Bated breath for the Booker

The Man Booker is the mother of all literary prizes.

But it isn’t for the $91,800 cash award that grown men threaten to shoot themselves. It isn’t for the unquestionable increase in profits from sales, likely film and foreign rights. It isn’t even for the glamour, though tonight’s announcement, televised throughout the United Kingdom, is more like our Oscars than any bookish ceremony.

It is for the sheer, indelible prestige of the thing.

More prestigious than the Pulitzers or the National Book Awards in the U.S., the Booker is given simply for the “best” novel of the year, in English, by a Commonwealth or Irish citizen and published in the U.K. That’s “best,” as Sir Michael Caine, one of the Booker’s founding advisors and chairman until 1993, once said, “as in the best book I’ve read all year.” “There’s nothing like the Booker in America,” says Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin. The National Book Awards simply do not, he says, drive up sales like the Booker, and the Pulitzer “just doesn’t start the same conversation.”

The Booker does both.

“It’s a bit of a life-changer,” says first-time nominee Zadie Smith, whose “On Beauty” is among the six short-listed novels announced on Sept. 8. On the final leg of her recent U.S. book tour, hunkered down behind a desk in the back room of Dutton’s Beverly Hills, the 29-year-old author covers her face with her hands. “You can’t talk about it,” she moans. “You can’t. You just can’t.”

Kazuo Ishiguro, one of the veterans in this year’s final group, won the prize in 1989 for “The Remains of the Day.” He was short-listed in 1986 for “An Artist of the Floating World” and again in 2000 for “When We Were Orphans,” and this year for his chilling novel of biotechnology run amok, “Never Let Me Go.” “Being short-listed caused a huge change in my personal life,” says the author, at home in Golders Green in north London. “Until then, I was knocking on doors. Afterward, my wife and I started to get a different kind of dinner invitation altogether.”

“The Booker has enormous international cachet,” says London agent Peter Straus, who in his 20 years of literary work (12 as publisher of Picador) has published and made deals for the likes of Helen Fielding, Cormac McCarthy and two of this year’s finalists -- John Banville and Sebastian Barry. “It’s not just a British prize,” he reminds, “it’s a Commonwealth prize. It’s a big deal in places like New Zealand and Ireland and Australia. If an Irish author is short-listed, it’s the cover of the Irish Times.”

Here’s how it works: U.K. publishers may submit two books by April 4. An advisory committee, led by prize administrator Martyn Goff, chooses a panel of five judges, usually including an academic, a literary critic, an editor, a novelist and a “major figure” (as in a politician or actor). “We don’t want five people who shout,” says Goff, an 82-year-old book dealer and 35-year veteran of the process, from his book-lined office in Sonderan’s Antiquarian Booksellers, a mouth-watering shop near London’s Savile Row and Bond Street.

The judges, who are given no criteria other than to “find the best novel,” must then choose a long list from the hundred-plus entries. (This year, 109 were submitted.) Several months later, the short list of six books is announced. A month later, a dinner is held in London’s Guildhall. A few hours before dinner, the judges, who are given about $8,600 each for their pains, meet and, in a discussion that takes roughly two hours, decide the winner, who is announced over “pudding.”

Competition though it may be, the Booker has coursed through the veins of many a literary friendship: Barry, the Irish playwright and author short-listed this year for his deeply moving novel of World War I, “A Long Long Way,” says that a few hours after he got the call, his good friend and fellow Dubliner Colm Toibin, whose novel “The Master” was short-listed last year, rang him up.

“I picked up the phone,” said Barry, slouching on a sofa in his London publisher’s office, “and it was Colm. His book and my book sat side by side on the coffee table in front of me. ‘You’re going to need good shoes,’ says Colm. ‘Don’t go to Moss Bros. [to buy them].’ And here I am,” says Barry in a rising brogue, “just after goin’ to Moss Bros.”

Julian Barnes, who is also on this year’s short list for his “Arthur & George,” a novel based on an incident in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that is to be published in the U.S. in January, says that “when you don’t win, you feel as though you’ve let other people down. Writing is not a competitive sport.” Nonetheless, says Barnes, who has been short-listed three times (in 1984 for “Flaubert’s Parrot” and in 1998 for “England, England”), he will not be able to read the other novels on this year’s list until after the dinner. “I just wouldn’t be able to read them correctly,” he says looking composed but a little pale.

