Booker Prize, 1971

1971

Jury:

John Fowles, Saul Bellow, Lady Antonia Fraser, Philip Toynbee and John Gross.

I assume we all know the first three (how did they get rid of Dame West?) Philip Toynbee was a British writer and journalist. He wrote experimental novels, and distinctive verse novels, one of which was an epic called Pantaloon. He also wrote memoirs of the 1930s, and reviews and literary criticism, the latter mainly via his employment with The Observer newspaper. John Gross, the respected critic, was the chair.

Books:

Thomas Kilroy: The Big Chapel, Faber & Faber; Doris Lessing: Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Jonathan Cape;  Mordecai Richler, St. Urbain’s Horseman; Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Derek Robinson, Goshaw Squadron, Pan, Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Chatto & Windus; V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State, Andre Deutsch

A blogger for The Guardian is reading all the Booker winners (just the winners, the lucky sap) and writing about each book. He also delivers some great gossip from time to time. Here’s the poop on the 71 pick:

Perhaps the experience of 1971 was enough to make the prize organizers think twice about including so many free-thinking intellectual heavyweights again. While Gross would cheerily describe the books he had to read as “rather a good lot”, Fowles, never one to mince his words said (probably more accurately): “Some of the publishers’ entries were insults to the judges and the others on their lists.” Bellow meanwhile declared that: “Five per cent were interesting,” and added: “For the rest it was like meeting virgins, who are neither wise nor foolish, but just bald.”

Most egregiously of all, and thus proving that the contemporary debate about whether the prize should go to the writer or the book (pace Ian McEwan and Amsterdam), Bellow also let slip that the prize had gone to: “the best writer, but not the best book.” He did so a full month before the prize was due to be officially announced, and, in fact, a week before the shortlist was even published.

I’ve been unable to discover which book Bellow actually thought better than In A Free State, but that’s by-the-by. Perhaps the most striking thing about the statement is that everybody seems to have assumed from it that VS Naipaul was going to win, even though other contenders included Doris Lessing and Elizabeth Taylor.

The Trinidadian titan’s status in 1971 was especially high, before all those memoirs complaining about his all-elbows personality and after a remarkable decade of writing beginning with A House For Mr. Biswas. This breakthrough comic masterpiece, still regarded as one of his best, had been produced at a price, however. The strain of writing it left him, he said, “a changed man”. He also noted sadly: “One has been damaged.”

Now I’m really looking forward to reading this bunch.

For 1969 and 1970 I reported on the books alphabetically with the winner last. From this point on, I will report on the books in the order in which I read them. My inclination is to try and read the winner last but I’m not always going to be able to do because it depends on how and when I get copies of the books.

Derek Robinson—Goshawk Squadron (UBC library)

The front cover: “A bleak and savage book, full of terror of warfare and shot through with grim humour; a sort of first-world-war Catch 22.” The Guardian.

Oh, boy.

I’ve read lots of war literature. In grad school I did a whole course on World War I literature. Certainly Goshawk Squadron is well written and stacks up with some of the best but it isn’t the startling revelation it purports to be—or , from the distance of 2008, doesn’t seem so. Sarah Palin might be startled by the suggestion that soldiers are not just doing God’s work, but most of us aren’t.

Robinson takes on the romantic vision of the WWI aviator. Young recruits arrive full of valor and sense of duty. The squadron leader, Wooley, does his best to disenchant them and prepare them for the realities of aerial dogfights.

And that’s where he lost me. On page 134. One dogfight too many. I skipped to the end where, in a 2-page epilogue, Robinson explains that he wrote the book after reading remarks from a former R. F. C. pilot written on the occasion of the 50^th jubilee of the R. A. F., “He said that, to be strictly honest about it, the objective of a fighter pilot in the First World War ‘was to sneak in unobserved close behind his opponent and then shoot him in the back.’” That sums up the novel.

Elizabeth Taylor—Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (UBC library)

I’ve seen the movie, and I hate it when I’ve seen a movie before reading a book. I go out of my way to avoid having that happen. That’s how I ended up reading The Da Vinci Code a few years back. Yoicks.

The movie was good. Joan Plowright was good. And it’s hard to get those images out of your head. The book sets the tone for the movie, but there is a richness that the movie can’t capture. It misses the internal monologues of the characters, and thereby often misses the motivation behind their actions.

