BBC's 'Big Read' Book Event: British Culture Writ Small

By Robert McCrum

Dec. 12, 2003 12 AM PT

Robert McCrum is the literary editor of the London Observer.

After months of polling and on-air debate, the BBC on Saturday will finally identify to the British reading public which is the nation’s “best-loved” book of all time. Deliberately excluding Shakespeare and the Bible, but admitting translations of foreign fiction, the announcement will be the culmination of a yearlong process.

First, the BBC invited its audience to vote by phone and e-mail. This exercise created a list of 100 top titles, ranging from Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd” to Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’ Diary” and Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy.” Viewers were next asked to vote on a not-very-short list of the top 21.

For a culture that is often denounced for its insularity, the BBC’s voters responded predictably. There was only one translation (Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”) on the short list, and the other nominations reflected the influence of film, television and literary fashion: Philip Pullman, Daphne du Maurier, Louis de Bernieres, Douglas Adams and C.S. Lewis. In advance of a live TV finale, J.R.R. Tolkein’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is a hot favorite, with J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” pressing hard. A fervent minority is hoping that Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” gets its nose ahead in the final furlong. Other fancied runners include J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller and Harper Lee; American titles make up about one-third.

Undignified? You might think so. Crass? That was just one of the kinder epithets hurled at the BBC. The Big Read, as it’s called, has inspired every possible reaction, from eye-rolling disdain to chin-wagging enthusiasm.

Top 10 lists and the arts certainly go ill together, but when the dust has settled, the Big Read will have raised a number of important cultural questions. You might question -- I certainly did -- the wisdom of consulting the opinions of a mass television audience, and no doubt the exercise was driven by a quest for ratings (Britons love lists). But, as much by accident as by design, the Big Read opened a window on a subject usually confined to the literary pages in newspapers.

First of all, the BBC’s exercise illustrates how difficult the idea of such a unified literary inheritance has become at the beginning of the 21st century. Does it make sense, now, to speak of a “best-loved” novel in English? “Best loved” by whom?

Leaving aside for a moment the rival claims of the English and American literary traditions -- would you rather choose Twain or Kipling, Melville or Trollope, Louisa May Alcott or Conrad? -- there is the knotty issue of our booming global English-language culture. If you were to characterize the post-1945 English (and American) literary tradition in a single phrase, it would be: The empire strikes back. The proliferation of competing literatures from Australia, India, Canada and South Africa -- even though they were not well represented on the original list -- has produced a host of world-class writers, from Seth to Peter Carey to Rohinton Mistry to Michael Ondaatje and the recent Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee. This has made it correspondingly difficult to arrive at a list that has the clarity and simplicity of, say, 100 years ago.

The Big Read also illustrated the difficulty of selecting contemporary work. The classics that British adults tended to vote for were the books they devoured in all-night adolescent sittings, books that entered their bloodstream as teenagers like a fierce, exotic drug. These are the books that stay with their readers for decades. And these are probably the titles you would want to see on a list of top 10 “best-loved” books, but it scarcely does justice to the incredible vitality of Anglo-American writing today.

Pullman and De Bernieres made the short list but they are just a hint of the riches of contemporary literature that have been passed over, riches that later generations will turn to with gratitude. In another way, too, time is a ruthless critic. Books that 50 years ago seemed essential have already dwindled in significance. Almost the only books that survive from 1903 are Henry James’ “The Ambassadors” and Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild.”

Another problem when you reach back in time is how to do justice to women’s writing. In 2003, it is impossible to think of a dozen recent novels without naming an important woman writer, from Shirley Hazzard to Zadie Smith. Toward the beginning of the last century, Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf were almost alone.

One fundamental change in the reading habits of the last 100 years has been the rise of mass culture and the emergence of a new literary strain: the genre novel, from spy thrillers to science fiction. You might not want to nominate Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler or James Ellroy for your top 10, but you’d think long and hard before excluding them.

Such, then, are some of the issues facing the adjudicators of Britain’s Big Read.

Who will win? The best guess is that the “best-loved” book will turn out to be one with a substantial children’s following, and an equal number of fans among adult readers -- probably “Lord of the Rings.”

And that raises one last question: How long before some enterprising American arts channel gives the idea a go?

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And the 21 Finalists Are ...

“Birdsong,” Sebastian Faulks

“Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” Louis de Bernieres

“Catch-22,” Joseph Heller

“The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Salinger

“Great Expectations,” Charles Dickens

“Gone With the Wind,” Margaret Mitchell

“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” J.K. Rowling

“His Dark Materials,” Philip Pullman

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams