The history of the coveted Man Booker prize has been colourful, to say the least. The 1972 winner John Berger (G.) threw all hues of shade at Booker-McConnell (then a sponsor of the prize), and their history of slave trade in the Carribean. “One does not have to be a novelist seeking very subtle connections to trace the 5000 pounds of this prize back to the economic activities from which they came. Booker-McConnell have had extensive trading interests in the Caribbean for over 130 years. The modern poverty of the Caribbean is the direct result of this and similar exploitation. One of the consequences of this Caribbean poverty is that hundreds of thousands of West Indians have been forced to come to Britain as migrant workers,” he said. In 2001, panel member Al Kennedy claimed that the award was "a pile of crooked nonsense", invariably determined by "who knows who, who's sleeping with who, who's selling drugs to who, who's married to who, whose turn it is".
But the Bookers survived, introducing the wider literary world to a slew of talents like Arundhati Roy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje and Marlon James. The prize will turn 50 next year, and to mark this anniversary, the committee announced the "Golden Five" shortlist on May 26 at the Hay Festival in Wales. The Golden Man Booker is a five-book shortlist, with each of the chosen titles representing its respective decade since the prize was first instituted in 1969.
The contenders of the Golden Man Booker are expected to represent a timelessness beyond the context in which they were conceived and published—the kind of English fiction which will easily stand the test of time, at least in the decade of its birth if not for posterity. The five-judge panel chose V.S. Naipaul’s In A Free State (1971), Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987), Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009) and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017).
Conspicuously absent from the list is Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), which was selected as the Booker of Bookers in 1993, to mark the prize's 25th anniversary. Again, in 2008, Midnight’s Children was voted as the Best of Booker on the eve of Man Booker's 40th anniversary. Instead, poet Lemn Sissay, the judge assigned to review Booker winners in the 1980s, chose the relatively less starry Moon Tiger. What could explain the unpredictable omission?
When it released, Rushdie's Midnight's Children was a literary sensation. Never before was a sprawling, unwieldy epic, spanning continents, so pithily balanced by a multi-layered narration of madness and humour—a delightful fusion of the fantastical and insightfully mundane. The story revolved around children born at the stroke of midnight, when India declared its independence from Britain in 1947.
Moon Tiger tells the story of an elderly, bed-ridden historian Claudia Hampton, who floats in and out of consciousness. She wants to complete this one last project, which is to write a history of the world from her deathbed. Instead, she ends up writing a captivating personal history of her unconventional life set in the backdrop of the two World Wars. In the book, she tells her nurse ''I'm writing a history of the world,'' and then adds to herself , ''The whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute—from the mud to the stars, universal and particular, your story and mine.'' Sissay described the character of Hampton as "a fascinating unpredictable woman way ahead of her time and yet absolutely of her time”.
Was Midnight's Children dated? Inspite of all its literary merits, was a perceived lack of contemporary relevance the iceberg that sunk the Rushdie Titanic? Remember Arundhati Roy's famous insult? “Rushdie's writing is merely exotic, mine is truthful.”
On the other hand, could it just be a fatigue born out of constantly eulogising Rushdie's most famous book? Is it a belated attempt to acknowledge more female authors, especially in the supercharged context of MeToo and TimesUp? Or a nod to the changing face of Booker prize which started accepting entries in 2014 onwards from any author who writes a work of fiction in English, irrespective of nationality? Was it because the final shortlist already includes an Indian-origin author, i.e., Naipaul.
Equally criticised was the decision to select George Saunders' 2017 work Lincoln in the Bardo over other choices of the decade. The book was a schizophrenic narration of the night of the death of young Willie Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln. It teetered on the cliff of extreme bipolarity—the book oscillated between rigidly journalistic recital of newspaper reports of the incident, and surreal interactions between souls stuck in limbo (in Tibetan Buddhist terms, Bardo). Would it yield to a comparison with Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, a polyphonic, earthy tale of attempted assassination of singer Bob Marley in the politically volatile 1970s Jamaica?
In any case, the nominations have been announced, and you can choose your favourite Booker winner from the shortlist, open for public voting till June 25. Both Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie failed to make the cut. Interestingly, V.S. Naipaul, an acerbic and somewhat polarising figure in his country of origin, who has publicly dissed both Roy and Rushdie, calling them “colonial writers”, did. Cue the last laugh for Sir Vidia.
