For Clive James, a sense of humour was just good manners
An exemplary critic, Clive laughed hard at himself and embraced his readers in their common failings
Howard Jacobson Sat 30 Nov 2019 07.00 GMT
Clive James never failed to get a joke. Or to go on to make a better one. This wasn’t because he was overly competitive: rather, like Dr Johnson, whom he often quoted, he believed that conversation obliged us to keep the ball in the air. People lacking the grace that is a sense of humour also lacked common sense, he once told Martin Amis. “A sense of humour,” he went on, “is nothing but common-sense dancing.” Since he loved the tango – perhaps because it, too, is conversation – it is hard not to put a picture to this. Only his was more than a common sense: it was a most uncommon genius for expressing subtle thought in the language of men speaking to men. The word for this isn’t populism: for him it was, as a matter of principle, intellectual good manners.
Howard Jacobson: 'I am a social distancer by instinct'
The novelist was in Tenerife when news of Covid-19 hit. He reflects on a month of uncertainty and the search for hand sanitiser
Howard Jacobson Saturday, 28 March 2020
“It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse, that the plague was returned again in Holland... ” So begins Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.
It was about the beginning of 2020 that I heard a new plague was heading this way from China. On the morning of 27 February I sat with my wife Jenny in a cafe in La Caleta, a pretty fishing village in Tenerife, which we were leaving to go home to London later that day. But for the calima, when wild winds lifted the Sahara and deposited it on our living-room floor, we’d been enjoying glorious weather. This morning was cruelly beautiful. We didn’t want to leave. But while there had been only one reported case of coronavirus on the island, we weren’t entirely convinced the authorities were on top of it; we weren’t sure how well-equipped for dealing with a severe outbreak they were; and we thought that if it did come to hospitalisation, at least in London we spoke the language. We no sooner took that decision than we regretted it. A sadness settled on us – a calima of the spirits – that hasn’t lifted.
A plane is not a comfortable place to be when the proximity of other people makes you anxious. This was early in the scare and no one was talking yet of social distancing let alone isolation, but I am a social distancer by instinct. The immigration hall at Gatwick was deserted. Once clear of customs, I bought the first English paper I’d read in days. “UK warns against mass panic as race to halt outbreak intensifies,” the Guardian proclaimed. So that was what we’d left the silvery-sweet air of La Caleta for: mass panic.
Howard Jacobson, photographed at his home in London. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
The next day we meet friends down from Manchester for lunch. They are in as much of a hurry not to kiss us as we are not to kiss them. We substitute some clumsy elbow banging. Jenny favours the Hindu namaste. I favour backing out of the restaurant. I don’t follow any of the conversation. I am not a good concentrator on other people at the best of times, but dread has now taken up all the room in my attention. At the next table people in their 20s are hugging and kissing.
Jenny shops for sanitising gels and wipes only to discover when she gets them home that they are the wrong gels and wipes. We aren’t killing bacteria, we are killing a virus. I don’t want to admit I don’t know the difference. Something’s got it in for us. Who cares what it’s called. But details matter. To be effective against the virus, sanitisers have to be 60% alcohol. “Why don’t I just breathe on every surface,” I joke. But even I don’t find me funny.
Jenny goes on one of her marathon trawls through the world’s online retailers. Only 20 infected and one dead and already every chemist has run out. Boris Johnson appears on television flanked by experts. I marvel that we have any left after the contempt shown to them by Brexiters. This is the first time I have seen the prime minister without a single inane grin on his face. Has something finally struck him as unsmirkful? But looking urgent isn’t the same as acting with urgency. Where are the sanitisers?
Somehow Jenny finds some that clip to your lapel like badges. I feel I’m warding off a vampire with a clove of garlic. She has stumbled in her researches on to a wipe for anus whitening. “There are still things I don’t know,” she says. “Why does anyone want to whiten their anus?” I ask. However little she knows, I know still less.
