Booker Prize thoughts

There’s been a bit of a hoo-ha in the world of books this week, thanks to the judging panel for this year’s Booker Prize insisting on awarding the prize to two authors instead of one – Margaret Atwood for The Testaments, and Bernardine Evaristo for Girl, Woman, Other.

I’ve just finished Girl, Woman, Other, and read The Testaments very recently, so I’ve been particularly interested in the controversy around the awarding of the prize over the last few days (and I would say I usually don’t pay very close attention to literary prizes!).

As far as I can gather, there are a few reasons why some people have been up in arms about it, the main ones being that the decision broke the prize’s rules, and that this is the first time a black female author has been awarded the prize, with comments from some that Evaristo’s achievement has been diminished by the decision to award it to Atwood, a white woman.

Yet, with an ethos similar to that of the Great British Bake-Off (well, in theory… don’t get me started on this year’s series), the whole point of the prize is to honour authors based only on the quality of the work nominated. The Booker website says its aim is to “reward the finest in fiction, highlighting great books to readers and transforming authors’ careers”. (So this article by one of the judges, Afua Hirsch, who refers to judging “the titanic career, the contribution to culture” of Atwood, is rather interesting.)

On that front, I believe that Girl, Woman, Other is superior to The Testaments and should have won the prize on its own.

I did enjoy Atwood’s novel and appreciated the relevance of its themes to the real-life chaos going on around the world today, but I didn’t take to it in quite the same way as The Handmaid’s Tale, and had some issues with the build-up to the climax at the end. It was possibly a case of me going into it with very high expectations after all the hype and anticipation, and being slightly disappointed as a result.

In contrast, Girl, Woman, Other mesmerised me from the moment I started reading it and is definitely one of my books of the year. The style – a fusion of poetry and prose – is unusual but highly effective, as is the structure, with each section focusing on one character and almost being short stories in themselves, despite being part of a narrative that spans the entire book. I felt like I got to know each character inside out, whereas a couple of the protagonists in The Testaments seemed a little vague or out of reach for me. It’s such a brilliant, honest portrayal of life in Britain as a woman (or non-binary person, in the case of one character), and especially of the vastly different experiences that women of colour in particular have.

To me, there’s no real contest between the two. However, there are lots of people out there who feel just as strongly about The Testaments as I do about Girl, Woman, Other – and others who think neither should’ve won.

As succinctly outlined in a brief book group scene in Girl, Woman, Other, there’s a whole other debate to be had about whether it’s possible to ‘objectively’ decide that one book is definitely of a higher quality than another, as opposed to believing a book to be good because it speaks to you on a personal level more than something else – regardless of how well it might be seen to be written in general. And who should decide whether a book is good, anyway? Critics, judges, other writers, the public?

I’m certainly capable of liking one book mainly because it seems well-written compared with other books I’ve read, and then liking another mainly because it echoes my own thoughts and experiences (or because it introduces me to experiences I’ve never known). I don’t think we have to be exclusively in one camp or the other for all the books we ever read.

If all of the Booker judges felt that both books were equally brilliant regardless of which side of the debate they’re on, then all we can do as readers is find out for ourselves whether we think they’re right or not. But no doubt the controversy will rumble on for a while yet!