The 21st anniversary of the Booker Prize compels some reflection on its extraordinary success in attracting public attention to the literary novel. As is well known, this success was not immediately achieved. In its first decade, the prize had relatively little impact on the sales or public visibility of the winner, and still less effect for the shortlisted candidates. But in the 1980s it has gone from strength to strength, and is now undoubtedly the most important single event in the British literary calendar. 

There are various theories about why and how the prize suddenly began to grip the popular imagination in the last decade. A key decision was undoubtedly made in 1979, requiring the judges to choose the winner on the day of the presentation, after the announcement of the shortlist. Previously, the winner was selected at the same time as the shortlist and kept secret so that the publisher concerned could reprint the book before announcement, but apparently it was nearly always leaked. The new arrangement increased the drama and suspense of the prize. 

More importantly, it encouraged bookmakers to accept bets on the result. The British, being a nation of gamblers, sat up and took notice. Since we are also a nation of television addicts, the increasing participation of that medium from 1982 onwards enhanced public consciousness of the prize. All these factors played their part in the runaway success of the 1980s. But it is no coincidence, surely, that this decade was also the decade of the enterprise culture, a market-led economy, and the expansion and deregulation of high finance. These things, as we all know, have had their effect on bookselling, and the growing importance of the Booker Prize is part of that effect.

Now the novel has always been a literary form with peculiarly close links with industrial capitalism. Perhaps I may take the liberty of quoting one of my own characters, Dr Robyn Penrose in Nice Work, on this subject: ‘The novelist invents a product which consumers didn’t know they wanted until it was made available, manufactures it with the help of purveyors of risk capital known as publishers, and sells it in competition with makers of marginally differentiated products of the same kind…The novel was the first mass-produced artefact.’ 

This is something of a caricature, but broadly true. Certainly the rise of the novel, in the 18th century, played a crucial role in making writers into self-employed professionals, rather than freelances dependent on patronage. In the 19th century, some of the greatest novelists, like Charles Dickens and George Eliot were also among the most popular and became relatively rich on the proceeds of their work. Dickens was a commissioning magazine editor as well as a writer of fiction, and took a keen interest in the entrepreneurial side of fiction publishing. George Eliot, using her consort George Lewes as a kind of literary agent secured very high rewards for her very high-minded books. Apart from the constraints on their treatment of sexuality, the Victorian novelists did not seem to feel that they were compromising their artistic standards in writing for a broadly based audience.

But, as is well-known, around the turn of the century a split began to develop between literary fiction and popular or middlebrow fiction, between novelists who saw themselves primarily as artists, and novelists who saw themselves primarily as entertainers. This was partly a consequence of the impact of modernism on the novel as a literary form. Developments in the form of the serious, literary novel, made it less accessible to a mass audience than the Victorian classic. The result, according to Peter Keating in The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1975-1914 ‘the failure of virtually every novelist of any innovative importance at the turn of the century to earn a living by writing fiction’.

Some of the printing and sales figures Dr Keating gives to substantiate this remark are poignant to contemplate, when one considers, how many hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies of these works there must be in circulation today, especially in the educational market. Henry James’ The Ambassadors, for instance, one of his mature masterpieces, was issued in 1903 in a printing of only three-and-a-half thousand copies, of which 341 were remaindered – and there was no paperback edition to follow in those days. It took five years to sell 3,000 copies of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and 15 years to sell 2,000 copies of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. It took James Joyce nine years to get his first work of fiction, Dubliners, published, and it sold exactly 379 copies, for which he received no payment at all. And when he finally wrote a novel that large numbers of people wanted to read, Ulysses, he was prevented from reaping his just reward by censorship and piracy, and was dependent through most of his working life on the extraordinary generosity of Harriet Shaw Weaver. In short, the writer generally considered to be the greatest modern novelist reverted to a pre-capitalist model of the writer’s profession, based on patronage.

If I may be personal and autobiographical for a moment: when I first started writing fiction in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it never crossed my mind that I might make my living as a novelist. Common sense told me that. For my first novel, received an advance of 75 pounds, in three instalments, spread over two years. It was not a free-spending publishing house. I do not recall ever being taken out to lunch, and when went to America in 1964, they corresponded with me by surface mail. Since the firm is now defunct, I cause no embarrassment by these revelations. In any case, I was well satisfied. 

Being published, getting recognition and favourable reviews, was the limit of my ambition. Perhaps it still is for most new writers of literary fiction. But now they may aspire to something more. The climate of the 1980s has created a new phenomenon, the literary bestseller, often written by a comparatively young or previously unknown writer, and the Booker Prize has contributed to that climate.

But we do seem to have reached a very critical point in the social history of the novel, and the Booker Prize is now situated on the dangerous, glamorous interface between the two sets of values. The judges do their conscientious best, debating the merits of the books submitted and comparing them according to the criteria of literary criticism. But media interest in the prize, and therefore most public interest, is focused on its lottery-like nature, the known fact that the book that wins now automatically becomes a bestseller – a term that, interestingly enough, entered the language at about the same time, the turn of the century – that a cleavage began to open up between literary and market-oriented fiction. The growing commercial importance of the prize has tended to generate a certain amount of hysteria around the event, and certainly produces considerable psychological strain for writers, publishers, agents and, not least, judges. 

Perhaps this anniversary year is an appropriate moment for all of us who are involved to take stock of the situation, and to ensure that, as the prize goes forward into its next decade, the novel as commodity does not dominate and overshadow the novel as work of art. ‘Art’ said Henry James, ‘lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.’ And that, it seems to me, is what the Booker is essentially about. The media attention, the interviews, the TV coverage, the bookmakers, odds and the bookshop promotions are all part of the event, but they are not, or should not be, the heart of the matter. It is good, not merely that more serious fiction is sold, but that it is read, and talked about. The great achievement of the Booker Prize has been to encourage ‘discussion…curiosity…the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints’ about the literary novel at every level from casual conversation in pubs to more rigorous discussion in adult education seminars and literary journals. The controversy which every year’s shortlist provokes is, to that extent, a healthy symptom.

Judges of literary prizes must be for books or against them, and there is perhaps an inevitable tendency in all prizes awarded by a panel of judges to exclude books which have a potential to provoke a strong negative reaction. I do not see any solution to that problem, for the Booker system of having a changing panel of judges who read all the books submitted in a given year is superior to any known alternative, and has contributed greatly to the esteem in which the prize is held.