in Canadian fiction and other, similarly dim PhD thesis subjects.  More than one juror has whined bitterly about being paid too little for the use of their valuable time.  It’s hard to find anyone in the writing and publishing community who doesn’t have a gripe, actually: the choices are too regional, not regional enough;  the prizes are too small and ill publicized; not enough representation by minorities, too much representation by virtual foreigners. The more the whiners have had to drink or smoke, the louder, sillier, and more nasal the whining gets.

This year I was a member of the non-fiction jury, so I got to see the process from the inside. That means, among other things, that I’m not supposed to be writing this, since jury deliberations are confidential. But because the Canada Council is too underfunded to defend their process–or publicize the prizes adequately, and the Council staff are too overworked to defend themselves, I’m going to break the rules and shoot off my mouth.

When I got the invitation to serve on the jury, my first question was the predictable one: “How many books?” There was a deep pause on the other end of the line. I’d have to evaluate over 200, and I’d be paid what worked out to about 20 cents an hour for it.  I thought about it for almost five seconds before I said yes.  I agreed to serve because being on a GG jury is a civic duty and, I suppose, an artistic honour.  I’m more interested in civic duty than in artistic honours, but there you are.

The truth is that I also saw it as an opportunity.  Several opportunities, actually. It was an opportunity to be able to read nearly every work of non-fiction published in the country at least one year of my life. It was also, I suppose, an opportunity to be able to blow off anyone asking me to review fiction by saying I’d decided to read nothing but non-fiction in 1996.  And to be completely candid, it was an opportunity to keep Rudy Wiebe and his conspiratorial colleagues out of at least one jury spot for one season.

Hey! You know what? Now that it’s over and done with, I don’t have a single complaint. It was great fun, and not at all onerous. Making up my short list wasn’t exactly an exercise in agony, either. Once I’d made my interpretation of the Council’s guidelines and done the basic reading, there were about 35-40 books I thought were pretty good, and well over ten I thought were worth shortlisting.

My judgment criteria was fairly simple. Non-fiction supposedly draws its primary base from the “World-O-Facts”, and so should illuminate and educate. But it must also do what literature has always done: surprise readers with the play of authorial intelligence, and delight them with the clarity of its language.

Four kinds of books didn’t make it onto my shortlist. The first kind was the ones that were poorly written. They’re amazingly easy to spot, and plentiful. Most of the time, their authors weren’t much interested in language–they just wanted to tell their story and get on with it. At lot of the books of this sort came from small presses, often from people who don’t write professionally and likely won’t ever write another book. What they wrote are frequently valuable documents, usually of community interest. But they just ain’t literature.

A second type of non-contender were the scholarly books Ms. Drainie complained about.  They’re non-contenders because the authors’ primary intentions are scholarly thoroughness and not art.  Those aren’t mutually exclusive goals in theory, but in practice, they tend to be.  That they are so mind-numbing wasn’t a problem I could correct. For the universities and the discourse they’re supposed to be fostering,  they’re a huge problem, but that’s another kind of bloodsport, isn’t it?

A third category–let’s call it commercial propaganda–abrogates my understanding of language and human reality, which I happen to believe are both infinitely complicated. Any piece of writing that can’t or won’t acknowledge that complexity just isn’t competent literature, whether the book is about Karla Homolka’s consummate evil or a commissioned wank of Ted Rogers.

I also excluded what I’ve come to call “devotional literature”. These are books that proceed by an undisclosed set of exclusory attitudes or beliefs, and the authors are really just rearranging their play blocks on paper. Since art is by definition inclusive, any work that defines reality on devotional terms can’t be literature. That got rid of the religious, ethnic, preferential and otherwise-crazed entries.

Don’t get me wrong. The entry criteria for the GGs can’t  and shouldn’t exclude any of these books, as Ms. Drainie would prefer. So long as Canada remains the democracy it is, publishers have the right to enter any or all of their books in the GG competition. Similarly, every writer has the same right to compete–why would they write at all if they didn’t believe their writings weren’t unique and excellent.  There is always the chance that one of these books will lift itself from its apparent limitations.  A few of the books I read for the GG’s actually did that.

Judging the quality of  a work of non-fiction is, of course, notably easier than judging fiction. With non-fiction, there is a nexus of facts and ideas to consider, along with the degree of clarity to which the writing holds and upholds that nexus. With fiction, there are no such comforts.

What I’m suggesting, I guess, is that everyone ought to give fiction juries a break. They’ve got an impossible job, and in recent years, it has gotten worse. Part of their problem is the virtual collapse of genres, which has meant that no one is really sure anymore what fiction is. That has led most jurors to exclude genre-crossing writing altogether, and to pull their critical wagons in a circle around anything that resembles 19th Century fiction. The other part of their problem is the elevation of sectarian sensitivies to the level of social lunacy, a phenomenon that in fiction, has turned point-of-view into a minefield of competing correctnesses.  A fiction juror’s only safe basis for judgment is the conventionality of narrative quality and writing style and a miniscule zone of “correct” subject matter that can’t be acknowledged: WASP writers expressing cultural guilt about what their ancestors did to the oppressed, or minority writers offering aggressive tribal hagiographies of one sort of one sort or another.  Fiction prizes are now prizes for conventional and correct behavior.

Given that, and the fact that the GG fiction jury is charged to make its selection from across the country and its various clamouring regional sensitivities, there’s no way to make any choice that doesn’t tromp on someone’s toes.  The winners don’t really win, and the losers all get to feel cheated whether they were or not.

