The Man Booker Prize for 2011

Abstract

The Man Booker Prize for 2011 Merritt Moseley (bio) A. D. Miller, Snowdrops. Doubleday, 2011. 272 pages. $24.95; Carol Birch, Jamrach’s Menagerie. Doubleday, 2011. 304 pages. $25.95; Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues. Picador, 2012. 336 pages. $15 pb; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending. Knopf, 2011. 176 pages. $23.95; Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers. Ecco, 2011. 336 pages. $24.99 pb; Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 288 pages. $24. When the Man Booker Prize for 2011 was awarded on October 18 to Julian Barnes for his novel The Sense of an Ending, the decision was almost universally hailed. Barnes, aged sixty-five, had been shortlisted for the fourth time; he is clearly one of Britain’s foremost living novelists; the bookmakers had made it a clear favorite; and The Sense of an Ending, while not his best book, is a genuinely fine novel. But the sense of relief felt by many observers was because somehow the judging panel and the Booker organization, after a series of gaffes and perplexing decisions, had finally gotten something right. Barnes’s victory partially rescued what had been the strangest and most troubling Booker season for many years. The Booker began as an award for the best British novel of the year. That remains its central purpose; but, in a sprawling drive to build the brand, the organizers have invented retrospective awards—the Best of the Booker and the Booker of Bookers, both won by Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—and the Lost Man Booker for the novels published in 1970 that had no chance to win because of a change in the rules (awarded to J. G. Farrell’s Troubles). There is a Russian Booker Prize. And there is a Man Booker International Prize, awarded every two years since 2005; the 2011 prize went in June to the American Philip Roth and produced a Booker brouhaha, or, as it tends to be called, a kerfuffle, with the judge Carmen Callil resigning in protest. The International prize, worth £60,000, is judged by a panel of only three persons, all English-speakers (the other two were Rick Gekoski, an author and a London book dealer, and Justin Cartwright, a South African novelist). The two men were strongly in favor of Roth; Callil was opposed and clearly wanted the panel to default to another candidate acceptable to all three. In many, many published comments afterward she declared that Roth “goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe”; “I don’t rate him as a writer at all”; and “Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. [End Page 341] His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist.” The founder of Virago, the feminist publishing house, Callil denied that her feminist views or Roth’s reputation in some quarters for misogyny had affected her decision: she just thinks he isn’t a good enough writer to earn that prize. Both Callil and Gekoski acknowledged the disadvantage suffered by foreign-language writers whose work must be judged in translation, and of the first three winners of the prize—Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro, and Roth—all write in English and two are North American (the initial prize went to the Albanian Ismail Kadar). This parochialism made even more astonishing the comments of Jonathan Taylor, chair of the Booker Prize Foundation, who declared that the International Booker is now more important than the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he described as “at best political.” Robert McCrum, one of Britain’s most serious bookmen, described this as throwing kerosene on the “smouldering wreck” of what had already been a Booker car crash. Roth didn’t turn up to get his award, but McCrum suspected he would have made his way to Stockholm for the Nobel ceremony. The Man Booker International Prize dates from 2005 and is awarded biennially. The Lost Booker is a one-off, and so is another oddity announced in 2011: the Best of Beryl. This gave readers the chance to vote on which...