Professor of Poetry

I do not get poetry, especially modern poetry. I struggle with it; rather I would struggle with it if I were to read it. The little, and it is very little, of modern poetry that I have read, has not seemed like poetry at all. It just seems like ordinary language only with peculiar, syntax-defying, arrangements of words, or lists of crossword puzzle clues. Whenever I have attempted to read modern free verses (not very often), the only question that comes to my mind is who set them free. Very occasionally, I feel bad about my lack of ability to appreciate poetry, but, at the end of the day, I am damned if I want to do anything about it. Indeed, I am not sure that I can do anything about it. Understanding and appreciating poetry, like creating it, is a gift, and not everyone is blessed with it. You have to take it on the chin and move on. Some time ago, I attended a literary programme where Stephen Fry spoke. As it happened, he was peddling what at the time was his most recent ware—Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet within. Fry spoke for about half an hour. As was only to be expected, the garrulous narcissist spent the whole time telling the audience how clever he was and how well read he was and how exceptional his memory was and how many rare words (which nobody had used since 1708) he knew. Occasionally, during this paean to his exceptional talent, Fry seemed to remember why he was there, and put it to the audience, smirking condescendingly under his crooked nose, that writing poem was awfully simple, anyone could do it, really, and spat out words like iambic and trochee, which probably put most in the audience off writing poetry. But I digress. Poetry is an indelible part of the literary life of a society, and most would agree that those who produce such works of creativity should be suitably rewarded. And what higher accolade could be bestowed upon them than the professorship in as august a university as Oxford? I had never heard of it before (the professorship of poetry, that is; I have heard of Oxford, obviously) but as already acknowledged, I am an ignoramus when it comes to poetry (and not just poetry). The post of Oxford University Professor of poetry has, like most things in Oxford, a great history and tradition behind it. I have it on reliable information that the role goes back three centuries, and, its first incumbent, one John Trapp, could recite works of Shakespeare in Latin. This tradition apparently continued until the middle of the nineteenth century when the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold finally convinced the faculty members that reading lectures in English rather than Latin might be an idea worth giving a go. The salary, at 7000 pounds a year (plus 40 pounds travel allowance), would have been considered meagre by the mean, money-minded materialistic, selfish ex-bankers when they still had their jobs, but the worth of not everything can be measured in money. In addition, the job, which involves giving three lectures a year and an oration every other year, is not exactly backbreaking. Some have described the post as one of the most influential positions in poetry, which, to me, sounds a tad hyperbolic. Nevertheless, the post has attracted, over the years, some of the big guns from the world of poetry, W.H. Auden and Seamus Heaney amongst them, the latter a Nobel Laureate.

This year, after Professor Christopher Ricks—an academic who is an expert on American poetry and is known to speak for hours on the lyrics of Bob Dylan—stepped down after completing his term of five years, three poets, one each from America, Britain and India, put forth their nominations. They were, in no particular order: Derek Walcott, the 79 year old St Lucia-born poet who won the 1992 Nobel prize for literature; Ruth Padel, the 63 year old great-great granddaughter of Charles Darwin (from her mother’s side) and a descendent of the great British surgeon John Hunter (from her father’s side), who, according to her personal website, is a prize-winning British poet (she won a national poetry competition in 1997); and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra whose age was not known, neither was his contribution to poetry other than that he had ‘much to say of value . . .on issues . . . that are pressingly important in today’s world’, according to one Peter D McDonald (about whom, too, is not much known other than he lives somewhere in Oxford). Mehrotra was a late entry and it is doubtful that he was a serious contender. It was thought to be a two-horse race between Walcott, a man of immense stature (according to his supporters, which included the 2004 Booker winner Alan Holinghurst and Hermione Lee) and Padel, a woman of immense connections (according to her detractors, all of whom are coming out of woodwork). A week before voting— members of the convocation vote to elect the professor—anonymous letters were sent to more than 100 Oxford professors, majority of them women, who had voting rights. The letters, postmarked London, referred to the allegations of sexual harassment made against Walcott in 1982, by a student of the Harvard University. Accompanying the letters were photocopied pages of a book published in the 1980s, titled Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus, which contained details of the claim and subsequent investigation carried out by the Harvard University. The student had complained that, while discussing her work with Walcott after the class, Walcott invited her to imagine him making love to her; he also wanted to know, among other things, how she made love and whether she would make love to him if he asked her to. When informed that the student was unable to imagine having a sexual congress with him (perhaps because she found him repulsive, but this is a guess) and would not sleep with him even if he begged her to (perhaps for the same reason—this is a guess too), Walcott gave her a C grade in his class, which, apparently, is the Harvard equivalent of a failure. Walcott denied propositioning the student; his defence was that his teaching style was ‘deliberately personal and intense’—he wasn’t a dirty old man chasing frocks; he was following his unique way of poetry teaching, which contained the obligatory module of sleeping with female students decades younger than him—and that he had sensed no reluctance [in the student] to pursue the topic of sexual relationships. Walcott was reprimanded and was made to apologize to the student. What the anonymous correspondence did not contain were details of another sexual harassment case against Walcott, brought out by another female student from Boston University, in the mid-1990s, who sued him for half a million dollars (Walcott reached out of court settlement with the woman). Following this, Walcott withdrew from the race, claiming that the election had ‘degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination’; he was disappointed that such ‘low tactics’ were being used (almost as low as the ones he used, some might point out, to get his female students to sleep with him). At this stage, Nicole Kelby, the woman who sued Walcott in 1996 for sexual harassment and with whom he came to an out-of-court settlement, probably feeling left out—her name was not mentioned in the anonymous letters circulated—decided to join the fray, and, bizarrely, came out publically to Walcott’s defence. Writing in the Times, Ms Kelby described Walcott as ‘the greatest living poet’, and urged his critics to consider that poetry is a ‘passionate art’. She went on to give the following insight—no doubt gained during the prolonged negotiations in 1996 that resulted in her receiving hefty sums of money for not dragging Walcott through the American penal system—into Walcott’s alleged behavior, over the years, towards his female students: ‘it is his [Walcott’s] way to be sexual, to push the envelope of both decorum and good taste’. Walcott then extended his support to Padel, described her as a gifted poet, and predicted that she would become a great professor of poetry (so generous of him). There were murmurs that the hugely ambitious and moderately talented Padel, Walcott’s only serious rival for the post, was behind the smear campaign. Padel denied the rumours and declared that she had ‘absolutely no wish to see Walcott humiliated’ and that she was ‘very very sorry’ that he had pulled out. She, nevertheless, felt obliged to clarify that she did not intend to withdraw from the race—ignoring the public exhortation from the pompous A.C. Grayling, the professor of Philosophy and one of her supporters for the post, to do so (‘To win because anonymous and malicious persons witch-hunted Walcott out of the race would be a hollow and tainted thing,’ wrote Grayling in blog in the Guardian)—even though she was ‘deeply disappointed’ to find herself in the position of winning as it were by default. ‘All along, we should have been talking about poetry and the role of poetry,’ she said. ‘This is not what poetry is for.’ It was, she demurely indicated, her sense of duty that drove her on; and the satisfaction she would get from fulfilling her role as the Professor of Poetry would help her to cope with the deep disappointment of winning the position. The reaction of her remaining rival, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was not known (probably because no one bothered to find out), so we can’t be certain whether he, too, was deeply disappointed that Walcott had withdrawn from the race.

