Prizes, literature and language

Wonderful article in today's Guardian by the ever-inspirational Jeanette Winterson, on the recent Booker debate. Here are the bits I love: 'Novels that last are language-based novels - the language is not simply a means of telling a story, it is the whole creation of the story.' Like Maths, she says, literature is another kind of language, not 'obscure or rarified precious - that's no test of a book - rather it is operating on a different level to our everyday exchanges of information and conversation ...There is such a thing as art and there is such a thing as literature.' And she doesn't mince her words: 'I did try to read Stella Rimington's own spy series, but ... began to wonder if we would choose an enthusiastic member of a painting-by-numbers club to judge the Turner prize.'

But don't rely on my cherry-picking, go and read the whole article if you haven't already.

Last night - before coming back to Rimington's extraordinary Booker speech, in which she spent most of the time defending herself and her fellow judges from criticism, dissed those who had offered their own choices, and failed to follow what I remember as a tradition of using the moment to give some limelight to each of the shortlisted books - I attended a very interesting Manchester Lit Fest debate on Prize Culture by staff of the Manchester University Centre for New Writing. I took notes and I'll write them up here if I get time later today.

But what do we MEAN by readability?

It's a pity, as Vanessa Gebbie commented on a recent post here, that this year's Booker judges didn't say what they meant by 'readability' when they announced that it was their main criterion, as some of the ensuing discussion seems to have wobbled on cross purposes. However, several of their comments give some indication.

Chris Mullin announced that he wanted books that 'zipped along'. Both he, in a Radio Times article answering criticism and torn to shreds by the New Statesman's Leo Robson, and Chair of the judges Stella Rimington have spoken as if, in championing 'readability', they were setting themselves up against a literary establishment for which such a quality would be anathema. There is contempt in Mullin's reference to 'London literati' 'huffing and puffing' about the matter and sarcasm in his description of them as 'those who know best'. At one point, as I remember, Rimington told The Guardian that the judges were looking for books that people would read rather than admire. There has been a chorus of protest from serious literary practitioners that, actually, no one advocates unreadability; the judges, Leo Robson comments, are striking at an enemy that doesn't exist: readability, it seems universally agreed, is a quality that makes for great literature.

All of this needs unpacking. Rimington's statement implies that books admired by the literary establishment are not in fact much read. Possibly in response to Robson's call for proof of this, judge Susan Hill tweeted last week a list of classic books which she finds 'unreadable', beginning with James Joyce's formally and linguistically innovative Ulysses and including War and Peace and Woolf's The Waves. Now it has to be said that only last week a serious literary thinker and innovator of the stature of Will Self commented that nowadays hardly anyone reads Ulysses. The judges are onto a certain contemporary truth which it would be foolish to deny, and which Self characterises thus: '...the novel, instead of moving on, lies there in the dark summoning up past pleasures while playing with itself in a masturbatory orgy of populism'.

An argument which accepts the simple terms of 'readability' versus 'unreadability' seems to me to sidestep the real issue: it accepts books as fixed by one or the other of two immutable (opposed) characteristics. But this is clearly nonsense. We all like different books. Books some of us find boring others don't. A book I might find difficult to read you perhaps won't. Reading is a dynamic process in which a complex array of things come into play: the reader's taste, mood, expectation and, above all, education - by which I don't mean formal schooling but cultural immersion. We can learn to like and understand books or the kinds of books we may not previously have liked or understood. Of course there are different kinds of books: we can also read in different ways, simply for enjoyment and comfort or to be challenged and made to think and have our perceptions overturned, and different books cater for those different experiences.

And this last, it seems to me, is the crux of the matter. By 'readability' I and I think many commentators really mean 'the power to engage'. And the books that have the power to engage me are indeed those that are challenging (linguistically, structurally, morally and politically etc): I like to be made to think, I like to have my perceptions overturned, I am thrilled by writers doing interesting things with language. I am dissatisfied by books that fail to do these things (and which happen to be the books that sell best) - actually, I find them unreadable - and I don't think it makes me the snob Mullin and Rimington imply. I'm doing exactly the same as those people who like mass market fiction in that I'm reading books I enjoy.

I don't think that Mullin with his search for books that 'zip' along, Rimington or Hill (if her tweets aren't ironic) mean this kind of engagement, however.  The implication is that by 'readability' they mean the other readerly impulse - the need to let a book wash over you, to read passively rather than actively, to not be challenged. But isn't it the role of literary arbiters and taste makers - and what else are Booker prize judges? - to do more than endorse this kind of reading, thus fuelling Self's 'orgy of populism' (leave alone to avoid casting aspersions on the other kind)? As Leo Robson says, 'literary history shows that certain readers have been able to recognise the value of writers that in time many others came to accept'. But as Alex Clark puts it in today's Observer: 'the problem is that this year's hoo-ha suggests that the Booker is happy to be seen as a marketing strategy than as an exercise – however flawed – in choosing and celebrating literary and artistic achievement'.

The Best Novels or the Best-Off Publishers?

You know those vanity moments a writer gets? It's coming up to what I thought was the deadline for submitting books to the Booker, and I allowed myself to wonder: what if my publishers were thinking of putting my novel in for it? After all, my first novel was entered by the publisher I had then... I even went so far as to look up the rules. Well, the first thing I discovered was that although books have to be in by the end of June, publishers must submit an application form by the end of March, so now is too late anyway. But I also discovered this:

Any eligible book which is entered for the prize will only qualify for the award if its publisher agrees:

a) to contribute £5,000 towards general publicity if the book reaches the shortlist.

b) to contribute a further £5,000 if the book wins the prize.

