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Booker judges show an unhealthy disregard for rules


Why not? In the grand scheme of things, why shouldn’t the Booker Prize judges give their gong to two winners instead of one? Sure, the rules explicitly state that “the prize may not be divided or withheld” but, honestly, why keep talking about rules when there are instincts and feelings at play?

Welcome to 2019, when the politics of instinct, the politics of feeling, have come to infect not only our most established democracies, but the hitherto well-mannered and imperturbable world of literary awards, too.

A reminder: the job of the Booker judges is to give the Booker Prize to a single author. That is, finally, the judges’ only job.

If you wonder how I know this, I will reveal that I have been a Booker judge — twice. Choosing one novel out of six magnificent candidates is really difficult. It is also, while we’re at it, nonsensical, since no novelist hopes that his or her book will be compared with another in this way. Readers, after all, don’t think like that. And yet, when you sign up to be a Booker judge, this is what you agree to do, because those are the rules.

On Monday, however, the Booker judges were, it seems, unable to follow the rules. Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival and this year’s chair, said the judges had tried voting to find a winner, but that didn’t work.

Come again? There were five judges, so I’m guessing there was a three to two split. There’s no electoral college to deal with here; it’s not complicated. Whoever gets the most votes wins. Unless, apparently, they don’t, which is how we all ended up with the wholly unsatisfactory result of both Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo winning the prize. I’m not going to get into an argument about which novel “deserved” to win — that’s not the point. A choice needed to be made, and what was made instead was fudge.

But, I say again, why not? Just last month, after all, the UK Supreme Court ruled that Boris Johnson’s suspension of parliament in the run-up to the Brexit deadline was unlawful. The British prime minister’s reaction? That he “profoundly disagreed” with the ruling. Jacob Rees-Mogg, leader of the House of Commons, called the action of the court a “constitutional coup”.

I am not a lawyer or a politician, yet it seems to me that profoundly disagreeing with a Supreme Court ruling is really not an option. As the writer and satirist Armando Iannucci tweeted, the next time you are pulled over for speeding, you should try expressing your highest regard for the police force while profoundly disagreeing with their interpretation of the law and see how far that gets you.

Over on the other side of the Atlantic, things are not much better. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal, House Democrats have issued impeachment inquiry subpoenas to the White House, the Pentagon and Rudy Giuliani, Mr Trump’s personal lawyer.

So will the White House, the Pentagon and Mr Giuliani comply? Nope, nope and nope, comes the answer from all sides. I have always understood that anyone in receipt of a subpoena has to comply. Subpoena: “a writ commanding a person designated in it to appear in court under a penalty for failure”, says the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In Mr Trump’s America, there are no penalties for lying, no fear of asking foreign governments to intervene in domestic politics, no price to be paid for any wrongdoing at all, it seems.

Mr Trump, like the diehard Brexiters who make themselves in his mould, is a master of the politics of instinct. “Make America Great Again!”, “£350m a week for the National Health Service!” The news cycle moves so fast, and sloganeering such as this has infected our discourse so completely, that the boring old rules simply can’t keep up.

In that final Booker meeting, we hear, Gaby Wood, the prize’s literary director, informed the judges that the prize could not be divided. Still, the judges insisted, they would divide the prize. “We took it as a starting point for further discussion,” Mr Florence said. Helena Kennedy, chair of the trustees, was called to deliver the same news. “It was the collective will of the jury to say, ‘we cannot abide by these rules’,” said Mr Florence.

That sentence strikes a chill into my heart. Who else in our society will be allowed to say: it is our collective will that we cannot abide by these rules? It is true, of course, that there are rules that must be challenged and, sometimes, broken. But the rule that there should be a single winner of the Booker Prize is surely not one of them. And I can’t help wondering whether the judges would have been quite so cavalier about their decision in a different political climate.

I know it’s only a literary prize. I know that we have two winners to celebrate now, and not one. And yet, the divided Booker seems a symptom of something darker, too.

The writer is chair of the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize





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