John Sutherland
The shortlist is out and Booker moves into its middle game. Between now and October 25 the final contenders will – on past evidence – enjoy a month in the sun.
Bookshops will display and discount the lucky six. Readers will scoop them up. Unfriendly newspapers will excoriate the list as the “most boring since George Steiner inflicted John Berger’s G on the long-suffering British public”. And the panel will be vilified as the lamest since Mary Wilson’s day. And, after the winner is announced, will come “The Scandal”. If it doesn’t come, someone will confect it. All in the good cause of clearing 50 000 copies of a hardback novel and getting quality fiction into headlines.
If Michael Frayn’s Headlong wins, some eagle-eyed critic (possibly an Australian academic, like last time) will disclose – shock, horror! – that the story is “not original”.
Frayn’s novel is about a dislikeable art historian who discovers what may be a missing Bruegel being used as a fireplace soot-guard. By trickery, he almost gets possession of the painting, and it all ends in a masterfully farcical conclusion. Irony piles on farce piles on irony.
Thirty years ago, Roald Dahl wrote a story called Parson’s Pleasure, about a dislikeable art dealer who finds himself by accident on a farm where he discovers that a famous Chippendale commode is being used as a kitchen table. Trickery ensues, and there is a farcical conclusion.
The resemblance is probably “purely accidental”, and the parallelism doesn’t detract an iota from Frayn’s superbly entertaining novel. But if a scandal is needed, this will serve.
A quite different scandal might be confected if Andrew O’Hagan’s Our Fathers is victorious. O’Hagan exploded into fame with a piece in The Guardian in March 1993, in the aftermath of the Jamie Bulger verdict. He recalled the sadistic practices of his Glasgow childhood gang, culminating in the mysterious death of a three-year-old on a building site.
O’Hagan does not indict himself for murder – except in a collective way – but an ill-intentioned tabloid newspaper, revisiting that piece, could conceivably come up with a “secret shame of Booker winner” story.
The Coetzee and Tibn novels will, I suspect, attract less scandal than gripe. Disgrace is the story of a “lecherous lecturer” of whom the author could be thought to approve. Could a feminist see this study of modern shame as condoning date rape?
Tibn’s The Blackwater Lightship will, if it wins, bring a gripe from the opposite ideological camp. It’s another lingering deathbed novel about a young Irishman dying of Aids. If it comes out on top, accusations of political correctness and pandering to the gay lobby will be automatic.
Hardest to whip up any scandal or gripe against is Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love. It’s possible, though, that there might be some Podsnappish “Not English” prejudice. The novel is set in the author’s native Egypt and in America.
Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting, also set in the east, might get a blast of the same unlovely English xenophobia, but it is probably the hardest of the novels to besmirch. Yet someone might notice that the novel was originally two shorter pieces, either of which might be disqualified (as novellas) if still separate.
>From some angle, I know, “The Scandal” is going to come. It wouldn’t be Booker if it didn’t.
John Sutherland is one of the judges of this year’s Booker Prize