L ouise Doughty, one of the judges of this year’s Man
Booker Prize and a fine novelist herself, said it best. Novelists, she remarked, are generally shyish, observing sorts of people; pushing them on stage, or under a spotlight, is a bit like asking a badger to tap-dance. My tapdancing badger moment began ten weeks ago, when at a computer in an internet café in a remote Swiss valley I discovered that my novel The Northern Clemency had been longlisted for the Booker. The badger went into double time when it got on the shortlist, and now I’m writing on the afternoon of the dinner itself. (I feel quite safe sucking up to Louise, by the way, since by the time this comes out, it will be far too late for sycophancy to make a difference either way.) I might win; I probably won’t: but all in all, I feel like the wrong sort of creature to be under anyone’s gaze. If only there were a proxy I could nominate.
Months ago, we decided to go to Syria for ten days at the end of September, and in the end didn’t see why a little thing like the Booker shortlist and the schedules of publicity should get in the way of that. Unexpectedly, Damascus has the most divine hotels, converted from old Mamluke courtyard houses — the Bait Al Mamlouka, with only eight suites, must be one of the most beautiful hotels in the world, and without a taint of that curiously demoralising ‘luxury’ which is turning up in the most improbable parts of the world. Though not exactly undiscovered, Syria has so few tourists doing the sights that we kept bumping into the Russians we first met around St Simeon Stylites’s basilica at Damascus’s Umayyad mosque two days later, and the coach full of foul-tempered Italians at Basra turned up again, still scowling, at the waterwheels of Hama. No idea why package tours are necessary in this easiest of Middle Eastern countries and, by observation, they don’t seem to add very much to individual human happiness. The country and its people didn’t look, I must say, very much like a member of the Axis of Evil; but a brief reminder of the tragic history of Hama, for instance, and its large-scale destruction by the security forces in 1982 reminds even the most irresponsible tourist where he is. Mind you, some of that divine Mamluke architecture, there or in Cairo, was originally put up by people who would make 20th-century dictators look about as frightening as Fanny Cradock. I’ve never tried to emulate the elegant uniqueness of subject of The Spectator’s own Toby Young, and rather dislike talking about myself or, in any detail, about my books. The telephone rings, and it is a newspaper. Could we come to photograph where you write? OK, but you won’t get anything to make Interiors-addicts salivate. Again: have you ever suffered a bout of stage-rage for a little feature we’re putting together? A third time: what’s your favourite poem, for another l.f.w.p.t? I can’t believe anyone would really be interested in the information that P. Hensher’s favourite poem is ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’. But it seems only polite to answer, and I can see that these features keep the costs of newspapers down. Not many people, even these days, would have the rind to ask to be paid for telling the Daily Telegraph what their favourite poem is.
Off to the Hayward to see its Andy Warhol exhibition, and to face a recurrent dilemma for the viewers of contemporary art. When are you allowed to stop watching a video in an art gallery? This one has, in a single room, all those terrible old movies you always heard about but have never seen — the film of the Empire State Building doing nothing much for eight hours, the film of the bloke sleeping, and so on. If you watched all these films back to back, you would be there for the whole week, and not have been entertained all that much. I conscientiously watched all of them for five minutes each, but felt, afterwards, that half that wouldn’t have affected my enjoyment much.
Novelists are generally nice and collegiate people, unlike poets, who of course all hate each other. The six Booker shortlistees, once brought together, quickly form a bond, starting with rebellious mutterings against a Guardian photographer who wants to stick Sebastian Barry up a ladder in the National Art library. Everyone else, I sense, is rather disappointed with our failure to behave like rival wrestlers with an eye on the cup. But literature, in the end, isn’t a zero-sum game where one writer wins and another one loses. It’s very unlike sport. Foreigners are fond of observing that ‘nobody remembers the one who came second’. That’s demonstrably untrue of literary competitions. Some of the novels I love best in the world are the ones which got shortlisted for, but didn’t win the Booker — Earthly Powers, Ending Up, A Bend in the River, The Beginning of Spring, Lawrence Durrell’s Constance. Reminder to self: keep telling yourself this.
And the next day everything went back to normal, and I got on with reviewing a new life of Gabriel García Márquez for The Spectator.
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