Booker Prize 2014*

The 2014 Man Booker Prize was awarded, and the Empire yet stands. The major talking point around this historic award in 2013 was the decision of its organizers to admit American novels to the competition, when previously it had been limited to any novel published in England and in English by nearly anybody, so long as the author was not from the United States. A broad stretch of UK literary opinion opposed any change, either because it was inequitable (the National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prize not being open to their books); because it was inevitable that US novelists would come to dominate; because the judges would be overworked; because the character of the prize would change (though how specific that character could be to include cultures as diverse as those of Canada, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and India, but vulnerable to an American taint, no one could say); because it would become harder for Australians to win; or because the US already exercises too much influence through the mfa programs in which many Commonwealth authors have been educated. The Australian Peter Carey, one of only three two-time winners, added his protest in October, mentioning the exclusivity of the Pulitzers and National Book Awards, some ill-defined “particular cultural flavour” inhering in Commonwealth fiction, and his distaste for global marketing.

Some of these fears may have seemed realized when the longlist of thirteen titles appeared in July. There were five Americans on it, but the inclusion of six British authors also helped to squeeze the Commonwealth representation down to one Australian and one Indian (resident in London). As usual the reaction was largely about who was not on the list—or in the usual term, who was snubbed. Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Edward St. Aubyn, and Philip Hensher—previous winners or nominees, all British, of whom Hensher is the most vehement opponent of American eligibility—all had new books out and failed to make the longlist, as did the American Donna Tartt.

The judging panel consisted of four men and two women, half of them employed at Oxford University (which seems very narrow). The chair was A. C. Grayling, an Oxford philosopher. There was also a neuroscientist, a former literary editor of the Times, two well-known literary scholars, and a former director of Literature at the Arts Council, now an Oxford don. It became known that the voting was not unanimous and that the chair, Grayling, used his deciding vote to unblock the decision.

In the end, fears of automatic American dominance, or Australian helplessness, proved empty. The winner, announced on October 14, was the Australian novelist Richard Flanagan, for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan is a Tasmanian, and a veteran writer with five previous novels to his credit. Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others, the only other Commonwealth book to make even the longlist, is but his second novel.

One clever bettor—who (like the bookmakers themselves) did not read any of the entries but worked out who would win and did well betting on Flanagan at 5-1—explained his “process.” He read reviews of the books, but he spent more time reading reviews of the judges, reasoning that, though the two women would not ordinarily favor a war book, the love story would rescue Flanagan for them and particularly that Grayling, a well-known atheist, would favor a book suggesting that life was chaotic and without direction. Grayling’s vote delivered the win to Flanagan.

The six shortlisted novels were, in addition to Flanagan’s and Mukherjee’s, Howard Jacobson’s J and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both, and the two American entries, Karen Joy...