This is what happened next. Oxford decided to go ahead with the election, which Padel duly won, beating the little known Indian poet by what the election analysts like to describe as a comfortable margin, the only surprise being Mehrotra managed to attract more than hundred votes. Padel described herself as honoured and humbled to accept the professorship. Feminists, lesbians, and lesbian feminists were overjoyed. May 2009 was described as a landmark month, which saw the election of the first woman professor of poetry at Oxford and the first woman poet laureate (Carole Ann Duffy). Their joy lasted for about a week, at the end of which the humble professor looked set to eat a humble pie. Padel, it turned out, was not the innocent bystander she had all along claimed to be to the ‘Walcott Character Assassination’ plot. It was revealed that she had sent e-mails to journalists alerting them of Walcott’s naughty behavior all those years ago. The Evening Standard published details of an e-mail she sent to one of its journalists in which she referred to the sexual harassment claims made against Walcott, helpfully pointing them in the direction of the book Lecherous Professor if they (the journalist) wanted to know what Walcott ‘actually’ did for students. Her e-mail, littered with typos, was as follows:

'Hi Olivia [‘The Evening Standard’ journalist], ON the CHair, there is still no other nomination except (so extraordinarily) Derek W and me. But thye close on 29th April so another or others may well turnup... ‘THere is aupposed to be a book called The Lecherous Professor, which has 6 pages on Derek Walcott's two cases of sexual harassment, which might provide interestigfn copy on what Oxford wants from its professors.. ALl best, Ruth.’

There were predictable gasps of horror from the academics, including Padel’s supporters (for her campaign), who could not now wait to dissociate themselves publically from her. Padel claimed she was disappointed (again). She admitted to sending the two e-mails to journalists, but felt aggrieved that what she had done in good faith was being construed as an underhand, dirty trick to undermine Walccott and derail his campaign. ‘The papers today quote from email in which I passed on, in good faith, the concerns of a student who believed a professor's relations with women students were relevant to her university's appointment of a professor,’ Padel wrote in an e-mail (one hopes, with less typos) to a broadsheet. She (Padel) wanted these concerns to be heard. ‘The details I passed on were in the public domain and were a source of genuine unease to her [the student], and I communicated them to two journalists who had asked to be kept informed.’ It made little difference. The chorus of ‘Padel must go’ became shriller; A.C. Grayling and Melvyn Bragg became even more blusterous and self-righteous. (‘The professorship is a very serious thing," Grayling reminded the audience at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. ‘This is dirty tricks and character assassination.’) Padel was –pardon the awful pun—up the proverbial creek without a pedal. She saw and accepted the writing on the wall and stepped down from the post to which she was elected just nine days earlier. In her resignation speech, Padel tried a different approach. She was ‘naive and silly’ (and not a knavish, malignant, deceitful, unscrupulous bitch) when she sent the e-mails. It was, we were to understand, a bad error of judgment. ‘I can of course see that people can misconstrue these two isolated emails of mine as part of a larger campaign I had nothing to do with,’ was her defence. The lesbian feminists were incandescent. They smelt a rat. This surely was a male conspiracy against Padel, the first woman to become professor of Poetry at Oxford. Lesbian novelist Janette Winterson fumed: ‘It's a pity she [Padel]has been backed into a corner. What she has done is so much more -trivial than her contribution to poetry. This feels malicious and nasty. We ought to be able to look beyond the woman to the poetry. This is a way of reducing women; it wouldn't have happened to a man. But then Oxford is a sexist little dump.’ (If you are not sure which side to support in a controversy, I’d suggest you wait for Jeanette Winterson to contribute her whining, malevolent, risible, and illogical two pence worth of tripe, and then you can safely come down on the other side.) Lesbian poet Jackie Kay agreed. ‘This was the first time that we had a woman as Oxford professor of poetry – and she has had to resign over two emails. The old boys have closed in on her. It would not have happened to a man, and I am very sad,’ she said. Reaction of the fellow academics was outwardly of sadness (and, no doubt, inwardly of schadenfreude). The reaction of the rest of the great British public was one of indifference—there were more pressing matters that needed their urgent attention (rather than what a bunch of naval gazing, back-stabbing academics from Oxford got up to) such as whether Susan Boyle, the latest sensation on Britain’ s Got Talent, whose looks and physiognomy belied a great voice (appreciated even by Simon Cowell—the voice, that is, not the looks), was, in addition to being a spinster, a virgin, and, if she was, would anyone dare to sleep with her? A reporter finally made a long-distance phone call to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (remember him? He was the third contestant) to get his reaction. Mehrotra opined (his reply could not be heard clearly, as the connection was not good and the noises from the street of Allahabad interfered): ‘From India where I live, these extra-literary goings-on appear more unfortunate than amusing.’ (Obviously, such instances of skulduggery and backstabbing are unheard of in the land of Krishna.)

The state of play at present is as follows. The post of Professor of Poetry is empty. Both Walcott and Padel have announced that they would not run the next election, the former because he does not want to be associated with ‘that awful business’, the latter because ‘no one would believe me now’. Mehrotra will ‘cross the bridge’ when it comes (which means he is interested, because he thinks that he stands a chance.) Clive James has indicated that he is interested in the job.

Let’s get back to Padel’s insistence that she was not associated with the smear campaign in any way. Indeed, she claimed in an interview that the so-called smear campaign against Walcott could have been instigated to ‘undermine her’! There was a conspiracy all right, but it was against her, not against Walcott! Let’s not go into what intellectual pyrotechniques Padel performed in order to arrive at this conclusion. If we believe in the conspiracy theory, then whoever was behind the smear campaign wanted both Padel and Walcott out of the race. (If you suspect that the story is beginning to resemble an Agatha Christie mystery, the suspicion is justified.) Who could have benefitted from both Padel and Walcott being out of the way? Arvind Krishna Mehrotra! So, did the wily Indian, sitting in his den in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, plan the intricate and subversive plot that claimed two high-profile victims? But hold on! The person who benefitted from the smear campaign was Padel, not Mehrotra! The smear campaign ensured that Walcott was conveniently out of the way, and his exit paved Padel’s way for the coveted job. What forced her to resign was not the smear campaign but the revelation that she had sent e-mails to journalists, alerting them to Walcott’s sexual misdemeanours. Doesn’t it strike you a tad curious that she did not think it was necessary to inform the public about the e-mails she had sent, when she was expressing her ‘deep disappointment’ at Walcott’s humiliation and premature exit in the wake of the poisonous letters sent to Oxford Professors, the content of which was identical to her e-mails? We can conclude that Ms Padel’s conjecture that the smear campaign was aimed at damaging her credibility, while it might convince lesbian feminists, does not hold water for the non-deluded, non-partisan, non-gullible heterosexuals.

