Unremarkably, the just-announced Orange prize shortlist showcases great talent. “Predictable,” was the comment grudgingly given by one bookseller on looking at the list, which includes Sarah Waters, Ali Smith, Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith. And indeed, it is predictable, precisely because these books are so very good, and have already been recognised as such. If you like reading fine new fiction, you have probably already spent time with more than one of these novels; two were shortlisted for last year’s Booker prize and one won last year’s Whitbread Novel of the Year award.
So the Orange prize’s defenders now have to answer this: Given that it would be hard to find a bookseller or a critic who would discount the imaginative energy of these writers, why is there a need for this prize? Once a prize that was there to put women writers on the map becomes predictable, has it had its day?
The prize is necessary because the most prestigious prize-giving culture in Britain still often shows itself as weirdly unable to recognise and reward the greatest writing — and, for some reason, books by women are still often the ones that lose out.
When Zadie Smith’s ferocious and heartfelt novel On Beauty lost out in the Booker race last year to John Banville’s desiccated The Sea, it was only what one has come to expect from the Booker prize. From time to time the panel gets it right and finds a winning book that is truly a work of great imagination, but all too often it steers towards an easy consensus. The differing opinions, often refereed by an academic or politician, tend to cancel each other out, leaving the panel on polite middle ground. What you get as a winner is a book that will be accepted by all the judges, rather than one passionately espoused by any of them.
Perhaps that is why women so often get a raw deal from the Booker prize, since the best women writers working at the moment do stir up passion and heat. On Beauty is almost shockingly energetic in the way it engages with its characters’ intellectual and sexual lives. This is the work of a talented novelist who has grown up and learned to use her uncanny knack of mimicking wildly various speech patterns — from the poetry class to the rap performance, from the mixed-race boy who wants to talk like his Haitian immigrant friends to his sister who wants to be accepted by the academic elite — not to show off, but to go deeply into the vagaries of the human heart.
Because Smith is one of the few writers around who can be morally serious as well as funny and entertaining, there is an urgency about her work. I will never forget the feeling, on turning the pages to the end, of finding that, despite all the broken connections and misunderstandings we had moved through, Smith was going to give us an ending that put faith in the power of intimacy.
It is interesting that, while readers can absolutely see the vitality of a book such as this, and took it to their hearts, the prize culture lagged behind. I’m not saying that this is because judges consciously prefer work by men. (Although I remember, when I was a judge for the Booker prize with John Sutherland, he startlingly discounted one book because it was “so much a woman’s novel”.) Still, only two of the past 10 Booker prize winners have been women, even though it is impossible to argue that men are writing four times as much good fiction as women. This suggests there is a tendency for judges to see male writers as offering a glaze of safety and quasi-authority that feels as if it sits better with the would-be authori-tative culture of the Booker prize.
In this context, even a predictable Orange prize has a role to play — not to play tit-for-tat, but simply to celebrate the writing by women that still does not always get the celebration that it deserves elsewhere. — Â