Man Booker: Time we look beyond the Commonwealth

With Patrick Modiano being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and Richard Flanagan winning the Man Booker Prize, 2014 may seem to be the year of anti-climaxes for literary recognition, as far as popular expectations are concerned.

The history of the Nobel Prize for Literature, given to a writer for an outstanding body of work, is fraught with criticism for the selection committee’s errors of omission. For every writer — of a certain language and nationality — chosen for the honour, hundreds of others have to be set aside. Since the Swedish Academy has its own political axes to grind as well, the choices are never free from biases, overt and covert.

In the case of the Booker, the pool was more compact and the criterion restricted to the merit of a single book, rather than of a lifetime’s labours. Until last year, it was open to only those writing fiction in English, published in Britain and/or the Commonwealth nations. Starting this year, it makes anglophone writers from any part of the world eligible.

Given the diversity of this year’s Booker shortlist, the outcome is disappointing, if not ironic. The writers came from diverse backgrounds — two Americans, three British (one Indian-born, another Scottish), and one Australian — who wrote in distinctive styles. A favourite among the bookies, Kolkata-born British citizen Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others is set in mid 20th century Bengal — a novel with small focus but full of big ideas. The other Britons in the list, Ali Smith and Howard Jacobson, stand out for their quirkiness — the former for daring to experiment with narrative, the latter for his inimitable bleak humour.

The inclusion of American writers in the Booker Prize, author Peter Carey recently surmised, would tarnish the sanctity of a “particular cultural flavour” that defined its character. “There was and there is a real Commonwealth culture,” he said, “America doesn’t really feel to be a part of that.” He need not have worried.

Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a luminous novel with a loony title, posed the only real threat to the competition from across the Atlantic. Joshua Ferris' To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (what is with titles and American publishing?), his weakest so far, felt like a token presence, intended to make the shortlist look less skewed.

The winner, Richard Flanagan, is Tasmanian, which must make Carey, his fellow Australian and two-time winner of the Booker, mightily pleased. The Narrow Road to the Deep North is an accomplished novel about the plight of the prisoners of World War II, employed to build the “Burma death railway”. Beautifully written, it has all the ingredients that encourage the reader to keep turning the pages: love, death, war, suffering. It is also a very traditional novel: a quiet, “solid choice” (as The Guardian calls it), far from having the foreign flavours that Carey, among other critics of the Booker, seem to deplore. AC Grayling, chair of the judges this year, called it “timeless” — the safest, but also the vaguest, if not most boring, epithet to use for a work of art. Without meaning to undermine Flanagan’s achievement, one does feel an opportunity has been lost. And given the significance of the prize this year, it may set an uneasy precedent.

Also, while the sentiment expressed by Carey and company may be politically sound — they are irate because America’s most important prizes, such as the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, remain closed to non-US citizens — it is problematic to use “Commonwealth” as a term to fix cultural identity, especially by a white Australian writer.

In 2001, Indian-born Amitav Ghosh rejected the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for being chosen in the Eurasia regional winner category. Pointing out the bias in the selection criteria (only novels written in English qualify), he argued the prize celebrates a single language and historical context, effectively abetting the “memorialisation of Empire” in the “rubric of the Commonwealth”.

The Commonwealth was created out of grim political churnings, and its ramifications, in the present, remains severely unequal, especially when it comes to the economic fortunes of its member nations. Imposing it as a unifying term for writing, emerging out of markedly disparate contexts not only diminishes the historical force of its significance but also does a great disservice to the ambitions of writers clubbed under it.