In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Bring on the Books:The Man Booker Prize for 2012
  • Merritt Moseley (bio)
Hilary Mantel , Bring up the Bodies. Henry Holt and Co., 2012. 432 pages. $28;
Tan Twan Eng , The Garden of Evening Mists. Weinstein Books, 2012. 352 pages. $15.99 pb;
Will Self , Umbrella. Grove Press, 2013. 448 pages. $25;
Deborah Levy , Swimming Home. Bloomsbury USA, 2012. 176 pages. $14 pb;
Alison Moore , The Lighthouse. Salt Publishing, 2012. 192 pages. £8.99 pb;
Jeet Thayil , Narcopolis. Penguin Press HC, 2012. 304 pages. $25.95.

The announcement on October 16 that Hilary Mantel had won the 2012 Man Booker Prize for her novel Bring Up The Bodies produced a complicated reaction. That Mantel might win was not a great surprise. Named [End Page 473] the favorite as soon as the shortlist came out in September, she was still considered joint front-runner (together with Will Self for Umbrella) as the decision approached. And yet a Booker for Bring Up the Bodies was unprecedented in several ways. Since she had won in 2009 for Wolf Hall, this made Mantel a double winner. There have been only two double winners—J. M. Coetzee and Peter Carey. Coetzee is South African; Carey, Australian—both men. So Mantel became the first English novelist to achieve the prize twice and the first woman.

Carey and Coetzee have shown that nothing rules out a double winner, but still it is rare. Salman Rushdie reportedly threw a tantrum in 1983 when he did not win the prize for Shame, only two years after taking the prize for Midnight's Children, and many observers agreed that he had been mistreated. Such former winners as Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, and A. S. Byatt continue to appear on the shortlist. Carey was shortlisted for what would have been his third Booker in 2011, and the double winner Coetzee was on the shortlist when Mantel won it in 2009. That the new repeater was an English woman may have redeemed some oversight by previous judging committees. Mantel pronounced herself astonished and made a small joke: "You wait 20 years for a Booker prize and then two come along at once."

Perhaps more unusual, or controversial, is that Bring Up The Bodies is the second installment of what will be a trilogy—in other words a sequel to Wolf Hall. As Sameer Rahim writes in his report for the Telegraph: "During the dinner all the discussion was about whether the judges could dare give it to Mantel once more and for a novel in the same series—something unprecedented in Booker history." Pat Barker won the prize in 1995 for The Ghost Road, which was also part of a trilogy; but it was the concluding volume, and neither of its predecessors had won (or even been on the list). The chair of judges, Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, ignored the possible controversy of re-recognizing Mantel, declined to reveal the vote, and only said that the panel had decided to give the prize to "a very remarkable piece of prose that transcends the work already written by a great author. She uses her art, her power of prose, to create moral ambiguity and the real uncertainty of political life then."

Finally, though very muted in this case, there are always murmurs about historical fiction. Historical novels have won a large number of (Man) Booker Prizes over the years, and there is a small but insistent critical voice that decries this fact, arguing that historical fiction is escapist and demonstrates a timid refusal to confront and represent the world in which we are all now living. Perhaps its prestige-challenged near-relative, the historical romance, infects the historical novel with its dubious reputation. Of course distinguishing between the two is not always easy, nor is there any agreement on how far back a novel has to be set to be a historical one. At any rate three novels on the 2012 shortlist are at least partly of that genre. Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists is set in Malaya and moves back [End Page 474] and forth between about 1940 and 1986. Self 's Umbrella...

pdf

Share