By contrast, Ali Smith, whose book “The Accidental” is perhaps the most experimental novel on this year’s list, says she’s “peculiarly disconnected, and I think that’s healthy. After all, books aren’t about competition. They’re about how we live.”

Smith says she finds interesting the amount of nostalgia in the short-listed novels, particularly for childhood holidays. She is heartened by the playfulness in the language used by the authors. “Wordplay,” she says by phone from her home in Cambridge, “gives you a level of hope,” even, as in the case of Barry’s characters, in the trenches of World War I.

“The English love a horse race,” says John Sutherland, a professor of English at University College London and this year’s chairman of the judges. He says he was surprised and disappointed by the short list, which did not include one of his own favorite writers, Salman Rushdie. “There’s not a lot of natural consensus” among the judges, he says, clasping his hands around a latte at a local Waterstone’s chain bookstore. “Five judges, six books, two hours, one winner. It can get bloody-minded.” If the judges don’t reach agreement, he says, they are allotted 15 points to vote on candidates. The book with the most points is awarded the prize.

Rick Gekoski, a Long Island-born writer and antiquarian-books dealer who has lived in London since 1966, is another of this year’s judges, one of the rare Americans (Saul Bellow was a judge in 1971). Gekoski read the long-listed books twice and the short-listed books four times each. He says that he read every day from 8 a.m. to lunchtime, then from teatime to dinner. After dinner each evening, he would “negotiate” with his wife to see if he could read a little more. Gekoski, a large and cheerful presence sometimes known locally as “Hurricane Gekoski,” gave up golf, newspapers, “The Simpsons” and the Telegraph’s crossword puzzle.

“I began to be irritable, obsessional and socially retractable,” he admits, twitching ever so slightly. Gekoski makes no secret of his love for “The Sea,” Banville’s short-listed novel about a man looking back on his childhood after his wife has died. It is the novel that has best withstood Gekoski’s re-readability criteria. He feels that Zadie Smith’s book “lacks distinction” and that Barnes’ “suffers from impeccability. Did you know,” he asks ominously, “that 17% of all short-listed Booker books have author names beginning with B?” As for the Booker’s integrity, Gekoski says he hasn’t seen a “whiff of scandal.” “No one,” he says, sounding vaguely disappointed, “has asked to go to bed with me.”

For all its unassailable integrity, the prize has always been accompanied by controversy. As author Martin Amis told Zadie Smith, “The Booker is a bloodsport.” In 1977, when the prize was a mere 8-year-old, poet Philip Larkin, chairman of the judges committee, threatened to jump out of a window if Paul Scott’s “Staying On” didn’t win. (It did.)

In 1983, chairwoman Fay Weldon threw up her hands in the final two-hour meeting and said that at home she never made decisions. “My husband makes them all,” she said, distraughtly undecided between J.M. Coetzee’s “Life and Times of Michael K” and Rushdie’s “Shame.” John Berger, who won for his novel “G” in 1972, told astonished dinner guests that he planned to donate half of the prize money to the Black Panthers as a protest against colonialism. In 1993, Vikram Seth’s publisher, Anthony Cheetham, called the judges “wankers” for not short-listing Seth’s “A Suitable Boy.”

Not everyone loves the Booker wholeheartedly. John S. Smith, who runs Heyward Hill, a highly respected neighborhood bookshop on Curzon Street in London’s fashionable Mayfair section, calls the Booker a “stitch up” between the publishers and the PR machine. He has not read any of the short-listed books and talks about them the way a literary highbrow in the U.S. might talk about Judith Krantz or Stephen King. The dinner, he says, is a “rodeo show” for the “telly.”

Lindsay Duguid, fiction editor at the Times Literary Supplement and one of this year’s judges, worries that prizes often overwhelm the wonderful, eccentric books for which English fiction is famous. She is troubled by the large amount of money given to the winner in a beleaguered publishing climate. She was quite disappointed that Hilary Mantel’s novel “Beyond Black” did not make the short list, and she “loathes” the Banville book. Duguid, bright-eyed and soft-spoken, seems to favor Ali Smith’s deeply disturbing, hauntingly beautiful novel about a young woman who insinuates herself into the life of a troubled family. “The Accidental” is the least “traditional” novel on this year’s list. “I just wish it was all over,” Duguid says, sighing.

