The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 14: The Sea or Arthur & George - the Booker vs the bookies

Last week we crowned the best Booker shortlist ever and this week, we’re going even deeper into that list. In 2005, the odds were on Julian Barnes to win the Booker Prize with Arthur & George but the judges chose The Sea by John Banville. Arthur & George traces the intersecting lives of an obscure solicitor and the world-famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, while The Sea follows a man attempting to escape a recent loss while confronting a past trauma. So, we’re taking a closer look at both books and asking: who was right – the Booker judges or the bookies?

• How do you place a winning bet on the Booker Prize? via The Atlantic

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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James Walton: 

It’s almost too perfect. 

Jo Hamya: 

That is ridiculous, you can’t charge a book with being too perfect. 

James Walton: 

Okay, let me- 

Jo Hamya: 

So the problem with it is that it’s too good? 

James Walton: 

No, no, it’s- 

Jo Hamya: 

I think I win, James. 

Welcome to the Booker Prize Podcast with me, Jo Hamya. 

James Walton: 

And me, James Walton. 

Jo Hamya: 

And today we’re launching an occasional series which we’re calling the Booker versus Bookies. The idea being that we’ll go back to a year when there was a firm bookie’s favourite to win the prize, but it didn’t. So who was right, we’ll be asking, the bookies or the Booker judges? 

James Walton: 

We’ll come to the two books slugging it out today in a minute. But I suppose we should briefly explain, especially for overseas listeners, the possibly strange idea of betting money on a high-minded literary prize. 

Jo, you’re apparently a bit of an expert on this subject, so can you fill in a bit of background? 

Jo Hamya: 

Not really an expert, I’m never gambled in my life, James… 

James Walton: 

But you’re a keen student of Booker history? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. There is a tradition that I think was started by Graham Sharpe at William Hill, of kind of betting on favourite Booker novels to win. It’s a bit like betting on horses except more highbrow. 

And there’s this really interesting interview he gave for The Atlantic, I think around 2013, where he says, while he does read all the books, “I try not to permit my own opinion of them to influence the opening odds.” One year he was convinced that Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell was certainly going to win because it was priced accordingly, but it was beaten. 

I think it’s not uncommon, people bet on Grammy Award shows, Mercury Prize, the Turner Prize for art. So it’s not entirely sort of unaccompanied, it’s not a kind of special case for Booker. But it does hold a lot of sway these days for newspapers, for chat on social media to eventually predict the winner. 

I’m not quite sure how I feel about it personally. I kind of think there’s this chance that it might reduce 13 books on a longlist to this idea, this gamified idea, of only one being special or only one being deservingly spoken about. But then again, I also think to decide a winner you’ve got to talk about all of the novels equally. So I can’t really make up my mind over whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. 

James Walton: 

No. Julian Barnes famously called the Booker once, “Posh bingo,” didn’t he? But then- 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. 

James Walton: 

… he withdrew that when he won, as people tend to do. 

Anyway, thanks very much. So here we are with our first ever the Booker Versus the Bookies. And we thought we’d begin with what we decided was the best ever Booker shortlist, namely 2005, when the winner was John Banville’s The Sea at 10 to one. But the firm favourite was Arthur & George by Julian Barnes at five to four. 

Even though, as you’d expect from the official best ever Booker shortlist, well semi-official, there were plenty of other strong contenders as well, namely On Beauty by Zadie Smith, The Accidental by Ali Smith, A Long Long Way by Sebastian Barry, and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. 

Jo Hamya: 

And there was a pretty strong longlist two, including Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, Rachel Cusk’s In the Fold, Marina Lewycka’s bestselling A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, and Saturday by Ian McEwan. 

James Walton: 

So Jo, do you want to take it away with introducing us to Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, the bookie’s favourite? 

Jo Hamya: 

Arthur & George is sort of the polar opposite to the winning novel that year, The Sea. It revolves around Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, who are both real historical figures. And the really strange crossover between them, it kind of follows them from boyhood almost to both their graves. Edalji was falsely imprisoned for ripping horses. 

James Walton: 

Yeah. A really weird crime, wasn’t it? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, really strange. And I think got sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. Conan Doyle intervened over what he thought was a miscarriage of justice, and Conan Doyle had him pardoned after three years when George sent him a letter. 

So George calls in Conan Doyle, who is kind of really flagging at this point in his life and needs something to reinvigorate him. And there’s this wonderful scene where he says to George, when they finally meet after this entire novel where their lives has kind of been chronicled side by side, “I’m going to make a tremendous amount of noise, because the British establishment doesn’t like noise. They want us to go in the back door and I’m going to stamp up the stairs and go in the front door.” 

