The Man Booker Prize (oh, dear!)

(my post for this week! This is the first part of a double-post that will feature for this week!)

As a young English student, I have always found the Man Booker Prize to be a rather prestigious award so to be reading that there has been a lot of criticism surrounding the prize is surprising to me. It seems that a new award known as the Literature Prize has surfaced. Andrew Kidd, the spokesman for the prize, has been only too keen to highlight the shortcomings of the Man Booker, in which he states that the "public deserves a prize whose sole aim is to celebrate the very best novels published in our time". The suggestion obviously being that the Man Booker does not uphold such an approach. Indeed, there has been a lot of criticism of this year's shortlist that has omitted such writers such as Alan Hollinghurst (I get the impression this is a rather big faux-pas by Man Booker).

I was reading an article earlier today by Katie Allen who touched upon the unrest surrounding the Man Booker. There is an argument that the Man Booker has promoted 'readability' in favour of actual artistic merit. Of course, Man Booker administrator Ian Trowin has described this as "tosh." He goes on to argue that how good a book is and the importance of readability are as equally important as each other and that "the two should go hand in hand." I tend to agree with him actually, but then I do wonder why Hollinghurst did not make the shortlist. I admit I have not read The Stranger's Child, (which may seem a little silly for me to even mention it here), but there has been significant buzz surrounding the novel. Surely, then, if this many people are so outraged by such an omission, this proves both the novel's literary merit and readability.

Rather disappointingly, Allen does not offer her own opinion on the matter as a whole, but Anne McElvoy in Wednesday evening's edition of the Evening Standard does. In her article, McElvoy praised the Man Booker as "a braver prize, because it acknowledges risk and serendipity." This is one of the more positive descriptions I have come across on the prize lately. She goes on to defend this year's shortlist, stating that it, "has a selection that takes us on journeys through time and experience, in the way that only literature's magic carpet can." What a lovely and positive way to celebrate this year's writers who must be feeling a little upset by how much negative publicity the Man Booker is getting this year. It is, afterall, a rather big deal to be shortlisted and to win such a prestigious award still. Is it not?

In his blog article for the Guardian, Rick Gekoski argued there is far more to the prize than taste, and that is judgement. He acknowledged that in literature, we cannot be truly objective because the art form itself is subjective. He goes on to state that judging a prize requires us to be "more self-critical, more capable of distinguishing our tastes from our judgments, [and] less inclined reflexively to credit our own opinions with more authority than they deserve, or those of others, with less." I suppose he is right, you cannot please everybody all the time, but there is something to be said about a prize that now garners more criticism than it does praise. If Man Booker are constantly having to defend themselves, what does that say about their authority in the literary world? And will the prize itself hold as much weight in the future as it has done in the past?

I am inclined to side with Robert McCrum, who, in his blog article for the Guardian, hopes that the Man Booker "will use the urgent and persuasive challenge of the Literature prize to make some long-overdue reforms."
You never know, perhaps the emergence of the Literature Prize will give the Man Booker the decided kick it needs to reignite its credibility. Perhaps we will all be talking about how the prize has pulled itself back from the edge of total lack of credibility in 2012. Perhaps...