Is there a better way?  Sure. Since we’re now a free market society,  let’s make a 90s kind of competition: triple the prize money, move the competitions for translation, poetry, drama and kidlit (they’re only club prizes anyway) to a lower category. Then we drop the jury size to one or two, announce the jurors at the beginning of the year, pay them properly (they’ll be working more or less full time) and let cyborg capitalism do its job. That means public debates, lobbies, and directed publicity campaigns throughout the publishing year–a free-for-all consciously aimed at influencing the juries. We now have the media capability to ensure thaat jurors won’t be able to take a wiz on the sly let alone make a sneaky deal or play the home side. And anyway, openness is always the best safeguard against corruption. The prize profiles would get a huge boost in public interest from such a process. Why not televise the jury deliberations like a kangaroo court or game show so everyone can know exactly why and how the winners win? Wouldn’t it be entertaining to see judges holding up scorecards with their ratings? Maybe we could hire Don Cherry to do between-book analysis.

Ah, but then we’d have to drop our tribal affiliations, stop whining about how we’re being victimized, and take the GG’s seriously.

---

[1] In a letter of apology sent to Dr. Bök, the Writing and Publishing Department of the Canada Council admits that “this situation could have been avoided had we had a prizes-tailored conflict of interest policy in place.”

8900 words, March 17, 2010

1973

1973

It’s the 2008 award season in Canada as I write this—the GGs, Giller and The Writers’ Trust of Canada have been dolling out money for the past few weeks. Nino Ricci won the GG, Miriam Toews The Writers’ Trust Rogers Fiction prize, and Joseph Boyden the Giller. No agreement there. Only one writer appeared on all three short-lists—Rawi Hage. Shouldn’t that make him the winner? It would if we threw them all in one pot and used the numeral count method of determining the winner.

These announcements are quickly followed by the nah sayers. One is Richard Bachmann, owner of The Different Drummer Bookstore in Burlington Ontario, organizer of a wonderful writers’ series, winner of the Jack Award (for book-selling) and a really nice man who is committed to books. Here is his response to the 2008 fiction prizes:

For many years, A Different Drummer Books has watched with incredulity, occasionally tempered with outrage, as worthy books have been passed by for Canada’s most esteemed literary honours. Finally, in 1993 we assumed the responsibility of recognizing works of literature inexplicably ignored by the Governor General’s Award and, more recently, The Giller Prize. In some years our decisions have been immediate, the omissions being so remarkably egregious. So, we proudly bestowed the Drummer General’s Award upon Jane Urquhart for Away, Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces, Alistair MacLeod for No Great Mischief, and Frances Itani for Deafening. These superb books went on to garner glittering prizes elsewhere, but in each case ours was the first award given.

Once again it is our responsibility to provide a corrective to the other awards. Let us begin with an honourable mention for Helen Humphreys’s fine novel, Coventry (Harper Collins). Ultimately, though, we decided our award for fiction must belong to Patrick Lane for Red Dog Red Dog (McClelland & Stewart).

One of the blurbs on the book jacket of Lane’s book is written by Bachmann. Hmmm. Conflict of interest? You bet.

I would also point out that the list Bachmann cites—Urquhart, Michaels et al—are all pretty mainstream stuff. No risks. No sparks. None of these books stack up against, say, anything by Paul Quarrington.

When George was Writer in Residence at the University of Western Ontario a few years ago he was asked to be part of London Reads and championed Elle by Douglas Glover. Someone else was championing No Great Mischief. The evening of the great debate I had recently finished the MacLeod book, and I foolishly opened my mouth and suggested that although I thought parts of the book were wonderful (though very sentimental) that the sections that take place in Calgary with the sister were tedious and poorly written. I pointed out that MacLeod is a notoriously slow writer and suggested that he’d been pushed to take the book to press before it was really ready. People gasped. Honest. You would have thought I had said Anne of Green Gables was a loud-mouthed spoiled brat. I was admonished—clearly there are some literary sacred cows you shouldn’t mess with.

Now, to the 1973 Bookers.

Beryl Bainbridge: The Dressmaker, Duckworth; J G Farrell: The Seige of Krishnapur, Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Elizabeth Mavor: The Green Equinox, Michael Joseph; Iris Murdoch: The Black Prince, Chatto & Windus

Jury: Karl Miller, Edna O’Brien, Mary McCarthy

Interesting mix. McCarthy, a US writer and known toughy. Miller is the founder and long-time editor of the London Review of Books. Edna O’Brien takes us back to my grad school days. I started my Ph.D. with the intention of writing a fairly straight-ahead assessment of her canon. Trouble was, there was no definitive bibliography of her work, and she’s prolific. As you may have noticed, I’m a tad obsessive sometimes. Anyway, it turned out that as I tracked the canon I ended up with a fully annotated checklist bibliography of O’Brien’s work including all interviews in major papers and reviews. Suffice to say I’m pretty familiar with her work. In the early 70s she was a hot property, and well-known in England because her books were banned (and burned) in Ireland.

Elizabeth Mavor—The Green Equinox U Vic

Sometimes mentioned as A Green Equinox I had a lot of trouble getting a copy of this one. Nothing at VPL, UBC or SFU. I figured I would just buy a copy (having recently donated the expensive Thomas Kilroy novel to UBC) but there is not one copy on abebooks. Eventually I did find one copy, on bookfinder, for just a bit less than $500.00. The guys who collect first editions of the Bookers must be on a constant lookout for this baby. I did locate a copy in the library at the University of Victoria. We were going to a reunion in Victoria and I arranged for our hostess to get a friend who teaches at U Vic to take the book out so I could read it while we were there. The extents to which I go!

