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Adam Roberts, Angela Carter, J.G. Ballard, Keith Jeffery, Martin Amis, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Richard Cobb
Shortly after reading Adam Roberts’s excellent post on awards, Maureen pointed out a passage in the current TLS. It is a review, by Keith Jeffery, of My Dear Hugh: Letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others edited by Tim Heald. Cobb was the chair of the Booker Prize in 1984, and, as Jeffery quotes him:
There he claimed to have done “a little NEGATIVE good” by keeping Martin Amis and Angela Carter off the shortlist, “and manoeuvred so that Ballard did not get the prize”.
My dilemma is that I am a great supporter of awards (given my history, you wouldn’t really expect much else), but I can’t help seeing problems with them.
Popular vote awards are unreliable because a vanishingly small proportion of voters will have read all the eligible works. Even when it comes to the shortlist, the chances are that a sizeable proportion of voters, if not an outright majority, will NOT have read all the works on the list. Any result is inevitably going to be partial, and based to a plethora of external factors such as word of mouth, reputation, previous works, likeability, and so on.
Juried awards are unreliable because they can be manipulated (as Cobb clearly did) by the prejudices of one member, because the jury is never representative of the readership, and because if the jury changes year by year then then the standards and attributes they wish to honour will vary, yet if the jury does not change it will grow hidebound in its opinions and attitudes.
Worst of all, NONE of them is actually choosing the best book, even though that is the only ostensive purpose of any literary award. Because no two people can ever agree on what ‘best’ actually means, let alone on what work most closely achieves that mythical status.
I think, therefore, that we misinterpret awards if we think they are meant to pick the best. (In a sense, perhaps, we are meant to misinterpret them?) ‘Best’ is our interpretation of what they do, looking from the outside (I admit I am not entirely an outsider on this, but for most awards and in most instances I am). ‘Best’ is shorthand for ‘the work that such-and-such an award has picked this year’; but best is meaningless, even in the narrow confines of any individual award. Awards do not pick the best book. Juried awards pick the book that the majority of the jury can agree on; popular vote awards pick the book that most members of the electorate are prepared to vote for. In every instance, the individual voters or jurors may well believe they are picking the book that is best for them, but that does not translate into the eventual winner being the best book.
So when people call for awards to be reformed, or when they create new awards to put things right, my response is to shrug and say: sure, if you want. It’s not going to make much difference. All awards have a systemic problem, and reformation will only change one systemic problem for another. And a new award will not correct a fault in old awards; it will just do something different that has faults of its own. The real problem, that we are never going to solve, probably because we are never really going to address it as a problem, is us. We invest emotionally in awards. We know we shouldn’t, we know it’s foolish, we know it’s meaningless, but we do. Because we know, inside ourselves, that one book is better than another, that one writer is better than another. We don’t always know how or why, but it is an inherent part of our approach to literature. And we believe that, in some way, awards should address and demonstrate this. And in fact they do, but never quite in ways we accept or respect or agree with.
So awards are always necessary, and always wrong.
I said elsewhere that I had a conversation about this very Booker last night, re Barnes not winning with Flaubert. That Ballard was manipulated out of a gong is nothing to crow about. Silly Cobb.
All awards are wrong. Some awards are more wrong than others…
I have often wondered how Anita Brookner’s worthy but unutterably dull “Hotel du Lac” had managed to win the Booker in 1984, beating several better novels on the shortlist (“Empire of the Sun” by Ballard, “Flaubert’s Parrot” by Barnes — even the slight “Small World” by David Lodge is more fun), not to mention “Money” by Martin Amis and “Nights at the Circus” by Angela Carter … and now all is explained!
Yes, it was a strong shortlist, and a good year for fiction, but a feeble winner. As Lucy says, above, maybe the Barnes win this year was a sort of recompense for Cobb’s shenanigans in 84 …
If a juried award rewards consensus rather than best what would you say if a jury is unanimous, or close to it, as has happened at least twice, maybe more in the case of The Arthur C Clarke Award? That choice indicates a definitive Best for that jury at least.
Would a different jury have been unanimous? Could the jury have been swayed by the enthusiasm of one of its members? I chaired one of the Clarke juries that was unanimous, and I couldn’t answer those questions. Nor does this alter the fact that every member of the jury may have considered the same work the best, but they might have done so for different reasons. I don’t think they would have agreed on why it was best. I really don’t believe there is, or can be, a ‘definitive Best’.