The Booker in the 1970s: 10 novels that are well worth rediscovering, five decades later

In the 1970s, its first full and turbulent decade, the Booker Prize was still finding its feet. It was a decade of short shortlists (only four books in 1972 and 1973, and just two in 1975), the first joint winners (in 1974), and the prize’s most controversial moment, when 1972 winner John Berger used his acceptance speech to attack the prize’s sponsors and donate his winnings to the British Black Panther Movement.

It was a less onerous period for judges, who had to read around 60-80 novels – today’s judges typically have twice as many to get through. But strong opinions remained – in 1972, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Odd Girl Out was a book, according to judge George Steiner, that ‘puts one off sex’. A year earlier, Malcolm Muggeridge had resigned from the judging panel, denouncing most of the entries as ‘mere pornography’.

Despite the challenges faced, the shortlists from the 1970s are of exceptionally high quality, and here we offer a selection of some shortlisted novels from the decade that are essential volumes for any keen reader’s library. (And one from the first Booker year, 1969, for completeness.)

John Brown’s Body by A.L. Barker (shortlisted, 1970)

‘I am a fanatical admirer of A.L. Barker,’ said Rebecca West. ‘If you cannot read her, it is your fault. You should ask your vet to put you down.’ No surprise then, that when West was a Booker judge in 1970, Barker’s novel John Brown’s Body made the shortlist after being called in by the judges.

The novel is about two people locked in deadly alignment. Marise has moved into a new flat with husband Jack, who is no feminist: ‘Having a silly, pretty wife cut a bigger dash than having an expensive car.’ But the man upstairs, Ralph, is a murderer, according to Marise’s uncle Fred. Ralph has troubles of his own – he’s covering for a colleague who embezzled money – but Marise becomes convinced he really is a killer. ‘Those were murderer’s arms, they did not end in pity or in shopping baskets.’

A.S. Byatt was a fan, too, but warns ‘you couldn’t form a cult around [Barker’s] novels … they are idiosyncratic and quietly estranged from the common’. This is only partly true: there’s a sensibility in John Brown’s Body that will appeal to readers of Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge or Bernice Rubens. It’s amused, sinister, unclubbable.

Marise becomes obsessed with the ‘killer’ upstairs, flirting with him and courting her own destruction, like Lise in Spark’s The Driver’s Seat. Where will it all end? At one point in John Brown’s Body, a doctor describes delivering a baby: ‘Here’s a brand new creature, a perfect being. What will we make of him? What will he make of himself?’ What the world makes us into is just what Barker’s book is about.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (shortlisted, 1971)

Taylor’s novels are now regarded as modern classics, but the Booker Prize recognised her work at the time. Mrs Palfrey is a classic boarding-house novel (see also Mrs Eckdorf, above), where the author brings a bunch of eccentric loners together and sets them running for our delight. The widowed Mrs Palfrey moves into the Claremont Hotel (‘Reduced winter rates. Excellent cuisine’), which is a sort of God’s waiting room, to see out her days. 

Mrs Palfrey struggles to fill her days of retirement, finding that ‘as she got older, she looked at her watch more often, and it was always earlier than she had thought it would be. When she was younger, it was always later.’ The book also offers a Booker cross-pollination: shortlisted author and judge Paul Bailey, who knew Taylor slightly, provided the inspiration for the character of Ludo, a young man Mrs Palfrey befriends.

Mrs Palfrey failed to win partly because judge Saul Bellow patronised the book as ‘one of those little tinkling teacup things that the British always do so well,’ yet there is probably no other novel on this list that balances comedy and tragedy so acutely. Taylor was a private person who did not enjoy talking about her work. When admirer Elizabeth Jane Howard interviewed her on TV, ‘I had prepared some thirty questions to ask her about her writing – to be on the safe side. It wasn’t: we got through those questions in about a minute and a half, since Mrs Taylor answered everything with two of the shortest words in the English language.’

Ending Up by Kingsley Amis (shortlisted, 1974)

Future Booker winner Amis’s eleventh novel was never likely to win the prize, given the controversy of his wife Elizabeth Jane Howard being on the judging panel. But it’s a short, sharp delight, an entertaining yet sobering account of how, as we grow older, we don’t necessarily get wiser.

Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage in Suffolk is occupied by five septuagenarians – and one terrier who, in dog years, is almost as old as the humans. Bernard and Shorty – a male couple who met in the army – are joined by Bernard’s sister Adela, as well as George (whose aphasia means he struggles to find words) and Marigold.

The plot builds to Christmas celebrations. En route the residents argue about their ailments – Bernard’s ‘prolonged and painful sessions’ on the toilet; Shorty’s failing memory which, when he reads a novel, ‘lent the narrative an air of deep mystery’ – and are visited by the ‘much despised and much in demand’ local doctor, who visits them room to room like a postman.

This is a more nuanced portrait of ageing than Amis’s best friend Philip Larkin’s poem ‘The Old Fools’, published the same year. There’s glee in the portrait of Bernard’s childish pranks – setting off a stink bomb and pretending it’s Marigold at the toilet, re-enacting his army training with a water pistol in the forest – and there’s nothing quite like the sound of Kingsley Amis working up a riff on one character’s linguistic foibles or another’s secret drinking. Ending Up is a tribute to the desire to carry on, ‘even when there was nothing to carry on until’.

Peter Smart’s Confessions by Paul Bailey (shortlisted, 1977)

A zestful comedy, bursting with life, about a man who wants to die? The Booker Library contains many surprises. Peter Smart is a failing actor, looking back on how he got here, from his vanishing father to his all-mouth-and-trousers mother. ‘If a bomb fell this minute and you were hit, the whole street would see the state of your vest and your pants and my name would be mud.’ There’s his mother’s lover, Dr F Leonard Cottie (‘Don’t allow [your bowels] to be capricious. Tell them, and tell them firmly, when to discharge their load’), whose terrible autobiography is ‘the book that stopped a thousand doors’. And there’s the camp, eccentric Neville Drake: ‘I can tell at a glance if a person’s knickers are fragrant.’ 

Even without the story and the emotional depth of Peter’s slow unpeeling of his life – and the seriousness beneath the frivolity – this book would be a pleasure to read, conveying the spark of fun Paul Bailey took in writing it. Peter Smart’s Confessions has all the best qualities of Bailey in full flight: sprightly dialogue worthy of Alan Bennett or Victoria Wood (Bailey’s background in the theatre probably helped), a cast of grotesque characters for whom we nonetheless feel empathy, and most of all a mother that one contemporary reviewer said was ‘awful enough to be able to bat for England for meanness’. (Bailey had a larger-than-life mother of his own, as readers of his fantastic memoir An Immaculate Mistake will know.)

Bailey’s novel would have been a worthy winner in a very strong shortlist, and perhaps could have been if not for the chair, Philip Larkin, who (according to Susan Hill) barely spoke to the other judges. He did however threaten to jump out of a window if his chosen book didn’t win. And so Paul Bailey did not win, while Paul Scott did.

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (shortlisted, 1979)

This is a bruising, brutal book, entirely unsentimental, as evidenced by its famous opening line: ‘The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’ It is also unquestionably a literary masterpiece, which is filled with vivid characters, tells a complex story, and digresses routinely into dazzling explorations on power, status and subjugation: the essence of the history of humankind.

The narrator is Salim, who sets up a shop in an unnamed central African country, at ‘the bend in the river … a natural meeting place’. He starts trading as he wants to be a part of his own history, as Africa’s colonial powers flee and the people’s desire to destroy the remnants of colonialism spills over into wider destruction.

Naipaul’s depiction of chaos in the continent (‘Africa was big. The bush muffled the sound of murder, and the muddy rivers and lakes washed the blood away’) has seen him criticised as an apologist for colonialism. But Naipaul recognises no morality but realism, in beautifully worked sentences that nonetheless appal us with their depictions of corruption, the rise of a dictator in ‘the Big Man’, and love that turns to betrayal.

By 1979 Naipaul had already won the Booker Prize once, for In a Free State, which may have swayed the jury against him this time. One judge, Hilary Spurling, said that others on the panel opposed this ‘documentary fiction’ winning, and so the prize went to ‘everybody’s second choice’. Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore is the polar opposite of A Bend in the River: subtle and oblique, not direct and bombastic; quiet rather than in-your-face; and its success opened the Booker to a different type of winner. Naipaul, never a modest man, was not deterred: his agent had thought A Bend in the River too ‘cerebral’ and sold it for a low sum, but it was a great success, and, Naipaul wrote, ‘I had the satisfaction of leaving the agent very soon after.’