All entries for Sunday 20 September 2009

The long short list: a numerical Booker

Big book, big evil. So goes the alleged proclivity of the Man Booker Prize judging panels of recent years towards picking slim volumes as winners and leaving the doorstops without a look-in. A recent issue of Private Eye speculates that the 2009 award may halt this tendency due to the head judge being James Naughtie, whose capacity for huge reads has been expressed on more than one occasion. But does this make a difference? (And does any of this really matter?) The issue can only be resolved through the method I know best: a bout of meaningless numerical grinding.

There follows a graph of the lengths of Booker prize winning novels since the award's inception. In each case, the edition of the book in question is the one most readily available today (thanks, Amazon!). This is rather subjective and unscientific, but books don't tend to vary all that wildly in length from one edition to another, so the graph's integrity isn't irreparably damaged. Also, on the two occasions where the prize was awarded jointly to two books (1974 and 1992), both winners are on the graph in arbitrary order.

(list of winners and nominees)

The first observation, one that is as necessary as it is dull, is that there is barely a long-term trend to be found. Well, I didn't promise fireworks. That said, the insubstantial novellas that we hear are being picked to win recently aren't actually that short: with the exception of The Sea (which, and apologies for this churlishness, seemed a lot longer than 200 pages) they have been hovering close to the 300-page mark for the past seven years. Rather than a general shortening of winners, this is more like a convergence on the middle: compare it to the wild oscillations from the late seventies and all through the eighties, wherein the Booker readership tended to tire itself out with a long book and rapidly switch back to letting a tiny one win. (The main exception to this is 1990-2, when in an extraordinary show of resilience the panels picked three long books in a row. The graph spike would look more impressive if we elided The English Patient, which actually scrapes into the longer half of all the prizewinning books, but looks tiny by comparison).

So, if you want to write a Booker winner and aren't sure how long it should be (I know I have suffered a few sleepless nights), then there really are no strict guidelines, but recent records show it's preferable to hedge your bets. That, or write a book of exactly 288 pages - with four books to its name, it is the most successful pagination, followed by 336 pages which has produced a respectable three winners.

But wait! Back to Naughtie and this year's shortlist. Private Eye may not have been so wrong after all, for the books on this year's shortlist average around 450 pages. It is time to break the trend! Who will win? It doesn't look good for Coetzee, whose book is both the shortest of the lot (224 pages? Pah!) and the only entry from a foreign author in an unusually British list, making it something of a loner. Neither does Foulds's The Quickening Maze look a likely winner, as it will surely be seen as chronically undersized. No, for a clue we must look to the past, to the 1990 award, when Hilary Mantel was on the judging panel that gave the prize to A.S. Byatt's Possession, the longest book on the shortlist. This year, Mantel has evidently remembered this and got one up on her fellow nominee: poor old A.S. might have thought she'd clinched it with a 624-page epic, but Mantel trumps her, clocking in at 672. Yes, the Naughtian predisposal to verbosity combined with Mantel's shrewd lengthiness can lead only to the selection of Wolf Hall to be the Booker winner, and in fact the longest book ever to win the prize.

Of course, since the judging panel changes from year to year, the appearance of any lasting trends of any sort is bound to be more coincidental than anything else. Furthermore, most people would agree that the frivolous schoolboyish business of comparing lengths is no substitute for actually reading the books and deciding which is the best-written; then again, it doesn't require shelling out for six hardcovers, which makes it infinitely preferable to me. And they say investigative journalism is dead.

Colin Fallon : 20 Sep 2009 16:37 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem