DEBATED, disputed, often derided, at times righteously denounced as most observers are by now aware, about the most interesting dimension to literary prizes tends to be the books that fail to win them. Exclusion from a short list might almost be a guarantee of quality. Of course it is fun for the rest of us to witness writers either rising to, or collapsing under, the pressures of the competitive situation. Stories about yet another massive advance being offered to a writer before the book in question has even been written, have lost their novelty. Prizes, it appears, are taken about as seriously as reviews are not very, if at all, but they do generate chat. Sponsors are often big corporations with cash to burn, who enjoy being associated with literary prizes as a heightened form of respectability. And eligible writers are not complaining.
But sponsors have now decided the bigger the better. The problem is just how big? And when exactly does big become excessive or merely vulgar?
Tomorrow the first winner of the IMPAC Prize will be announced and all the fuss has surrounded the money £100,000 to the winner selected from the seven contenders. IMPAC, the world's largest productivity improvement company, has pitched its entire launch year campaign on the size of the prize, rather than on the respective merits of the contenders.
Now entering its 27th year, the Booker Prize remains fixed at £20,000, a reasonable and realistic figure. The £1,500 five category Whitbread Prize with its additional overall £20,000 winner also continues to represent literary show biz at its most sane. The Irish Times International fiction prize and Irish literature prizes for poetry, fiction and non fiction, carry a total prize fund of £22,500.
I would certainly have preferred to see IMPAC sub divide its famous £100,000 into poetry, fiction and non fiction categories or to see the money being ploughed into Irish sport or youth theatre. With IMPAC, the literary prize racket now enters the Never Never Land of art world prices, a place where the bizarre and the vulgar began walking hand in hand a long time ago. Achievement must always be recognised, and artistic achievement encouraged. But do prize sponsor venously believe that writers sit down to write with the sole intention of winning prizes? Awards are certainly useful. But so too is a little common sense.
Ghosts by John Banville
Of the seven contenders, with no American nor English writers among them, Australian David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (Chatto, 1993) and John Banville's Ghosts (Secker, 1993) are light years removed from the other five in terms of language, artistry, imaginative power and sheer craft. Banville as the home boy may be at a disadvantage. It might look strange should this major Irish international prize begin its life with an Irish writer.
Characteristically witty and written in a tone of elegant self irony, Ghosts is an engaging exploration of the mutual interaction of art, reality, time, and the conflicting natures of passion and happiness. The wise, vulnerable and self loathing narrator, a Caliban of sorts in an inventive variation of The Tempest, oversees the arrival of a an unusual group of castaways on the island where he himself has come to live out his shame. The second part in a remarkable trilogy begun with Mejisto (1986), his finest work to date, and continued with Booker short listed, The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts, the most deliberately artistic of the contenders unfolds through the marvellous shifts of light and mood contained in its own twilight landscapes and the constant changes reflected in water and spirit images with which this "now you see it, now you don't" narrative abounds.
Sad and funny, erudite and questioning, Ghosts would prove a worthy if a possibly embarrassing winner for the ambitious organisers. Still Banville is an Irish writer with an international reputation.
Remembering Baylon by David Malouf
Remembering Babylon is a truly beautiful novel by the author of The Imaginary Life (1978) and The Great World (1991), whose prose has always possessed the lyricism of poetry. Short listed for the 1993 Booker and Irish Times International Fiction Prizes, IMPAC has the opportunity of honouring a superbly written, movingly humane work of immense integrity, warmth and compassion.
It opens with the arrival of a frightened, barely human creature in a mid 19th century Queensland settlement. Pathetic, vulnerable Gem my Fairley, castaway as a boy and raised by Aborigines, now represents all that the settlers fear of the native culture. "It was the mixture of monstrous strangeness and unwelcome likeness that made Gemmy Fairley so disturbing to them, since at any moment he could show either one face or the other." Malouf's settlers are people, who having left their native Scotland, find themselves part of a landscape and a history they feel they will never belong to.
