Tidy and Untidy Novels: The Booker Prizes 2006–2007

The Man Booker Prize for 2006, announced on October 10 of that year, went to Kiran Desai for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. Though Desai was a near beginner as a novelist—her Booker winner was only her second book, by some accounts she was still a student in a creative-writing program, and she was best known as the daughter of the well-regarded novelist Anita Desai, three-time shortlisted Booker also-ran—much of the surprise was already in the past. The announcement of the shortlist, with its promotion of younger and sometimes nearly unknown writers and its dismissal of the established names, had manured the ground for an unusual Man Booker decision, and, for that reason—as well as because The Inheritance of Loss is a worthy winner—Desai’s victory was generally applauded.

There was some grumbling about the shortlist of six novels. The long-list—the nineteen titles from which the six finalists would emerge—had included titles by such heavyweights as Howard Jacobson, the 1992 winner Barry Unsworth, David Mitchell (shortlisted for his two previous novels), the Nobel Prize–winner and Booker–winner Nadine Gordimer, and the two-time Booker–winner Peter Carey. Already Ian McEwan’s Iraq war novel Saturday, J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man, and House of Meetings, the latest novel from Martin Amis, the “most highly touted novelist never to win the Booker,” had fallen. Now the shortlist (Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss; Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men; M. J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down; Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch; Edward St. Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk; and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River) had further thinned the ranks of those with track records. Bookmakers are conservatives. From the shortlist they had made Mitchell favorite; now they switched their odds to Waters, whose Fingersmith had been shortlisted in 2002.

Never one for diplomacy, John Sutherland, a veteran Booker judge who had chaired the judging panel in 2005, pronounced himself gobsmacked and called it a bizarre list that might signal a changing of the literary guard—“What we may be seeing is a turning of the tide, the older generation giving way to the new.” A man of the older generation himself, Sutherland was deploring what others celebrated. That most of the names on the shortlist were unknown, that their books were often unavailable in the bookstores while embarrassed publishers rushed to reprint, was no problem for chair of the judges, Hermione Lee, who offered a comment that perhaps unwittingly gave a marketing-flavored insight into the Man Booker Prize. Carey, Mitchell, and the others, she explained, didn’t need the exposure: “they’re such talented and exceptional writers that they don’t need us.”

The logical conclusion to this reasoning would be the selection of utterly obscure or even bad books, books whose authors would need the exposure the most; but the judges stopped well short, producing a list of six genuinely good novels, each of which honestly earned its place. From there to Desai’s victory the process continued to be friendly. Though, as is customary, some of the judges later published their reflections and disclosed that they did not get their way in the choice of victor, there was none of the carping and backbiting that has sometimes (from Sutherland, for instance) embittered the journalistic reactions. Hermione Lee commented sensibly, “We chose the six books we were most passionate about and which most excited and interested all five of us. And it didn’t seem to me that the Man Booker judges should be bearing in mind, in the process of making their decision, what the betting is or might be, what the big bookshop chains want, or even what the general reading public expects.” Lee acknowledged the obscurity of some of the novels, explaining how she looked for them in bookshops and came to feel “like an organic farmer in a supermarket.” Her fellow judge Anthony Quinn (the others were the novelist Candia McWilliam, the poet Simon Armitage, and the actress Fiona Shaw...