The novel has a very small canvas—a widow relocating to a London hotel to spend out her last days. Taylor has a keen eye for astute details, and I’m not talking about a Carol Shields-like obsession with superfluous details like the colour of the strips on the tea towels. In this novel each detail is exact, and relevant.

The book jacket talks of the “casual cruelty” of daily lives and relationships. Taylor contrasts the pain and rudeness of youth and old age. Neither is condemned or condoned. All the characters are forgotten, marginalized people full of fears. Taylor’s writing is keen and sure. It’s deceptively simple. A marvelous read.

V. S. Naipaul—In A Free State—WINNER abebooks

Back to grad school, again, where I had to read a lot of Naipaul for a novel course. One of the students was completing her Ph.D. thesis on Naipaul. As I recall, she argued that Naipaul had a very bleak vision, a vision so dark that he is continually amazed that people carry on at all. This novel fits that description. Utterly humourless.

Written in five sections, the first and last as journal entries, the novel is a mosaic of people far from home—foreigners, aliens, misfits. Sometimes we know we are on a Greek steamer, or with a servant newly moved to Washington from Bombay. In other sections the location is unclear, and unimportant; it’s all about displacement. “Tell Me Who to Kill” is disjointed. The combination of pidgin English and non-linear narrative makes it tricky—the reader must really pay attention. Maybe too much attention—I don’t think the piece worked particularly well.

At the heart is the irony of free men in a free state and continually altering notions of happiness, rarely realized. Weddings are more like funerals. Free men are quickly enslaved. “In a Free State” is a race against civil war, a race with no chance to win and no finish line. Nothing remains fixed. Everything seems ambiguous.

It’s a powerful book, with flaws.

Doris Lessing—Briefing For a Descent into Hell VPL

I really wanted to like this book. The premise is so interesting. Charles is found wandering, with no memory and no identification. He is taken to hospital. The text is a combination of Charles inner world with occasional intrusions from the real world—though part of what is being challenged is the line between the two. As the internal narrative increasingly takes over, the inner world (mirrored by the writing style) becomes richer. Or, that’s what’s supposed to happen.

In actuality, it’s tedious. And pretentious. Around page 100 I started thinking of those long indulgent passages in Jonathan Livington Seagull. I read a page and a half to George, who moaned and begged me to stop. George Stanley came over for dinner, declared Lessing “brilliant” so I gave him the same passage to read. He stopped after half a page because he was bored.

As an exploration of “psychic geography” (as the BUMF claims) the book is not persuasive. It works better, but still is tedious, if read as science fiction; Charles’ mind is taken over by powers that he is unable to recall in his right mind.

Mordecai Richler—St. Urbain’s Horseman VPL

Oy. It’s so hard to imagine this book as if it were fresh and new, having previously read it and other Richler novels, which for me often seem to blend together. I had to work hard to put aside some sense of same-old, same-old. I find Richler’s insistent use of shit for humour to be tedious. (Notice how often I am using the word tedious in my reports?) One bathroom scene seems of no importance to the rest of the novel—only there for a cheap shit giggle. Do we need to know that Jake uses suppositories? And even if we do, do we need a complete description of the insertion procedure. It just seems to be gratuitous barroom humour.

But on the topic of toilets, it is interesting that Cousin Herky’s hare-brained scheme to get rich involves the development of a toilet with a variation of flush options depending on need, in order to save water. Cousin Herky was ahead of his time!

The novel captures some nuances of the time, such as the way Canadians, as Richler argues, “were reared to believe in the cultural thinness of their own blood.” It also reflects the sexual revolution of the 60s with some accuracy.

But there are times when it seems heavy handed—trying too hard to be a Big novel with Big themes. Jake is a schmuck. The novel does show Richler’s sure sense of language and great ear for dialogue. Does it deserve to be on this short-list? Yes, I think so. In 1971 I expect it would have had more startling power than it does now. Should it have won? No, not in my opinion.

Thomas Kilroy—The Big Chapel—(bookfinder)

Thomas Kilroy is a playwright. To date, this is his only published novel. Maybe that’s why it was so hard to find. This is the first book I was unable to find at either the Vancouver Public Library or at UBC. UBC has lots of his work, but all of them plays, not this novel. I was able to buy it online, though there weren’t many copies available and they are expensive. No picking up a cheap used paperback. Cheapest I could find was $30, plus shipping.

