Beryl Bainbridge was never robbed

Bainbridge’s repeated disappointments as a shortlisted author resulted from bad luck, not conspiracy It’s easy to see the latest people’s jury Booker vote as a publicity stunt . Not least because (to a certain extent) it is. Yet I’d be surprised if many people object to Beryl Bainbrbidge being the subject of this posthumous attention. It must have been agony to turn up for the award ceremonies in 1973, 1974, 1990, 1996 and 1998 and clap and smile for the cameras when different names were called. It may be too late for her to enjoy the honour but still it feels like some balance has been restored. Her daughter Jojo Davies says: “Beryl did want to win the Booker very much despite her protests to the contrary. We are glad she is finally able to become the bride, no longer the bridesmaid.” I’m not about to argue with that. More contentious, though, is the question of whether Bainbridge ought to have won the prize when she was alive – and why she didn’t. Many think she was robbed. No less an authority than Ion Trewin, the literary director of the Man Booker prizes, says: “Beryl Bainbridge was the greatest novelist of her generation who didn’t win the Man Booker prize, and quite underservedly so.” Some are even more forthright. Paul Bailey, her friend and fellow author said when she died: “She should have won it three or four times – because hers were better than the junk that did win.” Considering that she lost out to books as good as JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur , AS Byatt’s Possession and Stanley Middleton’s neglected but wonderful Holiday , all that seems excessive. So too do most of the suggestions I’ve read about why she might not have won. These are neatly summed up in an essay the Booker authorities have placed on their website, written by Alvaro Ribeiro . Like all the best conspiracy theories, these sound very convincing until you actually know anything at all about the subject. The most notable suggestion is that Beryl Bainbridge’s origins in Liverpool disqualify her from being able to “censure British ways” in the eyes of right-on judges: “In this perceived betrayal from within, we confront that striking characteristic of the Booker prize best described as ‘the Empire strikes back’. This phenomenon allows novelists from the Commonwealth and overseas the privilege to write, as Salman Rushdie (1981), Kazuo Ishiguro (1989), or Michael Ondaatje (1992) do, with impunity as they sharply critique British culture, playing on Britain’s massive sense of postcolonial guilt. But for Bainbridge, a native of Liverpool, to do so quite so insistently makes her into an internal threat. Thus do Booker judges marginalise her, and down she goes at the last hurdle.” I’d go along with that if it weren’t deeply insulting to suggest that – say – a book as good as Midnight’s Children won the award out of some sense of “guilt” rather than its own merit – and if every single person who won in the years Bainbridge was shortlisted weren’t Caucasian. Indeed, when she was first shortlisted in 1973, the winner was JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. That was a book written by an, erm, Liverpudlian and it provided just the kind of critique that poor Dame Beryl supposedly wasn’t allowed to make. The more simple truth is that she was unlucky. Plenty of people consider The Dressmaker her best book, but as Hilary Mantel says in a fond tribute to Bainbridge , that still doesn’t mean it deserved to beat The Siege of Krishnapur. Ribeiro’s other big idea is that Bainbridge’s books were too short. “Booker Prize judges, faced with the gravity of their decision, naturally lean towards the gravitational pull of a big complicated book: Midnight’s Children (1981); Possession (1990); Sacred Hunger (1992); The Blind Assassin (2000).” Hopefully, if you’re a stats nerd like me, you’ll already have noticed that only one of those books ran against Bainbridge – Possession. Once again, it’s an extraordinary book that took on Bainbridge’s novel that year, An Awfully Big Adventure, and won. What’s more, when Bainbridge was in the first stage of her career and writing the kind of short book that Ribeiro claims the judges don’t like, she lost out to two short books: Holiday and The Conservationist. Again, those are both fine novels. So much for providing a coherent explanation for Bainbridge’s misfortune. The more prosaic truth is that there are no real patterns that explain why books win the Booker (beyond the fact that the judges tend to come from the media establishment and don’t like SF unless it’s written by Margaret Atwood). Each year is a lottery. Beryl Bainbridge also had the bad luck to be up against some excellent competitors. Most of the time. Sadly, it was later on in her career, when the Booker bridesmaid jokes must have really begun to sting, that her books were beaten by two singularly unpopular winners: Graham Swift’s Last Orders and Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. “There was only one time that I cared, I think about the fourth time, when I began to kid myself that I would win; everybody said so, all the bets and everything. And that was quite a bit of a shock,” said Bainbridge during an interview for Desert Island Discs in 2008. Ouch! It might not necessarily right any wrongs, but it’s nice to know that she couldn’t lose this time around. Beryl Bainbridge Booker prize Fiction Awards and prizes Sam Jordison guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 20, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.