Will Americans wreck the Man Booker party?

 
16 September 2013
WEST END FINAL

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This time next year, could we see a Man Booker shortlist including Jonathan Franzen, Marilynne Robinson and Lorrie Moore? If a story in yesterday’s Sunday Times is to be credited — that the prize, previously open only to authors from the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth, will from next year admit US novelists to contention — that is exactly what’s on the table.

I say “if”: the story was unsourced. But I asked Man Booker if it was true yesterday and it said, “There are some changes afoot, under discussion for some time” — which if not a confirmation certainly isn’t a denial.

And if true, this is a huge deal. In our literary ecosystem, Man Booker is a keystone species. Publishing schedules are organised around its submission deadlines. It shifts many thousands of books that would otherwise sell in their hundreds. It makes careers. Its attendant razzmatazz and hype — for better or for worse — has a real effect on what people actually read. One of the accidents of its current remit, for instance, is that Booker has been a great promoter of Anglo-Indian literature.

The argument in favour of opening the prize to US authors is one of basic literary principle. Organising a literary prize around the long-gone historical accident of a set of political and trading relationships doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The territory of the English novel is the English language.

The arguments against are less simple but they are also strong. Less than a year ago I had a long conversation on exactly this subject with a very senior Man Booker honcho. His view was that admitting the Yanks presented an unsolvable practical problem. Man Booker’s special claim to authority is that all the judges read all the books. That is do-able, but only just. Booker judges are already drinking from a hose. To admit US writers to the party would be to ask them to drink from a fire-hose. If the cost of a sensible remit was the authority of the judging process, they counted it too high. Having held the opposite view, I came away more or less convinced.

What might have changed their minds? There’s the (perfectly creditable) empire-building the prize has been up to anyway, with its international offshoots. And there is, perhaps, anxiety about the new rival Folio Prize, whose declared remit includes the US. Would competing with Pulitzer and the NBAs enlarge the Man Booker brand or dilute it? Would becoming more like the Folio Prize present as strength or weakness? I can’t pretend to know.

The reaction of many people, though, has been that of Melvyn Bragg: “I’m disappointed … though not that surprised. The Booker will now lose its distinctiveness.” Man Booker’s distinctiveness may be cockeyed; but it is distinctiveness for all that.

Kit’s winning way with words

You have to love Kit Malthouse. What chutzpah! The deputy mayor’s latest scheme is to recommend to, for instance, Cardiff (and Glasgow, Belfast and other ghastly Seventies-type towns in the provinces) that rather than spend its tourism budget trying to attract visitors to Cardiff it should spend it on promoting London.

Let’s face it, he argues, nobody in their right mind wants to come to the UK to visit Cardiff. Your best hope is to get them to come to London, and then hope they come down for a day trip by accident or something. Competing against London is futile, he says, and the regions are “cutting off their noses to spite their faces” by doing so.

Hmm. All we can say for sure is that the one person who is now strongly advised not to take a day trip to the provinces — with his own nose and face central to the concern — is K Malthouse, Esq.

Tony Blair’s tender touch as his son ties the knot

Here comes the bride: Euan Blair and Suzanne Ashman leaving the church (Picture: Splash)

When you are used to seeing a public figure as a statesman — a dehumanising condition — it is especially touching to see them in another context. When his eldest son Euan got married on Saturday, we’re told, Tony Blair “was seen outside the chapel holding his son’s face in his hands and kissing him on the cheek”. His holding his son’s face is a terribly affecting detail. It makes you conscious that of all the triumphs and disasters in his public life none will touch nearer the centre of Tony Blair’s self than his relationship with his son. On the same Saturday I watched my little sister get married, so perhaps that has made me sentimental. Here’s to the new Mrs Blair, anyway — and to the new Mrs Boateng.

Copyright theft is a crime like any other

Good on Philip Pullman. In an article for Index on Censorship, the author of His Dark Materials has denounced illegal downloading: “The technical brilliance is so dazzling that people can’t see the moral squalor of what they’re doing. It is outrageous that anyone can steal an artist’s work and get away with it.” Cue the usual barrage of whiny special pleading from piracy fans. Stuff ’em. Copyright, in the digital age, may need reform. It does not need abolition.

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