What a switch from the Richler. It moved from Jewish angst to Irish angst. The novel is based on a real-life incident from the 1870s involving difference of opinions about schools (never fully explained) between Protestants and Catholics. It’s eerie to be reading this novel during the US election campaign where Sarah Palin has people worked up about Barrack Obama, screaming “kill him” at rallies, and no one saying, “Stop.” Some supporters describe Palin as “filled with the spirit of the Lord” which, for them,  makes her the right pick, versus “that Nigger who pals around with terrorists.” The novel is about such disparate and ignorant religious intolerance, and how it can turn to mob violence. In The Big Chapel an accusation of being “Godless” justifies bloodshed.

The novel seems a return to Victorian times in more than its topic. I wanted to pitch it after page 60. So, I googled around, looking for some reason for perseverance and found the following from The Guardian, May 2008. The Guardian editors had asked several dozen people to recommend books they would like to see back in print  to forward to Faber & Faber since the publisher was looking for such long out-of-print books. Brian Friel recommended The Big Chapel by Thomas Kilroy. Here are his reasons:

‘Thomas Kilroy’s The Big Chapel (1971) is an important novel, a prickly story, an angry story. As in all his angular plays, the people in this novel have their home – a term they wouldn’t be fully at ease with – in the margins. They are not of the centre, of the consensus. But they are not a marginalized people: the margins are their centre. And they inhabit the margins because, as Denis Donoghue says, “the margins is the place for those feelings and intuitions that daily life doesn’t           have a place for and mostly seems to suppress. And the most important intuition is of mystery.” Or, as Flannery O’Connor said, “Fiction is concerned with mystery that is lived; the ultimate mystery as we find it embodied in the concrete world of sense experience.”

And now The Big Chapel has a chance to come back to full life after 30 years of catalepsy. The Red Priest will thunder again. The big chapel will be desecrated. The Master will be felled. And the mystery life of its people, agitated and baffled by an unease just that bit beyond their comprehension and control, will unfold again as if for the first time. And the novel will be acclaimed and garlanded again. But what will keep it permanently vital will be the response it evokes once more       from its astonished and grateful readers.”

If it’s a modern Irish classic, as both the book jacket of my copy and Friel claim, why has it been out of print for decades? Then I poked some more and found that Friel and Kilroy have frequently worked together, which makes sense. Friel is generally acknowledged to be one of the best, if not the best Irish playwright of the last half-century.

I know and really like Friel’s work. Translations is one of my favourites, and I read many of the plays for my comprehensive exams (more confessions about that when we get to Edna O’Brien). The subject of this novel may be of great interest to Irish scholars, and to Friel, but as a novel it is a slog. And because of the non-linear jumping around of the storytelling technique, it is a confusing slog.

I guess I would give this year to Elizabeth Taylor. Nothing really knocked my socks off.

John Fowles comments above point to the huge influence of publishers on this prize. A publisher can only submit 2 books (a third can be sent if that author is a previous Booker winner). Jury members can request a book but how can jury members know every book published by Commonwealth writers?

How do jurors deal with this task? I’m only on the third year, and only reading the short-list, supposedly the best, and I’m feeling bogged down. How much time do they have to read them? How much are they paid? (It can’t possibly be enough). More importantly, who picks the jury? To some extent that process must also be picking the winners. And finally, what is the mandate for the make-up of the jury? I’ll have to do some homework and report back.

John Gross—from The Guardian

A faint aroma of the Nobel prize – or of Nobel prizes yet to come – hangs over the 1971 Booker. First, the award went to VS Naipaul (who was to be Nobel laureate in 2001) for In a Free State. It was a result with which I agreed. Second, the organizers had succeeded in persuading a distinguished writer from abroad to be one of the judges: Saul Bellow (who was to be Nobel laureate in 1976). It seemed a thrilling prospect.

In the event, one of the things I remember most clearly about Bellow is that he insisted on being put up at the Ritz (which must have burned a big hole in the budget), and then complained because he hadn’t been given a room overlooking Green Park.

Another recollection is his response when I advanced the claims of Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, which apart from the Naipaul was the book on the shortlist I most favoured. “Oh,” he said, “that’s one of those little tinkling teacup things that the British always do well.” He was quite wrong – Mrs. Palfrey is a work of deep feeling – but his dismissiveness effectively put paid to its chances.

But an even better piece of gossip comes from the Booker website itself:

1971

This was the year when the Booker Prize had its first controversy, in the form of one of the judges, Malcolm Muggeridge. Having read his way through most of the submissions he found himself ‘out of sympathy’ with them and withdrew his services, ‘nauseated and appalled’. Needless to say that year’s winner, V S Naipaul’s In a Free State, chalked up record sales.

