Books and the Booker

FOR some 15 years now the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness has meant the arrival, not just of dead leaves on the lawn, but of the Booker Prize shortlist. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the annual announcement of those six books has insinuated its way into the literary calendar to the point where an autumn without the shortlist would, for many readers of literary fiction, be as unthinkable as a spring without daffodils. But what effect, if any, has the Booker Prize had on the fiction which is its raison d'etre? Is there a thing as a Booker Book? Who writes these books? Who reads them?

It is to questions like these that Richard Todd devotes himself in his book Consuming Fictions. The Booker Prize And Fiction In Britain Today. Literary fiction, Todd argues, is now a consumer product like any other, battling to attract the reader's attention in a crowded marketplace; academic studies must accept, as he puts it, "the real extent to which contemporary literary canon formation is subject to powerful, rapidly changing market forces affecting and influencing the consumer". Determined to prove that his consumerist thesis can hold water, Todd gleefully fills his pages with marketing data by the bucketload. On occasion the flood of statistics drowns the issues under discussion (let alone the unwary reader); on occasion it washes away the dusty accumulated debris of years of popular misconception and suggests a fresh angle of approach.

As always with statistics, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that despite the recession and despite a steady growth in sales of multimedia leisure packages like videos and computer games, people are still buying books. The bad news is that the figures can be anywhere from misleading to inaccurate. Take the survey carried out by Book Marketing Ltd in the UK between 1989 and 1993 for the purposes of "sharpening the profile of the reader of serious literary fiction" in England, Scotland and Wales.

The survey shows that book purchases remained steady "or even increased slightly" over the period; but there are those who argue, as Todd points out though he fails to enlighten us as to precisely who they are - that even though sales have increased, books are being bought by fewer people. The same figures apparently show that a majority of readers and an even larger majority of buyers live in London and the South East of England; these, in turn, are mostly women, with 61 per cent of women reading 20th century fiction as opposed to 39 per cent of men. Here again there are problems of definition - the category "20th century fiction", for example - and Todd chooses to completely ignore the existence of audiobooks, the greatest publishing success story of recent years with spiralling sales ever expanding lists and, increasingly often of late, simultaneous publication of literary titles in hardback and audio formats.

Still, a certain amount of somewhat depressing gender based conclusion drawing seems in order, for if those who read literary fiction are mostly female, those who, having written it, are rewarded by a place on a Booker Prize shortlist are overwhelmingly male, with only 25 out of 83 shortlisted books since 1982 being written by women. And women are even less likely to give than to receive the Booker Prize for while there have been plenty of women judges over the years, the judging panel has been chaired by a woman only three times out of 14 since 1982.

The presence of women judges on the Booker panel cannot, of course, guarantee the presence of books by women writers on the shortlist. What kind of books, then, do make it? Todd is reluctant to commit himself on the notion of a typical "Booker book", and a glance at the assembled shortlists which form Appendix A confirms the wisdom of his position, for anyone who could construct a "typical" novel from among Tibor Fischer's Under The Frog, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, not to mention The Butcher Boy, The Book Of Evidence and The Van, would be fearless indeed.

The idea of a shortlist itself, on the other hand, he sees as a stroke of genius, for the very business of distilling the average 1980s annual quota of between 4,500 and 7,000 Booker eligible titles on to a list of six inevitably creates controversy - and for controversy, read welcome publicity. Every year there are claims that the Booker jury has "got it wrong"; every shortlist is bound to disappoint somebody. Then there is the element of suspense, the crucial six week time lapse between the announcement of the shortlist and the announcement of the winner. This, Todd points out, is a relatively recent innovation; the Booker Prize was first awarded in 1969, but in that and subsequent years the winner was leaked in advance and the award, attracted little or no media comment. The format was changed at the end of the 1970s, creating what Todd calls a potent brew of suspense and speculation".

The potency of that brew is, if anything, increased by the perceived volatility of Booker judgments. Todd believes that, unlike prizes such as the French Prix Goncourt and the Italian Premio Strega, both of which set out to select "a serious literary novel that is not a formidably difficult read"

a criterion which would, declares Todd, have instantly eliminated a book like James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late - the Booker Prize has never set itself a clear agenda. On the contrary, he says, the "conundrum that the Booker has never really faced up to is that there is no real consensus as to what its terms of reference actually are". Is it awarded for the best book written in any given year or, as was suggested in some quarters when the prize went to William Golding for Rites Of Passage in 1980, as a reward for a lifetime of high class fiction writing - or by way of consolation to a writer whose shortlisted book failed to win on a previous occasion? Did the convention that no author can win the Booker more than once rob Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh (the only odds on favourite in Booker history, at 4/5 on) of the prize in 1995?

As to the matter of whether victory at the Booker automatically means megasales, Todd urges extreme caution, particularly in respect of hardback sales figures. Publishers don't release the actual figures because they are tied in with royalty payments; on the other hand, if newspapers or magazines make inflated claims for particular titles, publishers don't deny them. In December 1990, for example, the Wall Street Journal announced that 60,000 copies of A.S. Byatt's novel Possession, that year's Booker winner, had been sold in the UK since its publication in March The British book selling chain W.H. Smith took a considerably more sanguine view of things; its 450 shops in the UK, it said, had together sold just 1,496 copies of Possession - and in the seven months before the Booker announcement, those same shops appeared to have sold only 82 copies of the book.

So it depends who you listen to - and where you put your goalposts. This is even true of the simplest question of all - which is the most successful Booker winner ever? Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, says Todd, which sold approximately 207,000 copies in hardback in 1993 and 355,000 copies in paperback in 1994, earning Doyle by early 1995 royalties of "over twenty times the prize money he had been awarded 15 months earlier". (That's £400,000, if you haven't got a calculator handy). But wait: didn't Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List sell over 870,000 copies in paperback in 1994? Ah, yes, says Todd, but only thanks to its reissue as a tie in to Steven Spielberg's movie: in its original paperback release in 1983, Schindler's List sold just 300,000 copies.

In any case, aspiring literary blockbuster writers should take heart. Books which are, in any given year, widely perceived to have been unjustly omitted from the shortlist often sell as well as, or better than, books which were selected. Thus in the year following A.S. Byatt's success with Possession, none of the other shortlisted titles even approached the paperback success of two unshortlisted novelists: William Boyd with Brazzaville Beach and Ian McEwan with The Innocent. And if being shortlisted can damage the health of your sales, winning won't necessarily bring happy ever after, either. The Anglo Irish writer J. G. Farrell won the Booker Prize in 1973 for his novel The Siege of Krishnapur, bought himself a small property in Bantry Bay - and died there as a result of a fishing accident just six years later.