And what an odd book. A mixture of first and third person narrative. Hero Kinoull, a repairer of antiquarian books, is having an affair with Hugh, the rococo expert, who is married to Belle. By the middle of the book Hero is wildly in love with Belle and by the end, is living/loving Hugh’s mother. Perhaps she has been sniffing too much glue.

The events around which these love affairs are hinged are a zinging combination of bathetic small-village comedy (a group of women wrapped around an ancient elm protecting it from bulldozers) and unlikely disasters—car accident, typhoid epidemic, near-drowning, drowning, and fire.

I can see why Edna O’Brien would like the comedic and unusual examination of love in a claustrophobic small village setting.

Beryl Bainbridge—The Dressmaker ILL

A few curious details here—a family cat named Nigger, a brother who is a butcher but can’t stand the sight of blood. It is a book of details on a small canvas. Two sisters and their niece share the familial home. The brother (father of the niece) visits. It’s 1944, the USA has joined the war and England is torn between the support of the troops and the resentment of the decadent and relatively wealthy Yanks in a country that has been scrimping for years.

The oldest sister Nellie watches over the family and is obsessed with her long-dead Mother. Family relationships are tense—the conflict between the harsh morals of a previous generation and the live-for-the-moment attitude of the late war. Tightly written, and tense. Who’s afraid of Baby Jane? Like O’Brien’s first novels, Bainbridge is focused on feckless girls who find themselves in trouble because they have no education or knowledge of the real world from their restrictive upbringings.

J G Farrell—The Siege of Krishnapur UBC (THE WINNER)

My mother was born in India. Her parents were in India as missionaries under the Presbyterian church. Growing up I was uneasy whenever there were stories about those days in India, under British rule. It seemed like such hypocrisy speaking of “those poor little black babies,” and their need to “find the Lord.” So, with that confession I will say this is the best book of the whole lot so far.

The book is about the siege of Krishnapur in 1857 during the Indian rebellion and is a penetrating look at British Victorian values. Farrell takes on opium use and production, the righteous anger of religious zealots, the problems created by the Crimean war (not enough available young men, for one), the fad of phrenology, social structure, the hypocrisy of Victorian morality, medical procedures (in one scene two doctors with opposing beliefs in the treatment of cholera thrash it out), issues of ownership and property, beauty and art, materialism, science and industry. It’s a scathing attack of the dangers of belief in a superior culture.

But it’s also funny, really funny—the Padre and the Roman Catholic chaplain fight over the allotted plots in the graveyard, and later the Padre and Fleury have a heated theological argument while digging graves. When needed to help fire the canon, Fleury isn’t sure what to do because he “had not been paying attention when the cannon was loaded; the beginnings of an epic poem had been simmering in his brain.”

It’s impossible to read this book—written in the 1970s, looking back to the previous decade—without considering our own culture; as a reader there is no smug way out. It isn’t possible to feel superior to these characters—that trap has been exposed. Instead the reader is forced to consider the occupation of Iraq, the “war on terrorism” and the fight to bring democracy and capitalism to another culture, and the assumption that North America’s relatively new culture is better.

In the novel, the Indians are little understood by the British; “In spite of the years he had spent in the East the Collector had never managed to get used to the appearance of the pariah dogs. Hideously thin, fur eaten away by mange to the raw skin, endlessly and uselessly scratching, timorous, vicious, and very often half crippled, they seemed like a parody of what Nature had intended. He had once, as it happened, on landing for the first time at Garden Reach in Calcutta, had the same thought about the human beggars who swarmed at the landing-stage; they, too, had seemed a parody. Yet when the Collector piously gave to the poor, it was to the English poor, by a fixed arrangement with his agent in London; he had accepted that the poverty of India was beyond redemption. The humans he had got used to, in time…the dogs, never.”

In the end the people of the garrison are forced to recognize that “the fiction of happy natives being led forward along the road to civilization could no longer be sustained.”

Too bad George W. is not a book reader.

Iris Murdoch—The Black Prince UBC

I have a little book where I keep track of books I want to read, either because of something else I have read, a review, or a tip from a fellow reader. The Black Prince has been on that list for some time. It is often referred to as Murdoch’s best novel.

Bradley Pearson, the first-person narrator, makes Bertie Wooster looks like an emotional giant. Brad makes Hamlet, The Prince of Denmark, appear to be an uncomplaining, unbrooding optimist. Remember the dolt of a narrator from Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, John Dowell? Well, Brad makes John seem reliable. Okay, I’ll stop.

Divorced from his wife, half-heartedly going after his best friend’s wife (both Bradley and his best friend, Arthur, are writers, though the friend is more successful) rumored to be a closet homosexual who really loves Arthur, Bradley falls desperately in love with Arthur’s daughter. Bradley’s rambling about his feeling are almost unbearable to read. Do men talk like this? His sister, Priscilla is even worse.

But I’m on to Murdoch and I was looking for the twist at the end, though I couldn’t anticipate what it would be. She snuck up, and clobbered me, again. In this novel the ending almost forces you to start at the beginning again to see how she pulled it off.

1973 Edna O’Brien—from The Guardian

Mary McCarthy and I were the judges, with Karl Miller presiding as chairman. Disputes were negligible. From a batch of about 20, it was whittled down to two contenders – The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell and The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch, with Farrell winning by a whisker. Next day, Mary changed her mind and it was left to Miller to cast the deciding vote, which he did with alacrity and no rancour. The prize has changed as the literary/publishing world has undergone a radical and not always edifying sea change: the celebrity virus now infects authors and judges alike.