What do they mean, “needless to say”? The Booker claims that it “promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year” but even the material the Booker itself produces indicates it’s all really about branding and marketing. The following is again from the Booker website:

Derek Johns on the impact of the Man Booker shortlist

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction heaps great rewards on those authors who win it, ensuring a world-wide audience for their books, and a good chance of seeing their winning novel adapted into a film.  What may sometimes be overlooked, however, is the rewards that even a shortlisted author may receive.

Since the longlist of the Man Booker Prize began to be published in 2001 (hitherto it was a closely guarded secret, even after the shortlist was announced), literary agents have become accustomed to receiving numerous inquiries about the books featured on it.  And now that the long-list has been reduced from about twenty or so to the twelve or thirteen it now is (the so-called ‘Booker Dozen’), these inquiries have increased in number.  It is when we get to the short-list announcement, however, that things become interesting.

It is generally the case that books which reach the shortlist have already established some sort of market for themselves.  But many shortlisted books will not yet have secured either American or translation publishers, and certainly will not have been placed with a film or television producers.  The announcement of the shortlisted books nowadays is certain to lead to a rush of inquiries from these sources.

American publishers are especially well-attuned to the Man Booker Prize.  Since no American prize has a comparable effect on sales (the Pulitzer boosts a career rather than a single book, and the National Book Award goes largely unnoticed), for many years now American publishers have taken a lively interest. Last year’s winner, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, has by reliable estimates sold over three hundred thousand copies in America, a remarkable number.

Given the dominance of the English language around the world, publishers in Europe and beyond are similarly alert to the possibilities that the Man Booker Prize affords.  Publishers in certain countries, such as Holland and Greece and Portugal, will respond very quickly.  It is often the case that the major foreign markets – Germany, France, Italy, Spain, etc. – will already have been sold; but a shortlisting may easily boost the number of translations from a modest three or four to ten or more (and winning will boost this number even further, to thirty or more).

Film and television producers are similarly alert to the possibilities.  The recent ‘Booker at the Movies’ programme at the ICA demonstrated how many books – short-listed books as well as winners – have been adapted for film or television.  Of this year’s short-listed books, I confidently expect at least two to be realised on the screen, and perhaps more.

The Man Booker Prize acts as a lightning-rod, drawing attention to the lucky (and talented) authors who feature on it.  It is a truly international prize, one of the very few literary prizes that have a world-wide influence.  In its forty years it has demonstrated year after year the strength and depth of fiction writing in the English language.’

Derek Johns is joint managing director A P Watt, the longest-established literary agency in the world. www.apwatt.co.uk

A P Watt represents three of this year’s shortlisted authors – Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture , Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs and Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency

How is this about anything but marketing, sales, sales, sales, not great literary quality? What will work in the literary aftermarket? And that dismissive comment about the National Book Prize! I tend to agree with Margaret Drabble in the following article, this time from the Independent:

At a meeting of alumni in her old Cambridge University college, Newnham, Dame Margaret suggested that she felt pressure from Penguin, to “rebrand” her fiction, The Independent has been told. At the discussion, alongside the novelist Sarah Dunant, she said: “I have had a weird feeling that I’m being dumbed down by my publishers and it’s interesting there’s an agenda of how it should be in the marketplace.

Dunant also commented on the idea of remarketing an author as a “semi-celebrity”:

There is also… anxiety over the whole role of prizes in this. We have more prizes than ever before. Who are they really for? Are they to celebrate the writer and the work or is this another arm of marketing in the books trade? Looking at publishing … it has been saturated with the notion of the creation of celebrity as a marketing opportunity … There has to be a box, a place they can put you. I just find it annoying but it doesn’t stop me from writing exactly what I wish to write. This conversation between Margaret Drabble and myself was part of the larger observation that everything needs to be packaged, that writers cannot be who they are,” she said.

Bang on, Dame Margaret. Celebrity and markets, not literary excellence.

3661 words,  January 20, 2010

Booker Prize, 1970

1970

Jury: David Holloway, Dame Rebecca West, Lady Antonia Fraser, Ross Higgins, Richard Hoggart. Holloway is not the guy who played in the CFL. I assume he’s the critic. Fraser is Harold Pinter’s second wife and a detective novelist and historian. Higgins? No idea. The Australian actor? Richard Hoggart, best known for  writing The Uses of Literacy.

