Oh dear. The UK’s literary establishment is upset at the Booker Prize. Of course it hasn’t let any awful science fiction books onto the lists or anything like that. But it may well have been guilty of honouring the occasional historical novel, or even crime fiction. There has even been a suggestion that the Booker jury are looking for book that are “readable”, which is a code word meaning “will appeal to the general public.” This will not do. So we are to have a brand new award especially for books that are about middle-aged literary professors from Hampstead who have unhappy marriages and undertake disastrous affairs with pretty young students. It will be called the Literary Prize, because only books it takes notice of will be properly literary.
Yeah, I know, sarcasm is unbecoming. And the critics do have a point. There is a suspicion that the main objective of the Booker is now not to reward quality writing, but to sell books. And if it is to do that, well, can you say “dumbing down”?
Personally, however, I think it is nice that the literary folks have a prize of their own. Perhaps they’ll start running conventions as well, so that they have a special place to go where they can meet other people with similar interests to themselves. I bet they already have fanzines.
I’ve just written a blog post about this (scheduled for tomorrow). You and I are on the same page 🙂
They do have fanzines. They’re called “literary journals.”
Right on! Andrew.
Oh, BTW, I’ll take the conflict between recognizing great works and promoting book sales as a given. The Man Group has painted itself into a corner and then put the paint bucket on its head.
But they should really call this new prize the “Hey, this book is better than all that crap that ordinary people, you know, actually read, and this award proves it, so it doesn’t matter nobody is reading it” prize.
You can rave all you want about a book’s “artistic achievement,” but if I don’t find it easy to read, and if I especially think that the writer was deliberately TRYING to make it difficult to read, I will generally consider it a piece of crap.
I agree, unfortunately. As well as genre I read a lot of literary fiction. The Booker used to be a good pointer to interesting – and challenging new books. ‘The Line of Beauty’ stayed in my memory for a long time. But lately, I fall asleep reading the short list descriptions.