Should we believe Padel’s claim that she had nothing to do with the smear campaign? This is probably an opportune time to introduce another character who played a vital part in the ‘Walcott character assassination’ plot (if there was one). He is John Walsh, and he is a columnist for the Independent. It was his drumbeating column in said broadsheet in April 2009 that publically set cat amongst the pigeons. Walsh declared himself a supporter of Padel and attempted a demolition job on Walcott’s reputation worthy of Iraqi looters. In the article he spieled about Walcott’s reputation as the dirty old man, quoting extensively from—you have guessed it— the 1984 book Lecherous Professor (was this book on the bestsellers’ list, or what?), although the book is not about Walcott, there being many other priapic academics with extensive experience of deflowering nubile female students; he is mentioned on a couple of pages. A professor of poetry, who shall remain unnamed, initiated and circulated a story that Padel, a close friend of John Walsh, had provided him with the details. Padel responded by labelling the claim as ridiculous. ‘I used to know John 10 years ago and I see him once a year at parties,’ she said. She must have got to know Walsh really well, as he is said to have made free with Padel’s (middle aged) loins ten years ago. Indeed, according to a piece in the Sunday Times, a poem by Padel, titled Home Cooking, which ends with a fuck on a kitchen table, is about her affair with said Walsh. What was the chronology of these events? Walsh’s piece in the Independent appeared a couple of days after Padel sent her e-mails to the journalists (not to Walsh, though), and the anonymous letters to Oxford academics were posted a day after Walsh’s article appeared. So, is it possible that Padel did not have anything to do with the smear campaign? It is possible in the same way that it is possible that the roof of the room in which I am typing this piece will collapse and kill me. Many things are possible. Even if one gives Padel the benefit of doubt and agree that she may not have been directly involved in the smear campaign, it seems undeniable that she was orchestrating her own smear campaign with roughly the same aim. John Walsh’s column in the Independent sought to do the same thing to Walcott’s reputation what the anonymous letters sought. If one accepts Padel’s assertion, improbable as it may seem, that she had nothing to do with Walsh’s piece either, there is still the matter of e-mails she sent to journalists, which, for all appearances, had the same design as Walsh’s column and the anonymous letters: influence, albeit indirectly, the voters by making them aware of Walcott’s history of predatory behaviour towards his female students. She says that she sent these emails in good conscience, has absolutely no idea who sent the anonymous letters, and has nothing to do with Walsh’s deplorable column in the Independent in which he took the hatchet to Walcott. So, here we have a woman who is either honourable and straightforward, and most unfortunately the chain of events conspired to make her look like a sneaky, ruthless, calculating, machinating, vicious harridan, who, together with her despicable cabal (which included a former lover) plotted to bring down a man who is considered to be one of the most outstanding poets of our generation; or she is a sneaky, ruthless, calculating, machinating, vicious harridan, who, together with her despicable cabal (which included a former lover) plotted to bring down a man who is considered to be one of the most outstanding poets of our generation; she is also a barefaced liar capable of breathtaking hypocrisy, not a word of whose is to be trusted (including ‘and’ and ‘the’). Take your pick. I know what I am thinking.

Whither goest Padel from here? The clever woman she is, she will no doubt have gleaned the single most important lesson: do not leave your fingerprints anywhere near the crime scene. The bard said it centuries ago:

Why did you bring these daggers from the place?
They must lie there: go carry them; and smear
The sleepy grooms with blood.
(Macbeth)

Who will be the next Professor of Poetry at Oxford? My money is on Clive James: he is tanned, rested, and suitably mediocre.

Why are academic disputes so vicious? Woodrow Wilson thought it was because so little is at stake.

John Updike RIP

John Updike died of lung cancer, in a hospice, last month, at the age of 76. Many would say he was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, deserving of the Nobel. He was certainly one of the most prolific: in a career spanning five decades, Updike published 28 novels, 14 brick-thick collections of short stories, and 9 volumes of poetry. Add to this the countless reviews he wrote, on subjects as varying as golf, paintings, and cartoons—he was apparently an able cartoonist—, and you will get some idea of the intellectual fecundity of the man. Like the great Somerset Maugham, renowned for writing a few pages every day, 365 days a year—on days when he did not feel inspired, Maugham would fill pages with his signature—Updike, too, till the end, laboured in front of his typewriter for several hours every day.

It was ineluctable that some or more of the output was ordinary, especially his later works with their super-clever premises, which seemed mere vehicles for Updike to deluge his readers with digressive, random pontifications on whatever subject that happened to be on his mind at the time . The patience of all but the most generous reader would surely stretch and snap as they plough through Toward the End of Time, Updike’s 18th novel, as its senescent garrulous narrator yammers on about quantum mechanics and horticulture. The gimmicky Seek My Face, his 54th book, written in just one chapter—indeed one paragraph— left the readers less than enchanted with pages and pages of textbook criticism, and offered no new insights into the works (or lives) of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, the two artists upon whom two of the main characters of the novels were based. Gertrude and Claudius, his self-conscious prequel to Hamlet, was strangely devoid of any passion or drama, as it meandered along, never getting out of the far left lane. In Terrorist, his final novel, Updike showed glimpses of his sly wit and linguistic brilliance that had earned him legion of admirers in his distinguished writing career, but the novel, which, in contrast to his more recent novels, was well paced, suffered from a weak central plot and was ultimately unconvincing.

It seems that once he was through writing the great novels of American man (I am using the word in its gender specific sense) and the sexual revolution sweeping the middle classes in the sixties, Updike, driven by the need—an eye on the Nobel perhaps?—to move on to weightier subject matters, ended up writing plenty about not very much. What also became increasingly noticeable in the later works was his obsessively detailed eye for the quotidian. The unstoppably vivid descriptions of mundane occurrences such as a car being started and going past an observer or the preparation a tuna salad, running into several paragraphs and giving the reader no way-stations to pause for rest, served little purpose other than adding to their sense of ennui. The stylistic excellence and pseudophilosophical insights failed to camouflage the lack of coherent or, in some instances, plausible premise, and the work was about as captivating to the common reader as a monograph studying Julius Caesar's Latin and comparing its rhythmic structure to Byzantine hymns. The whole exercise, it seemed, no longer had any goals beyond enjoyment, dare I say egotistical?, of its own overbred faculties.

However, posterity will judge John Updike not on his lesser, autumnal offerings, but on novels such as the Rabbit books, the zeitgeist series that represented the silent American men of his generation (and won him the Pulitzer twice), and Couples, which made him famous and which won him the reputation of the novelist of sexual revolution, or, as a critic once put it hyperbolically, the novelist who kicked down the doors of American bedrooms. Updike made his reputation on effectively transcribing the angst of common people who outwardly appeared to be content with their lot; and the deliberately provocative manner in which he wrote about sex earned him millions of fans all over the world, but also made him vulnerable to the charge that what he wrote was mild pornography disguised as social insight. Be that as it may, Updike perhaps realised that the seam was too narrow, and moved on to different, abstruse, subjects. Shorn of new ideas he kept going by giving himself technical challenges; writer's block was but a surface for him to practise his craft. Herman Hesse, the great German novelist and Nobel Laureate, published The Glass Bead Game, in 1943. Hesse was 65 when his magnum opus was published. He did not publish a single novel in the remainder of his life. Not everyone has the courage or insight to accept that the stream of creativity has dried up. What you end up doing then, to borrow a phrase from Truman Capote, is typing, not writing.

Philip Roth, Updike’s contemporary and no less a chronicler of American, albeit Jewish American, adultery, was the first to pay him the following tribute:

‘[Updike is] our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable.’

Updike was an accomplished and technically gifted wordsmith. He had, in abundance, all the virtues a writer would dream of. Was he a great writer? Probably.

Are American Authors Insular?

Below is a list of the Nobel laureates in literature in the past fifteen years.

2008 - Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
2007 - Doris Lessing
2006 - Orhan Pamuk
2005 - Harold Pinter
2004 – Elfriede Jelinek
2003 - J. M. Coetzee
2002 - Imre Kertész
2001 - V. S. Naipaul
2000 - Gao Xingjian
1999 - Günter Grass
1998 - José Saramago
1997 - Dario Fo
1996 - Wislawa Szymborska
1995 - Seamus Heaney
1994 - Kenzaburo Oe

Is there anything about the list that thrusts into your attention? Here is a clue:

2008 winner—Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio— is French.

2007 winner—Doris Lessing—is of English ancestry: born in Iran, raised in what was then Rhodesia, she lives in the United Kingdom and is a British citizen.

2006 winer—Orhan Pamuk—is Turkish. He is not exactly Mr. Popular in Turkey for his views about Turkey’s treatment of Armenians around the time of the First World War.

2005 winner—Harold Pinter—is English, and lives in the UK.

2004 winner—Elfriede Jelinek—is Austrian.

2003 winner—J.M. Coetzee—is a South African of European ancestry; he now lives in Australia.