Exile, alienation, identity and the transposing of cultures feature in a narrative which moves beyond individual character and becomes the story of Australia and the hopeful and despairing mixed bunch who arrived from else where to become a part of its history. It also a subtle examination of the realities of colonialism and the bullyingly insecure defiance of the colonialist. Could it be third time lucky for this writer?
The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom.
Cees Nooteboom's The Following Story (1991 Harvill 1994) brilliantly translated by Ina Rilke is the wise funny, truthful and philosophically acute account of one man's private, "musings, thoughts and memories. Hermann Mussert, a former classics teacher, is caught in a half life between his thinking and feeling selves the one lying on his bed in his Amsterdam apartment, the other in the Lisbon hotel room in which 20 years before he acted out an episode from his only love affair, he tells himself. "I know, I must settle down to the business of memory."
Possessing a well developed sense of irony about himself as well as a disciplined understanding of the multiple concepts of time, reality and change, he explains the difference between gods and men "Gods can change themselves, humans can only be changed." This is a precise, witty, elegiac, virtuoso curiosity posing endless possibilities. Its literary key is probably Ovid's Metamorphoses. Still for all its many merits and it is an outstanding work of European as well as Dutch fiction Nooteboom's 96 page long kaleidoscopic puzzle, confession and testimony of tragic inertia should it wind works out at just over £1,000 a page. Now that would be the ultimate literary gimmickry.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by Jose Saramago.
Veteran Portugese writer, Jose Saramago, is represented by The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Lisbon, 19.91 Harvill 1993). As the title suggests, it is the story of Jesus, from conception to death on a cross. Written in a wryly formal prose translated by Giovanni Pontiero, it is a mixture of Christian history as we know it, with some speculation such as Jesus was the troubled eldest of nine children his father Joseph was also crucified and that Jesus lived with Mary Magdalene and knowing asides about women as second class citizens.
While it may have a universal appeal, this subversive, occasionally polemical re write of a familiar story is also capable of offending some readers. Saramago is a versatile and imaginative European writer who would have been far better represented by his best book, The Year of The Death of Ricardo Reis (Lisbon 1984 Harvill, 1992) or The Stone Raft (Harvill, 1994.) Should you like the idea of reading about Jesus bickering with his mother and younger siblings, it may amuse. Despite its irreverent liberties, when one has finished it, it seems oddly forgettable. If pastiche such as this wins, then Jesus would be advised to sue.
A Way in the World by V.S.Naipaul.
Indo Trinidadian V.S. Naipaul's A Way In The World (Heinemann, 1994) is a ponderously disconnected compendium of bits and pieces, largely haphazard sketches and is yet again burdened by an account of Naipaul's apparent obsession, his version of his slow climb to literary recognition. Always partial to weighty pronouncements, Naipaul declares in this book, "Narrative has its strictures. It requires at from A Wayin The World.
Whereas his previous non novel The Enigma of Arrival (1987), a unique, repetitive exploration of the landscape of his adopted country England, reverberates with an urgent, if elegantly, expressed sense of purpose and represents the later Naipaul at his best, this book of random jottings fails through his preoccupation with retelling his own story. A big name but even at 368 pages, it is a small, narrow book.
The Laws by Connie Palmen.
Personal obsession is also the theme of Connie Palmen's pretentious self exploration, The Laws (Holland, 1990 New York, 1993). Marie Deniet is a smug philosophy student who tells her small story by recording the incredibly boring accounts of seven relationships with seven men.
It is a cryptic, almost repulsive and extremely derivative performance. The self congratulatory narrator says things such as "Hugo asks me why I am studying philosophy. I dawdle answering. I hesitate whether I will say In order to practice dying or Because I long for a personal destiny. Both replies are equally beautiful." Or "I want to be good. I'm so tired of acquiring a character." Winner of the European Novel of the Year Award, it typifies "clever fiction" at its most and and the shortcomings of literary prizes.
Away by Jane Urquhart.
Even after a second reading, I am still bewildered as to how Jane Urquhart's cloyingly unconvincing Away (Canada, 1993), a weak supermarket shlock romance about Ireland, the fairies, silent women and romance across the generations leading to Canada, ever got published, never mind short listed for anything serious. Considering the quality of Canadian fiction, this nomination is surprising.