But it increases my sadness to be given this reminder of the ingenuity of human playfulness and desire, and to think how our incorrigible variety is being brought low, robbed of its virtuosity and joy, reduced to a single pitch of panic, by a virus. It is absurd to anthropomorphise Covid-19, but like all pestilence it is puritanical in intent. Its purpose is to flatten us out.
The infected rate continues to rise. We have to be told, but I’d still prefer not to know. Let the dead number the dead. I ring my sister in Manchester to see how she and my 97-year-old mother are getting on. Fine. Fine? Yes, fine. “What will be will be,” my sister says. We grew up in the same house: where the hell did she learn that philosophy?
I have taken to wearing gloves when I venture out but get confused as to whether I need to keep them on or take them off to touch my face. If I’ve sanitised my hands before putting on gloves, does that mean the gloves are sanitised from the inside? Or will they have contaminated my hands? I drop my bottle of gel and don’t know whether to pick it up gloved or ungloved. I look around to see who’s witnessing this sad fiasco. No one is. The streets are empty.
Howard Jacobson: 'A feelgood Holocaust exploits the dead and demeans the living'
It once felt impious just to mention Auschwitz. Now, 75 years after its liberation, the death camp has spawned a literary subgenre – and Hitler is in Oscar-nominated comedy Jojo Rabbit. Are we betraying the dead?
Howard Jacobson
Silence is the angel with which literature wrestles. The silence of inadequacy to the task of expression – TS Eliot’s struggle against “last year’s words” while “next year’s words await another voice”. The silence of moral hesitancy or humane consideration. The silence enjoined by laws of blasphemy, or fears of persecution. The silence of bad conscience or exhaustion. The silence of tact.
Over and above these, the Holocaust for many writers and thinkers made reticence not a matter of choice but a moral and psychological obligation. “No poetry after Auschwitz” – the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s famous phrase, ringing through the deathly quiet like the plague bell, could be read both as an injunction and a lament.
Either way, it didn’t simply mean no fancy language. It meant not rushing to possess by articulation, or even to explain what might have been beyond explanation, while the thing itself was still warm and its consequences still unfolding. The issue wasn’t language’s ineffectualness in the face of a terrible event. The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, who as a boy was transported to a labour camp and later spent three years foraging and in hiding, wrote of “learning silence” as a mode of forgetting, burying “the bitter memories deep in the bedrock of the soul, in a place where no stranger’s eye, not even our own, could get to them”.
We think of understanding as our greatest gift, and language as our greatest means of expressing it, but it was Primo Levi – author ofIf This Is a Man, the finest of all accounts of life in the camps – who warned against “understanding” the Nazi project to eliminate the Jews, as though it were susceptible to rationality. It might be that the deep bedrock of the soul is a better place to house what defeats reason than the printed page or the cinema screen.
For many who survived incarceration and torture, Appelfeld’s silence became a way of being, without consolation or salve. The idea of cure, let alone transfiguration, belongs to a later generation of Holocaust excavators, those who had not experienced for themselves but wanted to speak as though they had, either to berate those they felt hadn’t learned its lessons or simply to profit from it in some way – peddling kitsch being the most profitable.
Once it felt impious just to say the word Auschwitz. The clutch of cruel consonants caught in one’s throat. Now, as we reach the 75th anniversary of its liberation on 27 January, the horror associated with those consonants has dissolved into an almost jaunty familiarity. Auschwitz today is a tourist destination, whether you mean to go there by train and come back with a trinket or travel to it between the covers of a book. It has even spawned a popular subgenre – the Auschwitz novel. Auschwitz Lullaby, The Child of Auschwitz, The Librarian of Auschwitz, The Druggist of Auschwitz, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The Chiropodist of Auschwitz. Only one of those is made up by me, and who’s to say it isn’t being written this minute?
Is The Chiropodist of Auschwitz next? … death camp novels.
