As I entered the bowels of the Guildhall for the Man Booker Prize dinner, there was
no escaping his plump, butcher's face. Henry VIII and the Barber Surgeons, which
hangs on a wall near the cloakroom, was painted by Hans Holbein around 1540.
That's around the time Hilary Mantel's extraordinary trilogy of novels about the
king's right-hand-man Thomas Cromwell, which began with the Man Booker-winning
Wolf Hall in 2009 and continued with the Man Booker-winning Bring Up the Bodies
last night, will finally end: by then Cromwell had fallen from grace and been
executed.
During the dinner all the discussion was about whether the judges could dare
give it to Mantel once more and for a novel in the same series – something
unprecedented in Booker history. There was plenty of support for the other books
on the shortlist as well. Ben Okri, winner for The Famished Road in 1990, told
me that he loved the poetic beauty of Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening
Mists. I overheard one former Booker judge go into raptures over Alison Moore's
The Lighthouse. Sophie Lewis, editor-at-large of the small publishing house And
Other Stories, had flown in from Rio to support her author Deborah Levy's
Swimming Home. Will Self's Umbrella divided opinion: some thought it a
masterpiece, others couldn't get past the first page. Someone else hadn't read
his books but recognised him from Shooting Stars.
This year has been regarded as the “experimental” or “highbrow” year in
comparison to last year’s apparent collection of easy reads. But just how
wrongheaded those definitions are was brought home to me when the person sitting
to my left said that she had finally read all the books on the shortlist after
trying every time for the last 11 years. Bad writing is hard to read and good
writing, if not necessarily easy, is certainly more worth the effort.
When the chair of the judges Sir Peter Stothard announced that Hilary Mantel
had the prize time there was an audible well of approval from the audience. “You
wait 20 years for the Booker Prize and two come along at once,” said Mantel, but
unlike some other winners’ speeches in recent years there was no hint of
haughtiness. She has an appealing otherworldliness about her. As if the world of
prizes and interviews is far less interesting than the fictional one she has
created.Which of course it is.
One of the judges told me that Bring Up the Bodies was in a tradition of
“mythopoetic Englishness”. I said that I could not remember a modern novel whose
author clearly took so much pleasure in its creation.
No comments:
Post a Comment