2002 winner—Imre Kertesz—is Hungarian.

2001 winner—V.S. Naipaul is of Indian ancestry; he was born in Trinidad; he came to England when he was 18 and has lived in that country all his life. He is a British citizen.

2000 winner—Gao Xingjian—was born in China, but has lived in France for many years, in exile. Like Pamuk, he has incurred the wrath of the government of his parent country because of his controversial political views.

1999 winner—Gunter Grass—is German.

1998 winner—Jose Saramago—is Portuguese.

1997 winner—Dario Fo—is Italian.

1996 winner—Wislawa Szymborska—is Polish.

1995 winner—Seamus Heaney—is Irish

1994 winner—Kenzaburo Oe—is Japanese. He lives in Japan.

Has the penny dropped? It has? Good! So you have noticed that there are rather a lot of European authors lining up the list. All except one of the Nobel winners in the past fifteen years either are Europeans or have European connection. Kenzaburo Oe, who won more than a decade ago, is the only one amongst these worthies who has no European connection. Surprised? What is not so surprising is that men outnumber women by a ratio of one to four.

Let us concentrate a bit on the preponderance of European authors among the Nobel winners in the past fifteen years, or, the relative paucity of writers from other parts of the world, if you prefer to look at it from a different angle. There are not many American authors in this list; in fact, there is none. Does it matter? Probably no more than the fact that African, Australian, Russian, Indian, Chinese, and Latin American writers are also conspicuous by their absence. For the record, the last Australian author to win the Nobel was Patrick White, in 1973 (and he was a naturalised Australian, having been born and bred in England); the last Latin American was Octavio Paz, a Mexican, who won in 1990; and the last African was the Nigerian Wole Soyinka, in 1986. Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) is the last author, to date, from the Middle East to win the one million dollar (or is it euro now?), in 1988. No Russian author has been awarded the Nobel after 1970 (when Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who, as it happened, was living in exile in the USA, won it, as much for his literary talent as for his anti-Soviet stance ). The last (and to date the only) time an Indian hit the literary jackpot was almost a century ago, when the poet Rabindranath Tagore (who holds the distinction of having his poems chosen by two countries—India in 1947 and Bangla Desh in 1971—as their national anthems), enthusiastically promoted by W.B. Yeats (who won the award himself ten years later), won it; and, astonishing as it may seem, no Chinese has been deemed good enough to merit it. What about Naipaul and Xingjian, I hear you asking. While it is true that Naipaul is of Indian ancestry (which he acknowledged in his Nobel acceptance speech) and has written his celebrated (and controversial) trilogy on India, he was not born in India, neither has he lived in the land of his ancestors. Born in the Indian community in Trinidad, Naipaul has lived all his adult life in England, and been a British citizen for decades. Rudyard Kipling, the first British writer to win the Nobel, was probably more Indian than Naipaul—he was born in Bombay and lived in India for while (and no one will make the mistake of considering the Imperialist Kipling, who, like many other European Nobel Laureates, has sunk into well-deserved obscurity, Indian). Xinjiang, as we shall see later, is a persona non grata in China; he has lived in exile in France for more than twenty years, and is a French (albeit naturalized) citizen.

Indeed, if one looks at the 101-year history of the Nobel Prize in literature and its winners, only thirty-one are from outside of Europe, Scandinavia and the Baltic. If anything, the Nobel has become more global in the past sixty years; in the first fifty years of the award, only five were outside of Europe and Scandinavia. Of the thirty-one non-European authors who have been awarded the Nobel, ten—almost one third— are Americans. (Of the ten, at least three were naturalised Americans including Joseph Brodsky, who, like Xingjian, had left his home country, the USSR, for political reasons.)

Last year, after Doris Lessing won the Nobel, the whole raft her novels, several of which were out of print for years, were re-circulated, reminding the buyers, in bold letters, that the author was the winner of the Nobel Prize. Therefore, presumably, winning the award, in addition to the manna attached to it, also boosts the sales of the winner’s books. However, it is not just that. Over the decades, winning the Nobel has somehow come to represent the acme of a writer’s career. Almost all the novels of V.S. Naipaul, published before his Nobel, made it a point to mention that he had won all the literary awards except the Nobel. It obviously mattered to Naipaul that the award had eluded him.

The Nobel has become controversial for a number of reasons. In 2001 V.S. Naipaul became the first British author in almost twenty years—after William Golding, who was awarded the prize in 1983—to be awarded with what many think has become a political award. Some suggested at the time that Naipaul—considered by many to be the finest British author writing in English—was presented the award not so much for his awesome literary output over the years—many are of the view that Sir Vidya should have won years ago—as for his alleged anti-Islamic views (his two travelogues—Among the Believers and its sequel, Beyond Belief -are deemed by those (who are always on the lookout for evidence that will confirm their prejudices) to be an averment of Naipaul’s anti-Muslim prejudice) which became fashionable again in the West on the backdrop of anti-Muslim sentiments sweeping through Europe and the Western world after September 11. A year before Naipaul, Gao Xingjian, a till then little-known Chinese author (but not just that; he is also a dramatist, critic and artist), who had been living in exile in France since the late 1980s (he has held French citizenship since 1998), and whose work in China apparently came to a halt after he wrote a play against the backdrop of what is referred to in the Western media as the Tiananmen Square massacre. The Chinese were not amused and dubbed the award a political manoeuvre, which it probably was. (The Chinese, it has to be said, were somewhat ungracious, and dropped oblique hints that Xingjian was probably not a Nobel material, and would not have won it but for the political angle.) The fact that one Goran Malamquist, who has translated and produced Xingjian’s plays in Stockholm, is on the panel that makes the selection of Nobel Laureates, may also have helped Xingjian. In 2005, Orhan Pamuk, the outspoken Turkish author, incurred the wrath of the Turkish government and many Turkish nationalists by his comments about what Turkey refuses to acknowledge, officially, the Armenian genocide of the 1915 and Turkey’s treatment of the Kurdish separatists. He was taken to courts for insulting Turkishness and, had he been found guilty, would have faced a jail-sentence. Overnight Pamuk became the darling of the Western and European media which became self-righteously indignant over the affair—Salman Rushdie railed against the oppression of free speech in Turkey—and, lo and behold, the very next year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Coincidence? I think not. This disposition of the Nobel committees is not new, however. Nobel committees, over decades, seem to have taken a le malin plaisir in awarding the prize to rebel authors emerging from other, non-European / non-Western, societies and cultures which, or the regimes ruling over these cultures, are deemed to be at odds with the European / Western value systems. These winners—be it Bunin or Solzhenistyn or Brodsky—at the time the honour was bestowed upon them—were living in the West, in exile. (This augurs well for Kundera and Llohsa.)

It should, therefore, not be excessively surprising that the Russians and the Chinese and the Turks have found themselves in less than fulsome agreement with the Nobel committees over their choices. Now, bizarrely enough, the American literati find themselves in a state of agitation—somewhere between dudgeon and umbrage—over the decisions of the Nobel selection committee, for very different reasons. Of late, American authors, as mentioned earlier, are conspicuous by their absence in the list of Nobel winners. Now their worst suspicions are confirmed. Horace Engdahl, the top member of the award jury for the Nobel Prize for Literature, has delivered his judgment. American authors, Engdahl has declared, are too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture. ‘The US,’ Horace has discovered, ‘is too isolated; too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. This ignorance is restraining.’ So the Swedish dude (as I believe Americans like to refer to male adults of different age groups) has puked all over the smorgasboard (if you allow me to mix my metaphors) of American literature, and the NY Mag hacks are very unhappy on behalf of Philip Roth and John Updike, whose chances of winning the Nobel, in light of Engdhal’s helpful comments, seem to be about as good as the second coming of Christ (which is particularly sad for Updike, who, by dint of having produced his best work forty years ago and being old—like Pinter and Lessing—, one would have thought, qualifies for it). Long lists of contemporary great American authors few have heard of (outside of America)are produced, accompanied by the penetrating observation that theEuropean Nobel winners are virtually unknown outside of Europe. All of which, to some, may appear as avowing what Engdhal has (rightly or wrongly) accused them of. Of course, we are insular; that is what makes us great. (And, if you think that it is a bit like saying, of course, ocean is wet, you would not be the only one.)