Look at the publicity for these novels and you discover the same claim being made for all of them. The Druggist of Auschwitz is a “documentary” novel. The Child of Auschwitz is described as historical fiction. The Librarian of Auschwitz is based on “an incredible true story”. As for the latest, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, it is the real-life story of how a Slovakian Jew fell in love with a girl he was tattooing in the camp. In other words, they are all novels that are not prepared to take the risk of being works of the imagination, and therefore exist in some no man’s land between fact and fancy.
How we feel about novels making claims to be true, over and above what we mean by imaginatively true, will tell us how we feel about novels altogether. It isn’t new for writers or their publishers to make such declarations. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was sold on the assurance that his “Life and strange surprizing adventures” were “written by himself” and therefore authentic. Moll Flanders the same. And that was 300 years ago. But the novel has evolved considerably since then and it hasn’t been thought necessary to assure us that Thomas Hardy based Jude the Obscure on a real Dorsetshire loser who wasn’t able to kill a pig. That we are returning to fact to justify fiction is the sure sign that the novel no longer commands the respect it did.
Only when a story avowedly tells of something that really happened, it seems, are we willing to grace it with our credulity and tears. Ironically, a number of these works have been criticised by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum for failing to live up to their own promises of authenticity. Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz, the Memorial complains, “contains numerous errors and information inconsistent with the facts, as well as exaggerations, misinterpretations and understatements”.
The publisher’s response – “Heather is a fiction writer, not a historian” – is a disingenuous attempt to have it both ways. Either you’re aiming to tell the historical truth or you aren’t. The classic defence of novels and films of this sort, that they are “based” on real events, is no defence at all. “Based” conceals a world of subterfuge, giving the author access to the best of both worlds – “truth” in the historical sense and “truth” in the imaginative – while having to bear responsibility for neither.
The question we have to ask is why readers are so eager to enter into this shady contract. What is it about “historical truth” that licenses them to be moved in a way that “imaginative truth” no longer seems to? The Tattooist of Auschwitz fulfils two of the classic expectations of kitsch. By sweetening the horrors of the camps (“I tattooed a number on her arm. She tattooed her name on my heart”) it answers to Milan Kundera’s claim that “kitsch is the absolute denial of shit”. And in its faux historicism – right down to the inclusion of photographs of the actual tattooist whose story the novel borrows – it angles for those double tears that are the hallmark of kitsch: weeping over the suffering of others and weeping a second time over our capacity to do so.
Farcical Fuhrer …Hitler as an imaginary friend in Jojo Rabbit.
To be clear: it is not my argument that the Holocaust should be approached as though it is the Holy of Holies. I have been chased from the Temple myself, accused of defacing sacred memory in my novel Kalooki Nights by detailing the adolescent hero’s obsession with Ilse Koch, the notoriously sadistic wife of the commandant of Buchenwald. An early copy of Lord Russell of Liverpool’s The Scourge of the Swastika, complete with grainy, semi-sadomasochistic photographs, falls into the boy’s hands when he is of an age to be susceptible to its imagery. Thereafter, his imagination riots in the hell of Buchenwald.
But there is all the difference in the world between pornographic exploitation of the Holocaust and a dramatisation of how reading about it can be deranging. The forms in which we receive and process images of the camps are integral now to what the Holocaust means to us. There is nothing titillating about their study.
Nor is there blasphemy in disturbing the solemn hush with parody and satire. If we are to know and bear witness while accepting Levi’s injunction against “understanding”, we need all our wits about us. Sometimes the comedy just isn’t comic enough, as is the case in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator; or not funny at all as in Roberto Benigni’s film Life Is Beautiful; and sometimes it makes us squirm and fret, and then wonder why we shouldn’t, as in Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest. But comedy can be a contentious and disruptive force whether or not its subject is the Holocaust. The important thing is to accept that seriousness can take many forms.
Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit has several Oscar nominations, including for best film (warning: spoiler details ahead). It tells of a 10-year-old German boy living at the end of the second world war, who moves from being a member of the Hitler Youth to helping conceal a Jewish girl in his house. To complicate his loyalties, his imaginary friend is the Führer, played farcically by Waititi himself. In a gesture that might be said to complete his de-Nazification, Jojo finally shouts, “Fuck off, Hitler,” and kicks him out of the window. Is this too cute to be cathartic? “Kitsch is a parody of catharsis,” Adorno wrote. Could Jojo Rabbit’s breezy optimism be deceptive? Could it be concealing a parody of kitsch?
Whatever the film is up to, it can’t be accused of spurious reverence. An atrocious event doesn’t automatically confer seriousness on every representation of it. Seriousness has to be earned again each time. A feelgood Holocaust – whether it takes the form of pseudo-historicity or redemption romance – not only exploits the dead, it demeans the living.
“I am afraid of one thing,” Dostoevsky said. “That I won’t be worthy of my torment.” We who never experienced the torments of the Holocaust for ourselves bear a double responsibility: first to those who did and then to our own capacity to imagine without false solace. Silence was once thought to be the only way to penetrate this darkest of dark places. Now we are talking again, we owe it to humanity not to belittle or betray the deep bedrock of the soul.
In this dazzling novel, Howard Jacobson uses Jewishness as a way in to universal questions about life and society
Edward Docx Sun 15 Aug 2010 00.05 BST
So what is the book about? Well, this is the story of Julian Treslove, once of the BBC (pleasingly satirised) and now making a living as a celebrity lookalike. Treslove is not Jewish but, in simple terms, the narrative details his love affair with and besotted inquiry into what Jewishness means – politically, socially, economically, romantically, intellectually, emotionally, culturally, musically and so on. Treslove has only a "timid" awareness of his place in the universe "ringed by a barbed wire fence of rights and limits". He wants to be part of something vast and ancient, something abounding and intense. He wants to be Jewish.
Howard Jacobson: Is American Pastoral Philip Roth at his best?
Roth said Sabbath’s Theater was his best book, even though many hated it. Should we take notice of a writer’s evaluation of their own work?
Howard Jacobson
11 November 2016
P
hilip Roth has said thatSabbath’s Theater is his best, or at least his best-written, novel. One should take writers’ valuations of their own work with a pinch of salt: they are likely to rank them differently tomorrow. But this judgment is particularly interesting, regardless of whether one agrees with it – though I do – for the reason that Roth seems to take satisfaction in noting that many people “hated” the novel. As though “hating” is a precondition of understanding it. Roth, of course, has always been a novelist who gives his readers a wild ride. If you haven’t wrestled with the angel and the devil and lost to both, you can’t be said to have read him. The nakedness of the encounter is part of what makes him the greatest novelist alive.
If ever a writer put paid to the notion that the best books are those you can’t put down, it’s Roth. But is there an over-and-above provocation to readerly exhaustion and rage in Sabbath’s Theater of which Roth is especially proud and which in itself explains his preference for it? It’s a testament, not only to how much there is to think about in the book, but to its grand comic scandalousness, that you need to pause to catch your breath every dozen pages or so.
Live a Little by Howard Jacobson, review: A novel about love in old age penned with his trademark verbose flourishes
The Man Booker Prize-winning author of ‘The Finkler Question’ writes impressively about ninety-plus-year-olds, while indulging in wordplay and biting political commentary
Holy Baxter 1 July 2019
Howard Jacobson’s Live a Little takes place during the final years of Beryl Dusinbery and Shimi Carmelli, both in their nineties, who meet outside a crematorium after Shimi’s brother’s funeral. Beryl, who spends her time embroidering morbid quotes from literature, is losing her memory; Shimi, on the other hand, is unable to forget anything that ever happened to him (and tormented by the fact). Shimi, a give-it-a-go cartomancer, predicts the future with a deck of cards in a Chinese restaurant every Friday; Beryl writes down her past on cards that she once used to report on her students. Shimi’s name was stolen by his older brother; Beryl has decided to abandon her own name in favour of the altogether more bizarre moniker Princess Schweppessodawasser.