I can’t remember how it came up, but one day when Susan Musgrave was over and prizes were mentioned she said she thought all prizes should be abolished. So, I asked her why. This was her answer:

Prizes are a mockery, a snare and a delusion. Very bad for writers (all but the ones who win); very good for the odd publisher, the marketers and booksellers, etc. All the focus on one ‘best’ book (and we all know there is no such thing—it is simply the arbitrary decision of a bunch of writers like me, or George, and depending on what our taste is – that book wins.) Often the book that is the compromise (one that is fourth or fifth on everyone’s list but at least is on everyone’s list) wins for that reason. I have never been on a jury where the Number 1 book on anyone’s list has been the winner.

The attention focuses on one book, but there are hundreds that never win prizes and because they do not win prizes they a) do not sell foreign rights and b) get relegated to the non-prize-winning section of the bookstore (I’m thinking of the World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto.) Books are not commodities, they are worlds…prizes focus on product, not process.

I’ve heard that often from writers who have done jury duty—that the top book on their lists never wins, that juries are an exercise in compromise. But the people administering the prizes certainly do everything possible to say the winner is the best book. For the 2008 Canadian prizes in fiction, three different juries came up with three different winners. There was hardly any overlap on the short-lists. It seems to me that whoever is selecting the jury is the one with the real power. Essentially when you pick the jury, you’ve picked the winner.

Rex Weyler: The downside is that the prize process may also influence writing, which is a negative … and may also award the in-crowd, which is another negative because that kills real creativity.

Ah, and then there’s the in-crowd problem. The following article is from the Toronto Star in response to the GG poetry winner for 2008

Canada Council denies conflict of interest

November 25, 2008

VIT WAGNER

PUBLISHING REPORTER

The Canada Council, which administers the Governor General’s Literary Awards, is standing by the decision of its jury to award this year’s poetry prize to Jacob Scheier in the face of complaints by some critics that the decision is tainted by conflict of interest.

Scheier, a 28-year-old Toronto poet living in Brooklyn, N.Y., won for his debut, More to Keep Us Warm. In the acknowledgements, Scheier thanks two of the three jury members: poets Di Brandt, who helped translate a poem contained in the collection, and Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, who blurbed the book.

This has sparked an outcry among some in the poetry community. Eyebrows were raised almost immediately after the $25,000 award was announced last week, with naysayers venting their objections on the literary website Bookninja.com

“We followed guidelines and process to the letter,” Melanie Rutledge, the Canada Council’s head of writing and publishing, said yesterday. “We feel that it was a consensual decision reached by all three of the jury members. We stand behind the process. We stand behind the professionalism of the committee.

“At the same time, if some in the poetry community believe that we should not have been satisfied with the committee’s ability to be 100 per cent objective, then we must graciously and responsibly accept this feedback and continue to try to do the best we can.”

The Canada Council guidelines stipulate that a conflict “may” exist “if the assessor has made a direct, intellectual contribution to one of the books” or “if the assessor’s name is listed in the acknowledgement section.”

As the word “may” suggests, it’s a discretionary call.

Brandt denied the existence of a conflict in a comment to Quill & Quire.

Questions of perceived conflicts are not uncommon, particularly in a country with a relatively small literary community whose members are largely known to one another.

“It’s a sort of Catch-22 for the writer involved here,” allowed Bookninja publisher, poet George Murray on a website posting. “(Scheier) didn’t choose the jurors and can’t help if his book was elevated to the shortlist by what are likely well-meaning people who probably really did enjoy his book.

“But when one juror has provided a blurb for your cover and another has collaborated on one of the poems within (and is thanked for editing), you have to wonder about the ethics of the choice – especially from the jurors’ point of view. Wouldn’t you recuse yourself?”

“Although Canada Council jurors who review grant applications are expected to disqualify themselves from potentially conflicted decisions, no such provision exists for Governor General’s Literary Award jurors.

And more from the Globe and Mail:

Literary prizes and judgment calls

The poetry jury has turned Jacob Scheier’s GG award into a poisoned chalice, André Alexis says

By ANDRÉ ALEXIS

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

The recent controversy over Jacob Scheier’s winning of the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry is both interesting and dull. Interesting, because it brings up moral and aesthetic questions. Dull, because it brings up the same questions we are often asked: What is objectivity? Can a juror know a book well and still judge it fairly against others he or she knows only glancingly?

Di Brandt, one of three jurors who judged Scheier’s More To Keep Us Warm to be the best work of poetry published in the past year, was acknowledged in Scheier’s book for her “ongoing advice, support and feedback in the process of writing this book.” Brandt also co-translated the first poem that appears in the book, Rilke’s The Voice. That is, Brandt helped to shape the book and had a hand in the creation of one of the book’s poems. This constitutes a conflict of interest, doesn’t it? In which case, Brandt should have stepped down from the jury, once it became clear “her” book was one of the finalists, don’t you think? As one who has stepped down from a jury in order to avoid judging my then-partner’s work, I understand some of the conflicts.

First, Canadian writers know other Canadian writers. We’re not such a large community that you can easily avoid all other practitioners of your art. The conflicts range from “I met Poet X at such and such a festival and liked him and his work” to “I have had a friendship with Poet X for several years.” Meeting and liking a poet should not compromise your judgment overmuch, while deep emotional relationships probably do.