Let’s have a look at Engdhal’s condemnation of American literature—because that is what it is; Engdhal, when he made these remarks was animadverting. He says that the US is too isolated, too insular. Not having read very many US authors I do not know what to make of what sounds like a sweeping generalisation. I would say that most authors educe their subject matter from the environs they know best; and, for most of us the environs we know best are the ones in which we live. If one tries to write about cultures we do not have a firsthand experience of, would it ring true? David Gutterson made this point, albeit indirectly, in a literary festival. When asked what he had to say to Engdhal’s charge that American authors are insular, he answered, quite unapologetically, that he put his hand up to the charge; he wrote about things he felt comfortable about. Naipaul and Lessing, the two recent British Nobel Laureates, have written about different cultures, but then they had the experience of living in and travelling through different cultures, and that is why, perhaps, their stories ring true. (It is also true that both of them have produced high quality work that has universal significance.

It is plain daft to assume that works which are local (in the sense that they are geographically specific) are ipso facto lacking in universal relevance. Take for example the works of the 2002 Nobel winner Imre Kertesz. Some of Kertesz’s greatest fictional output is closely linked to his own experience in the German (Nazi) concentration camps. Kertesz would not have been able to write Sorstalanság (translated into English as Fatelessness) if he had not survived Auschwitz. Fatelessness, a work of fiction, is an intensely personal account of an adolescent boy who goes through the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Although resolutely specific in its attentions, the Nobel jurors, very appropriately, recognized the universal themes emerging from Kertesz’s narratives, and awarded him the Nobel for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history. Therefore, it is not as though the Nobel Jurors are incapable of looking beyond the immediacy of geographical location in which the narrative is set. So, when Engdhal accuses of American writers of insularity, he is suggesting that he cannot find anything of significance in the writings of American authors that touches the wider human condition. This is nonsense. Even those, who have read only the internationally acclaimed American writers—Roth, Ford, and McCarthy to name just three whose writing clearly transcends national boundaries—, will find his assertion hard to swallow. To return to the point David Gutterson made, it is absurd to consider that a ‘provincial’ novel is somehow less elevated than a ‘universal’ novel. I have enjoyed many an American novel for their unabashed Americanness than those with universal pretensions. A great novel—Jonathan Franzen’s Correction is a case in point—always finds its way to the wider human condition via the specific. The Great Russian writers of the twentieth century—Pasternak and Sholokhov, who are widely known outside of Russia—and they both were awarded the Nobel—wrote books deeply rooted in their cultural and social milieu.

Engdhal’s other accusation is that Americans do not translate enough; one assumes that the non-English works Engdhal has in mind are European. I should doubt very much whether Engdhal is bothered whether the Americans are translating enough non-European writers. The winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the thirteenth Frenchman to get the accolade and first since 1985 (if one excludes Xingjian), is an author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization, according to the Nobel Committee. While the English language readers have no reason to doubt the judgment of the Nobel Jurors—apparently Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio is a well known and respected literary figure in France—they are, at present not in a position to draw their independent conclusions about the merits of the Nobel Laureate, because his works have not been available in the UK, the only English-speaking country in Europe. Therefore, America is not only English speaking that does not translate enough.

It is also interesting that Engdhal picked out American literature for his criticism and proffered his wisdom as to why no American writer has won the Nobel for more than a decade, when it is not only that continent but almost all other parts of the world, except Europe, have been ignored. Americans are not the only ones subjected to Engdhal’s sweeping generalisations. He dishes out a different set of prejudice against non-Western cultures. This is what he has to say about them: ‘Europe respects the independence of literature and can serve as a safe haven. Very many authors who have their roots in other countries work in Europe, because it is only here where you can be left alone and write, without being beaten to death. It is dangerous to be an author in big parts of Asia and Africa.’ Like all irrational biases, there is a kernel of truth in this, but what Engdhal does is he takes it as a springboard and makes outrageously inaccurate value judgments about Africa and Asia. Implicit in Engdhal’s pronouncement on large parts of Africa and Asia is his view on the literary integrity of those who have chosen to live there and the quality of their work. One wonders whether Engdhal realises how offensive such utterances are. Probably he does, and does not care. Perhaps other continents are not on Engdhal’s radar, cocooned as he is—like a crab under a rock, cheerfully contented in its limited universe, feeling no desire to explore the wide sea spread in front—in his belief that ‘Europe is still the centre of the literary world.’ The conceited, overweening Eurocentric swagger of Engdhal and his uppity trumpery reveal more about his profound anti-America bias, and ignorance (or disdain, or both) of non-European literature than the insularity of American literature. It is not the US, but Engdhal, who is insular, narrow minded, parochial, and ignorant.

Should it matter what Engdhal thinks of American literature? Not unless, perhaps, you are Philip Roth, and expecting the Nobel. Roth—you can bet your mortgage on it—is not going to win the award so long as the Swede has a say on the matter. But then, may be, Roth—who, together with Joyce Carol Oates, was said to be on this year’s secret five-person short-list for the Nobel—holds the same view about the Nobel as Saul Bellow, who, when he heard the news that he had been awarded the 1976 Nobel, is said to have remarked that while he was glad to have it, he could have lived without it. Roth is a great writer, an iconic figure in literature, like Conrad, Nabokov, and Scott Fitzgerald before him (to name just a few who wrote in English who are missing from the Nobel list), whose work will outlast that of many a Nobel Laureate.

Adiga Wins the 2008 Man-Booker

Well, smack, as they say, my fanny, and call me Diana (or Charlie, if you prefer). A rank outsider has won the Booker; what a surprise! Arvind Adiga’s debut novel, The White Tiger, an acidic satire (is this a tautology?) on modern India, blew Michael Portillo’s socks off, and landed the glabrous Indian with the 2008 Man Booker prize. In recent years the Booker awarding committees seem to take special (and, you can’t help wondering, malicious) pleasure in proving the bookies wrong. They have done it for the fourth successive year, awarding the prize, as it happens, to two Irish and two Indian authors. Indeed, being tipped by the bookies as a favourite must, now, be counted as a certainty that the novel—it was Sebastian Barry’s misfortune to have been backed by the bookies to win the prize this year—will not make it.

For the record, Adiga is the fourth Indian born author after Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Kiran Desai to have won the Booker. One can add to this list V.S. Naipaul, who, while he wasn’t born or lived in India, is of Indian ancestry. He (Adiga, not Naipaul), at 33, is the second youngest author to win the Booker, after Ben Okri (who won it when he was 32). He is the fourth author after Keri Hulme (1985), Arundhati Roy (1997) and DBC Pierre (2003) to win the award for his debut novel. In an interview to BBC Radio 4 Adiga laid to rest any fears that he might suffer the same fate as that of the two women, neither of whom has published another novel after their prize-winning efforts (although Roy, to be fair, has published a couple of works of non-fiction, and is rumoured to have been working, after a decade, on her second novel; Hulme, as the cliché goes, has disappeared without trace). When asked whether he was thinking about writing his next novel, Adiga replied that his next novel—he was rather coy about its subject matter, and mumbled some unconvincing clichés about writing being an intensely personal and private activity—was more or less complete. One imagines that after the Booker success he would not have much trouble in finding a publisher.

