Booker, Booker, Booker!

An account of the voting by one of the Booker Prize judges makes clear that this was a committee decision, a vote sealed by compromise rather than by love:

Judges thought Animal’s People was brimful of verve. They also commended the novel’s strong characterisation. But they were divided on the effectiveness of the author’s use of language: none were impressed by “the Kha in the jar”, a device whereby the narrator addresses a preserved fÅ“tus.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist divided the panel: one judge felt the book tacitly supported Islamic fundamentalist violence, another that it evaded the issue. I thought these views were wrong. To my mind the skill of the book lay in the way its ingenious narrative device implicated the reader in the political issues explored.

The text itself remained ambivalent. The fact that the device was borrowed or learned from Camus’ The Fall did not generate as much excitement among the judges as it did among certain literary journalists. Most of us felt imitation of form was one of the ways in which literature is carried on. Besides, the debt to the author of The Fall was implicitly acknowledged by its overtness, and by a mention of Camus in the blurb…

… a couple of judges felt [Mister Pip] fell apart a bit in the last 30 pages (this was a common problem in many of the novels submitted)…

[In Darkmans,] not enough thought had been given to the reader. It seemed a book written for the author, whose evident zeal for language could only take one so far… A number of judges had difficulty with italic interjections, broken out of the main text, as a way of presenting a character’s thoughts…

In the end, we voted, first by a weighted system which biased the outcome towards our more preferred choices, then by a first-past-the-post system. In each case The Gathering won. Enright’s novel had the support in depth and range other titles were not able to muster. It is, perhaps, a book people admire rather than immediately warm to… [Link]

More on the novel which served as the scaffolding for Fundamentalist:

… the main force of Camus’ novel lies in its use of narrative technique which, as Clamence reflects upon the way he has lived his life, challenges the reader to examine the way he has lived his own. Camus’ primary aim is to draw the reader to the conclusion that life is entirely absurd — and then teach them to come to terms with it…

The novel opens with Clamence sitting in the bar, Mexico City, casually talking to a stranger — that is, the reader — about the proper way to order a drink; for here, despite the cosmopolitan nature of Amsterdam, the bartender refuses to respond to anything other than Dutch. Thus, Clamence serves as interpreter and he and the stranger, having discovered that they are fellow compatriots who, moreover, both hail from Paris, begin discussing more substantive matters… [Link]

This is where Changez casts off his life as a yuppie management consultant:

The realization that his whole life has been lived in hypocrisy and denial precipitates an emotional and intellectual crisis for Clamence… Clamence thus proceeds to “destroy that flattering reputation” … by making public comments that he knows will be received as objectionable… [Link]

Related posts: The wounded pamphleteer, Partying in Pakistan, ‘Moth Smoke,’ the film