Shimi is also known as the last man in north London who can do up his own flies, and pursued ferociously by the widows of Finchley Road because of this standalone quality. Beryl is dismissed by her self-absorbed politician sons as a bothersome, nasty old woman, left in the care of two recent immigrants, who she throws racist asides towards every few pages. Both are obsessed with death, which is staring them in the face. Both have made some terrible mistakes.
They make for a strange pair, and both are united by their disgust for humanity (Shimi’s visceral; Beryl’s personal.) Beryl has married too often and doesn’t believe in love; Shimi has never married. He is an introvert, easily embarrassed, obsessed with phrenology and the structure of the head, while she is a brash, extroverted linguist obsessed with categorizing words and correcting grammar.
Hilary Mantel, Marlon James, Anne Enright Julian Barnes. Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson
What it is like to win the Booker prize, by Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, Peter Carey and more
As the Man Booker prize turns 50 and readers vote for their favourite ever recipient, novelists reveal the highs (and lows) of winning ‘the Oscar’ of the literary world Saturday 30 June 2018
Hilary Mantel: ‘You could spend years floating around showing off’
Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012)
It’s a measure of the status of the prize that you wake up in a different world. Wolf Halland Bring Up the Bodieshad way outsold my previous books even before the shortlist. But after the wins, overseas deals multiplied rapidly and the effect bounced along to my backlist. So your previous career is recast, and all your work re-evaluated – both in a marketing sense, and a literary sense.
The prize has been nothing but good to me, but I can see that it might be destabilising. Big opportunities open up. It would be possible to spend years floating around the world showing off, and to become a professional winner instead of a professional writer. I imagine also that panic could strike. Luckily for me, I was held safe, because I was committed to a trilogy. So neither in 2009 or in 2012 did I have to ask myself, “What do I do now?”
Having been a judge as well as a contender, I know about the vast burden of reading, the chancy and nervous nature of the process, and how much depends on the dynamics of the final meeting. It may be skill that gets you to the shortlist stage, but we winners should remember that we have had a bit of luck, too. It’s important to get back to your desk, sit down in a spirit of humility, and – if you aim to flourish after the prize – learn all over again how to fail.
Julian Barnes: ‘I felt a general soppy warmth towards everyone’
I’ve always believed that literary prizes should be for the encouragement of the young, and the consolation of the old. In the middle stretch, you should just get on with it. So winning the Man Booker in my mid-60s was indeed a consolation – also a relief (I’d been shortlisted in each of the preceding three decades), but mainly a simple pleasure. I knew there was no danger of it changing the way I might write, and little (I hoped) of it going to my head. My old friend Ian McEwan warned me a few days afterwards: “By the way, you’ll find that from now on you’re no longer ‘the novelist Julian Barnes’ – you’ve been transformed into ‘the Booker prize-winning novelist Julian Barnes’.” This has indeed proved the case, but it’s hardly much of a burden.
The highlights of that evening in 2011? A kind friend assuring me as I sat down to dinner: “We’ll love you just as much if you don’t win.” (And me asking her jauntily two hours later, “So do you love me more now?”) My (female, British) publisher jumping into my lap a few milliseconds after the announcement. My (male, American) publisher instantly tapping into his iPhone instructions to up the print run for the forthcoming American edition. Then a general soppy warmth towards everyone in the Guildhall: the judges, my fellow shortlistees, waiters, interviewers – even the journalist overheard before the press conference boasting to a chum that “I’m going to ambush him with The Martin Amis Question”. Nothing could shake my absurd, if logical, good humour. I was overfamiliar with the downside of not winning the Booker, and could see no downside at all to finally winning it.
