Resting easy with the Booker

The lack of ‘Indians’ in this year’s prize race should provide cause for introspection

In late July, one news item largely escaped attention, making a fleeting appearance in the inside pages of our newspapers. The Booker longlist was out, and not a single Indian author had featured in it. The national media just as easily ignored it, moving on to other things. For someone not particularly clued in to the literary scene, it would seem that the Booker Prize is not taking place this year at all.

For long, our engagement with the Booker Prize has been defined by this sort of inconsistency. Our frenzied reactions to a Booker win, making no qualms about appropriating the success of an immigrant elite as unmistakably Indian, only make the task of a critical engagement more difficult. In the event of an Indian winning the prize, as Adiga last year did, the otherwise indifferent attitude to the prize transforms into another opportunity to beat up our chests with proud nationalist fervour.

This is particularly silly, because every artistic achievement is, first and foremost, an individual one. Writing is even more so – it is an act of solitary cultural production, the fruit of the labour of hours spent alone. At times, this alliance with nationalism can also backfire spectacularly, when writers are unwillingly bound to the metanarrative of a rising nation. The most obvious example is Arundhati Roy, whose oppositional politics surprised those who were quick to anoint her the darling of a resurgent India.

Far more alarming, though, is the reluctance of the literary intelligentsia to contest the politics of the Booker Prize. The prize now has been awarded to diverse writers from many parts of the world (within that relic called the Commonwealth), imbuing the Booker with the appearance of radical qualities. Yet despite 40 years of the prize, the category of the so-called ‘universal’ writer is still occupied by the white Christian male. The rest can all be slotted in a ghetto of their own – women writers, Asian writers and so on.

Especially in the case of Asia and Africa, the writers function as imperial ethnologists, representing their ‘native’ lands in forms that must both entertain and elucidate. It is not surprising, then, that while the prize-winning citation of predominantly white writers is framed in generally vague liberal humanist terms, the Indian and African writer usually finds his work slotted in particular terms, representing a country or continent.

Another aspect that makes the evaluation of the Booker problematic is the debate within Britain as to what purpose the prize must serve. A substantial section of the literary establishment believes that the Booker is essentially a ‘British’ prize, reflecting the country’s values and ideas of literature. Not surprisingly then, in the year after the prize has gone to an ‘outsider’, the Booker finds itself responding to a backlash that exhorts it to return to its origins as an upholder of British literature.

This is as true of 2009, as it has been of previous years. Let us consider the books that won the prize in 1982, 1998 and 2007 – years after Rushdie, Roy and Desai won respectively. Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982), Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) and Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) are books that share a convention of form, theme and narrative. All are defined by a sedate, conservative way of storytelling, centred on events distinctly European. This is offset against the tumultuous narrative energy and radical formalism of at least two books that preceded them – Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.

A look at the 2009 shortlist is revealing, yet entirely predictable, with its abundance of quintessentially British novels. The Booker favourite, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, is a tale about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s trusted adviser, as he tries to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Booker website calls it ‘that rare thing: a truly great English novel’. Adam Foulds’ The Quickening Maze is a historical reconstruction of the meeting of the poets John Clare and Alfred Tennyson at a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest, while Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger is a ghost story set in post-war Warwickshire. Add to this, AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, a ‘vivid, rich and moving saga taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme’.

It is during years such as this that the Booker’s relevance as a global literary prize comes severely under question. Therefore, this is a time good as any to examine the Booker Prize in its historical context and redefine the terms of our engagement. One of the most heartening aspects of The White Tiger win last year was the vibrant cultural dialogue and spirited debate that followed. It is a dialogue that, in a mature literary milieu, we must now seek to begin on our own. The Booker may then become an event to which we pay attention, but it does not define our sense of literary worth.