The prestigious Booker prize has often courted controversy across its forty-three year lifespan, though some of these controversies have been somewhat more infamous than others. For instance, in 1972 when John Berger won the award with his book G, he stood to make a speech at his victory dinner and announced that he was inexplicably planning to donate half of the prize money to the Black Panther movement (despite the fact that the Black Panthers had dissolved two years earlier), provoking outrage and disgust in his guests and throughout much of the literary world.
Yet, excluding the odd denouncement of capitalism here or a threat to leap out of the window there, the Booker controversies seem to have settled down considerably- that is, until now.
With the announcement of the 2011 shortlist and the subsequent claiming of the prize by Julian Barnes with his novel The Sense of an Ending, the prize has come under attack for apparently valuing readability over actual canonical literary quality.
This in itself has created controversy, with the general mood being summed up succinctly by poet Jackie Kay. She says, “we desperately need a prize which shows off the best writers writing in English. It is a sad day when even the Booker is afraid to be bookish … People want to think. They don’t want to be patronised.”
To many (myself included) this smacks of brazen snobbery; surely a book should be judged for its effect upon an audience, the emotions it stirs and the feelings it evokes- in essence, for the sheer enjoyment one gains from reading it. The literary world seems to be divided on this matter.
The Booker’s administrator, Ion Trewin, defended the prize, saying that the judges were looking for a combination of quality and readability and that “nobody wants something with literary quality which is unreadable – that would be daft”, which, in terms of common sense, is very true. But common sense has no place in the literary world- let alone in the world of the Booker Prize – and as one publisher said, rather truthfully if not a little tactlessly, “basically the whole thing needs to be an utter snobfest, otherwise how is it different from the Costas?”
The Costa book awards, formerly known as the Whitbread awards, have a reputation for being far more populist and focusing upon enjoyable and readable works, rather than conforming to the infinitely enigmatic and impenetrable criteria for the Booker award, whatever that may be. But is this really such a base and terrible concept? Many seem to think so, but unfortunately literature and pretentiousness have traditionally gone hand in hand for centuries, and with this latest outbreak of controversy it seems as if the Booker prize is destined – or doomed – to return to upholding that tradition.