Second, there is the matter of aesthetic leanings. Canadians don’t share a single, monolithic aesthetic approach. Despite some general similarities (a tendency to the personal or confessional, for instance), Canadian poets have a great many approaches at their disposal. From the formal (would anyone be surprised if a Canadian poet released a collection of sestinas about his or her divorce?) to the so-called avant-garde (poems generated using three goldfish, the I Ching and a 1956 telephone book from Mombassa). Naturally, it’s almost impossible for a single person to be equally well versed in all the different aesthetic traditions, to treat a sestina and a concrete poem with the same objectivity or critical acumen.

But conflict over traditions (regional, political, aesthetic etc.) is inevitable, and even desirable. A prize should not serve to endorse one aesthetic over another. It’s perfectly appropriate to have Christian Bök win the Griffin Poetry Prize one year and Anne Simpson win it another. Every three or four years, a jury’s choice will actually accord with your own. You celebrate for a few days and move on.

In an interview with industry trade magazine Quill and Quire, Brandt is reported to have said it is “absurd” to make an issue of her role in Scheier’s creative development. She added: “If people want to debate anything, they should at least be having a discussion on the level of poetics.” She is further quoted as saying, “There is a debate going on in Canada about what is the important poetics of our time, and I think that Jacob Scheier’s book demonstrates a poetic clarity … and spiritual engagement which is in some ways unconventional in the current, neo-Dadaist fashion in some circles in Toronto.”

Now, there may be debate going on about the “important poetics of our time,” but the problem with this jury’s decision to give Scheier the Governor- General’s Award has nothing to do with aesthetic conflict. It’s Brandt’s involvement with the winning book that is suspect. She worked as one of its de facto editors, even if she is not the editor of record, and that’s a problem for many of us.

Also, the assertion that Scheier’s work is being criticized because it does not meet the approval of “the current, neo-Dadaist fashion in some circles of Toronto” is a shameful effort to shift the argument from one about her own morally dubious behaviour to an argument about Toronto, its poets and their supposed dislike of Scheier’s book, as if one had to live in Toronto to believe a juror’s intimacy with a book gives the book and the writer an unfair edge over other books and other writers up for the same award.

There’s another aspect to this that is off-putting. Scheier is quoted as saying, “I think if [people] knew Di, they would see she has more integrity than pretty much anyone I’ve known in my life.”

Melanie Rutledge of the Canada Council has said, “You need to have a very serious conversation with the prospective juror and say, ‘Look, you need to be very sure that you can be 100-per-cent objective in evaluating [the submission].’ ”

All of this is meant to assert Brandt’s moral bona fides: She’s a “good person” and she chose “objectively.” But this controversy is not about whether Brandt is a good person or a bad one. It is about a kind of conflict that precludes objectivity, the objectivity of the process as much as of the juror. When you are on a jury, you have little time to assess works that have taken their authors years to produce. G-G fiction jurors are expected to read about 200 works of fiction in five or six months. Poetry juries probably read fewer books, but poetry is dense and intense and needs time to work its strongest effects. In principle, the juror starts at zero (or somewhere reasonably near zero) with a book, reads it and evaluates according to strong first or second impressions.

A juror who has worked on a book of poems, who has seen the progress of a number of poems, who has participated in their development can in no way be said to have started from “zero” or anywhere near it. The juror who has worked on a book of poems has an intimacy with the work in question that he or she does not have with the others under consideration. Brandt was intimate with Scheier’s work. She knew its warp and weave as she did not know that of other works. To assert that she can have been “objective” and to call those who doubt it “absurd” is self-serving and rude.

Scheier’s work had an unfair advantage over the others this year. (We don’t even need to get into the fact that another juror, Pier Giorgio di Cicco, had given Scheier’s book a blurb, or question just how dispassionate Brandt can have been when her own work was part of the book under consideration and a poem in More To Keep Us Warm is actually entitled Di and is addressed, one assumes, to her.) The Canada Council did not do anything to rectify this advantage, it seems.

At the very least, Brandt should have left the room when Scheier’s work was under discussion. Did she? She should have had no hand in choosing this book as the winner. Had she? So the Canada Council should take some (or even most) of the blame. It has guidelines, presumably, that should have been imposed.

In all this, I have sympathy for Scheier. This is nothing to do with him or the value of his work. Time will tell if More To Keep Us Warm is any good or not. But Scheier was given a poisoned chalice, and that’s sad, no cause for celebration. And I think those – from across the country – who feel this year’s Governor-General’s Award for Poetry is a bad job have a very good point.

How’s that for in crowd?

1972

Jury: Cyril Connolly, Dr. George Steiner, Elizabeth Bowen. Down from 5 to 3. Wonder why? And only 4 short-listed books rather than 6 of previous years.

John Berger: G, Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Susan Hill: Bird of Night, Hamish Hamilton; Thomas Keneally: The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Angus & Robertson; David Storey: Pasmore, Longman

From Brian Fawcett:

1972 had Steiner and Cyril Connolly—who was the most perceptive British literary critic of the entire century (he went to school with George Orwell, and was able to recognize both his and Henry Miller’s genius: he’s the one who told that hilarious story about Orwell going to Paris to try to convince Miller to fight in the Spanish civil war.)

Most of these contests are made or broken by their jurists. In 90 percent of cases, it becomes a prize for conventional behavior. Once in a while, you get a jury like this one, and you get a winner like G.

I’m increasingly interested in the whole jury process—selection, discussion, etc. Basically there are three methods used for literary prizes. 1. One judge picks the short-list and winner. 2. Between three and five jurors meet, discuss choices, pick a short-list, then a winner. That’s how the Booker jury works. 3. Between three and five judges make a list of their top five books. That list is sent to the organizing body and using a numerical system, a short-list and winner is announced. That’s the system the BC Book Prizes uses, in theory to avoid the possibility of one judge bullying the others.

