Eyes on the prize: my year as a Booker judge

The first time I was asked to judge the Booker Prize, I said no. I was too busy with my day job here at Prospect, and desperately wanted to finish a novel that I had spent years working on. Three years later, the call came again. I still had the job and was starting my second book. Oh, and my wife and I were expecting our first baby in January. But this time I couldn’t refuse: you don’t get asked three times. On the day the press release announced that I was one of five judges—the others being our chair, publisher Margaret Busby, thriller-writer Lee Child, poet Lemn Sissay and classicist Emily Wilson—our baby daughter arrived. Forty-eight hours later, I was sitting in an oversized hospital chair with an infant in the crook of one arm and book number one in the other—the first of 162 that I read in the next few months, at a rate of one a day.

Why take on the Booker? There was an element of professional relish—and ego, I suppose. As a literary journalist, I have been hanging round the Prize for a decade or so, lauding or lamenting the winner, gossiping at the fancy Guildhall dinner about what really went down in the meeting room, and which judge had holidayed that summer with the winning author. It was about time I got properly involved. It was also an unrepeatable chance to take a satellite photo of the state of the novel in English. How were authors telling their stories? How did the increased scope of the prize—since 2014 it has been open to American and non-Commonwealth entries, so long as they are published in the UK or Ireland—alter the landscape? I would also enjoy testing my critical faculties against an intimidatingly eminent set of fellow judges.

For some writers, the idea of anointing a single novel goes against the spirit of literature. Amit Chaudhuri has written that “The idea that a ‘book of the year’ can be assessed annually by a bunch of people—judges who have to read almost a book a day—is absurd, as is the idea that this is any way of honouring a writer.” The novelist Edward St Aubyn wrote an entire novel satirising book prize culture. (In a nice irony Lost for Words won the Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction.) Each publishing imprint gets to nominate at least one novel; those with previous nominees or winners get more slots. A couple of well-known authors I had expected to be considering this year decided not to submit their novels. Perhaps the agony of being rejected was too great; or maybe they felt, quite reasonably, that they didn’t need the validation of a prize.

But there are plenty of reasons why the Booker is a good thing. The crowning of a winner commands attention, and reminds the public that literature matters. For the 13 longlisted and six shortlisted writers, the imprimatur “Booker nominee” will boost their profile, and might be the difference between having their next novel accepted or not. Judging panels are sometimes ultimately proved wrong (Vikram Seth’s monumental A Suitable Boy, adapted in 2020 for the BBC, was famously left off the 1993 shortlist), but they do get to write the first draft of literary history.

The prize certainly stirs conversation. When our longlist came out in July, some readers argued passionately for their discarded favourites, while others were curious about some of the relative unknowns we had selected. And when the shortlist came out in September, the absence of the third part of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, the first two volumes having both won the prize, was an inevitable talking point. (As a judge it would be unfair to comment on individual books: I will say that we read the Mantel twice over, and had long discussions about it.) All this was vigorously debated on social media, podcasts and YouTube, and I found the arguments (mostly) invigorating.

Less heartening was the by-now ritualistic Booker controversy. This year the judges were accused of being variously in thrall to “diversity,” American writers and debut novelists. At the same time, we were charged with ignoring the Irish fiction renaissance and British ethnic minorities. No doubt the five of us each had, as all readers do, our biases—unconscious or otherwise. Judging literature is not a scientific process. But I can honestly say that in our monthly meetings, first in person and then on Zoom, my personal focus was on the book, not the author’s identity. This was for practical as much as ethical reasons. There was literally no time to Google what an author’s passport might be or whether they had published a previous novel. (Because of the pandemic we read a lot of the books as PDFs, which often lacked the author’s biography, though naturally I recognised some names.)

The judging process from the inside was more a matter of practical juggling. Lockdown didn’t affect my evenings, which were curfewed well before March. When the baby slept, usually in the four-hour window between eight and midnight, then I read. I became an expert at spotting gaps when extra reading could be squeezed in: while stirring a risotto, for instance, or holding a broken toilet seat together as the glue dried.

Instead of one novel a day, I preferred to read two halves of two. That allowed extra time for each novel to work on my subconscious, and gave me a shot of adrenaline as I opened a new book mid-evening. I never lost the excitement of picking what to read next. At a time without socialising, I went on a series of Booker blind dates. You can very quickly realise something isn’t for you, but duty pushes you to the end anyway. Some initially dazzle, but after 50 pages fade disappointingly. A bad run can be depressing—and potentially misleading. After, say, 10 duds in a row, when something turns out to be quite good, you have to resist the temptation of overrating it. As art critic EH Gombrich argued, we perceive colours differently depending on which others they are put beside. Going at a rate of 30 a month, selection was only clarified once we had made our way through all the books, and could compare each one more fairly against the others.

My fellow judges were good correctives: a couple of lethally pithy comments or just an embarrassed silence usually made me realise when I had been too forgiving of a book’s flaws. Zoom meetings, I think, made us more wary of interrupting each other. But they also humanised us a bit. My daughter made unannounced interruptions; Lee and Lemn filled the screen with cigarette smoke.

Surveying the submitted novels, a few broad patterns emerged: four years on from #MeToo, there were plenty of novels about bad men. (About 60 per cent of the novels were by women.) There is still a strong appetite, it appears, for the literary heritage novel. Shakespeare, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, George Eliot and Joyce either made appearances in person or had their work riffed on in some fashion. Only a handful of novels by British ethnic minorities were entered. African-American fiction, by contrast, is in robust health. Nearly every novel was between 250 and 350 pages: there were few novellas or behemoths. Cruel satire was lacking: no budding Evelyn Waughs or Muriel Sparks, it seems. Stories from Africa were well represented: two made our shortlist, This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga and The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste. This may simply be how the books fell this time—the picture may well be different in the coming years.

