Can the Man Booker prize winner restore the shine to this tarnished trophy?

This year’s Man Booker Prize longlist reflects the diverse taste of the judges
David Sexton26 July 2018

No grouse yet, I’m afraid — but we do have this year’s Man Booker longlist, 13 titles, the “Man Booker dozen”, as they waggishly call it, top tips from the judges for novels to take away for holiday reading this summer. Then comes the rentrée, when the longlist is winnowed down to the shortlist of six, on September 20, followed by the ceremonious harvest festival, when the winner is announced at a grandiose black-tie dinner at the Guildhall, on October 16.

The Booker longlist is always a rum do, often more notable for the many disappointments it dispenses than any surprise joy it confers. This year there’s a particularly distinguished roll call of the discarded. It includes many writers previously favoured by the prize, as well as other obvious candidates, including Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Pat Barker, Peter Carey, Ali Smith, John Banville, Jim Crace, Richard Flanagan, Philip Hensher, Patrick deWitt, Sebastian Faulks, Ned Beauman, Anne Tyler, David Peace, Rachel Cusk, William Boyd, Kate Atkinson and Jennifer Egan, just for starters.

Since all previously shortlisted authors are automatically eligible for consideration, somehow this year’s five judges contrived to read or otherwise assess 171 submissions, the highest number ever.

Understandably, after such a grotesque ordeal they have wanted to express themselves when it comes to creating a longlist. Luckily, that is never a problem at this stage of proceedings — the compromises and humiliations kick in later — since the tacit, or in fact pretty explicit, method for agreeing a longlist is that each of the judges gets his or her particular favourites on, however peculiar they may be, in return for waving through the favourites and aberrations of their fellow judges.

This year, when the longlist has stirred almost an element of controversy by including a graphic novel (or comic, as its author prefers to call it) and a thriller, the effects of that arrangement have been comically obvious — for identity is a force here too.

The crime writer Val McDermid is a judge and she provided a pre-publication endorsement for Snap by Belinda Bauer, a mystery about a mother’s disappearance. Her praise — “The best crime thriller I’ve read in a very long time” — is blazoned on the book’s cover, so it is not surprising to find she and her fellow judges have allocated the book a place on their longlist too.

Likewise, the graphic novelist Leanne Shapton is a judge and this is the first year that a graphic novel, Sabrina (also about a woman going missing) by Nick Drnaso, has made the longlist. Apparently, it has met the rule that “every submitted novel must be a unified and substantial work”, despite having a pretty low total word count and operating mainly by other (pictorial) means.

For the prize’s purposes, it’s essential that this work be referred to as a graphic novel — so it was a pity that, down the line from Chicago on Front Row, Drnaso was quite so clear: “I’m very much a cartoonist, I haven’t come at this from the perspective of being an author or a novelist,” he said.

Jacqueline Rose, a Sylvia Plath expert, is also a judge. Her academic interests meld feminism, psychoanalysis and literature, in the study of female torment — and some fine examples grace the longlist, including Everything Under by Daisy Johnson, a feminist rewriting of the Oedipus story set on a canal boat, and The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh, a post-apocalypse feminist dystopia set on a beach, in which masculinity appears to have become literally toxic to women.

Perhaps the other judges’ preferences are not quite so clearly present? The chair, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a cultural theorist best known for his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, has provided an interesting, quasi-politicised quote about the longlist, saying: “All of these books — which take in slavery, ecology, missing persons, inner-city violence, young love, prisons, trauma, race — capture something about a world on the brink...”And we were struck, overall, by their disruptive power. So it is possible to infer which of this year’s books most conform to that as a vision of literature’s purpose. Disrupt! Like Trump?

Can literary excellence even be recognised any more as the main criterion when literature has devolved so much into intersectionality?

The fifth judge, Leo Robson, is merely a demanding and scrupulous literary reviewer — and there are certain highly accomplished books on this list. Perhaps Richard Powers’s 500-page whopper about strangers summoned together by trees, The Overstory, is one, for example?

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is an extremely sophisticated piece of work, about a boy abandoned by his parents in postwar London who becomes involved with a peculiar set of parental substitutes, spending the rest of his life in the secret world of intelligence, trying to discover the truth of his own much obscured background. It’s literary and allusive but also melodramatic and a mystery story, like a complicated John Buchan.

Sally Rooney’s second novel, Ordinary People, the only one of these novels not yet published, tells a familiar enough girl-boy story. Friends at school, they are clearly destined to be together, but in the confusions of their student years they repeatedly misunderstand and miss each other. Rooney has already developed an absolutely distinctive narrative voice, relating inner and outer lives in a single flow with startling intuition and confidence. It’s entrancing.

The eventual winner will make this longlist forgotten. May the judges choose well — for the Man Booker prize, for so long a force in literary fiction, is in some trouble now, having thrown away its special cachet by opening up to American writers.

The daft “Golden Booker” 50-year anniversary celebrations were meant to reassert its primacy (the best-of-the-best prize went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient) but have done little to do so. To get its power back the prize needs to act as though literary distinction exists above other credentials. But is that even possible now?

For the full Booker longlist go to themanbookerprize.com

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