Hey, at least I knew who that Rebecca West dame was.

The Books: A.L. Barker, John Brown’s Body, Hogarth Press; Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout, Jonathan Cape; Iris Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream, Chatto & Windus; William Trevor, Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, Bodley Head, T.W. Wheeler, The Conjunction, Angus & Robertson, Bernice Rubens, The Elected Member, Chatto & Windus.

A. L. Barker—John Brown’s Body

Barker’s first book, a collection of short stories won the inaugural Somerset Maugham prize. In 1970 she was made a member of the Royal Society of Literature. She died in 2002 so there is some material on the web, obituaries, etc.

The book blurb for the republished Virago edition in 1999 says, “A.L. Barker explores the tug between body and soul, life and death, truth and fantasy.” Okay, maybe. There is a carefulness of detail that reminds me of Anita Brookner, and Barker is sure-handed with her language. But the premise of the book—a tenant in an apartment building is mistaken as a murderer and the wife of another tenant finds this exciting and terrifying—is more interesting than its realization.

Elizabeth Bowen—Eva Trout

Highly stylized. Tedious use of commas, used often as decoration. It creates a breathless quality to the prose that’s irritating. And all the characters speak the same way. I’ve read that this is the weakest of Bowen’s work, and a poor introduction. It is interesting that all the action happens between the chapters, so the book is about what happens after something momentous takes place which may be a pretty accurate reflection of life. It wouldn’t make my list.

Iris Murdoch—Bruno’s Dream [VPL]

How did Murdoch pull this off—another hulking book in a year? She weaves such intricate lives; in this novel the dying Bruno is obsessed with spiders and stamps. How apt. Again the Shakespearean coupling at the end, even more unexpected than the previous book. At the heart of this one is love, and its relationship to death. Murdoch refuses easy answers.

Out of print

William Trevor—Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel [abebooks]

A novel set in Dublin, what a surprise. Mrs. Eckdorf is a photographer come to Dublin to capture the “local interest” of a tragedy that happened 30 years before, a tale she learned from a barman on a ship. The other foreigner, Mr. Smedley, the traveling salesmen, is “a man of vigour who didn’t mind spending a bob or two” but can’t get the bartenders to point him to a whorehouse in Dublin, claiming “no such persons were permitted to exist in this city of godliness and decency.” O’Neill’s Hotel and the streets around it are occupied by a cast of weird characters. The term Stage Irish comes to mind. Agnes Quin who began as a nun and ended up a whore. Mrs. Sinnott, the deaf and dumb 91-year-old matriarch who resides on the third floor, communicates by writing (and being written to) in school scribblers, and is the confessor for all the others. Her sherry-sodden son has let the once-glorious hotel fall into ruin and be turned into a brothel. And a large cast of orphans that Mrs. Sinnott has taken in over the years. And so on, and so forth.

Mrs. Eckdorf (described by her ex-husband as “the cruelest woman that ever lived”) sets out to expose these people, “for it was right, she knew, that the fears and faithfulness of poverty-dogged peasants should be seen and understood on the coffee-tables of the rich.” She falls under the spell of the goodness of Mrs. Sinnott and has an epiphany. The silence of Mrs. Sinnot is the silence of forgiveness. Eckdorf’s insight doesn’t last, she goes mad and the other characters carry on in the Irish fog.

After many paperback editions it appears this book is now Out of print

T W Wheeler—The Conjunction [UBC]

I’ve never heard of Wheeler. Apparently neither has anyone else. I could find nothing on the Internet. Even Wikipedia has no entry. When I picked up the book from the UBC library I did note there is one other book on the shelf by Wheeler. But online, other than the name on lists of Booker short-lists, there is virtually nothing. I did find out the book was never released in paperback despite the short-list. But I could find no biography. I did find some Gale entries written by T W Wheeler, so maybe the mysterious Wheeler became an industry hack (or it could be Tom Wheeler who was book editor for the Daily Mirror in the 40s). Finally I found Terence Wheeler, author of three books—the other two are From Home in Heaven and Wreck of the Rat Trap. And that’s it. No reviews. No obituary. Not a word. Since the copy I read is from the UBC library, it has no dust jacket so no hints there.

