Gathering at the high end celebration
Neill Denny on the Man Booker dinner
The Man Booker night really begins when you first arrive at the cocktail party, which is the key period - at least for mingling. Hundreds of people crammed together and seemingly all the key players are in one room simultaneously, from Doris Lessing to Gerry Johnson, from Gail Rebuck to Tim Hely Hutchison. David Roche was there, and in particularly chipper mood, as well he might.
The Man Booker dinner is almost perfect: good food, great company, and a gathering sense of excitement as the fateful moment neared - although it must be torture for the authors. My table was marred by the no-show of three people (Kathy Lette amongst them - shame on you) so I alternated between Samenua Sesher and Sir Christopher Bland, chairman of Canongate.
The chairman of judges, Sir Howard Davies, did a fine job of pacing the evening because the announcement has to be at exactly 10.23 ish to fit in the the BBC1 10 o’clock news. Weirdly, the big moment, the culmination of all that blood sweat and tears, is gone in a flash and the winner’s presentation and speech last less than five minutes.
To the people at home on their sofas their one annual glimpse of the literary world must present it as a bizarre anachronism, a giant medieval hall stuffed full of people in dinner suits clapping a winner that they, the viewers, have never heard of. I used to think this was a terrible thing, that it made the book world seem dated and out-of-touch, and part of me still does, but I am also coming round to the view that the sheer elitism of the Booker and all it stands for is no bad thing, and that the high end needs a counterpoint to Richard and Judy and the 342s. There is more than enough room for both in this world.
I wasn’t carrying a clopometer with me, but it did seem to me that the biggest cheer on the night was for Doris Lessing’s Nobel, announced by Davies, and with the great woman in the hall. Her reaction was very different to the now-legendary YouTube clip of her being broken the news by a reporter, in which she clasps her head in her hand and mutters ‘Christ’.
Personally I felt a little sorry for Ian McEwan, who has ben shortlisted four times but only won once. He was the only big name on the list and had most to lose by not winning. That one-in-four hit rate makes him seem like some kind of failure, when of course the reality is that he is our most popular literary novelist by a country mile.
When I went up to Ian Hudson and Gail Rebuck on Random’s table they were clearly conflicted, delighted Anne had won but sorry Ian hadn’t. In commercial terms though it could be the best result of all for Random, becuase a new star has been created rather than an established brand burnished.
There then follows a formal press conference with the winner, where a baffling wide variety of questions were thrown at Anne by an eclectic group of the world’s press, which Anne batted away very smoothly. She seemed more at home in the spotlight than the last Irish winner, John Banville, and made the amusing revelation that James Joyce writes like a woman. She was then whisked away to do a live Newsnight piece. By this time the party is pretty much over, with groups from the shortlisted publishers dispersing across Soho to either drown their sorrows or toast their winner.
Neill Denny is editor-in-chief of The Bookseller. He will be blogging on the book business and on how the print magazine is produced each week at theBookseller.com
