Saddling up old warhorses
Last summer it was decided to reissue Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy in a new look (above, design and illustration by Penguin's own Nathan Burton) that complemented her new book Life Class, also set during the First World War. The three books form a particularly pleasing tableau when lined up together (booksellers take note). The reissues were published on the 1st of May and, coincidently, eleven days later it was announced that The Ghost Road, the third title in the trilogy, which won the Booker Prize in 1995, had been short listed for the Best of Bookers.
The Best of Booker Prize is a curious event pitting past winners of the forty-year-old prize against one another: the old warhorses of yesteryear saddled up for one last battle. It works something like this. Forty-two winners (two years had joint winners) were read by a judging panel of three and whittled down to a short list of six, announced on May 12th. The winner will be announced on July 10th, decided by public vote via text or website.
Obviously, this Booker of Bookers is just a publicity exercise intended to get people talking about books and the state of literature as published in the UK, while reminding people of the cultural value of the Booker Prize. But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, the process is somewhat flawed. If we leave aside the fact that comparing books is like comparing apples and apricots, we have the larger problem of the public vote. A judging panel is at least required to try and read all the eligible books. The public have no such obligation. So the votes for the short list will fall almost exclusively on those books voters are familiar with. In my case that is one book - which I forked out money for and sat down and read. Three others I have had cause to work on professionally.
It is therefore a popularity contest. Tony Blair might have called it the People's Booker.
In which case, you might ask, why not use book sales? The mass of people prepared to put their money down for a book are making a definitive statement - any book which didn't pass muster with joe public would swiftly find itself out of print (which has been the fate of at least one past Booker winner). William Hill have already put Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, which won an earlier Best of the Booker contest in 1993, as favourite, while Barker's The Ghost Road is odds on second.
However, despite these flaws, the short list of the Best of Bookers, which stretches from 1973 to 1999 is one means of taking the cultural temperature of the country's readers. Is a book about the struggles of a nascent post-colonial nation more important to us than one detailing the crumbling mind of a soldier shattered by war? Does a story about a gamble for love in nineteenth-century Australia touch us more than one about the personal and cultural consequences of abusing a position of power in post-apartheid South Africa? Does a novel of nineteenth-century colonial arrogance in India beat one of twentieth-century colonial hypocrisy in South Africa? Perhaps issues don't make a winner and it is instead the artistry of the writer that will ensure the enduring appeal of a book. Most likely, it is some hard-to-put-your-finger-on mixture of both.
The book judged best in any given year will be viewed differently in subsequent years. It is a prize winner, but what keeps it relevant? What does its survival or non-survival say about it - and us? Reading any Booker Prize winner today will always be a different experience from reading it when it first came out. We as readers come to certain books at a remove from the context in which they were originally written and received. (There are reasons we don't see quite as much post-colonial fiction published these days and yet the short list we are offered is dominated by such books.)
The Booker of Bookers reminds us of the distance that separates us from the books of the past. But, I would argue, not so much through the books that have made the cut - but through those that haven't. What have we lost since then? What has become more or less important to us as readers?
So while we salute the short list we are given and, eventually, the public winner of the Booker of Bookers we will give ourselves, let us also raise a glass to the old warhorses - insert your choice from the list here - that haven't been saddled up and paraded before us.
Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter
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