And I’m intrigued because nothing about this book makes sense to me, particularly its appearance on this short-list. It is set is 1962, “The twelve months from the liberation of Goa until the collapse of Indian military power in the face of Chinese aggression saw also the collapse of a generation.” The collapse of this generation is seen through the takeover of power at Nawab College (run by the Jaimer Mineral Combine at Jhalawat) from Dr Jobwal by Suresh Nayyar. This information is provided on the first page otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to follow. It’s confusing. A while back I read Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call. I learned more about the politics and bad feelings behind the Air India crash than I ever learned from the mainstream news. This book does not provide that level of information, nor does it provide any  clarification. It’s muddled.

As for the writing, how about this?

“Situated as it is upon the plain, like an ant on an orange, the Jhalawat oasis stands wide open to the first light of day, which in winter comes up thin and white and unimpeded like the headlights of a truck breasting a hill. With twenty minutes remaining before it sets, the moon sits like a pebble on the rim of the sky, and the sky itself is starless and the colour of a dead furnace. The dawn rustles the scrub and loose sand, and strums the telephone wires overhead.”

I can’t believe I read the whole thing.

Out of print. Not even the guy with the blog about collecting first editions of Booker winners and short-listed books has a copy of this one.

Bernice Rubens—The Elected Member [abebooks]—THE WINNER

Before chapter one, “If patients are disturbed, their families are often very disturbing” from The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing. Ah, the Blame Mom theory. Did Rubens write the novel to prove this assertion? It certainly seems so. Norman is the brilliant oldest son of a London Jewish family, now mad from abuse of amphetamines. His smothering mother is dead. The father and one sister (who still lives at home at 40) are desperate about his madness. A second sister is estranged from the family because Norman lied to her and the result is the suicide of her fiancé. This family brings new meaning to the term dysfunctional. Norman and the other sister have an incestuous relationship. The mother lies about Norman’s age to make his brilliance with languages seem even more remarkable.

It’s hard to say why this book won. Part of the novel is from Norman’s perspective—inside the mind of a madman—but I’m not persuaded by it. Once again I would point to Lowry or Paul Quarrington. By the end, which is highly unsatisfactory, mere melodrama.

I’d give this year to Murdoch, again. I can see why Murdoch’s novels are still around, and still being read and taught while many of the others here have disappeared.

Something else that may reflect the longevity of influence of a prize is to check how many of the books are available in alternative formats—audio books and Braille, for instance. I asked a friend who is blind to check. None of the books from 1969 are in the CNIB or alternative catalogues. Willy says, “In fact, hardly any of the authors are there. There are several Iris Murdoch books in the CNIB catalogue but none in the other. Both catalogues list books by Muriel Spark.

“Of the 1970 candidates the only one represented among the Surrey Public Library audio books is William Trevor, with 10 titles. Mrs. Eckdorf is not one of them.

“The CNIB has Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream on order. I think that means that somebody is recording it on a DAISY audio disk. There are 19 books by William Trevor in the CNIB library, but Mrs. Eckdorf isn’t there, either. There are 6 books by Bernice Rubens, including The Elected Member, the only title among the 1970 list that seems to have made it into alternative format so far.

1970 Antonia Fraser—from The Guardian:

The judging of the 1970 prize was a low-key affair except for the feisty behaviour of Dame Rebecca West, a judge for the second year running. At one point she denounced Margaret Drabble for her novels of domestic life on the grounds that “Anyone can do the washing-up; just get a big bowl and some liquid; so why complain about it?” The novel in question was The Waterfall, which both Richard Hoggart and I admired greatly (and didn’t think was about washing-up). I knew Rebecca West, since she was a friend and neighbour of my parents in Sussex, and was very fond of her; all the same, it occurred to me that she was possibly one of the brilliant old ladies who felt threatened by a brilliant young one in the shape of Maggie Drabble. In the end we were split between William Trevor’s Mrs. Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel and Bernice Rubens’s The Elected Member. I voted for Rubens but today would vote for Trevor.

1971 was much more exacting. The most exciting thing that happened to me as a Booker Judge for the second time was not controversial. I shared a taxi back with fellow judge Saul Bellow on a long, long ride from somewhere in the City: he was nattily dressed in a pale green shantung suit, blue shirt, green tie with large blue dots on it; his silver hair and slanting, large dark eyes made him look like a 30s film star playing a refined gangster. Suddenly he leaned forward and asked: “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a very handsome woman?” I pondered on a suitable reply, modest yet encouraging. But having spoken, the Great Man closed his eyes and remained apparently asleep for the rest of the journey.

