(excerpted from The New Statesman)

    A metaphorical bomb was thrown at the 1984 Booker prize dinner when Richard Cobb – professor of modern history at the University of Oxford, visiting professor of history at the Collège de France, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur – announced that he had read neither Joyce nor Proust. There was a gasp of disbelief: this, after all, was a man who had lived in Paris from 1946 to 1955 and whose first three books were written in French. Had being chairman of the Booker judges gone to his head? Or had my desperate and devious attempt to keep him away from the wine on the table until after his speech momentarily unbalanced him?

    We shall never know – soon after the Booker dinner Cobb invited me to a high table dinner in Oxford, warm, charming and friendly as he was. As bid, I arrived at 6pm. As not forewarned, there was to be a pub crawl (under a more dignified name) before the meal itself. Unfortunately, le tour des auberges resulted in my having to send the professor home in a taxi long before the college meal; and before I could ask him if his speech as chairman had been nothing more than an elaborate wheeze.

    That particular dinner, in 1984, contained a second, smaller bombshell. It had been widely predicted and even firmly stated that the winner would be J G Ballard’s The Empire of the Sun. In the event, the prize went to Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner. As it happens, Brookner, along with Carmen Callil, had come to supper with my partner and me the previous Saturday, an evening mainly devoted to talking about a now forgotten writer, Edith Templeton. As Brookner left at the end of the evening, I called after her, "Good luck next Thursday". This was not well received: "You of all people ought to know that I was very lucky to have been shortlisted. There’s no likelihood whatsoever of my winning. Good night."

    The controversy of 1988 took place entirely behind the scenes, at the final meeting of the judges. Chairmen, except the one that year, tend to ask the judges for their choice of winner, then follow with his or her own choice. So chairman Michael Foot began by saying that "My choice is Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses" – soon after to become infamous for its impact on the world of Islamic fundamentalism. Blake Morrison and Sebastian Faulks demurred, preferring, as did Philip French, Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. "Well," Michael Foot replied immediately, "Whatever else I am, I am a democrat; and if that’s what the majority wants, then Carey is the winner." So it was all over.

    But Morrison and Faulks’s demurs were only a step towards arguing the relative merits of Rushdie and Carey. Foot’s democratic imperative put a sudden and emphatic end to a potentially fascinating discussion.

    The following year saw another tiny bombshell, once more exploding behind the scenes. When the shortlist was announced there was an outcry at the exclusion of Martin Amis and Angela Carter – a surprise since David Lodge, chairman of the judges, was a supporter of Amis at least. But Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, the two female judges, were fiercely anti-Amis, accusing him of misogyny. The male judges – David Profumo, the American Edmund White and indeed Lodge himself – were keen on Amis’ London Fields.

    So Maggie Gee set out her views at length, quoting widely from the novel in support of her argument. To my surprise, despite having a three-two majority in favour, David Lodge submitted and London Fields was excluded. Informed rumour has it that Lodge has regretted his decision ever since, and only made it because of the anxiety that Gee might resign. Too late was I able to tell him that such resignations – witness that of Nicholas Mosley in 1991 – are splendid publicity for Booker, not the reverse.

    What does all this show about the first 30 years of the Booker prize?Well, there have been many grumbles about Booker over the years: that it has not made all winners bestsellers; that the judges have honoured the wrong books; that it trivialises literature and humilates authors. But the prize has only two aims: to reward excellence and to raise people’s awareness of serious fiction. Even the squabbles, gossip and disagreements do the latter. They demonstrate, too, how seriously the judges take their job; and it is the personality of the judges – their liking for or antipathy towards one another – that plays such a large part in their final decisions. And while reading more than 100 books between March and August is a gruelling chore, it is also a lot of fun, not least for me.

--New Statesman, 23 October 1998

David Lodge

    Another Booker prize has, like the swallow, come and gone. It no longer attracts quite the same degree of public attention as in its heyday of the 1980s, but for anyone interested in the literary novel it still exerts an irresistible fascination. Nobody who has been personally involved, as either shortlisted candidate or judge, is likely to forget the experience of or the intense emotions, not always edifying, that it generates.