Curious to know if I could see some pattern, I made lists of the winners and short lists for the following prizes, (beginning in 2001, the first year of the Griffin)—Griffin, Governor General Award for Poetry, BC Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry. If there is a pattern I couldn’t find it. A BC poet will appear on the Griffin, but not on the other two—Robert Bringhurst for 2001. In 2002, Karen Solie was on both the Griffin and BC list, but not on the GG. In that same year three other BC poets were on the GG but not on the other two—Roy Miki, Tammy Armstrong, Colin Browne. BC poet Robin Blaser was given the lifetime achievement award at the Griffins in 2006, the Order of Canada in 2007, then in 2008 won the Canadian part of the Griffin prize. In the 45 odd years that Blaser has lived and been writing in BC he has never received the GG or the BC Book Prize (actually, never even been short-listed for the later).

Then I thought of another way to review prizewinners as measured through other methods. The BC Book Prizes began in 1986. The Order of BC was created in 1984 to acknowledge the highest achievement in the province. Of the 274 who have received the Order during that time, there are five writers—George Bowering, W. P. Kinsella, Joy Kogawa, P. K. Page, and Jane Rule. You would think this group might have stacked up a few BC Book Prizes, right? Wrong. The total is one—P. K. Page in 1988 won the non-fiction prize for Brazilian Journal. If I add David Suzuki (who surely received the OBC for his foundation and environmental work) we can add another prize. And, if I add Howard White (who probably received the OBC for his dogged work for the publishing and writing community as long-time publisher of Harbour) we can add another.

I asked Fred Wah about his experience as a BC Book judge. Does that system work? “It does and doesn’t work. It only works if, during the discussions, there seems to be some consensus, at least on the shortlist(s). But I was on a jury in Alberta with similar guidelines and I protested, after the winners were announced, that not one of my choices was even on the shortlist. In other words, with this method it could happen that two of the three judges’ totals negate the other judge’s choices completely.”

There have been complaints to the BC Book Prizes about this very thing. When George was a judge a number of years ago not one of his top three made the short-list. Now, the administrators tell me, the top pick of each judge is guaranteed to be on the short-list. I don’t know how that affects the numerical calculations but it might explain why the prizes now have short-lists of five where before the short-list was usually three books. But it doesn’t seem to solve the problem of 2 judges eliminating the opinion of the third.

I asked Brian Fawcett about his experience with the BC Book Prizes. He responded in classic Fawcett style.

We were invited to discuss the submissions and to provide one another with shortlists, and so we did. What I caught, as did one of the other jurors, was that the third juror had an agenda, which was that she liked one book because it was good, but was also, for reasons she didn’t disclose,  determined to get another not-so-great book on the shortlist, and thus was plumping her vote accordingly. Between the two of us, we figured out the weighting system of the votes, and acted on it—without having to openly conspire–to get the book both of us preferred over the top. The book that the third juror liked but didn’t have a personal agenda on might have won had we not figured this out, because it was also second or third on our lists, too, whereas our common  favourite didn’t rate  in her calculation at all—she’d figured out the system, too, or thought she had. Her weakness was that she thought she was smarter than we were, or that we were going to be too principled to manipulate the system the way she did. I decided to let her think that, and both the other juror and I adjusted our voting to cancel out strategic weighting.

I think most prize juries operate the same way—certainly almost all of the dozen or so juries I’ve been on have had greater or lesser degrees of it. One judge will be bullying, another politicking, and who knows who’s sleeping with whom, in the end, and the worst juries I’ve been on were carried on with the greatest airs of elevated correctness.

Personally, I think we’d be better off if prize jury deliberations were done in the open, with jurors arguing their cases for the books they like, which would help to expose  pressures being exerted, allow inside connections to be outed and public commentaries and counter-arguments made by jurors along the way—most of it stuff that goes on in juries that are pretending to be objective and principled.  The publicity that would result would do the prizes more good than the fakery that goes on with the ‘objective and fair’ decision-making processes. There’s no such thing as “fair and objective” in the real world, and no bureaucrat is going to create a system to prevent it that won’t also ensure that only mediocre and conventional books—the compromise winners that always seem to emerge when jurors try to be fair and objective– win all the prizes. They manage to do that in 99 percent of cases anyway, but anything that prevents that is for the better. Making it wide open and public would at least make it more fun and less hypocritical. It’s also worth noting that the selection of jurors is done by the bureaucrats, and is often done on the basis of an agenda, which might be artistic, commercial or personal. Nobody ever looks at that possible source of corruption. It would be much more fair if a pool of jurors was created, and the jurors then picked at random.

But in the absence of a more public jury system, a juror should pick his or her winner, and do what’s needed to ensure that it wins. Because the other judges, by the same or different means, will almost certainly be doing the same.

Sounds messy, doesn’t it?

Susan Hill—The Bird of Night VPL

Another book about a madman.

Francis (the mad but genius poet) and Harvey (Egyptologist) live together for 20 years during which time Francis writes the brilliant long poem “Janus” between bouts of depression and suicidal madness, to which he finally succumbs. As an old man Harvey writes about their time together and tries to stave off the academics in search of the poet’s papers: “I will not have the bones of them picked over, I will not have those arrogant, salacious young men sniffing about his books like vultures over carrion.” I liked that part.

The writing is overwrought. The relationship between the two men is never fully examined—are they buddies or lovers? Part of the structure of the novel is the use of sections from the diary of Francis. There is no evidence this guy can write well.