I think really the most incredible thing about this book is how much it humanises the two men. I think it’s really interesting, because what Barnes essentially has is one really well-known figure in Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s a whole cult of people who are even now, decades on, obsessed with Doyliana and Sherlock Holmes. 

But then he’s got the polar opposite in George Edalji who no one has ever heard of. And in a sense what he has to do is bring Conan Doyle down to human proportions and bring Edalji up- 

James Walton: 

Yeah. That’s interesting. Yeah, yeah. 

Jo Hamya: 

… to I guess any kind of recognition or care in the reader’s mind. I think he does so absolutely beautifully. And it is actually, I agree with the bookies, my favourite to win for that year. 

James Walton: 

Yeah. I mean they are, as you say, carefully contrasted, aren’t they? Because Doyle, very imaginative from a boy, and George, let’s call them Arthur and George. Arthur very… 

Actually, he doesn’t reveal… It’s interesting, he insisted that on the back of the book, it should not say who Arthur was. But of course if you’d read anything or heard anything about the book, including podcasts, you’d know it was Arthur Conan Doyle. But actually it’s only about a fifth of the way through when he starts writing and he comes up with a character called Sherlock Holmes and you think, “Ah.” 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. 

James Walton: 

Except you don’t think, “Ah,” because you know it’s Arthur Conan Doyle. 

Jo Hamya: 

Because you know it. 

James Walton: 

No, but anyway, so Arthur, very imaginative from an early age. George, completely unimaginative, isn’t he? Because, well, he actually says on about page three, I think, “George had no imagination.” And he regards adventure stories as too unlikely to be true, whereas Arthur loves them. 

But this contrast between them goes all the way through. And, well, I think we probably should also mention that George is, well, his father is Asian, his father’s an Indian. 

Jo Hamya: 

He’s Parsi. 

James Walton: 

Yeah. But George refuses to accept that the framing of him has any racial prejudice involved at all. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. Which is really unbelievable, because George is Parsi, his mother is Scottish, his dad is Indian. They live in this small village, in Great Wyrley. And for the first sort of third of the book they received torrents and torrents of abuse, anonymous letters, dead birds being thrown into the vicarage where his father works and preaches. 

George is sort of, I think picked on is kind of putting it really lightly, at school. But there’s this thing that’s a massive giveaway, to me at least, by the end of the book, where a boy named Wally Sharp comes up to him and whispers, “You’re not the right sort,” on page 12. Which becomes a really key phrase. But I think- 

James Walton: 

And again, we don’t know that, because again, he doesn’t reveal that he’s Asian for a little while either. Although there’s possibly a clue in his surname, but only just. 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, I think there’s this really beautiful passage that I find really key to understanding George, and I think it sort of demonstrates what Barnes does best in this book. 

So this is George sort of just after he’s left school and become a solicitor. And it goes, “At school additional stories and explanations of life were put before him. This is what science says, this is what history says, this is what literature says. George became adept at answering examination questions on these subjects even if they had no real vivacity in his mind, but now he has discovered the law and the world is finally beginning to make sense.” 

“Here the two invisible connections between people, between things, between ideas and principles are gradually revealing themselves. For instance, he is on the train between Bloxwich and Birchills, looking out the window at a hedgerow. He sees not what his fellow passengers would see, a few intertwined bushes blown by the wind, home to some nesting birds, but instead a formal boundary between owners of land, a delineation settled by contracts or long usage. Something active, something liable to promote either amity or dispute.” 

“At the vicarage he looks at the maid scrubbing the kitchen table, and instead of a coarse and clumsy girl likely to misplace his books, he sees a contract of employment and a duty of care. A complicated and delicate tying together backed by centuries of case law, all of it unfamiliar to the parties involved.” 

One of the amazing things in this book, which is true, I mean all of this is true, I think there’s only one letter that Barnes sort of wrote himself and fictionalised, but everything else is kind of extracted from a real archive. George Edalji wrote a book on railway law, which is frequently excerpted in this book. 

James Walton: 

Oh, yes. For the man on the train. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, that’s what it was. He’s got a little pamphlet he’s terribly proud of. And even later on when he becomes… Because Doyle does make a noise, and he never gets his pardon and it’s all a bit ambiguous towards the end. 

But anyway, he still becomes famous as a result of Doyle’s intervention, which he’s slightly uneasy about. But he thinks, “Maybe this is a good chance to reprint my book on train law.” And then he thinks, “No, I’m taking advantage of my notoriety.” But one of the many heartbreaking things about this book is his faith in the law. 

Jo Hamya: 

But yeah, this is what I was going to say, is that there’s this point where… But I think it’s… For me that passage is amazing, because that point about duty of care through law. I mean, you said that he has no imagination, I mean, it says, “He has no real vivacity in his mind,” but he does believe in process and justice. 