Adiga’s novel, which he has been at pains to clarify (a) is not so much angry as funny, and (b) was a ‘bestseller’ in his home-country, India, even before it was long-and-short-listed for the Booker (one hopes that the novel, which has so far sold a meagre 3000 copies in the West, will do better post-Booker), is about what he describes as the ‘other India’, comprising, he would have us believe, the majority of that country’s denizens, who have not reaped the rewards of the economic liberalization in the past decade or so. (Given the sobering statistics, announced by the World Health organization this month, outlining the extent of the problem of malnutrition facing modern India—40% of the world’s malnourished live in India, and some states in Northern and Central parts of India are apparently on par with some of the sub-Saharan African countries—there may be some truth in this claim.) This vast underclass, Adiga claims, is the real India, not the 5% of the affluent, educated, privileged class, to which, incidentally, he, a son of a doctor, belongs. Some have questioned Adiga’s credentials to write about underclass to which he does not belong, the implicit assumption being his view, therefore, is that of an outsider, not, somehow, quite echt. This is rather harsh. Orwell’s Down And Out in Paris and London is no less authentic because he belonged to the chattering classes. (It is not a very well known fact that in writing Down And Out in Paris and London Orwell was no more than a literary tourist. Orwell lived as a homeless and unemployed, all the time secure in the knowledge that he could return to the bosom of his wealthy family any time, which is what he did after a few weeks, having gathered, presumably, enough raw material to write a novel.) Adiga worked, for a few years, as a business journalist for the Time magazine, and, during his travels, had, allegedly, the opportunity to look at the downtrodden of India from close quarters. The White Tiger was the result of these travels, a novel, he has revealed, he wrote a few years ago, although it was published only recently. Adiga says he took upon himself to write about ‘the brutal injustice’ of the Indian society—‘India is a society of profound inequality and inequality is not just a moral vice, it also leads to instability’, he declares— since no one had done it, according to him, previously. By this, he probably means English language novels written by Indians. India is only a partial English speaking country, but it has a long literary tradition; there must be wealth of local literature waiting to be translated into English. One imagines literature was getting published in some or more of India’s several local languages—each state has its own language— for a while before some or more of the educated Indians cottoned on to the idea of writing in English, thereby attracting a wider audience, recognition (and possibly royalties) for their works; and it stretches the limits of credulity somewhat to assume that the disadvantaged and dispossessed went unrepresented in Indian literature before Adiga got his brainwave. In a recent interview Adiga drew comparisons with Flaubert, Balzac, and Dickens—nothing wrong in that; you might as well do it yourself if no one else seems to be in a rush to do it—claiming that his work, just like theirs, threw into sharp relief the injustice of the society; and he hoped that Indian society would be a better one as a result of his endeavours, just as French and British societies became better ones as a result of theirs. One has to admire the nobility of the young man’s ambition.

I have often wondered how a winner of such awards is chosen. There must have been books which were unanimous choices of all the judges. I should like to think that Schindler’s List and The Remains of the Day were two such winners. According to Paul Theroux, one of the judges on the 1979 panel, the winner that year, Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, which holds the record of the shortest book to have won the Booker, was a ‘compromise winner’: the panel was apparently equally divided between those who felt V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River was a masterpiece and those who were determined (Theroux amongst them) to ensure that Naipaul, who, even then, had managed to antagonize many, did not win the Booker the second time. The White Tiger, by all accounts, was not a compromise winner. There was a fierce deadlock with Adiga edging out Barry, the Bookies’ favourite, 3:2. One judge was said to be in tears when she (or he) could not win over a third person to Barry.

Finally, what about Linda Grant, my choice for the Booker? Well, she might not have trousered the £ 50,000 award, but, according to her (appropriately named) blog, The Thoughtful Dresser, on which she was agitating for months about not having a suitable dress to wear for the ceremony, she was the only one of the short-listed author who ‘walked away with a free Oasis Clarke dress.’

2008 Booker Long-list

I have a great deal of admiration and sympathy for the judges of the Booker Award (or, for that matter, any literary prize). To trawl through more than hundred novels in six months, and to prepare long-lists and short-lists (which, let's face it, never satisfy all) can seem like a burden. Unless you are Philip Hensher, one of the long-listed authors this year, and himself a judge in 2001. Hensher, who perhaps is more widely known as a critic and reviewer than a novelist, famously declared a few years ago that he read an average of five books a week, and the number of novels he read in six months as a Booker judge was no more than his average frequency. But then Hensher is in that enviable position where he reads books to earn living. Wouldn't it be nice if you have the luxury of viewing your profession not as a real profession but an agreeable frame of mind, a way of going about things rather than things you exactly do?

This year’s Booker long-list, in keeping with the recent trend, has five debut novelists, four novelists from the Indian subcontinent, and a few established names including a couple of former Booker winners. The categories mentioned here are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

I have not read any of the long-listed novels, although I have read some or more novels of some or more long-listed authors. There are some novels I shall probably buy—Booker or no Booker—once the paperback editions are out: some because their authors are my favourites (Rushdie and Grant); some because I have enjoyed reading their authors’ previous novels (Ghosh, Hensher); some because their authors have been on my ‘to be read’ list for years and I have not so far got round to read any of their novels and I might as well begin with the Booker-long-listed novel (Barry); and some others because I am curious to find out what the fuss is about (Hanif). Finally there are some novels on the list which I shall read only if they go on to win the Booker (Adiga, Rob-Smith, de Krester, O’Neill, Arnold and Toltz). I should come clean and admit that I had not heard any of the authors in the last category till they, rather their novels, got long-listed for the Booker. It is a known fact that the novels which win prestigious literary awards such as the Booker enjoy a sharp uplift in their sales; I should very much doubt whether the long-listed novels enjoy similar good fortune, unless their authors are well-known and have a dedicated fan-following (in which case they do not depend on being long or short-listed for the Booker).

One of the long-listed authors is John Berger—I know, I know; he is not just a novelist: he is also an artist, essayist and a critic—who caused something of an upset in 1972 when he won the Booker award with his experimental novel, G, piping some worthy opponents (Thomas Keneally and David Storey) to the post, and then probably caused more upset by announcing that he was donating half his prize money to the Black Panther movement in protest of what he alleged was Booker’s colonialist policy in the West Indies. (Someone should have pointed out to Berger that the Black Panther movement had in fact dissolved two years before.) Will the old warhorse cause upset again with A to X, ‘A Story in Letters’? I think not.

Philip Hensher, another critic and reviewer, and himself a judge in 2001, is long-listed for Northern Clemency. I have read three of his earlier novels two of which—his debut novel, Kitchen Venom, and Pleasured—I enjoyed thoroughly, especially the former which was in the tradition of vintage Evelyn Waugh. The third, The Mulberry Empire, in which Hensher, in a departure from his earlier books, tried his hand at a historical epic, was so well-crafted it was almost contrived, and, despite being packed with dramatic set-pieces, was strangely soulless. What will Northern Clemency, which, at 740 pages, is the longest of the long-listed novels, be like? On the plus side, it promises to be a chronicle of the contemporary English life, something Hensher, in my opinion, excels at. On the other hand it is disconcerting to note that Hensher, apparently, took inspiration from ‘the great nineteenth century Russian novels’ when he wrote Northern Clemency (which perhaps explains the length of the novel). Judging by the less than exhilarating results the last time Hensher attempted something ambitious and sprawling, I believe my concern is justified. When one is getting a bit long in the tooth, one does not want to be left feeling underwhelmed, especially when one has shown the perseverance to trawl through more than 700 pages. Will Hensher win the Booker? I should doubt it.

