Cheryl's Reviews > Lost for Words

The 2011 Booker awards season is the gift that keeps on giving.

The chair that year was Stella Rimington, an ex-spymaster for MI5 whose purported link to literature is her retirement hobby of penning apparently adequately competent spy thrillers. She wasn’t off to a good start with the literary critics (who she likened to the KGB) when she announced that this year the focus would be on “readability”. One of her judges supported her by saying that for him, the novels “had to zip along”. Oh. My. God! exclaimed the literati. Zippiness? Readability? What about the quality of the writing, of the deeper meanings and layers of the story?

Well, there certainly are books that embrace all of those qualities — they are not mutually exclusive. But they also weren’t on that Booker list. My own conspiracy theory was that the presence of Snowdrops was a case of mistaken identity: the nomination should have gone to Andrew Miller, author of the far better book Pure, rather than Andrew Miller (A.D. Miller), author of the mediocre Snowdrops. But once such a mistake is committed, it would be impossible to correct.
It was fun, nonetheless, to read the snarky articles and comments that permeated the book pages at the Guardian etc as well as the book blogs.

Redemption was achieved when Julian Barnes won. And now it has also provided inspiration for this book.

This is a deliciously fun romp. The sponsor of the prestigious book prize is Elysian, a controversial manufacturer of herbicides and pesticides, ”…a leader in the field of genetically modified crops, crossing wheat with Arctic cod to make it frost resistant, or lemons with bullet ants to give them extra zest.” They are the usual corporate bad guy looking for disguise in the purifying robes of “the Arts”.
The Chair of the jury, an MP on the downhill slope, accepts the job because of “backbench boredom”, and a need to get more public attention. The jurors include a celebrity columnist whose “ruling passion was ‘relevance’”. “The question I’ll be asking myself as I read a book is just how relevant is this to my readers.” Another juror is an academic, an unavoidable but undesirable type — but”…there was no harm in having one expert on the history of literature, if it reassured the public.” There is an ex-girlfriend of the Elysian director in charge of the awards. She writes. Badly. But her books are popular. These were some of the funniest parts of the book, written in a free indirect style of Penny Feathers. Excerpts of her writings show flat, plodding simple sentences notable only for the extraordinary density of cliches. I thought of my GR friends when Penny rewards her own hard work with a Paris weekend at the Ritz, ”… a favourite haunt of Marcel Proust’s. Although she sympathized with his choice of watering hole, Penny couldn’t help reflecting that he was exactly the kind of author who would not have made it onto this year’s Short List. She hadn’t actually read any Proust, but she knew perfectly well that he was a long-winded snob, with far too much private money and some very unconventional sexual tastes: just the sort of thing they had been trying to avoid.”

And just as the quality of the jury is questionable, so too is that of the books on the long list. This includes an accidentally submitted cookbook, which the columnist champions as a “ludic, postmodern, multi-media masterpiece.” Could this be the parallel to the Andrew Millers mix-up of the real Booker?
It all proceeds in a somewhat chaotic fashion, hopping from one viewpoint to the other, and like all good satire, revealing truths along the way. ”Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent. Only the mediocre, pushing forward a commonplace view of life in a commonplace language, can really be compared, but my wife thinks that “least mediocre of the mediocre” is a discouraging title for a prize.”

And who can resist the ultimate irony that this book turned out itself to win a major award, The Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, which encourages even more sniping — the book is too superficial, the satire too broad, the targets too easy. It is what it is, and for what it is, it is a funny and well-written commentary on the world of literary awards. Just have fun with it.