Margaret Atwood: ‘I had a contest with Beryl Bainbridge – who could be nominated most without winning’
The Blind Assassin (2000)
It was an evening with especially good flower arrangements in 2000, the year I won. I’d been nominated for The Handmaid’s Tale (too feminist), Cat’s Eye(too provincial) and Alias Grace (too colonial), and it seemed that I was in the Beryl Bainbridge category – always a bridesmaid but never a bride. In fact she and I had a contest going, who could be nominated the most without winning? When I actually did win, my first thought was “My new shoes are too tight”, because now I would have to walk in them to get photographed and so forth.
I probably shouldn’t have said that my earliest literary influence was Beatrix Potter – however true – but as I wasn’t expecting to win, I had no speech prepared. I was of course thrilled and grateful, but also I was simply relieved: I would not have to return to Canada to a reproachful but gleeful media chorus of “Atwood Fails to Win Booker”, as if it were a horse race. It’s much more like Best Pumpkin in Show: the pumpkin does nothing.
If there’s such a thing as a Man Booker experience I’ve drunk deep on it. Overlooked, infuriated, longlisted, shortlisted, victorious, overjoyed. I lost friends when I won. Not for winning but for reneging, as they saw it, on my earlier infuriation. Naive of them. If you are angry with a prize that doesn’t seem to value the sort of novels you write you are bound to change your tune when it does.
I got lucky with the judges – three women and two men of rare discernment and a sense of humour. Of course I thought myself deserving, but justice is no more than the dice rolling in your favour. Losing had been equally arbitrary.
Winning opened doors I thought were shut forever. Overnight, offers came in from foreign publishers, even publishers in Israel who until then had largely ignored my work on the grounds, they told my agent, that it was too Jewish.
How Jewish is too Jewish? There’s an argument that the fathers of the novel are Homer and the Old Testament, the Old Testament being responsible for the jokes. That being the case, all novels are Jewish in the disputatious, dialogic sense. If I didn’t expect The Finkler Question to win – and my mother was so convinced it wouldn’t I suspect she went to William Hill and bet against it – that was because I feared it was too overtly Jewish. Which goes to show you never know. Thus my only advice to aspirants to the prize: don’t try to write a Man Booker book. Leave it to the dice. And remember to be graceful in victory. We need all the help we can get.
Anne Enright: ‘I thought the camera was on Ian McEwan’
The Gathering (2007)
One of the most useful things said to me after the Man Booker came from my medical sister, who looked at me with a cool, diagnostic eye and said, “I usually advise people not to make any major decisions until six months after a life changing event.” I didn’t know my life had changed, I just knew that it was hard to get back to the desk. This was not part of the fantasy of the night, of course. I saw the cameraman lining up a shot on me and thought he was aiming at Ian McEwan, who was sitting over my left shoulder. When the announcement came, I expected a name, but the chairman of the judges read out the title of a book, and it took me a long second to realise that I had written this book. I told all this to a local audience in Dublin the other day and they just loved it: the fantasy of being the chosen one is incredibly strong. But if I am proud, it is of one fact: The Gathering is not just one of the minority of books written by a woman to claim the prize, it is also one of the very few to have a female narrator – perhaps five out of the 50 – and I am happy to have beaten those odds.
Peter Carey: ‘Nothing prepared me for the apocalyptic flashbulbs’
When I was shortlisted for Illywhacker in 1985 I had never read in public in my life. I was terrified that I would win and therefore have to make a speech. For two days I calmed myself by imagining Doris Lessing or Keri Hulmewould win. That worked, for my nerves, and for Keri Hulme as well.
When, three years later, I was shortlisted for Oscar and Lucinda I was a different man, not quite ready to punch the air or throw myself on the floor, but confident I would not lose my voice if called on to speak.
What I said is fortunately forgotten but I accepted the nice cheque and slipped it in my rented tux. It was only after this, when I had the money in my pocket, that I discovered there was something ahead, more overwhelming than a speech.