Sea of Poppies is Amitav Ghosh’s seventh novel. Of his previous novels I have read two: The Calcutta Chromosome, which, I think, was his debut novel—I thought it was disappointingly lacking in depth; the novel’s subtitle was ‘a novel of fevers, delirium and discovery’; it was, for me, more like a novel of terrifying dullness—, and the splendid Glass Palace. In Sea of Poppies, Ghosh returns to the genre he handled so well in Glass Palace—historical epic. This is one to watch. Ghosh might just hit the jackpot.

Sebastian Barry was short-listed in 2005 for A Long Long Way. He is long-listed this year for The Secret Scripture, the heroine of which is the cousin of Eneas McNulty (Barry’s eponymous debut novel), who has spent longer time in an asylum in Ireland than either she or anyone can remember. The psychiatrist under whose care she is admitted is curious about the circumstances in which she was admitted. I find the subject matter interesting—stories of mentally unhinged and those who think they can cure them have always appealed to me; make of it what you will—and I should read it. If I like it, I’ll probably get hold of Barry’s debut novel.

Linda Grant is a favourite author of mine. I have read two of her previous novels—the Orange Prize winner When I Lived in Modern Times, and Still Here—and liked them both thoroughly. I shall definitely read Clothes on their Backs which tells the story of a Hungarian Jewish family. This is another subject that interests me and I expect the novel to be as engrossing, perceptive and witty as Grant’s earlier novels. I will not be surprised if it is short-listed. It may even win, the only factor weighing against it is it has sold very well—it was reprinted twice even before it was long-listed. Sounds cynical? Cynical? Moi?

Of the by now customary slew of debut novelists making it to the long-list, Tom Rob Smith has made a history of sorts: his novel, Child 44 is a thriller; and novels in this genre do not often get long or short-listed for literary awards. Unfair? Probably; but such is life. The other day I tuned into the BBC Radio 4 and found myself bang in the middle of a heated (the epithet should be used advisedly with regard to Beeb) discussion about what comprises literature and whether thrillers (or suspense novels as Patricia Highsmith was known to describe her novels) are literature, the occasion being the publication of the latest John le Carre novel (The Most Wanted Man). le Carre, of course has not won any literary award. Tom Rob Smith participated in the debate (no one should and will grudge him his fifteen minutes of fame), and, when the presenter suggested to him that it was an outrage that le Carre has been persistently overlooked for literary awards, pointed out (very reasonably, I thought) that the main reason for that was le Carre never gives permission to submit his novels for any awards. He also felt confident, having no doubt researched the subject at great length, to disabuse the BBC presenter of the notion that his, Rob Smith’s, novel was the first thriller to be long-listed for the Booker: Brian Moore was short-listed twice, in 1987 and 1990, for The Colour of Blood, and Lies of Silence. So well done Tom Rob Smith. However, I suspect that this is as good as it is going to be for Child 44. I can’t see the panel—unless they are driven by a sense of malicious hilarity—short-listing the book which moved one reviewer to write that he could not ‘respect a committee that decides to pick a book like Child 44’. Then there are the much-hyped The Netherland, this year’s Great American Novel (contractual terms require the use of this phrase in all reviews; while I have no plans of reviewing the book and I am absolutely positive that no one is going to log on to this blog, I shouldn’t take any risks), The Case of Exploding Mangoes, a satire on the events surrounding the death of General Zia the Pakistani dictator in the 1980s, and A Fraction of the Whole, which has been compared to Tom Wolfe’s chartbusters from the 1980s (which probably means large print and lots of pages).

Finally, there is Sir Salman Rushdie, weaving familiar themes and developing elaborate conceits into a fulgurant fantasy, The Enchantress of Florence, which will enrapture his legion of fans.

So, here is the Booker long-list:

Arvind Adiga (The White Tiger)

Gaynor Arnold (Girl In A Blue Dress)

Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture)

Philip Hensher (Northern Clemency)

Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence)

John Berger (From A to X)

Linda Grant (The Clothes On their Back)

Tom Rob Smith (Child 44)

Mohammad Hanif (The Case of Exploding Mangoes)

Michelle de Krester (The Lost Dog)

Joseph O’Neill (The Netherland)

Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)

Amitav Ghosh (The Sea of Poppies)

Which amongst the above will be short-listed, if the short-list is of, say, five?

Here is my guess:

Linda Grant (The Clothes On their Back)

Amitav Ghosh (The Sea of Poppies)

Salman Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence)

Sebastian Barry (The Secret Scripture)

Steve Toltz (A Fraction of the Whole)


We shall know on 9th September.

Rushdie, Midnght's Children and The Booker

I might as well declare at the outset that Salman Rushdie is one of my favourite authors writing in English. I have read all of his full-length novels except the first (Grimus) and the most recent (The Enchantress of Florence). In my list of all-time favourite novels (written in Original English) there will definitely be two of Rushdie: The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children; and I will be tempted to add a third one (Moore’s Last Sigh).

Rushdie has the amazing capacity to arouse extreme passions. As John Sutherland remarked, he either rocks or he sucks. He irritates you the same way a driver gets under your skin by stealing a parking space from right under your nose, which fills you with murderous rage wholly disproportionate to the crime. And what are Rushdie's crimes? Different groups seem to hate him for different reasons. There are those, usually Muslim fundamentalists, who are convinced he is Islamophobic: he is subjected to vituperative attacks on a number of Islamic web-sites, I am told; many of the attackers, needless to say, have not actually read The Satanic Verses. Some consider him to be a shameless self-promotionist and aggrandiser. Rushdie’s cameo appearance in Bridget Jones’s Diary is often cited by them as an incontrovertible evidence that there is no turpitude he will not sink to so long as he stays in limelight. (It has to be said, though, that the man does not exactly shy away from publicity. It may even be argued that sometimes he goes actively in search of it. Take, for example, his recent claim that he now holds the record of signing maximum number of books in an hour. Driven by the need to make this fact public Rushdie wrote a letter to The Guardian, helpfully pointing out that he had broken the previously held record of the wine critic Malcolm Gluck. ‘His record is toast,’ Rushdie crowed in the letter. Gluck chose to see the humour in the situation—perhaps Salman was tongue in cheek all along—and compared it (Rushdie’s boasting) to men’s boastings about the size of their equipments (he was probably not far off the mark; I can’t see many women writers going for this type of record)). Then there are those who are pissed off with him for no reason other than he seems to have little difficulty in hooking up with young, glamorous women (although, the cockles of their hearts must have, no doubt, been warmed by the news that his third—or is it fourth? Most recent, anyway—wife, an ex-model, has left him). If some or more of you are wondering quite what any of this has got to do with Rushdie’s auctorial capabilities, let me advise you that there are those who don’t think much of him as a writer. A proportion of these have heard from a friend who happened to have overheard a conversation in a party that Rushdie is unreadable. Some have tried to read some of Rushdie’s books and struggled to go beyond the first fifty pages, which, of course, means that Rushdie is dull, tiresome, boring, and tedious. Rushdie, according to these individuals, who may or may not have achieved an elementary level of ability in reading, is over-hyped and writes tripe. He is a load of tosh, baloney and hokum. You will be excused if News of the World is not the first publication you reach for for literary fiction reviews, in which case let me inform you that one Carole Malone, a regular columnist in this British tabloid, thinks that Rushdie’s knighthood (awarded by the British Government) for the service to literature is farcical because she has yet to meet anyone, ‘me included’ (just so that there is no room for misunderstanding), who has managed to get through anything he has written. Ms Malone, it would be fair to conclude, is in the ‘Rushdie sucks’ camp. Finally, there are those who accept, grudgingly, that Rushdie used to be good, but point out, gleefully, that he is now past his sell-by-date; he is surviving on past reputation. Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury are often given as examples of Rushdie’s declining prowess as a writer. (Martin Amis is another writer of Rushdie’s generation many seem to derive great pleasure in trashing).

