Let's not Reduce the Booker to a Popularity Contest

First appeared in The Guardian

The Booker prize should employ more critical rigour if it wants to avoid becoming the literary equivalent of American Idol

If critic John Sutherland laments the wobbly status of newspaper-hosted lit-crit, Victoria Glendinning has just taken a club to the last legs it stands on. "Why should five people sit there and decide the best novel each year," says biographer and novelist who chaired the panel that culled the list of 41 winners to a shortlist of six in the recent Booker of Bookers contest. "After all, the true constituency is the readers."But popularity is no gauge of greatness. If the Man Booker organization is content to relinquish its role as arbiter of the "best" in literary excellence, then they are of course free to do so. The world of beauty contests and American Idols awaits. If, however, they wish to maintain their position as a patron of what is outstanding in art, then they'd be well advised to reject Glendinning's call. No, more than that - to do the exact opposite.

Michael Portillo, chair of the 2008 prize judging committee, is not a very good reader, not very fast and not that well read, he tells us in his Booker site blog. As one of their duties, judges typically have to read more than 100 books during the course of about eight months in order to render their decision. How on earth after zombie-ing through tens of thousands of pages, are they supposed to determine relative merit? Plots and characters and places must surely get twisted up in their minds to a point where deciphering Delhi from Dover, or their bottoms from Baghdad, must undoubtedly seem a lofty challenge, to say nothing of judging literary excellence.

Not so, says Portillo: "The only thing we judges need to decide right now is whether we think a book should be on the longlist. Is it in the top 10%? There is no doubt that some titles just stand out. You could discuss criteria and put ticks in boxes against 'plot', 'characterization' etc. but it would miss the point. Some books have a combination of qualities that make them special and that is evident."

But is Portillo missing the point himself? Without articulated evaluative criteria isn't the process just a black box, open to accusations that all sorts of sinister extra-literary determinants may be at play? The jaded view is that literary prizes are simply marketing machines for big name publishers to sell more books, and for the establishment to slap itself on the back; tinsel awarded for popularity and salability, with notice of originality and literary excellence just fortuitous happenstance, if or when it occurs.

Prizes step straight into this soil whenever winners of "perceived" lower quality are chosen over more "deserving" titles. Just look at the chorus of disapproval that greeted Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, or John Banville's The Sea. Here in Canada the choice of Vincent Lam's Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures as Scotiabank Giller prize-winner over Rawi Hage's IMPAC award-winning De Niro's Game continues to weather storms of derisive, accusatory commentary.

If the Man Booker wants to strengthen its role as arbiter of greatness, the worst thing it can do is follow Glendinning's advice. Rather it can do us all a great service, by using the prize to reintroduce a commitment to the kind of literary criticism John Sutherland claims is all but gone from the pages of today's printed media.

If the Booker prize seriously wants to find the best writing and provoke debate then it should dispense with the fiction that judges can give their full attention to every submission, and employ a set of qualified readers to arrive at a longlist. It should publicly articulate an agreed upon set of criteria against which judges must evaluate submissions, and require that judges present a written justification for their choices.

Sure there would be all sorts of rows over what criteria should be used; over how they have been applied, and yes, perhaps authors would even be tempted to tailor their work to fit this criteria. But at least the discussions would be focused on literature, and not on the distractions that surround this and so many other literary prizes.