Plugger Booker

What is The Man Booker prize for? Its rubric is to reward the 'best original full-length novel written in English' which seeing as that revolves around interpretation of a word like 'best' is about as wooly as it can get.

It's not a 'best' as determined by sales figures. Nor could it be, seeing that two of those making the final short-list, were held back from release to bookshops until the longlist was published and they could be stickered accordingly. So they were nominated with only the Judges and those who had received review copies the sole people to have read them. No nod in the direction of the reading public whatsoever.

I have no problem with arts industries having a beano to recognise their annual achievements. We have the Oscars, the Baftas and a whole raft of music award ceremonies. But we must recognise that they are mainly plugging opportunities to push the nominated works further in the marketplace. The amount of lobbying that has been going on behind the scenes for some of the shortlisted titles reinforces the notion that this is less about the art and more about the marketing boost landing the prize can provide.

Yet it's here where I think literature is at a disadvantage compared to those more populist art forms. Jonathan Franzen argues that literature is no longer a mass art form, but very much a niche one, albeit one populated by devotees ("born readers" as he calls them). In an internet age of book bloggers and online reading groups which supplement the Broadsheet reviewers, the chances are this community are already going to be conscious of the chosen books. It gives them something to talk about, but is it introducing them to titles and authors they were unaware of previously?

Therefore one has to ask whether the Booker Prize serves to push its nominees out to a less informed constituency? One independent bookseller reported to me that there was little significant upsurge in several of the longlisted titles, though this was unlikely to be a reflection of any industry wide malaise, since a debut American novel was flying off his shelves.

Certainly the winner, to judge by 2009's "Wolf Hall", stands to see a huge impetus to sales. But again, I wonder at the penetration into the public beyond Franzen's "born readers" cohort. It's not like a good old fashioned obscenity trial which impelled "Lady Chatterly's Lover" into homes up and down the country. Again, anecdotal as it is, my father bought Mantel's book with its "Booker Winner" sticker for my wife's birthday, because he didn't know what to get her. The book was moved on unread...

That the Prize is largely about marketing should not be in doubt. Indeed the longlist itself was only made public as recently as 2001 and that reputedly so as to prevent mutterings of unseemly dark practises. This year, Twitter was abuzz with queries as to why people had received emails from Amazon pushing the shortlisted novels, before the list had been officially announced.

Having said all this, I think the Judging panel under the Chairmanship of Sir Andrew Motion, have put together a reasonably good list. Last year I wasn't moved to read any of the nominees, but this year I have read three. Which brings me back to the notion of what makes a book 'the best'? To my mind the winner - ideally all six nominated books, but let's not get too ambitious - should be a remarkable book. Not a solid, nor merely a well-written one. This isn't 'good reads', but 'the best' read. Something about it should be notable, or conspicuously different from its peers. Now I'll be honest, of the three I've read, none quite come into this 'remarkable' category, while I suspect two of the other nominees are more on the list in recognition for their career body of work rather than these specific novels à la the Oscars. But I would still like to commend one title to you as a worthy recipient of the prize, because I believe it to be the 'best' book on the list.

Tomorrow I'll blog which of the nominated books I'd like to see win.