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The books are read, the winner is chosen, the speeches are made, the party is over. I knew I would feel a little sad, and I do. The Man Booker prize has already had more than its share of controversy this year: first over changing the rules to allow any author writing in English to enter, a phrase that has been widely interpreted to mean "Americans". As an American myself, I don't find the prospect of Americans joining things especially horrifying. I have always thought nationality a strange eligibility requirement for literary prizes: readers don't care what passport an author holds. That's literature's entire point: it lets us traverse boundaries.
All six judges read 156 books submitted by 94 publishing imprints, and argued about them. That sentence makes this part sound rather breezy. For just over six months, I read a novel a day. Upon hearing this, many people remark wistfully that they wish they could spend their life reading novels. Anyone who longs for such a life has never tried it – no matter how much you love books, and I yield to no one in that respect, reading all day every day is work, demanding not only mentally, but physically: for upwards of 12 hours a day, you are forced to remain stationary, which is really not very pleasant. (No, we don't get audiobooks, and I wouldn't want them if we did, because other people's voices are interpretive: it would skew my evaluation.) You also have to read books you don't like, because it isn't fair to throw them away; I came to think of this as the Middlemarch rule. I find the first 100 pages of Middlemarch really heavy going, and if I judged it on that basis only, I'd toss it aside. The rest of it, however, is one of the greatest novels in our tradition. So I kept reading, even the books I didn't like.
The other thing people assume is that we must skim. (One of our longlisted authors told a journalist we couldn't possibly read all the books. He was wrong. As one of the books we read was his, he should have given us the benefit of the doubt.) I kept reading books I hated right to the end in case my fellow judges loved them: we came to meetings armed with arguments against books as well as for them. So the reading continued: sitting, reclining, sitting, standing, perched on one leg, on the cross-trainer. By the end I was reading in yoga poses. A strange cognitive effect emerges, or it did for me, after living too long in the fantasy world of others; spend too long in someone else's mind and you feel rather as if you're losing your own.
Then we had to agree a longlist, and I learned from ever-helpful social media that my fellow judge Erica Wagner and I are personally responsible for patriarchal hegemony. We only longlisted three women out of 13 writers and so we are a disgrace to the sisterhood. (This also presumes that the four men on our panel are chest-beating misogynists.) The job was to choose the best book, in our estimation, and to persuade the other five strong-minded, experienced readers in the room to share our estimation. I'm terribly sorry that I didn't correct for institutionalised sexism while I was at it.
People tend to forget two things when they criticise the books judges choose. First: unless you've read all 156, you can't really say whether a certain book "deserves" to be on the list. Second: although 156 books is a bloody lot of books, it is only a fraction of the novels published in the UK last year. We read what publishers submit to us; we're permitted to call in a maximum of 12 additional titles, a process that presumes we already know what we can't know, namely which books we will like that we haven't heard of. If out of those 156 books, publishers only submit a fraction of women, then that is a function of systemic institutional sexism in our culture. The same point goes for racial diversity: either we six people, all of whom work on behalf of literacy and education, are sexist, racist troglodytes, or we live in a racist, sexist world and the publishing culture reflects that.
The Man Booker prize will not change the world, but it can certainly change writers' lives. It makes careers, and I desperately didn't want to get it wrong, or be unfair to a writer who had poured everything into a novel. Ultimately, you can only judge the books in front of you, and do your utmost to pay attention, read closely, do them justice, give them a chance. I read most of mine electronically, as it happens, because I feared I was getting repetitive stress injuries from clutching heavy books for days on end. This had an unexpected advantage: it made my reading mostly anonymous. I often didn't remember the gender, and didn't know the ethnicity, of the author I was reading. I simply assessed the book, to the best of my ability. That's the job.
I'm pleased that our longlist had so many funny books, and that we rejected the invidious false dichotomy that pretends to distinguish between "readable" and "literary" books. All books are readable, by definition; some are more demanding than others. We discussed throughout our meetings the fact that this judging process asks of books something they're not really designed for: to be read three times in a row by people probing for weakness. Most books just crumble under that kind of pressure: only the most rich, the most layered, continue to dazzle and reveal ever more. There were two that we all agreed did just that: Ali Smith's How to Be Both and Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. We all loved them both, but one had to win. I think Narrow Road is a magnificent book, and I hope everyone sees in it the grandeur we do. Now that this amazing, challenging, rewarding process is finished, I can get on with abolishing institutional sexism. I'm just waiting on the paperwork.
