Ordinary Novels

When the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded to Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger on October 14 of last year, there were some easy observations to make. Adiga, who is thirty-three years old and a first-time novelist, continued the trend noticeable in recent years—a trend away from established authors and awards given after an oeuvre had taken shape and toward younger, brasher, more obscure authors and titles. The winner for 2007, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, was a surprise outsider, and, in 2006, when the prize went to Kiran Desai for The Inheritance of Loss (her second novel), it was received as a daring choice. Maybe the once daring is becoming the predictable.

The Guardian’s news story about Adiga’s victory delivered some unsettling news: “He is only the fourth first time novelist to win the prize, after Keri Hulme in 1985, Arundhati Roy in 1997 and DBC Pierre in 2003—and he is the second youngest after Ben Okri, who won in 1991 aged 32.”

Oh dear. If there were a poll to choose the most rebarbative of the Booker winners over its forty-year history, Hulme’s The Bone People and Okri’s The Famished Road would probably contend for the palm; Roy’s The God of Small Things looks increasingly insignificant as the years go by; and DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little is probably the worst novel ever to have been chosen for a Booker. Perhaps the judges should look once again at established authors of a certain age. Perhaps (Roy being Indian, Hulme a New Zealander, Okri Nigerian, and “Pierre”—a pseudonym—Australo-Mexican) even middle-aged British writers ought to be given another look.

Some of them were on the Booker longlist: its twelve titles included former winner and the aging enfant terrible John Berger; Philip Hensher, previously nominated for The Mulberry Empire; the Irishman Sebastian Barry, previously nominated for A Long Long Way; Linda Grant, a former winner of the Orange Prize for When I Lived in Modern Times; as well as the redoubtable Salman Rushdie, winner of the Booker in 1981 and various cumulative awards for Midnight’s Children. Grant, Hensher, and Barry, unlike Rushdie and Berger, made the shortlist. Berger denounced the funders when he won the award in 1972; Rushdie, by contrast, has been rather too openly covetous of the award in any year he is eligible, with the result that his failure to win always earns (as it did again in 2008) “Booker Snubs Rushdie” headlines.

The shortlist for 2008 consists of these novels: Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture; Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies; Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs; Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency; Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole; and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, the winner. Once such great names as Rushdie were gone, the favorite, according to the bookies who annually figure Booker odds, was Barry’s The Secret Scripture, with some betting interest given to Steve Toltz’s A Fraction of the Whole.

There was lively discussion of the shortlist—what it meant, what it portended. The chair of the judges, Michael Portillo, emphasized the “readability” of the list; and Ion Trewin, who is the literary director for the Man Booker prizes, commented: “it was only when the list was settled we realised it was the most readable in years.” Readable is code for not too modernist or postmodernist or confusing or experimental or intellectual, and Trewin added, in a phrase that must have had many observers and former winners grinding their teeth, that the Man Booker represents “Richard and Judy for grown-ups.” Richard and Judy are Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, hosts...