It is difficult to say which amongst Rushdie’s ten full-length novels is his most famous. Many would plump for The Satanic Verses, which made Rushdie a household name in the non-English speaking world after Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme religious leader when the novel was published, issued a Fatwah sentencing Rushdie publicly to death as he (Khomeini) deemed The Satanic Verses to be blaspheming Islam. (One doubts very much whether Khomeini, who couldn’t read English, had actually read the novel, but he probably did not have to; he was after all God’s mouthpiece. Also, it wasn’t immediately apparent to many at the time quite how Khomeini was going to bring about Rushdie’s death unless he was depending on the Umah (which, I have it on reliable information, is an Arebic word for 'Brotherhood of Islam'); Rushdie wasn’t an Iranian citizen, and, after the Fatwah, one would have assumed that Tehran was probably not on the top of his list of holiday destinations.) The Satanic Verses is probably Rushdie’s commercially most successful book, although Rushdie, who had to go into hiding after the Fatwah for several years—the British government spent millions of pounds on his security—, would probably have settled for less copies of the novel selling if it meant he could live as a free man. It might be argued that The Satanic Verses made Rushdie not so much famous as infamous. It was Midnight’s Children—a hypermanic, clamorous tale, full of wit and slapstick, tracing the story of India’s independence and the first thirty post-independent years, through the memories of its drip-nosed, telepathic protagonist— that propelled him, overnight, to the cutting edge of the literary world, and won for him many a laurel.

Midnight’s Children was Salman Rushdie’s second novel. His first was Grimus which had sold barely nine hundred copies and had to be remaindered. Midnight’s Children changed all that. It made Rushdie into a celebrity. Years later he recalled: ‘Before [Midnight’s Children] my career as a writer was completely obscure. Overnight it wasn’t. I gained confidence.’ Still later he put it differently (and provocatively): ‘I walked into literary London as a stranger and ran off with a cheque, which feels OK.’ Rushdie began writing the novel in 1976. He felt a ‘sense of exhilaration’ as the voice of Saleem Sanai, the garrulous, witty narrator of what was to become Midnight’s Children ‘came over’ him. It was with this novel Rushdie, by his own admission, really became a writer ‘after a decade of false starts’. It took him three years to complete the novel and, to Rushdie’s delight, the two top names in the publishing word on either side of the Atlantic—Jonathan Cape in London and Alfred Knoff in New York—accepted the book. The publication got delayed for all sorts of reasons, and, when Rushdie requested to see some alternatives to the livid salmon-pink dust jacket of the book—he was, understandably concerned about the salmon / salman joke that would plague him for years—he was told that he could not as that would delay the publication of the book even further (one guesses the publishers have, since, become more receptive to Rushdie’s concerns).

Upon its publication, Midnight’s Children won the 1981 Booker prize, awarded to writers from Britain, Ireland, South Africa and the Commonwealth countries, ahead of some worthy competitors: Muriel Spark (Loitering with Intent), Doris Lessing (The Sirian Experiment), Ian McEwan (The Comfort of Strangers), and Molly Keane (The Good Behaviour), the last one making a literary comeback after decades of silence. In 1993, it was awarded the ‘Booker of Booker’ to celebrate twenty-five years of the literary prize the British fondly believe to be the most prestigious literary award in the world. And this year, in 2008, it won ‘The Best of the Booker’ award, a special prize awarded in commemoration of the forty years of the Booker Prize, now known as the ‘Man Booker Prize'.

The process of selection was different on the two occasions. In 1993 the winner was chosen by a committee of three, chaired by the late Malcolm Bradbury. Bradbury was also the chair of the committee that awarded the Booker to Midnight’s Children in 1981, although in his personal capacity he had voted against it at the time, so make of that what you will. The runner up, the committee had announced, was William Golding’s Rites of Passage, the 1980 Booker winner. In 2008, a shortlist of six was chosen by the novelist Victoria Glendinning, the broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and the professor of English (at University College London) John Mullan. The nominees were Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee), Siege of Krishnapur (J.G. Farrell), The Conversationist (Nadine Gordimer), Ghost Road (Pat Barker), Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey), and Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie). (The process of choosing the short-list of six was painful and disturbing, according to Glendinning; at least one book, personally significant to each one of the panel members, had to be axed, as the other two were not in sympathy. A particularly difficult category, apparently, was writers whom all the panel members admired unreservedly and who had won the Booker, ‘but for the wrong book’. The two novelists who came under this category were V.S. Naipaul (who won the 1971 Booker for In A Free State) and Margaret Atwood (who won the award in 2000 for The Blind Assassin)).

The winner of 'The Best of Booker' was chosen by public vote. Midnight’s Children won hands down with almost 40% voting for it. Disgrace was in second place.

In 1993, when he won the ‘Booker of Booker’, Rushdie was still living under the shadow of Khomeini's Fatwah. He was in hiding and was provided with tight security by the British government (at tax payers’ expense, of course). He attended the ceremony surrounded by bodyguards and police patrolling the streets with walki-talkies. Fifteen years down the line, circumstances were more felicitous, and the Fatwah had become a distant memory, although Rushdie could not receive the award in person as he was touring America, promoting his latest novel (which, it has been announced, is long-listed for the 2008 Booker. Should he win it—he probably won’t—he will become the third writer—after Coetzee and Carey—to win the award twice).

Midnight’s Children, Rushdie was to recall after many yeas, was an attempt by him, born and bred in Bombay (now Mumbai) to reclaim his Indian origins and heritage. He was particularly pleased that the book was very well received in the country of his birth (as much as English language books can be received; India is only a partially English speaking country, and it’s a lesser known fact in the West that authors writing in local languages, many of whom have never been translated into English, outsell the English-language books by a huge margin). The book was so widely pirated in India that he began receiving anonymous greeting cards and Thank You cards from the pirates. (It must have been painful for Rushdie when, six years later, India became the first (and probably the only) democratic and secular country to ban The Satanic Verses.)

A couple of years ago I attended a literary evening in which Rushdie was the main speaker (he was promoting Shalimar the Clown). In the ‘Question and Answers’ session, there were, inevitably, questions on Midnight’s Children. An Asian man commented that he had enjoyed the book thoroughly and found it to be hilarious in parts, however, at the end of it, he was left wondering what was the point of it all. There was a mild titter in the audience and Rushdie obviously felt the need to put the cheeky bloke in his place. He replied by saying that the very same question was asked by ‘a very pretty woman in a saree’ many years ago, in New Delhi. He then went on to caricature the Indian accent, replete with wild gesticulations (much to the merriment of the audience). Finally, he answered the question in a couple of sentences: he wrote the novel because he wanted to show that individual memories—of people who have lived through a particular epoch— can be at variance with the official version of history.

In a literary blog hosted by a broadsheet, there was a lively discussion after Midnight’s Children won the ‘Best of Bookers’. There were quite a few postings which stated that Midnight’s Children was not a worthy winner and compared it unfavourably to the novels of Marquez (which was strange seeing as Marquez, being a Latin American, non-English, writer, had never been short-listed for the Booker). Some others made the discovery that Midnight’s Children owed a lot to Grass’s Tin Drum. While the Tin Drum influence—and it is true that few seem to have noticed it—is probably there, in my view, Midnight’s Children is not at all derivative, and the influence—inspiration is the word I would prefer—detracts not a jot from its endlessly inventive resplendence. Let’s all hail Rushdie!