Brought to Booker
Auberon Waugh
Novelists are peculiarly defenceless creatures. There may be no strong commercial incentive to write a good novel nowadays, since very few novelists indeed, and only those nearing the top of their profession can be sure of earning as much money as an unskilled agricultural workero. Only literary prizes hold out any hope for new writers that there may yet be a reward on earth for someone who strives to achieve excellence in the English novel. And among literary prizes, the £5,000 Booker Prize is paramount.
In the course of the year I saw about four hundred novels and reviewed nearly a hundred of them at considerable length. Of these, about fifty had some merit, and twelve seemed touched by excellence in one form or another. My conclusion is that the novel is as healthy as ever, even if few people pay much attention to it nowadays. A particularly encouraging aspect of this year's crop of novels was how very many of them, especially from the more intelligent young novelists, could be seen to reject all the major tenets of what for the last fifty years has solemnly been dubbed the Modern Movement.
A small handful struggled on, but these were immediately recognisable as being imitators rather than pioneers. Fifty years ago, of course, the Booker judge, Mr Cyril Connolly, was a frisky bright-eyed young man of nineteen; another, Miss Elizabeth Bowen, was preparing to offer herself as the radiant and delicious bride of Mr Cameron; and the third judge, someone called Dr George Steiner, from Cambridge, was probably blowing bubbles happily through a stethoscope in Leipzig or Budapest. I don't know. All I do know is that fifty years ago it may have been possible for intelligent, independentminded people to hope that there were exciting and wonderful things to be achieved by disregarding every rule that language had devised to facilitate the communication of ideas, the logical requirement of narrative in holding a reader's attention. Nowadays, it is obvious that these hopes were unfounded. The only people who cling to them are the old, who are too hidebound in their loyalties or too vain to recognise their errors, and the imitative young who are, almost by definition, the secondand third-raters of their generation.
Mr Cyril Connolly has staked his reputation as a prophet or seer (as opposed to his well-deserved reputation as a learned and entertaining weekly book reviewer) on the existence and continuation of a Modern Movement in English letters. Perhaps, at sixty-nine, he still believes that there is vitality left in the movement, or perhaps he is merely too obstinate to recognise the fact that there is none, and that he has spent most of his life — honourably enough — illuminating a literary cul-de-sac. That is not important. What matters is that for the last twenty seven years the climate of serious literary criticism has been exclusively controlled by disciples of the modern movement, and the evidence of last week's Booker Prize reveals that these people are not prepared to let go their stranglehold on the British novel.
Awarding the Booker Prize to John Berger's 'G' last week, Mr Connolly praised the book for its "humanity, its intellectual distinction, its grasp of modern history and its sympathy with the oppressed." The book itself was reviewed at very considerable length in The Spectator of June 10. Readers may remember that, rather than a novel, it is a commonplace book of minute observations about life strung together by general reflections — some of Mr Berger's own, some borrowed from other writers — of a more or less asinine nature: "Cattle carry their horns as men carry their years of experience "; "Honey may be either healthy or toxic, just as a woman in her normal condition is ' a honey' but secretes a poison when she is indisposed "; etc, etc. It is true that a few of these bland, inane pronouncements have a Marxist flavour, and it has become an alternative plea in justification of the Modern Movement, as it developed after the war, that just as all great works of art must, by definition, be inspired by a true understanding of Marx, so true understanding of Marx can somehow transform what might otherwise be seen not only as pompous drivel but as illiterate pompous drivel into a work of art.
The Modern Movement is so well entrenched on the review pages that most novel readers must learn to manage without reviews. But it is a cruel and wicked thing that those who have been either neglecting the English novel since the war or gently smothering it with their idiotic critical systems should now be allowed to take over and smother the novelist's only hope of meaningful recognition — the literary prizes. This year's choice of judges has had three injurious consequences for the English novel. In the first place, there will be those who examine John Berger's ' G ' on the understanding that it was the best English novel of 1972, recognise it as pretentious rubbish and leave English novels alone thereafter; others may not recognise it for what it is, but will humbly decide that the advance of the novel has left them behind and return to Miss Woodham-Smith's excellent life of Queen Victoria. In the second place, novelists who have tried to write proper novels will be discouraged yet again — a few might be tempted to imitate the ghastly Berger style, but many others will pocket their £250 publishers' cheques and apply for a readership in James Joyce studies at the University of Leicester. Finally, after the fiasco of the judges' choice and presentation, when Berger predictably insulted the prize's sponsors and promised to give half — but only half — of their money to the Black Panthers in atonement, few philanthropic organisations
will be anxious to sponsor this sort of event in future.
The Black Panther gesture would not matter if Mr Berger's book were not itself so ineffably fatuous. Probably Mr Berger intended no more than a charming bow to his disciple, Lord Gowrie, the controversial Afro-Asian poet whom Mr Heath has taken into his administration. But there can be no joy in celebrating such futility, and I hope Mr Connolly will take it from me his flamboyant decision to spit in the face of the novel-writing community has not gone unnoticed.
Previous page
