The Booker Prize at war: why novelists are drawn to 'the echo and dream of battles'

Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929 as Im Westen nichts Neues (Nothing New on the Western Front), brought its author huge riches, international fame and unimaginable pain. The book recounts Remarque’s experiences in the trenches of the First World War, where he saw active service before being peppered with shrapnel in 1917 and seeing out the war from a military hospital bed.  

The visceral nature of the book is superbly captured in Edward Berger’s 2022 film, which recently won an unprecedented seven BAFTAs with Oscars glory almost certain to follow. It is the third movie version of the novel - with the first made just a year after publication - and there have been several television and radio adaptations too. These variations are testament not just to the book’s power but to the universality of the experiences it contains - the well-worn and often hollow phrases of the pain, horror and futility of war. 

All Quiet was translated into English in its year of publication and became an instant international bestseller. Remarque soon changed his name from the more Teutonic Remark to disassociate himself from German militarism and wrote several other books that dealt with the war. In 1933, Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels declared Remarque’s books to be ‘unpatriotic’ and banned them in Germany. The author left the country to live in Switzerland and his citizenship was revoked. In 1943, however, the Nazis had their revenge: Remarque’s sister, Elfriede Scholz, who had remained in Germany, was arrested and tried for ‘undermining morale’. The court president made clear the real motivation for the prosecution: ‘Your brother is unfortunately beyond our reach - you, however, will not escape us.’ Elfriede was beheaded. All because of a war novel. 

If Remarque lived through the experiences he described, it is little surprise that novelists who have had no first-hand experience of battle and conflict should turn to war as a subject too. Conflict offers a heightened atmosphere where humanity can be depicted in extremis and with normal human agency tested in ways peace cannot offer. It takes a degree of writerly bravery to take on a wartime story and face the dangers of bathos and cliché that wait for the slightest maladroitness.  

Over the course of the Booker Prize’s history, numerous authors have set themselves to the task. Although P.H. Newby, the Prize’s inaugural winner in 1969, had served in France, the Middle East and Egypt during the Second World War, he chose not to make war the subject of Something to Answer For, but war and its effects are a key theme in a cluster of winning novels. J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987), Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (1982), Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995), and Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2014) all ring to what the 19th-century writer Alfred de Vigny called ‘the echo and the dream of battles’. 

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road is the final book in her own Regeneration trilogy. Here, however, it is not such macro themes as war hastening imperial decline or questioning the morality of colonialism that drive the narrative, but war’s effects on the individual. Her central figures are Billy Prior, a working-class soldier during the First World War who suffers from shellshock, and the real-life psychoanalyst William Rivers who specialised in treating the affliction. The war is a continual presence, a menacing entity that sits loweringly to one side for much of the book, but which eventually devours Prior when he returns to the front and dies in battle, alongside the poet Wilfred Owen, just a few days before Armistice.

The First World War appears in many of Barker’s books and although she has never drawn an explicit link, at the time of writing The Ghost Road, the Bosnian War was reminding Europeans of the horrors that took place on the Continent only some 80 years earlier (Bosnia would itself feature in a later novel, Double Vision). ‘Novelists are sort of vultures, aren’t they?’ she has said, and contemporary reports of atrocities and psychological damage can be felt in the traumas she describes in her First World War trilogy.  

As with J.L. Carr in A Month in the Country, shortlisted for the prize in 1980, beneath the human strand of Barker’s novel sits a plea for understanding and sympathy for people who have been faced with unimaginable events. Carr was just two when the First World War started, Barker was born with two years of the Second World War still to run, so both grew up among survivors who bore physical and mental wounds, and the effects of war were tangible throughout both writers’ early lives. 

Perhaps the greatest unimaginable event of the 20th century was the Holocaust, and this too has been tackled by Booker writers. Schindler’s Ark, which won the 1982 Prize, was a book Thomas Keneally felt compelled to write. He had gone into a shop in Beverly Hills to buy a briefcase and, while chatting there, it emerged that the owner, Poldek Pfefferberg, was one of the Jews saved by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler.

When Pfefferberg learned that Keneally was a novelist, he persuaded him to write the story. Although Keneally’s father served in the Royal Australian Air Force during the war, the child novelist-to-be passed the war years safely in New South Wales. It makes the imaginative achievement of Schindler’s Ark all the more remarkable; not only was the world he portrayed in it thousands of miles distant, in a foreign land with alien sensibilities, but Keneally was not Jewish and indeed had trained for the Catholic priesthood.