Recently Susan Hill has published a YA novel so there are various interviews floating around, this one from a London paper:

“Have you written any books you now do not like?

“Yes. I think THE BIRD OF NIGHT is a bad novel, though there are some powerful scenes in it. But I just don’t believe in the central character any more and I think it’s a pretty unlikely story. Oddly enough, it won me the Whitbread Prize and was shortlisted for The Booker !!”

How refreshing is that?

Thomas Keneally—The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith VPL

I’ve scanned the coming shortlists and we’ll be seeing a lot of Keneally. This book is based on the real-life story of a half-breed young man—Jimmy Governor—who, after much abuse, flips out and goes on a killing spree. The book touches on the issues around Australian racism and in many ways is both deep and complex. But there is also something unsettling.

I’m again reminded of the bizarre election we just watched to our south. Sarah Palin at rallies accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” Otherwise upright citizens charging that Obama is a “Muslim” and the “anti-Christ” (how can he be both?). The First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division (3,000 to 4,000 soldiers) was deployed in the US for crowd control of “unruly individuals.” And the police in LA were concerned about race riots if Obama didn’t win. Fear mongering creates such a thin line, and you can see the potential for folks to flip out.

One of my problems with Jimmie Blacksmith is that he doesn’t flip out. It isn’t madness of the moment. Keneally describes his mental process:

“Now Jimmie himself knew that Newby was not what he wanted. He was in a fever for some definite release. Killing Newby, however, was not it. When he put his rifle against Newby’s gut, he knew that he wished to kill that honey-smooth Miss Graf. His desire for her blood, he understood, came as a climax to his earlier indecencies—relinquishing Harry Edwards to Senior Constable Farrell, for example. He wished to scare the schoolmistress apart with his authority, to hear her whimper.”

Elsewhere in the book: “Jimmie Blacksmith was suddenly ashamed and overcome with a fatalism native to his blood, the fatalism that had kept him at Verona once against his will.”

I don’t want to get into the issue of voice appropriation, but there is something here that might be voice misappropriation. More to the point, the book suffers because there is no distance. Periodic psychic analysis, which is what happens here, doesn’t work.

Another Australian book about the Ned Kelly gang will be turning up on the shortlist later and perhaps this issue will arise again. I think George handled this challenge much better in Shoot.

I putzed around a bit, curious about this issue and found the following from a publisher’s preface for a reprint in 2001: “Keneally had read a book on Governor by the historian Frank Clune and after consulting various other works on Aboriginal kinship and newspapers from 1900, went about fictionalizing Governor’s life. It is very much a product of its time—it is a work whose story is told from the perspective of a black man but is written by a white man. Keneally in no way renounces the work, but acknowledges that if he were to tackle it in 2001, it would be more appropriately told through the eyes of one of the white characters.”

John Berger—G VPL—WINNER

You will know from the comments above that Brian Fawcett thinks highly of this book. So does George B. One evening when I was heavily sighing over the novel George frowned and said, “If you don’t say in your report that G is the best novel of the last half of the twenty century, we’re over.”

I reported this conversation to Fawcett who wrote, “Yeah, well, if you don’t put it in your Booker report I won’t pick you up and marry you after he dumps you. So George and I are in accord over that one.”

I can see I will need my Batman training to deal with this one.

“So”, she asked, “why do you think this novel is so great?”

“The writing,” he said.

“That’s it?”

“The writing and the experience of reading it.”

“But tell me about the book. If a grad student gave you those two answers, with nothing else, you’d fail him.”

“Well,” GB finally admitted, “I can’t really remember anything about the book. I read it more than 30 years ago.”

Hmmmm

There have been times when a book has knocked me off my stool. That happened with As I Lay Dying. About 30 years ago. But I remember profoundly not just the language and the experience, but lines, very distinct details. More recently, The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Nighttime, the sex scenes in Galveston, the ride into the middle of Cloud Atlas.

I’ve finished G. My socks are still on.

I can’t, of course, really imagine what it would have been like to read this book in the context of the time it was written. I was in grade 9, busy (and pretentiously) reading all of Ibsen and Shaw. I’m not sure it has the same punch anymore. Certainly the fractured narrative is used effectively to explore the nature of interior/exterior and the theme of exile displacement. So much is about ways of seeing, and new ways of seeing which appear so often in subsequent works by Berger (who at heart is an art critic). Here the emphasis is often about seeing things carefully and we suspect a strong Cubist influence. An example of the writing:

“I must emphasize that I use the word ‘play’ as a metaphor so that we can appreciate the essentially artificial, symbolic, exemplary and spectacular nature of the occasion. But the scene and the props are real. The winter weather, the hounds, the coverts to be drawn, the fences to be jumped, the country that is there to be ridden over, the drag of the fox, the fatigue of the man who has thrust all day – these are real: and the physical experience of these is all the more intenser because of their symbolism which every hard-bitten hunting-man feels.”

The style is frequently self-consciously modernist, which doesn’t bother me that much. Sometimes the narrative is taken over by an essay (which reminds me of Shaw) but again, although at times it gets long-winded and dated, this doesn’t’ bother me all that much. One thing that does get me is the analysis of sex. Why are any of the women interested in G? Only because Berger/the author says so (which, of course, is the point). G is a character (well, more a figure than a character) with no ability to connect with his surroundings. But, when he ensnares a woman we are to believe (or see) that he “recognizes” her as she has never known herself, or been seen before. “Looking at you he recognizes you. His recognition cannot be put out. It burns what it recognizes. And by the light of its burning it recognizes more and more until it is so bright that it recognizes as familiar what it has never seen.”

