Tag Archives: novels

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Booker Prize 2012 – controversy free??

According to Sir Peter Stothard,  the chairman of this year’s panel,  the 2012 Man Booker Prize will be “controversy free.” By that he means free from the accusations of ‘dumbing down’  that surrounded last year’s awards when the judges announced they wanted books that had a high ‘readability’ factor.

So how are we meant to interpret the way this year’s prize will be determined?

Some academic heavyweights have been brought into the judging panel to lend gravitas but the figures from the entertainment world are still in evidence – presumably to ensure that the reading tastes of the ordinary man/woman in the street can still be reflected. Does that mean we will end up with a list of books that people actually want  to read – or feel they should read so they can keep up with conversation around the supper party table in some leafy London suburb?

The judges undoubtedly have  a difficult balancing act ahead of them –  if they choose books the academy world loves but are deemed ‘difficult’ to read, the sales boost much desired by publishers, will not materialise. Sales of the 2011 shortlisted titles – a list considered to have a higher ‘readability’ factor than previous years – were more than double the level of the 2010 short listed books.

Stothard’s comments may have been designed to placate the literary cognoscenti and in doing so, fend off the threat that a rival prize  will be established. Until we see the shortlisted titles, we won’t know whether he has succeeded. One thing is sure however, the idea of a controversy free year will not be all that welcomed by the publishing companies representing the authors of shortlisted titles. For them, all controversy (which translates into column inches in print or electronic ink) represents free exposure for their product. The greater the level of controversy, the more the reading public could feel compelled to go out and actually buy the book even if it’s merely to find out what all the fuss is about.

So a year in which the shortlist doesn’t attract comment, will not please the commercial interests that encircle award schemes like the Booker; the Orange Prize and the Costa Book Awards to the increasingly close tie up between entertainment world and books (think Oprah Book Club; Richard and Judy etc). Maybe Stothard is simply tilting at windmills?

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Getting to know P H Newby

All I knew about PH Newby when I began reading Something to Answer For,  was that he was the first winner of the Booker Prize. 

The short biography on the Booker site didn’t enlighten me much further since it contained just the bare facts: born 1918 in Crowborough, Sussex, Newby was a private in a Medical Corps Unit during World War 2 and served first in France and then in Egypt.  After his release from active duty in December 1942, he taught English Literature at Fouad 1st University, Cairo. When his first novel, A Journey into the Interior(1946) was published, he returned to England.  He joined the BBC in 1949, beginning as a radio producer and going on to become successively Controller of the Third Programme and Radio Three, Director of Programmes (Radio), and finally Managing Director, BBC Radio before his retirement in 1978. He was awarded  a CBE for his work as Managing Director of BBC Radio.

Despite what most people would have considered a demanding job, he was a prolific writer, at one time producing a new book every year. His rate of output apparently was one of the reasons why other writers dismissed him as a second rate artist. Literature was meant to be crafted slowly and painstakingly in the mode of Flaubert, not rattled out like a production factory, they sniffed. Little wonder that Graham Greene called Newby  “A fine writer who has never had the full recognition he deserves. ” 

It was left to Newby’s friend, Anthony Thwaite to delve beneath the surface and to disclose something of the man’s character.  In an insightful – and touching – obituary, Thwaite called Newby “One of the best English novelists of the second half of the century”

Thwaite recalled their early encounters which began in 1954,when Newby was already an established figure in the literary circles at the BBC and Thwaite was an Oxford undergraduate. Later the two became colleagues at the BBC.

” I was always aware of two things: his quiet, precise defence of high standards, and his equally quiet, precise caution,” said Thwaite. “Some of my colleagues put too much emphasis on the second of these in Newby, as if he were some sort of inhuman litmus placed between anything new and the noisy condemnatory world out there beyond the microphone. I never found this so. I found he was a man with whom one could equably discuss heterodox things; and he could give way.”

According to Thwaite, 1942 was a turning-point in Newby’s life. He was seconded by the Army to be a lecturer in English literature at Fuad 1st University, and remained there until 1946. He drew on that experience of Egypt  intermittently for the rest of his life. The extravagances of Arabic-English, in which volatile feelings and a relish for rhetoric combine, fascinated him. ‘Everything was extreme, and he quietly revelled in the extremities,’ commented Thwaite.

Egypt was the backdrop for many of his books even in his later years, against which he played out his characteristic theme of  the discovery of a man’s self through a journey or quest that he forces himself, or is forced, to take.

Where to Find More 

It’s rather a scant bibliography but here’s what I’ve found so far

  • Frederick R. Karl, “A Search for P. H. Newby,” in his A Reader’s Guide to the Contemporary English Novel (reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.; © 1961, 1962, 1971, 1972 by Frederick R. Karl), Farrar, Straus, 1962, pp. 269-73.
  • Walter Allen, in his The Modern Novel: In Britain and the United States (copyright © 1964 by Walter Allen; published by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. in a paperback edition and used with their permission), Dutton, 1964, pp. 266-67.
  • E. C. Bufkin, “Quest in the Novels of P. H. Newby,” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. VIII, No. 1, 1965, pp. 51-62.
  • Stanley Poss, “Manners and Myths in the Novels of P. M. Newby,” inCritique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XII, No. 1, 1970, pp. 5-19.
  •  Obituary: The Independent, Obituary, 9 September 1997
  • http://www.phnewby.net/articles/ (extracts from some of Newby’s lectures and interviews)