The Literary Year 2011

Photo: Gary Taxali

A year of Booker bust-ups and beleaguered booksellers: 2011 in review

By David Robson

For a few mad weeks in autumn, it looked as if literary Britain was going to be split down the middle, with novelist set against novelist and publisher against publisher. The Man Booker shortlist was announced, the judges waxed lyrical about the readability of the books they had chosen and, within days, a rival Literature Prize had emerged, almost as if the r-word had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Readable literature? Whatever next?

The mission statement of the new prize (“to establish a clear and uncompromising standard of excellence”) could not have been starker, nor could the tacit implication that the Man Booker had sold its soul, confusing art with showbusiness and enlisting politicians and celebrities as judges. The battle lines had been drawn and pundits rushed to the barricades, armed with their literary weapon of choice, be it Dickens or Proust, Joyce or Jane Austen.

It was a surreal debate, whichever side of the argument you were on. Imagine the cinema-going fraternity having a heated debate about whether films should be watchable. But it raised important questions and concentrated minds. Although the new Literature Prize is at an embryonic stage, still looking for a sponsor, its champions, including many leading publishers, are not going to go away. They have certainly challenged the Man Booker to look at itself in the mirror, which may be no bad thing.

The 2011 judges, chaired by Dame Stella Rimington, former head of M15, produced a flimsy, eccentric shortlist, with thrillers predominating. Was it just a lean year for fiction? Or were they guilty as charged of dumbing down the prize? Opinion was divided. It was hardly as if Jeffrey Archer or Maeve Binchy had made the list.

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No one has (yet) remarked on the paradox of this year’s Man Booker victor. A panel of judges which had promoted “readability” and accessibility picked a book that borrows its title from a somewhat abstruse work of literary theory. In 1967, Frank Kermode’s original The Sense of an Ending reflected on the arc of the story and the arc of existence, tapping into the notion of apocalypse in Western literature from Plato to Beckett. Julian Barnes’s winning book does, I suspect, deploy some of Kermode’s insights into the imperfect closure and completion of narratives and lives. But to name a novel after an arcane exercise in litcrit – just how “elitist” can a writer get?

The “readability” test has plunged Dame Stella Rimington – as the chair who most vigorously thumped the populist drum – into a war of words. It may, in time, help to renovate the prize. But I never knew that an intelligence professional who had spent 28 years in the security service, with four as Director-General of MI5, could be quite so thin-skinned. If Dame Stella’s nuclear riposte to a handful of sarky comment pieces about her shortlist by literary journalists is any guide, Thames House under her stewardship must have trembled on the brink of apocalypse day by day. We can only surmise that her demand for universal “readability” did not apply to signals traffic.

Barnes’s compact, tight and close-grained novel proves the key point better than any polemic. Its elegance and lucidity (readability, if you like) in no way corresponds to a shirking of nuance and complexity. Quite the contrary: from Chekhov and Kafka to Borges and Beckett, the subtlest of modern classics often employ the simplest of means.

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Man Booker Prize 2011: Twitter ‘stopping children reading’, says judge Dame Stella Rimington

Children spend so much time on Twitter and mobile phones that they are losing their love of novels and reading less, the chair of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction has warned.

By Tim Ross

Dame Stella Rimington Photo: EPA/ANGEL DIAZ

Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, said she was concerned that pupils were missing out on the pleasure of books as electronic communications increasingly dominate their lives.

The judges yesterday announced this year’s longlist of 13 novels, including one of the shortest books ever selected for the 42-year-old award, four first-time novelists and one previous winner.

Dame Stella said that while she was confident a market for fiction would still exist in 100 years, she feared many children were not growing up to be book lovers. “I think much of the Twittering and emailing and texting and all that sort of stuff that children go in for now may be taking their eyes off reading fiction. When I was young we read more than the average child reads now.”

Teachers needed to find ways to instil a love of fiction in children, she said, although electronic “reader” devices that can store hundreds of books and newspapers, such as the Amazon Kindle, “could help turn the tide”.

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