I don't know if this rule has always existed, but I suspect not, and that it shows not only how far the prize has moved towards marketing and away from the pure principle of literary merit, but has come to discriminate against books from small publishers. I know it's generally recognized that, since certain winners - James Kelman, I think - failed to sell in the expected numbers even after winning, the prize has moved towards the principle of saleability, and one could argue that this applies to all publishers, large and small alike, and all publishers are thus likely to enter their more saleable literary books. One could argue about the rightness of this, in the broader literary-cultural terms, but, assuming that any prize is allowed to set its own principles, let's for the moment accept it. Yet it seems to me that plenty of books that look wildly saleable turn out to be mysteriously not so, and while that £5,000 payment for a shortlisting may look like chickenfeed to a large publisher, it's nothing of the sort to a small publisher on a shoestring. And even if shortlisting is going to bring them returns many times over they may simply not have the ready cash to make the payment upfront...

The 'Lost' Booker Prize

Although I am known here to be pretty dubious about competitions including the literary (and of course would be a marketing-literary fool not to be pleased to win one!), I'm giving two cheers for the 'Lost Booker Prize', precisely because it shows up the (often unacknowledged) arbitrary nature of such prizes: the books eligible for this one are those which fell between the two stools of eligibility the year that the deadline for submission for the Booker Prize was changed. Not so thrilled by the voting system, though: anyone can vote online, without having bothered to read all of the shortlisted books, presumably - or even any of them, I guess. Though on second thoughts, that makes a nice mockery of the whole idea of winners, doesn't it...?

Opening It Up or Narrowing It Down?

You know me: my heart sank when I opened the Observer on Sunday and there was a double-page spread on the new pony race, the public vote for the best Booker book.

After listing some of its benefits -'the Booker stirs up literary debate and makes people who would otherwise go to bed with a biography or a thriller open a novel, probably by someone they've never heard of' and 'promotes a global readership of British fiction' and has come up with 'an impressive list of winners' - the article's author Robert McCrum concludes that while 'lotteries and literature go ill together' (here, here) ' the Booker probably does more good than harm.' ( I actually typed 'more harm than good' and had to edit it!)

I've expressed my doubts previously as to how far such competitions open up people to literature generally. Geared as publisher's marketing campaigns are to them, don't they rather consist of a narrowing of buyers' and readers' focus to just a few books? And isn't this current exercise, along with the earlier Booker of Bookers, a narrowing of the cultural focus even further, in spite of the reports I've read of the publishers of previous but forgotten winners looking forward to a polishing of the backlists?

Interestingly, in the responses from a selection of interviewed previous judges, there emerge some other pretty powerful arguments against the validity of these kinds of competitions.

David Baddiel (2002): I found just reading those books soul-destroying. Your critical faculties get blunted... (my italics)

Rowan Pelling (2004): It's all a bit unfair because you don't read books in a vacuum. As I was having my little boy halfway through the process, the books I read before I gave birth were clouded by pregnancy, whereas I read The Line of Beauty when I was relaxing on holiday in the south of France.

Simon Armitage (2006): It's a hard slog - almost impossible. You have not much more than six months and at one stage, mathematically, it was a book every day and a half.

Adam Mars-Jones (1995): Books have a natural tempo and there can be a violation if you're making yourself read 60 pages an hour.

And Rowan Pelling again, most tellingly: When we were judging we tried three different voting systems and each time a different winner emerged.

And Adam Mars-Jones again, refusing to 'play the game', and telling us instead about the book which didn't win (and about which one wonders if it is still associated with the Booker in the popular mind): The book I genuinely liked best was Taking Apart the Poco Poco by Richard Francis, a family story told in strict equality by two parents, two children and the dog. But I couldn't convince anyone.

Perhaps the most pointed statement comes from the ever down-to-earth DJ Taylor with his eye, like McCrum's, on the paradoxes existing for writers and publishers nowadays:

The thing about serious writing is either it has to be part of the marketing circus or it has to exist in obscurity - there's no middle way.

Depends What You're Judging

Any author would be a fool not to be glad of the exposure gained by winning a prize, but that should not prevent us from noting certain invidious aspects of the whole prize game. Notwithstanding the buzz of critical comment (especially on the web) each time the result of the Booker or any other literary competition is announced, there is an ingrained public acceptance, I think, that the winner has been judged The Best - with the danger of a consequent diminishing in the public perception of those works over which it has won.

Great then that Giles Foden, one of this year's Booker judges, has this to say about the judging process, now at shortlist stage:

Filters affect outcomes. If one looked only at literary style, Anne Enright or Ian McEwan would win. If one considered books as nothing but psychological mechanisms, Mohsin Hamid would be the victor: The Reluctant Fundamentalist does subtle things to manipulate its readers. For implicit polemic and strong portrayal of character, however, Indra Sinha would be the choice. If it's strangeness and beauty you're after, look no further than Nicola Barker's Darkmans. Then there is Lloyd Jones, the supposed new favourite and (according to some reports) an "unknown writer", whose Mister Pip would win if the sole criterion was the emotional impact of the story.

Judges in other years have revealed the way that some of these criteria can outweigh others, and other factors that come into play, such as compromise choices. One time that I was on the judging panel for a competition for an unpublished novel, the eventual winner hadn't even featured on most of the judges' personal shortlists.

Articles like Foden's contribute towards transparency, but I sometimes think it would be good if judging panels went the whole hog and officially owned up to their 'filters'. Though thinking back to that particular first-novel competition, you can see why they don't...