1846 words  December 29, 2009

Reading the Bookers: 1969

Sometime in 2008—and now I wish I had kept track of the exact date—for a number of reasons I decided to read the short-listed and winning books for the Booker Prize starting with the inaugural prize in 1969. I picked the Booker because it is generally thought of as “the Anglophone world’s most influential literary prize.”

I was interested in this because I’d been having discussions with The Writers’ Trust and others about the long-term impact of prizes. After the press releases and  the parties, who really cares about prizes? Well, maybe for a while, but for how long? Do prizes influence writers’ careers, visibility and sales of other books? Are there negative aspects to prizes? Do prizes serve writers well?

I’m also interested in the jury process. There is no knowing the discussion that occurred, but are there patterns to be seen by looking at the jury lists?

Is the short-list more interesting than the winning list? How often will I agree with the selection?

And mostly, I’m interested in finding some new, and I hope, interesting writers.

So, here we go….

1969

Jury: WL Webb, Dame Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode, David Farrer. Webb was a famous literary editor, the three writers are well known, but I have no idea about David Farrer.

Shortlist: Barry England, Figures in a Landscape, Jonathan Cape; Nicolas Mosley The Impossible Object, Hodder & Stoughton; Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good, Chatto & Windus; Muriel Spark, The Public Image, Macmillan; G.M. Williams, From Scenes Like These, Secker & Warburg.

I made the assumption that I could get all these books through the Vancouver Library system. Wrong. VPL has no copy of the winner of the first year, Something to Answer For. Hmmm. I checked abebooks.com and bookfinder.com. There are a few copies floating around in distant parts of the globe, but since the book has been out of print for decades those copies are $70 or more. I did buy a couple of the other short-listed books online because they also were not available through VPL. Seems that, early on anyway, winning the Booker doesn’t keep you in print or on the shelves.

Then someone suggested the UBC library. Eureka. I was able to get Something to Answer For through ASRS, which roughly translates as Automatic Shelving Retrieval System. This is where they put the books that are never on course lists and are rarely taken out. In my notes on books I will indicate where I got the reading copy since that does seem to be of importance to one of my concerns. VPL, ASRS, UBC (indicates it came from the stacks rather than the retrieval system) abebooks (that means I was unable to get the books through a library).

It is worth noting that in the first year there was no party. Newby was notified by mail.

Barry England—Figures in a Landscape [purchased through abebooks.com]

Two escaped guys trek their way through an unidentified tropical landscape fighting nature and a helicopter opponent. There are no extra details. The book is grueling, tight, sharp, and raw. For years my favourite war book has been Generals Die in Bed. Figures in a Landscape is as good, and as urgent though no specific war is ever mentioned. At times the tension in the book is almost unbearable. This was England’s first novel. A remarkable debut. About 40 years later he published a second novel and is mostly known (if at all) for his plays. I don’t think this book should have been the winner but I suspect it will be the one I will remember the most vividly for the longest period of time.

Apparently it was made into a film starring Malcolm McDowell and Robert Shaw.

The book is out of print and rare in used editions.

Nicolas Mosley—The Impossible Object [purchased through abebooks.com]

Turns out that Mosley is also Lord Ravensdale, son of Sir Oswald Mosley—founder of the British Union of Fascists and supporter of Hitler and Mussolini. One of the famous Mitford sisters was Mosley’s stepmother. Phew.

The object of the title is love. The form is highly experimental in point of view, narrative patterns, like a Rubic Cube without a solution you know it is never all going to go together. But the pattern succeeds in making what appears to be a collection of loosely-connected short stories into a novel. Not my favourite but I suspect George B will really like it.

This book is also out of print, though it appears to have been reprinted in paperback in 2006

Later George B did read the novel. Here is his report:

Let me say, without critical aim or tools, that I liked Impossible Object because it disabused me of the notion that recent Brit authors are just not interested in post-realist fiction. Yet one’s primordial hankering for narration is gratified because Mosley does not entirely dispense with those 5 things that John Hawkes claimed to be enemies of the novel—plot, characterization, setting, theme and whatever the other one is. One sees a limiting of characterization in the fact that none of the figures has a name. In fact the narrator, if that is not a misnomer, sometimes makes a point of not naming anyone. Of course it would be the godlike author who names people. There you have another nice thing—the fact that you have trouble distinguishing between author and authee. The result is that you do not see the text as something between you and the world, but rather the world that you are reading. Something similar might be said for all the rhymes in the story, the references to Milan, the he knows she knows he knows she knows almost arguments, and so on. One is constantly drawn to the experiencing of the text rather than the experience referred to by the text. What result are questions—we question the need for cause-and-effect or we question the unavailability of it (along with the shadow of it). Some readers, those who really really like Graham Greene, will want to puzzle it all out, or gather all the pieces and put together the whole. Others such as I will be happy reading the book as something added to the world rather than something offering a blurry picture of the world presumably already there.