Oscar and Lucinda had been my fourth publication. I had already done many interviews, I thought. I had been photographed more than was decent. But nothing in my previous life prepared me for what followed. I mean my body had known nothing like these apocalyptic flashbulbs, relentless probes, strobes, questions left, right and over there. I was over the moon. I said I was. I was proud. I said that, too. Others were proud, my whole country even. What did I feel? What did I think? Was I happy? In those hours of media triumph and celebration, while my publishing life changed for ever, the cruellest trick of all was how numb I felt. I had to wait three days, for a stranger to hail me in the arrivals hall of Sydney airport, to really feel the thrill: “Good on you, mate. Well done.”
Marlon James: ‘I had to be marched back to my seat’
I really didn’t think I was going to win. So much so that I didn’t even write a speech. I was so convinced another book was the winner that right before the announcement I set off to the bathroom, only to be met by two near panicking members of the dinner staff who had run after me. They marched me right back to my seat. The journalist beside me knew I had won and tried to impress on me that I really should write a speech, to which I politely but firmly said no.
I was stunned when Michael Wood called my name. You really do slip outside yourself for a second, the way you do with any extreme experience, whether fear, pain, joy or heartbreak. I bumbled through a speech where I think I mentioned my father way too much, and then told people all the reasons why my book was not easy. I wonder if “not easy” referred more to the writing of it than the reading of it.
Hilary Mantel wrote a brilliant and hilarious article about not winning awards, which I had read at least three times, mostly in an attempt to get accustomed to not winning. I watched clips of Maggie Smith playing an actor who did not win the Academy award. Because honestly, I never win anything. You try not to be bitter about it, but who are we fooling? “It was an honour to be nominated” can sound as hollow as you think it would.
Except that it’s not hollow. No disrespect to the winners at all, but my most surprising reading experiences have come from the shortlist (Monica Ali, for example) and the longlist, (Timothy Mo, for example). So I had come to a quite beautiful moment of acceptance that I was about to join some truly esteemed company. But then I won.
Pat Barker: ‘It’s more like an Oscar than a literary prize’
Does the winning author ever know the result before it’s officially announced? Not in my year, though there was a clue: the cameras seemed to be focusing more on the winning table. I remember saying to my publisher, “I think we’ve done it!” After that, my memories are a blur of radio and TV interviews and a bank of cameras with flashing blue lights and voices calling out of the darkness, “Look this way!” “Over here!” You feel like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
Winning the Booker changes everything. In its power to transform a career it’s more like winning an Oscar than another literary prize. I was always aware of the luck element. A different set of judges might well have chosen another book. The question is, how do you react to your sudden (though shortlived!) fame? Embrace it, wallow in it or run away from it as fast as you can? I ran. As soon as I could, I went home and settled down to being the unsuccessful author of the next book. Though even that wasn’t easy. You’re always aware that the next book will receive more critical scrutiny than any previous book has done and that can be inhibiting. But even sitting in front of a blank screen tearing my hair out I was always grateful to have won.
In recent years I’ve become more aware of a downside to the Booker prize-winning label. Too many intelligent, enthusiastic readers take it as a sign the book will be above their heads, and yet many of these books – the shortlisted as much as the winners – are brilliantly accessible. “Give it a go,” you want to say, “You never know, you might be missing a good read.”
John Banville: ‘The notion I might win made everyone try not to laugh’
On the day of the award in 2005, I flew into London from Philadelphia at 6am. I had long before arranged to be in America at that time, as no one, especially myself, had the slightest expectation that my novel would even reach the shortlist. When it did get on, it became imperative that I attend the award dinner, in the fear that if they knew I would not be coming the jury would take offence – though even the notion that I might win made everyone put on a straight face and try not to laugh.