What was I looking for? Literary criticism is a strange discipline—part analysis, part instinct. But these are the questions I posed myself. Does the novel display mastery of form? Does it allow multiple close readings? Is there an active intelligence continually at work? I’m especially interested in plot-construction and dialogue so anything that excelled there found favour with me. It was also important to ascertain an author’s purpose. Or rather purposes. Great novels have multiple shades of intention that allow space for the reader to register them in different ways.

The final criteria is the most important but the one least susceptible to discussion. What Samuel Johnson called those “nameless and inexplicable elegancies which appeal wholly to the fancy, from which we feel delight, but know not how they produce it, and which may well be termed the enchantress of the soul.” In other words, our instinctive sense—conditioned by culture, no doubt, but no less real for that—of the rightness of a phrase or a description, of the unfolding of a plot point, of the cadence of a sentence. It’s a feeling akin to when a joke lands. Or when you meet someone and instinctively click. Writers can be the best friends you will never meet; in the year of social distancing, it was a special balm to find an author whose company you didn’t want to leave.

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain was the very last Booker novel I read: 162 out of 162. By this point, I was exhausted of fictional conventions—“right, I get it, these are made-up people having made-up conversations…”—and, frankly, I’d have been relieved if I could have easily dismissed it. That the first 20 pages were clearly the work of a proper writer prompted a slight deflation: I would have to take this one slowly. Soon enough, though, the book’s immense qualities became apparent.

Set in working-class Glasgow in the 1980s, Shuggie Bain follows the fortunes—or rather misfortunes—of the Bain clan. The taxi-driving hard bastard father Shug; his charismatic alcoholic wife Agnes; her children from a previous relationship Catherine and Leek; and the couple’s only child, gentle Shuggie Bain, through whose eyes we come to see this looming, dangerous family.

In my copy, the first passage underlined is on page 41. (Another judge had marked the same one.) The author is observing the behaviour of Glasgow drunks:

Their Friday wages were splintered by every bar they passed till they rolled around in pockets as five and ten pence in change, the cumulative weight of the heavy small coins giving them a waddling walk and a hump. They would live on the coins for the rest of the week, taking their chances with their random findings. Even in sleep they were never to be separated from their trousers and large coats for fear their wives or children would tip them out first and buy bread and milk with the shrapnel.

Like Dickens, Stuart combines acutely observed details with slyly humorous amplification. The “waddling walk” is as likely caused by the drink as the change. The words “splintered” and “shrapnel” stand out: this Glasgow is a war zone with plenty of civilian casualties.

Stuart trained as a textile-maker—he wanted to read English, but was put off in favour of a more practical pursuit—and works in fashion. Not only does he write expertly about clothes and accessories—there is a memorable early scene when Agnes and her pals try on bras—but the entire novel is stitched together with a formal elegance that transforms painfully raw material. That raw material, Stuart has admitted, comes from his own childhood. His mother died when he was 16 from alcohol addiction. He grew up gay in an environment where reading a book made your masculinity suspect. (Shuggie is taunted as “Liberace” and prefers playing with dolls.) Now in his mid-forties, and a long-time resident of New York, Stuart has said that writing Shuggie Bain was a way to patch together the different halves of his life; he recreates the traumatic childhood experiences with an almost nostalgic love for the sheer largeness of his old life and its brutal extremities.

Despite its bleakness, the novel is extremely funny both at the level of the sentence (“young lassies dribble chips on to the street”) and in its setpieces. Agnes goes on a date at a US-themed restaurant where the women “wore either cowgirl outfits with Stetson hats or big flouncy harlot’s dresses with lace trim and feathers in their hair.” Eugene, the man taking her out, is dressed like a sheriff in leather boots with a gun belt—though whether he will save her or punish her is at this point unknown.

We hear rather a lot these days about how literature should tell untold stories—and fair enough, as far as that goes. In one judging meeting, a familiar proverb was cited: “Until the lion tells his story, the tale will always glorify the hunter.” But the best literature also recognises there is no easy division between oppressor and oppressed: lions are also hunters and gazelles have their tales too.

Stuart’s portrayal of Agnes demonstrates this beautifully. She is by turns mesmerising and infuriating. Slurping down her lagers or Irn-Bru and vodka—sometimes in tandem—she is magnificently, appallingly dissolute. Spending all her social security money on drink, and then breaking into the television meter for loose change to buy even more, her desperation pushes away first Catherine and then Leek. Only Shuggie stays loyal. He helps Agnes keep up appearances to attract the Glasgow men who bring her little but pain. When the rubber tip wears away from her heel, she colours it in with her black bingo marker—but as the years pass, her odds of survival lengthen.

I read Shuggie Bain three times. The first across two evenings; the second over a week; the third in a month. Each time I discovered more riches, more shades of invention, more formal intricacy. It is a book that enchants the soul, suffused with a generous love for Glasgow and its inhabitants—no matter how low they sink.

There was no Guildhall dinner this year. (The Guildhall yard is now my local Covid-19 testing centre.) On the night the prize was announced, rather than fiddling with my bow tie and settling into a three-course dinner, I listened to the ceremony on the radio while giving my daughter a bath. I reflected on what power parents have over their children’s lives, and what a fine tribute Stuart has made to his mother, the woman to whom he writes in his acknowledgements, “I owe everything.”

Listen to Sameer Rahim speak to Douglas Stuart on “The Prospect Interview” podcast