Lee Brackstone, a young editor at Faber & Faber (a publisher that has had at least one book short-listed every year for the last 10 years), thinks that the Booker dominates the literary landscape to such a degree that other books are neglected. His book, DBC Pierre’s “Vernon God Little,” printed an additional 750,000 copies after winning the Booker in 2003 and was translated into 38 languages. “Only the Booker can do that,” he says. Brackstone, who believes that today’s best literature comes from America, thinks the process ought to be “opened up a bit” so that more alternative books could be considered. “I’d like to see a prize that rewards bravery,” says the 32-year-old editor.

On a balmy fall evening in London, the literati face two parties: the announcement of the Forward Poetry Prize and Tattler Magazine’s party for Bret Easton Ellis’ novel, “Luna Park.”

At the poets’ party there is wine and there are poets.The winner, David Hersent, tells a reporter who asks what it’s like to be a poet in London: “Why, the same as being a poet in Los Angeles. You’re marginalized, primarily misunderstood and occasionally lauded.” Across town, the Tattler party could easily be in Beverly Hills. Tall blond models sway on the arms of aging rock stars. Novelist Josephine Hart, also one of this year’s Booker judges, says, laughing, “The history of literature, as someone said, is mostly critics getting it wrong.”

“This year’s is a very literary short list. There is an intensity about the voices on this list,” says Hart, who talks about feeling the books as well as reading them, a sentiment echoed by Barry, who says he tried to write “A Long Long Way” as if it were a story to be heard, not read silently.

Out on the street -- or perhaps, more correctly, in the salons of literary households across the city -- readers place bets on the Booker, what Barnes calls “Posh Bingo.” Graham Sharpe, media relations director for London bookmaker William Hill, sets the odds each year for what he calls the city’s “literary-minded layers,” or bettors. This year’s favorite, if you believe the “diarists” in the papers, is Barnes’ “Arthur & George.”

“Oh, God,” says Zadie Smith, begging, pleading. “Can we please, please just talk about something else?”

*

(Begin Text of Infobox)

The nominees

A look at the Man Booker nominees and how judges are reacting to them. The winner will be announced tonight in London.

*

“Never Let Me Go,” by Kazuo Ishiguro: The story of three children raised in an idyllic British boarding school; part of a harrowing effort to create clones as organ donors. Unfortunately, they have souls! All five of the Booker Prize judges seem to agree on how much they like Ishiguro.

*

“A Long Long Way,” by Sebastian Barry: A World War I story, as told by young Catholic volunteer Willie Dunne, barely 18 when he leaves his father, his sisters and Greta, the girl he plans to marry, in Dublin for the trenches. All the judges seem to like Barry, but some, such as chairman John Sutherland, worry that his novel might be overwritten.

*

“Arthur & George,” by Julian Barnes: The true story of the George Edalji case, a breach of justice that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, took up in the second half of his life. Barnes, says judge Rick Gekoski, “suffers from impeccability,” which echoes the sentiment of a few other judges, though all admire the novelist greatly.

*

“The Accidental,” by Ali Smith: A haunting tale in which a strange young woman insinuates herself into the lives of a troubled family. A special favorite of judge Lindsay Duguid but perhaps a little mystifying to the other Booker judges.

*

“The Sea,” by John Banville: After the death of his wife, a grief-stricken man remembers the characters of his childhood summer holidays. Championed by judge Gekoski; loathed by Duguid and vaguely admired by the other judges.

*

“On Beauty,” by Zadie Smith: A novel that picks up where E.M. Forster’s “Howards End” left off: The disoriented, disaffected, academic father in a mixed-race family spins out of control. It “lacks distinction,” says judge Gekoski. “Has its roots in New England, rather than English soil,” says chairman Sutherland, but otherwise admired by the other three Booker judges for its well-done voices.

*

-- Susan Salter Reynolds