Peter Ackroyd on the Booker Prize boobies
It is probably unwise to contest the choices of the Booker Prize panel. Personal taste is, after all: strictly personal and the three judges, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Antonia Byatt and Ion T rewin are not people to stand for any fraud or nonsense in critical matters (unlike certain of their predecessors). Which makes their rather ill-considered choices, Ending Up by Kingsley Arnis, The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge, The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, Holiday by Stanley Middleton and In Their Wisdom by C. P. Snow, all the more surprising. A mixture of piety and fashionable eclecticism does not seem to me to be a reasonable substitute for the proper recognition of substantial or innovative work, but this Year's judges have indeed fallen for the softest options.
In any ordinary year Mr Amis would have Won With ease. But this is not an ordinary year: is wife is one of the judges (each of whom can exercise a veto), and he cannot and should not /vIn. This may be squeamish or old-fashioned, , I think it is right. The latest novel of Beryl bambridge is by no means as good as her Previous one, and I get the imprespion that she was included Only as an act of obeisance to the Younger generation of novelists who are now coming forward the best of whom have, unfortunately, been forgotten by the Booker Panel, Nadine Gordimer's novel will be reviewed later and I will confine myself here to saying that it does not seem strong enough to merit the Prize. I reviewed Mr wilddleton's Holiday a few weeks back, and I can only repeat that I was not much impressed (Why pass over Francis King's A Game of Patience in favour of Holiday: readers of both novels will know what I mean?). As for Snow's in Their Wisdom, it has been reported that it was included as an "act of piety" on the part of the Judges. But piety, misplaced or otherwise, has no place in the award of a major literary Prize, It is rather the time to recognise achieved and imaginative work, the best work of a kflOW author or the outstanding work of a new one It is this which the judges have the failed to do; which brings me to ine novels which they have not included. Some omissions are perhaps too obvious to r,nention: Iris Murdoch's latest novel should have been included, whether or not she has appeared on the short-list before. So should ,_'Iond Red, Sister Rose by Thomas Keneally: oath books are outstanding, and represent a TaJor development in the work of each author. There are also certain Younger writers Who have been neglected for no good or clear reason: there are three recent novels, for
'ainple, which are better constructed and a'sPlay more imaginative strength than almost an
Y of the novels on the present short list: Gone L/I The Head by Ian Cochrane, Happy Endings Y bavid Cook and The Raining Tree War by ba wavid Pownall. Perhaps they stater from the c3.1sadvantage, from the judges' point of view, of ,,eing relatively unknown. But the opportunity missed for changing that situation and tor bolstering the failing prestige and the failing Public of the new generation of novelists.
I am not, of course, privy to the secrets of the judges but it is generally thought that Miss Gordimer has won the prize. If it is true, it is not in the least surprising. There is a terrible temptation to praise South African writers who deal with race in more than black-and-white terms. Miss Gordimer has written a novel* in which the white man is a loser but at least a dignified one, and in which the natives are the inheritors of the earth and yet stubbornly primitive. It then becomes very easy for critics, especially liberal critics, to describe it as "honest" or ''complex" or "subtle" or any of the other code-words which throw an iron curtain between book and reader. The Conservationist is, in fact, an obviously well-intentioned but equally obviously boring book.
Mehring is a white industrialist who is "in pig-iron" the way other people are in clover; he has bought a rural hide-away somewhere in the Transvaal, with a nice house and some nice natives. Nature is generally thought to be more earthy than mere stocks and bonds, despite all *The Conservationist Nadine Gordimer (Jonathan Cape £2.75) external evidence to the contrary, and Mehring is undone by weather and natives alike: just going to pi-ove that one man's feat is a novelist's frisson. Every political novel must, of course, have an objective correlative to cast light upon what might otherwise be a boring general statement, and Miss Gordimer has thoughtfully provided her plot with the body of a murdered kaffir who is buried on Mehring's property only to be resurrected by torrential rains. Mehring himself comes to a sticky end, in the best traditions of white hubris.
:the phrase "political novel" has to be used warily in this context, however, since this book is as oblique and as slow-moving as its national context. Miss Gordimer writes very carefully, with an eye for detail and an ear for cadence, as she broods over the shadows and gleanings of political passions; this is not an approach I would recommend in the circumstances. South African culture is clearly a very starched one, much given to the more formal rituals of conversation and to the exchange of formal signs. Gordimer has observed very closely these local details; but for some reason they do not or cannot cohere. Each chapter is conceived in streams of consciousness but they are dry streams and the whole is much less than its parts.
Miss Gordimer has a feminine interest in what is euphemistically known as local colour, but it becomes in her hands too much a painting by numbers. An odd affair between Mehring and a thoroughly modern South African lady, for example, appears as a leit motif but it becomes all too heavy and sinks. Matters are not helped very much by Miss Gordimer's singularly odd handling of character, since she concentrates so much upon texture and appearance that her people loom very rubbery and very wild. This may, of course, be the point but if so it is one which I did not take. It is, all in all, a curiously unsatisfying book, wreathed in hints and obliquities, saying nothing too much and eventually saying nothing at all.
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