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Prize Fighters Essay, Research Paper

Prize fightersYou can see what the publicity people at the Man Group, the stockbroking company that now finances what was once the Booker Prize, have been thinking. We have this brand: high recognition, cheap at the price. But isn’t it small beer? Hasn’t the label been used to mean arty-but-little, elegant-but-genteel? Why not be bolder? Why not make the competition a kind of world title? Think of Wimbledon. Think of the Open Golf Championship. Classy, very British, but also the world’s top events. Why not set Roth against Rushdie, Atwood versus Morrison? One imagines some such excited speculation behind the decision that the Man Booker Prize will be open to American novels from 2004. The Man Group, which has committed £2.5m to its sponsorship of the prize over the next five years, wishes to project itself in the US. How much more interested would Americans be if their own big hitters were taking part. Think how much they love the Ryder Cup. Everyone will be able to know it as the World Literary Championship – so everyone, presumably, will be giving Man their money to invest. You can see the match-ups that have been imagined, on the basis of past performance. Setting previous Booker champs against winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, you would have had some hot, publicity-generating contests. Plenty of controversy, plenty of publicity, more than a bit of edge. There would have been Roth vs McEwan (1998), Richard Ford vs Graham Swift (1996), Carol Shields vs Pat Barker (1995). In the more distant past there would have been prize fights like Norman Mailer vs William Golding (1981). British academics and literati have already bemoaned the change. This year’s chair of the judging panel, Professor Lisa Jardine, is worried that a rather British institution will become “blandly generic”. And perhaps she too had Henman vs Sampras as a model when she pessimistically predicted that the top American seeds would blast the gallant British and Commonwealth battlers away. “With someone like Roth at his best, I can’t see how an Amis or McEwan would touch them.” “The American novelists paint on a much bigger canvas.” Perhaps she was implying just the contest between scale and precision that the sponsors might be relishing. “If you look at Pulitzer prizewinners, every book there is on a majestic scale.” But is this not mere defeatism. Alison Lurie, Anne Tyler and E Annie Proux have all won the Pulitzer with quite small books, while “epic” winners such as Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain are as much grandiose as grand. Would our usual literary heroes and heroines stand so little chance? Jardine also points out the practical problem. How to open the competition to another literary continent, yet keep the long list down to manageable proportions? At the moment judges must read about 130 novels in a year, surely as many as an honest intellectual can ever manage. So there will have to be sieving, or pre-judging, especially given the ruthlessness of the big US publishers, hungry for hype. What chance now for those unknowns – the bus-driver with his first novel – making it through to at least temporary fame? Maybe this will not worry the sponsoring fund managers. Having increased the first prize to £50,000 they may consider a loss of eccentricity a price worth paying. They may claim that the response of critics every year to the announcement of the Booker shortlist has even pushed them into this change. Think of all those articles lamenting the limited range of the British novel. Think of that annual yearning for the wide skies of American fiction. “Well,” the sponsors might righteously say, “at least we are pushing the Commonwealth team to pit themselves against ambitious opponents – perhaps we will goad them to expand their horizons.” Yet you do just wonder whether the finance people know what books are about. Why, one might ask, has the Booker Prize been such an extraordinary PR success over the past two decades and more? Perhaps it has something to do with a factor that the sponsors now risk losing. Up until now, the books on each year’s shortlist, and even those notoriously failing to make that list, have looked like members of an extended, rancorous family. The most distant Commonwealth writers have usually been close to Britain in some way. Twice-winner JM Coetzee, who will not leave South Africa to collect his prizes, sets much of his latest novel, Youth, in London. The protagonist of Disgrace, which won in 1999, lives in Capetown but teaches and adores English Romantic poetry. Even in their antagonisms, Booker novels look as though they belong together. For all Martin Amis’s attempts to import the cadences of Nabokov and Bellow, the American novel is foreign – foreign in just the way that often makes it exciting. A list made up of Commonwealth and American novels is likely to look like a mere assortment of preferences. Up to now, the success of the Booker has been the implicit claim of its shortlist to be the index of a shared literary culture – a rivalry within a literary clan. What makes it interesting is also what makes it sometimes seem parochial. The sponsors might not realise it, but perhaps all those publicity-making, sales-achieving arguments that the Booker has produced would never have happened if it had not been as small as it is. · John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College LondonDistinguished former winners offer their opinion Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989) I’m all in favour of letting in the Americans – the Booker did a terrific job in the 1970s and 80s bringing literary fiction to the public’s attention, but it’s done that job and there is now room for a bigger competition. I don’t think there’s enough exchange between the United States and other English-speaking cultures. We read a lot of each other’s big books, but if there

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