One of Britain’s proudest cultural traditions
Jonathan Ruppin, Web Editor, Foyles bookshop
This year's sales of the Man Booker longlist have been the strongest since 2001, news which has given the book trade encouragement in challenging times. It also perhaps finally buries that crass statistic wheeled out by the press each year since 2007, that Katie Price's ghostwritten novel Crystal outsold the entire shortlist in the year of Anne Enright's victory. (More people buy Dairy Milk than Valrhona but that says nothing about their relative quality.)
The Man Booker's pre-eminent place in the field of British literary awards means that the reasons for this increase say something about both the success of the Prize and about the status of literary fiction in a crowded cultural milieu.
Media coverage of books, in comparison to some other arts, is sparse at best. Literary editors - at least those whose role has not been cut as an uneconomic indulgence - face a constant battle to retain their allocation of pages, since they are deemed to be unattractive to advertisers. This is at least partly rectified by the increasing proportion of serious fiction covered by many consumer magazines, although those aimed largely at men fall very short in this regard. But the absence of a TV book review programme on the BBC, supposedly a public service broadcaster, is indefensible, no matter that the programming on Radios 4 and 5 Live is generally excellent.
Meanwhile book retailers - amongst whom we must now count the supermarkets, who contribute nearly a quarter of UK book sales - have displayed a short-sighted lack of enthusiasm for promoting literary fiction. This was certainly one of the contributory factors to the failure of Borders and it must be hoped that the stated intention of the new regime at Waterstone's to reverse this is felt both sincerely and urgently.
All of which means that prizes have become a more significant way for the reading public to track down those books that are deserving of our limited leisure time. This is reflected in the fact that sales of prize winners and shortlisted titles for many awards, not just the Man Booker, have been climbing for while.
The last two winners of the Man Booker, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall last year and Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, have shifted public perception of the Prize. Much as I might personally adore the Nabokovian elegance of John Banville's The Sea and the brittle beauty of Anne Enright's The Gathering, I do recognise their complexity may be intimidating for some. The winners in 2008 and 2009 are exemplary proof that literary quality and page-turning entertainment are not mutually exclusive. (This serendipitous combination has been the making of the Orange Prize, most of whose recent winners have been both excellent and accessible.)
That is not to demand that commercial prospects should ever be considered by the judges, but let us accept that in some years the winner will not be a popular favourite and not judge the health of the Prize on nothing more than a comparison of winners' sales.
But aside from the Man Booker's ongoing progress as a marque of quality, there are reasons why this year's longlist has provoked such interest.
First, it's a very strong selection. I'd struggle to identify any title which might just have scraped on and has no chance of further progress; nothing that's made it onto the longlist is there to make up the numbers. (This positive note is perhaps undermined a little by the fact that, these titles aside, it's not been a vintage year for Commonwealth fiction. Most years, there's a litany of titles whose lack of Man Booker recognition I lament in embittered terms, but this year, I can think of scarcely a handful. I've found myself bogged down in blandness, clichés and general mediocrity far too often.)
Second, this year's longlist features a goodly number of genuinely popular - rather than just acclaimed - writers, with David Mitchell, Andrea Levy, Peter Carey and Rose Tremain already established favourites amongst readers; a number of the others also have a devoted following. There are no debuts included for the first time in several years, which I think is a very good sign: very few writers are ever really good enough first time out to be serious contenders. It suggests the judges are attracted to writers who know how to keep people reading, rather than those whose principle appeal is their novelty.
Third, there are also a number of books which have, independently, attracted a great deal of attention. The debate surrounding the palatability of the characters and attitudes in Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap began as soon as the book was published in May (and had been rumbling away in his native Australia for over a year). The parallels, although exaggerated, of Emma Donoghue's Room with the case of Josef Fritzl have elicited an inevitable prurient interest and this has been sustained by the bravura and originality of the book itself. Tom McCarthy's C was preceded by re-ignition of the perennial debate about the state of literary fiction, fuelled largely by the author himself, whose wider artistic endeavours have shown him to have a gift for self-publicity.
There have also been many intelligent responses to Lee Siegel's provocative dismissal of contemporary fiction in the New York Observer as "a museum piece genre" and Christos Tsiolkas' suggestion at the Edinburgh International Book Festival that European fiction fails to tackle real life in the way American fiction supposedly does.
The fact that the omission of big-hitters such as Martin Amis and Ian McEwan failed to provoke much surprise from anyone other than their perennial cheerleaders also diverted many news outlets from their frequent tactic of focusing on the fate of literary giants and has instead encouraged a more thoughtful debate on the merits of the books themselves, rather than the reputations of the writers. There have been no controversies comparable with James Lever's Me Cheeta last year, a quirky spoof on the Hollywood memoir written from the supposed perspective of Tarzan's ape companion - although I do wonder what that furore did to the chances of Andrew O'Hagan's The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe this time around!
The Man Booker Prize has established itself as one of Britain's proudest cultural traditions, an annual reminder that our literary heritage remains at the heart of our national identity. There are those who dismiss it as ‘worthy', but the fact that Hamlet requires intellectual engagement to appreciate it fully doesn't diminish its power as piece of dramatic storytelling. There are extraordinary new worlds, fascinating new people and engrossing new stories out there, created by writers of sublime eloquence and vision, and there is no better tour guide than the Man Booker Prize.