If part of what Berger is trying to achieve is to alienate the reader through his examination of alienation, he succeeded with this reader. If you are interested in the relationship of art/art criticism to the development of the novel, read this book. If you are interested in the influence of communism on the modern novel, read this book. If you are interested in the work of Michael Ondaatje and what influenced his writing, read this book. But give yourself lot of time to get through it. It is rich, and dense, and intelligent. Stimulating, and frustrating.

The blurb on the dustjacket calls the novel “luminous”.

Brian Fawcett: “(None of [what you write] disputes any claim that Berger was (and remains) a loose cannon.)

“I think he’s the epitome of the difference between creative and lucid intelligence (Primo Levi would be the illustration of the latter.)

“G didn’t impress me because of its prose style. It impressed me because it was about the roots of everything we’re now strangling in: the thrill of technology, the wonder of flight, and the briefness of the period where one could actually be optimistic about the political, social and cultural effect of technology without also being a moron. I was thrilled by the ideas in that book, not by the prose. Berger’s prose has always been clumsy. He’s a little like John Ralston Saul that way. The ideation is remarkable, but each sentence he writes begs for revision.”

Technology? G dies before the beginning of WWI. Huh?

And from Steven Heighton: “Significant observation: I, like George, loved “G” but now

don’t recall a damn thing about it.”

After a few weeks, Steven added: “Further to my brief, lazy comment about G.  I said that I, like George, didn’t remember a damn thing about it–but writing that very line has apparently revived some neglected neural circuitry, because now things are coming back to me.  And I recall that a friend who read my last novel told me that the hero reminded him of the character G.  So–I guess the book has affected me more than I thought.

“What I was getting at in saying I remembered nothing about it was that novels of ideas always risk being forgettable in terms of narrative and character.  It’s a risk worth taking, I think, but there’s no use pretending the risk isn’t there.  I was thinking that G, as an embodiment of certain ideas of Berger’s rather than a conventionally “rounded” character, felt less vital, and was therefore less memorable, than, say, Falstaff or Anna K or Uriah Heep.  And yet  . . . the sum total of the character, a sort of gestalt of moral ferocity, has stayed with me.  And I recall admiring G’s unusual (or is it?) combination of sensual passion and moral austerity . . .

“And I shd add that I don’t believe narrative memorability is the only test of a novel’s merit.”

To which Brian Fawcett replied, “I don’t remember much about the narrative or characters in the novel, either. What I remember was its illumination of that period, just before WW1, where it was possible to consider technology and not duck and groan. I hadn’t, until I read that novel, realized what a fuckup occurred with World War I, or how many possibilities it took away from the century that followed–so in that sense, it was the beginning of my real education. I’d trade that insight for most of the literature of the 20th century–and the deluge of navel lint it has brought down on us.

David Storey—Pasmore UBC

Colin Pasmore wakes one morning full of despair. Despite his loving wife, children and good job there is something missing. He falls into depression, says he will leave his wife because he no longer has feelings for her, and becomes shiftless. Then he starts an affair with a mystery woman who once was a student, becomes totally regenerated, loving to family and friends. Renewed and refreshed by this “independence.”

It doesn’t last long. Of his mistress,  “He began to feel cheated. To feel, that it, that he was cheating himself. As time passed he wanted to make something out of his feelings for her. Nothing stood still.” Of his wife, “The continual need each time he returned home of having to court her, to reassure himself of her, to question her by his gestures as well as by his silences, began to wear him down.”

He sinks back into depression, and moves out of the house. Just when this reader is getting rather fed up with the navel-gazing whinner, the husband of the mystery woman shows up, and offers to pay Pasmore off. Pasmore refuses. The next day a hearse delivers a coffin to his door. Then funeral wreaths. Then a thug to badly beat Pasmore. None of it arouses any sympathy, or even much interest in Colin Pasmore.

As Pasmore moves increasingly into his nervous breakdown, he goes north to visit his parents. In other Storey books much is made of the industrial north, and the oppression of coal mining life, the social stigma, and the aspirations to do better but here it is not fully explored. Colin carries the weight of his father’s expectations, yes, but this doesn’t make sense of the rest of the novel. Nor does the ending, which returns us to the Pasmore family home. And perhaps that is the point—you can’t always find sociological explanations for personal bafflement.

Considering the competition, it doesn’t seem so remarkable that the prize went to Berger. A big book—yes. An important book—yes. The most important book of the last half of the C20th? Not in my books.

1972 George Steiner—from The Guardian

It was the most illustrious panel in the Booker’s history. Both the other judges, Cyril Connolly and Elizabeth Bowen, were too ill to attend the ceremony. I fought very hard for John Berger to win for G, and then he threw it in my face by giving half the prize money to the Black Panthers. It was a very grim experience. I was in a very precarious position at the time and I literally thought it was the end for me in this country. I thought I would have to pack my bags and go.

1972–Booker website

John Berger was the 1972 winner with G and another controversy hit the prize. Guests at the dinner in the Café Royal were astonished when Berger got up and announced he was planning to give half his prize money to the Black Panther movement in protest at what he alleged was Booker’s colonialist policy in the West Indies. In fact Booker had had its sugar plantations and refineries confiscated 10 years previously – and the Black Panther movement had dissolved two years before. Rebecca West, a guest, was so shocked that she stood up and protested noisily; another guest, Terence Kilmartin, the literary editor of the Observer, walked out in disgust at Berger’s behaviour.

3894 words, February 2nd, 2010

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