HOW WE JUDGED THE BOOKER
her fellow judges kept race and politics out of the literary prize
THE newspapers were not at their best the day after the Booker shortlist was announced. The Times got the amount of the prize-money wrong, and its Diarist described the judges emerging from their room at the Athenaeum 'like a conclave of cardinals electing a Pope.' Well, not very like. Three of us were women.
Elsewhere in the press there was the usual carping. We had chosen six immense- ly talented authors, all writing at the peak of their form. Can't argue with that, the Judges thought; but we were wrong. The Sunday Times called our selection 'moth- eaten' and cried out for 'just one callow writer under 50'. Callowness had not been in short supply among the entries, but we did not think it our business to encourage or reward it.
Literary editors misunderstand — wilful- ly, no doubt — what the Booker shortlist is for. For the judges it is simply a stage in selection. It is not intended to give en- couragement to young writers or reward near-misses. The rules governing the prize are clear; a book may not be shortlisted unless at least one judge thinks it a possible winner.
So when the panel met at Booker head- quarters on Tuesday afternoon our first act was roundly to curse the literary commen- tators. Kate Saunders summed up the general feeling: 'I hadn't realised how unfashionable it was to be an older author. Why should there be a prejudice against writers at the pinnacle of their careers?' Our second act was to confess to the enormous tension we felt. I have been shortlisted myself for various prizes, and I have learned how to fix a smile on my face as someone else carries off the prize. It is a nervous business, being a candidate; but on Tuesday I felt that being a judge was worse.
_ It was not that we feared a big row. Disappointingly for the press, this year's panel has got on well, whilst disagreeing at times about almost everything. In part, this was due to the benign but authoritative chairmanship of Sir Denis Forman. Com- mittees have a tendency to take a decision and then talk over the merits of the case, wasting their time on the might-have-been.
Sir Denis would allow free, wide-ranging discussion; but he would not allow post- mortems.
But there were other reasons why judg- ing the Booker this year has been a pleasure. My fellow-judges were hard- working. They had a disposition to concen- trate on the words on the page — not on book-trade politics, or on past reputations, or on the monstrous (yet highly enviable) advances received by some eligible au- thors. These matters were outside our ambit on Tuesday. Martyn Goff, our men- tor from the Book Trust, set up the shortlisted volumes on the committee table. We began. As a book was excluded, Martyn reached forward and gently col- lapsed it. It was like watching your oldest friends being shot.
As we named our fourth, fifth and sixth choices, it became clear that support for one book had fallen away. The task began to look possible, but very difficult. John McGahern's Amongst Women had been my choice for many months. I had read it before I was appointed a judge, and recognised its immense quality from the first paragraph. It had won through to the shortlist almost without demur. But be- tween the shortlist meeting and the final decision, my thinking had become more complicated. I went to the meeting feeling that there were three books that I would be happy to see win. For the other three, if I did not feel the same personal warmth, I
felt immense respect.
Our discussion was lively, impassioned, and good-tempered to a degree that amazed Walton Litz, our American panel member. In the United States, he felt, our meetings would have been doomed from the start. 'It would have been a bear- garden,' he said. 'It would have been a dog-fight.' The merits of the individual books would have gone by the board, while we discussed ethnic quotas, and divided on ideological lines. We did not do this; we read passages to each other, and argued in a minute and particular way. I believe that this is the way a literary prize should be judged. I am sorry to think that there is any other way of going about it.
It is a sad fact, as Susannah Clapp pointed out, that by argument you can persuade someone to think less of a book, but you cannot make them like it more. In the end the vote was split. A.S. Byatt's fine novel Possession gained the prize by the chairman's casting vote. Did the two 'los- ers' feel aggrieved? I don't think so. If you are satisifed with the quality of the discus- sion, it is easy to accept the verdict.
The Booker is wonderful for the trade; at least that is the received wisdom, and I have no reason to quarrel with it. It is painful for authors; it generates tension, envy and self-doubt. But I am glad that I have served on the panel, because I think it will protect me from the worst of these emotions in future years. This year's judges had to read over 100 books in a few weeks. About 30 of them were of the right calibre. A panel may consist of saints, yet they cannot exclude the arbitrary and the whimsical from their operations, In a sense, we were passing judgment on an author's future bank balance; perhaps that is why our hands shook, with a small motion like that of riffling through notes. We were aiming to reward excellence, yet we were conscious that there is too much excellence about. It should comfort an author to keep in mind that the verdict is not handed down by God, but by five fallible people doing their best.
What did the Booker entries have in common? Sex, according to our chairman. He calculates that in three months the judges have encountered over 180 separate descriptions of the sexual act. It will be interesting to see if our moral character deteriorates in future years.
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