UNLISTED

I have been asked to give an account of why I have withdrawn my novel from the longlist issued for this year’s Man Booker Prize. I am content to do so.

In the first place, my publisher did not extend to me the elementary courtesy of asking me whether I would approve of my novel being put forward for this award. He assumed that it was a given that I must necessarily be delighted to be considered and to have this so-called longlist consideration known. He was wrong on both counts.

Were I remotely drawn to the notion of receiving a literary award, I cannot imagine that I should derive much joy from being included in a list of twelve titles and then perhaps dropped along with five others when the shortlist is unveiled some weeks later. Worse still would be the tenor of the media coverage which, if past form be a guide, is apt to treat of such notions as “vintage” and “non-vintage” years, the “betting” on the composition of the shortlist and the eventual winner, the absence from the longlist of certain celebrated authors – frequently described melodramatically as a “snub” – and the supposed unworthiness of some of those listed, perhaps including my own work.

The original Booker trophy

This kind of treatment is not to be endured by anyone of any reasonable sensibility. There is no objective or consensual hierarchy of new fiction and, if there were, then it would certainly not be reflective of pure and wholly literary judgments. Those works that are deemed to be “important” are rarely so deemed on grounds of writing alone. If they were, the Booker Prize would be an infallible guide to the quality of writing in the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and the Republic of Ireland over some forty years. But it is not.

If you consider the roll-call of Booker winners and shortlists, the almost total absence of fiction emanating from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is very striking. But neither could the list of prize-winners reliably supply one with the pick of English literature over the same period. Anyone imagining that Ian McEwan’s Booker-winning Amsterdam is superior to either Saturday or Atonement, for instance, would be greatly mistaken.

PH Newby, the first Booker winner

The habit among prize juries of picking the right artist but the wrong work is well established. Look at Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed, markedly inferior to Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, none of which won. The directing Oscars awarded to Vincente Minnelli, George Cukor and Carol Reed for, respectively, Gigi, My Fair Lady and Oliver! reward mere organisation of unwieldy, stagy musicals rather than the directorial judgments, fine and personal, that their much tighter projects allowed.

One of the few things that Booker juries have got admirably and consistently right is their underlining of the international pre-eminence of JM Coetzee, whose two most accomplished novels both won the Booker. But who is to say that Coetzee’s work as a whole is more important or worthy than that of the authors whom he “defeated” in his Booker wins, among them Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Ahdaf Soueil and Graham Swift?

Ian McEwan in the 1990s

Simply put, it is mendacious nonsense to compare and rank works of art as diverse as contemporary novels. People write fiction out of many private and public instincts, some of them perhaps not even conscious. How may a large, multi-voiced panorama, aspiring to weigh the state of a nation and/or culture, be coherently compared with an interiorised contemplation of a single relationship? Who can say which of them, fifty years hence, will be more widely thought to have pinned down some essential insight about how we live now? Will Booker winners who are presently out fashion – Keri Hulme, PH Newby, Bernice Rubens – ever come back into favour? And were their awards necessarily “wrong”?

If judgments upon art are not pure, the financial support of awards is as tainted as may be. Commercial sponsorship has just two motivations: self-promotion and tax-avoidance. There is no organic relationship between the companies that offer funds to award-giving bodies and other enterprises. How is the involvement of McDonald’s relevant or appropriate to the current Olympics? Athletes at the top of their game pay meticulous attention to dietary needs. None of them shovels down her gullet the abattoir slurry that passes for “a meal” in a fast food outlet.

JM Coetzee in the 1980s

Forty years ago this year, the Booker Prize (as it was then called) was awarded to John Berger’s polemical historical novel G. In his acceptance speech, Berger delivered a fierce assault on the Booker McConnell company that then sponsored the award, excoriating its manipulation of sugar interests in the Caribbean and announcing his decision to divide the (then modest) prize money between the Black Panther movement and his own research for a project on migrant workers.

Ten years ago, the prize was hived off into a new entity, the Booker Foundation, a unitary charity “supporting a diverse range of activities which promote and foster literature”. Its mission statement mentions libraries a great deal, but its website gives no clue as to what role, if any, it has played in the campaign to save the nation’s libraries from closure.

At the same time that the charity was launched, a new sponsor came on board, the investment management company, Man. This outfit deals in what its website calls “investor splutions” [sic]. It currently manages $52.7bn-worth of emerging markets, credit and convertibles, equities and futures. Patently, then, it is financing the prize out of the goodness of its heart.

John Berger in 1972

But if sponsors are chiefly interested in profit, the Booker administrators and many of the writers whose novels appear on the various lists seem no less motivated by money. Time and again, the hike in sales concomitant upon Booker attention is cited as the great benefit to literature and writers. This strikes me as shabby and shallow. Cash-in-hand has never been a realistic aspiration for writers. For every JK Rowling squillionaire – and there is anyway only one JK Rowling squillionaire – there are the 95 percent of writers who need to subsidise their writing by other means. No doubt a five-figure cash prize is a bit of a help, though of course it barely registers against the seven-figure sums paid to major winners in such sports as golf and tennis, let alone the advertising deals that ride on the back of such recognition. No doubt, though, the day will soon be upon us when novels carry advertising on their covers just as sportspeople bear sponsors’ liveries on their clothes and equipment.

But increased sales cannot be seen as an unalloyed benefit. The books-do-furnish-a-room attitude that motivates the purchasers of novels specifically because they have been promoted by Booker can hardly be said to furnish any writer’s ideal readership. As a novelist, you want readers who do actually read your book and who, while doing so, have the empathy and intelligence to appreciate at least something of what you were trying to do. In that sense, the only truly desirable promotion for your work is word of mouth. Book reviews are hopelessly compromised by so many extraneous factors. For instance, Fight and Kick and Bite, my critical biography of Dennis Potter that was published in 1995, was given a miserable review in The Sunday Times, most of whose readers will not have known that a regular reviewer for the paper, Humphrey Carpenter, was then working on the official Potter biography. Other reviews were considerably more supportive.

Any novelist who says that she unequivocally welcomes the extra sales that Booker listing brings reveals thereby that her own prime motivation is income. Rather as the injection of sponsorship and broadcasting dollars has utterly corrupted all sport, so the cash waved at novelists – though clearly on a far more modest scale – has corrupted literature. There is no getting away from it.

Accordingly, I do not intend to play this game. I want my novel to be read by those most likely to appreciate it for what it is and if that means it loses sales to non-readers and those who take instruction in what they should buy, so be it. That may be my small loss in remuneration, but I hope it is literature’s small gain in self-respect.

Please note: the foregoing is an example of metafiction. No novel of mine has ever been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Indeed, it is 21 years since a novel of mine was published.