I came back to the UK alone, with a return flight to New York arranged for the next day at 10.30am – bad taste for a loser to hang about any longer than necessary. But what, I wondered, could I possibly do with this day, a whole day, on my own in London? I determined that I must not drink – I had made a great mistake in that regard when I was on the shortlist in 1989 – so I simply strolled about the city in the October sunshine, looking in the shop windows at all the things I would no more be able to afford tomorrow than I was today.
As the afternoon grew late, and the dreaded dinner hour approached, I found myself in St James’s Park, standing by the little lake there, idly watching five pure white waterbirds fighting with a duck over a crust of bread. The duck won. I took it for an omen, and went off to put on my black tie.
Penelope Lively: ‘The prize is nicely unpredictable – it may be you’
At lunchtime, on the day of the Booker dinner, my husband said: “I don’t think you’re going to win, but, just in case, perhaps you’d better think of something to say.” Wise words, as it turned out. I wasn’t the favourite, so the advice I would give to anyone shortlisted would be the same: the Booker is nicely unpredictable, so it may turn out to be you, even if they are all saying that is unlikely. And remember, anyway, that there is no such thing as a best book, merely one on which a group of people have been able to reach agreement.
Life after the Man Booker meant a couple of years and more when it was difficult to do what I wanted to do, which was get on with some writing. There was much book-related travel, too much time in airports, too many events. All that is 30 years ago now, and in a way I am quite grateful for the travel: it means that one of the satisfactions of old age is the thought that I shall never see Heathrow again. I have had all the travel I want or need.
Once the searchlight is turned on others, your take on the Man Booker is that of any reader – the revelation of books you might not otherwise have come across, and will now read. That is the value of the shortlist (longlist, too) – a swathe of books are highlighted for readers. For me, though, there are also the ones that got away that should have won. Two, to my mind: Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries.
Ben Okri: ‘The hunger and the dreams are still there’
You take a young poet and novelist flaming with hunger and obscurity and dreams, you put him through the rigours of the short-story form, you unleash him on a novel he had been secretly writing for years, and you gift him with a strange magical night at the Guildhall in October 1991, and what do you get?
You first get shock, surprise, retreat, delight, celebration, partying, making up for the hunger years, excessive travel, an explosion of readership, the opening up of the magic casement of African writing, a very English lingering backlash, many beautiful friendships, an initial stunned hiatus in writing followed by a steady, quiet harvest, opportunities for constant literary and spiritual growth, much conflicting criticism, an ebb and flow of fortunes, some smouldering resentment, the curious compliment of being plagiarised, publication in many languages, undue expectation followed by a rush to declare disappointment, many St Sebastian-like arrows patiently and humorously borne, love and kindness directed at me from ever renewing sources, and an abiding, never faltering gratitude for the fact that regardless of how my books are received or not received the flame and the hunger and the dreams are still there, enriched by that destiny-altering night at the Guildhall in 1991.
DBC Pierre: ‘I bet a tenner on myself as if I were a horse’
For a participant, one thing the Man Booker prize is strange for is that your days of feverish writing can be two or more years behind you. There’s an extreme Doppler shift: you didn’t write the book with a view to later competing with others. You suddenly find yourself not only in competition but given odds at the bookies (I put a tenner on myself as if I were a horse – you just have to). As if runners ran a race against themselves, and judges were convened years later in a different place; or you worked up the strength to lob a bowling ball up an alley over the horizon, and by the time you got over the rise you saw that agents and publishers had kept the thing rolling on. The night itself is numbing. The shortlist is the realistic prize. I don’t know how possible it is to find a single winner among artworks. From the perspective of the dinner table on the night you quickly realise the show’s set up for TV. I remember being told to expect one of five roving cameras in my face as the winner was announced. Those are the cameras that catch your reaction when someone else wins. Only five of them, as the winner will go to the stage. I spotted the cameras early. Watched them wait for the announcement; and lived a very long split-second as I realised none were coming to me •