Told ya he’d like it.

Iris Murdoch—The Nice and the Good [abebooks]

You always know when you’re in a Murdoch book: constant probing. This book does for “nice” and “good” what Austen did for pride, prejudice, sense and sensibility. There is a great Shakespearean ending with lots of surprising coupling. Twists galore. And the most claustrophobic scene I’ve ever read. A splendid thought experiment presented as a murder mystery.

The 1978 edition is still available through Penguin

Muriel Spark—The Public Image [Vancouver Public Library]

Tightly written, with a wonderful twist at the end, about the shallowness of a life built on a public image. It seems to be an experiment for Spark—it’s vastly different from the biting satirical novels that established her reputation, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Momento Mori, and not as good.

The 1993 New Directions paperback is still available.

Gordon Williams—From Scenes Like These [Vancouver Public Library]

Gordon who? In an interview he says he stopped writing novels because he “got bored.” As well as this Booker SL novel, he wrote the novel on which the Peckinpaw movie Straw Dogs was based (Of the movie, Williams says, “it’s crap.” He also wrote the scripts for the long-running TV sit-com, Hazel.)

Endless details of hard life on a Scottish farm. Some have argued it’s a lost masterpiece but I got bored around page 45 and stopped reading.

Out of print

PH Newby—Something to Answer For [ASRS] WINNER

I’ve never heard of Newby. Best known as the director of BBC Radio 3.

The book begins in a classical narrative style, a Brit named Townrow, not much liked by anyone, is off to Egypt. Yeah, yeah, the ex-pat colonist plot this time during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. Then Townrow gets a boink on the head and when he comes to he’s never really sure again where he is or what’s going on. And neither is the reader. The book is not first-person narrative but the narrative line does follow Townrow’s consciousness—if he’s asleep, or knocked out, or having a memory lapse, the reader gets no details. It’s baffling, and intriguing. But also frustrating. It doesn’t succeed the way Lowry or Quarrington do with confusion of the senses.

On a cheery note, Something to Answer For is scheduled for re-release in fall 2008 after decades of being out of print. Advance notices seem to be cashing in on the current visibility of the Booker rather than the merit of the first winner.

I’d give 1969 to Murdoch (though parts of the book get tedious) with high tribute to Figures in a Landscape.

Murdoch and Spark were literary stars before their books appeared on this Booker list. The others have disappeared, both the reputation of the writers and the books themselves.

In Canada the GG for 1969 went to The Studhorse Man by Robert Kroetsch. It’s better than anything on the Booker shortlist.

For the 40^th anniversary of the Booker prize The Guardian asked a judge from each year to comment. I’ll insert these comments at the end of each of my diatribes.

1969 Frank Kermode—from The Guardian:

The first judges were Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, David Farrer and WL Webb, at that time literary editor of the Guardian. We were handsomely treated: in London we haunted Bertorelli’s, but we spent more than one weekend at Michael Astor’s beautiful Cotswold house, where Dame Rebecca strode the grounds authoritatively between bouts of laying down the law. There were perhaps 60 books, which seemed a lot, though modern judges are said to read twice as many. Getting through the 60 was made easier by our not daring to take on Dame Rebecca. “Miss Murdoch writes good and bad novels in alternate years,” she said. “This is a bad year.” Muriel Spark: “clever but too playful.” And out they went.

Two of us favoured Nicholas Mosley’s Impossible Object, but were soon silenced. The choice of PH Newby’s Something to Answer For was the result of a compromise. Dame Rebecca didn’t dislike it as much as nearly all the others. Surveyors of the prize’s history have spoken ill of this good book, perhaps without reading it, or by being too ready to suppose that this industrious writer could manage a novel a year as well as running the Third Programme. Anyway, I remember this, my one experience of judging, with much pleasure and amusement.

1804 words: November 26, 2009

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