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This omission is about to be corrected. A longlist of 21 titles has been drawn up by a panel of judges, which will be turned into a shortlist at the Oxford Literary Festival on 25 March, when the public can also have their say about who they think should have won. What interests me is whether the shortlist would have read the same — and the eventual result been the same — if the voting had taken place at the time. I assume it would not have been, and that indeed half the titles on the longlist would have been there because of some local excitement, possibly to do with publishers’ hype, or a writer’s reputation that was peaking just then and has since fallen away. And indeed some of these writers and titles we recognise now might not have made the grade in 1970. As Peter Straus points out: ‘Genre writers have often been ignored by Booker judging panels, but here we have several strong contenders that have survived the test of time,’ and he goes on to list Deighton, O’Brian, Reginald Hill and Renault.
The musical equivalent of the Booker Prize is the awards hosted by several of our specialist magazines, read and admired the world over. Every year there are longlists and then shortlists in every imaginable category of musical endeavour, eventually yielding a winner. What is that winner? To put it starkly: is it, as it is claimed to be, the best recording in its category that the judges of the moment are capable of appreciating, or is it in fact a quite presentable rendition by a group that has become trendy, on whom money has been spent in publicity? Would they still be winning this prize in 40 years’ time, or would some other recording, hidden in the pile, come to be seen as finer and be played for decades after the winner has sunk without trace?
And does it matter? Of course the judges in both these disciplines cannot guess how the movement of taste will go over many years. The stories of publishing houses that turned down manuscripts which subsequently became bestsellers and would have made their fortunes are wonderful. One accepts that blinkered judgments are inevitable, while saying also that the winners are probably not at all bad, and deserve public recognition. Yet if we were really after the record or book that is the best of its time, we would have to take up Matt Damon’s advice and wait. There would be debate about how long we should wait: 40 years gives one perspective, ten another; but what would be more or less completely eliminated by waiting even five years would be the distortion inherent in the publicity attending new releases. In this there can be a kind of bribery.
It is anyway impossible these days to say what Malcolm Muggeridge said of the 1971 Booker list he had to judge: ‘The truth is that most of the entries seem to me to be pornography’ lacking ‘any literary qualities or distinction which could possibly compensate for the unsavouriness of their contents…ill-written, squalid, shapeless and devoid of humour’. The press corps would soon see to him. We have to have plausible winners.
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