    Having been shortlisted twice, and chairman of the judges in 1989, I was invited to a government reception a few weeks ago to mark the 30^th anniversary of the prize.

    The grand, gilt-encrusted state rooms of Lancaster House, more usually associated with high-level political conferences, provided the venue, and Alan Howarth, minister for the arts, was the host. Eleven former winners of the prize were present, and numerous shortlisted authors. One recurring topic of conversation and concern in the heaving scrum of literati was the reported financial problems of Booker plc, and rumours of a hostile takeover bid by a company called Budget. The Budget prize for fiction would hardly have the same aura.

    The Booker, like Test cricket, encourages statistical conversations. One of the first guests I encountered, rather lugubriously sipping champagne on his own, was Julian Rathbone, who claimed the melancholic distinction of having written the only shortlisted novel (Joseph, 1979) that was never issued as a paperback.

    Later in the evening the publisher Peter Straus, a Mastermind-class expert on the prize, informed me that this was also the fate of T W Wheeler’s The Conjunction in 1970. Beryl Bainbridge told me she was not, as I had supposed, the most frequently shortlisted author, but somebody came up and distracted her before she could tell me who was.

    The success of the Booker as a cultural event depends very heavily on the willingness of writers such as Beryl to turn up at the Guildhall and sportingly not-win the prize on network television. (There will be widespread sympathy for her in the literary world this year for, once again, being pipped at the post.)

    My own first taste of this experience was in 1984, with Small World. Like everybody else, I expected J G Ballard to win with Empire of the Sun. No one was more astonished than Anita Brookner when Richard Cobb announced that the prize had gone to her Hotel du Lac.

    Afterwards, in the crypt bar, the Labour MP Ted Rowlands, one of the judges, told me that they had been very divided in their final session, and that Polly Devlin had carried the day for Brookner with an impassioned speech in which she quoted from my complimentary review of Brookner’s previous novel, printed on the back side of Hotel du Lac.

    I was really not in a mood to appreciate this exquisite irony. In 1991, when Nicholas Moseley resigned from the judging panel in protest at his colleagues’ decisions, John Fuller, one of the judges in 1984, revealed that his fellow judge Anthony Curtis had seriously considered resigning if Small World didn’t win; It was perhaps just as well for my peace of mind that I didn’t discover this, too, on the night.

    Martyn Goff, who has sat in on all the judging since 1972 as an administrator, recently reported in these pages some other behind-the-scenes dramas, including the shortlist meeting I chaired in 1989. This was famous, or notorious, for the exclusion of Martin Amis’s London Fields because of strong objections by the two women judges, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil.

    Martyn claims to have been surprised that I did not use the 3-2 majority in favour of London Fields to put it on the shortlist. He has evidently forgotten that one of the other judges, David Profumo, declared that he didn’t think we could shortlist the Amis novel if Maggie and Helen were so determinedly opposed.

    As we had previously agreed, at my own suggestion, to reach our decisions by consensus rather than by counting votes, I could not disagree.

    I presumed that had I, inconsistently, forced a formal vote, David would have abstained and the result would have been the same. I admit that in retrospect I wish I had done so, just to be certain, for I deeply regretted the absence of London Fields from our shortlist.

    We did not, however, exclude Angela Carter, as Martyn Goff states; she didn’t publish a novel that year.

    I was not invited to the award banquet last week. Instead I drove through lashing rain to Kidderminster’s splendid new public library, which had enterprisingly arranged a Bookner Evening event. I gave a talk about the prize, and then we sat down together with a glass of wine to watch the live television broadcast on a big screen. Like a cup final, the programme is more fun to watch with a crowd.

    The barbed insults Will Self hurled at the shortlist, and at his colleagues on the critical panel, provoked much laughter. He is obviously aiming to succeed Howard Jacobson and Tom Paulin as the Thersites of the cultural airwaves.

    But the glitch that deprived us, at the climax of the programme, of the beginning of Douglas Hurd’s speech, and most of Ian McEwan’s acceptance speech, was infuriating.

    Not having read any of the shortlisted novels yet, I can’t comment on the justice of the result. But the Kidderminster library ran a sort of sweepstake which involved guessing the winner and a majority plumped, like the judges, for McEwan.

--New Statesman, 6 November 1998

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