And I think when he’s in prison there’s this kind of moment of disbelief in his mind where he goes, “Well, the police got it wrong, they didn’t realise that I wasn’t ripping these horses. But surely the bailiff will get it right. And the bailiff’s not getting it right, so then I’ll go to court and surely the jury will see that I’m not guilty.” And then the jury doesn’t, and he goes, “Okay, that’s fine, court of magistrates will.” The magistrates don’t. And then he’s like, “Well, what do I believe in anymore?” 

James Walton: 

Yeah, absolutely. 

Jo Hamya: 

Which is another kind of key strand in this book, because it really does concern a loss of faith, like religious faith, for both Arthur and George. And he goes quite deeply into Conan Doyle’s sort of ventures into what he likes to call spiritism, which is essentially kind of… I guess, what would you call it now? 

James Walton: 

Spiritualism. I think, spiritualism. 

Jo Hamya: 

Spiritualism. Mediums, talking to the dead, predicting the other side, the other side of the veil. 

James Walton: 

I think one of the many interesting things about the book is that it’s often… Because he dedicated the last 20 odd years of his life to spiritualism, writing about it, campaigning for it. The book ends, I don’t think this is a spoiler, with a massive seance after he’s died. Doyle wanted a massive seance in the Royal Albert Hall, which was attended by thousands of people. And the medium says, “He’s with us,” and everybody cheers. 

And I think what we tend to think now is, “Isn’t it amazing that this bloke who invented Sherlock Holmes, the absolute sort of epitome of science, of evidence-based science, should also fall for spiritualism?” But in fact, what the book makes clear is how scientific that was for a while. 

I read somewhere else that Marconi invented the radio, and Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and John Logie Baird invented the television, all with an eye to contacting the dead. This was going to be the next stage of science. Because I think you can’t… 

I forget what an astonishing thing it was to be able to speak to someone who wasn’t there for the first time, which those things allowed, or to hear someone who wasn’t there. And that had never happened before in all of human history. And I think they thought, “Well, the next stage of that is we talk to people who are dead.” And it was more of a scientific project than we think. 

And Barnes, again in his own thoughts, where he brings all that out as well. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, he really does. And I think it’s really nicely complemented by the fact that Conan Doyle at the time spent 13 really long years waiting… Well, not waiting. But his wife had consumption. At first she was given three months, and then three months stretched into 13 years, and he was constantly kind of waiting for that moment when she would die, Louisa, who he nicknames Touie… Takes a mistress at that point. And insists that it’s fine because they’re not having sex, but still feels sort of racked with guilt and purposeless. 

And I think that there’s this really lovely slide that Barnes achieves, from Arthur being this sort of man who wants to have a family and provide for it and be a hero, and then all of a sudden having his dreams shattered by Touie’s diagnosis. The slide from that diagnosis into wanting so badly to contact the dead is just really beautiful. 

James Walton: 

Yeah. No, there’s a… He is brilliant at capturing that sort of dilemma. So that he’s got this Jean Leckie who he obviously falls in love with, but because they’re not having sex and he’s looking after his wife, but he’s not allowed to have sex with his wife either on medical grounds. But he’s extremely honourable about it all. 

And then when his wife dies, he thinks, “Uh…” He suddenly… that’s when he’s completely paralysed, because he thinks, “To marry Jean immediately would be to admit that she’s been my true love all these years,”. Which would upset his children and he falls into this complete spiral of inertia, and it’s then that George’s letter turns up and that gives him this new lease of life. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. I think really, for me… This is a book about two men obviously, and they’re fascinating, and it’s engrossing, and I loved it. But I think to me what’s most amazing about this book is that sometimes I can’t believe that Julian Barnes isn’t a woman. The way that he writes Jean Leckie and Touie, or Louisa, is unbelievable. 

There’s this point where George’s appeal, although I don’t know whether it would’ve officially been called an appeal at that point, kind of goes right, but goes wrong. I won’t spoil it for readers who wants to read the book. And Conan Doyle gets very angry whilst he’s reading a report in a newspaper, and Jean kind of thinks to herself, “I’ve never seen this side of him before. I’ve never seen this temper.” 

And then she goes, “I would hate for it to be turned on me,” to herself inwardly. And I’ve known so many women who have said exactly the same thing to each other and it’s just the most striking line to me in that book. And, to me, completely illustrates how beautifully Barnes achieves his character work. 

James Walton: 

So you think the bookie’s were right here? 

Jo Hamya: 

I think they were totally right, yeah. 

James Walton: 

But shall I do the Banville first, do you think? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. 

James Walton: 

So let’s get into him. So John Banville’s The Sea, far less well-known book. Arthur & George actually became a ITV drama series starring Martin Clunes, who was the hottest thing in television at the moment. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, I was going to watch it, but then I didn’t want the book spoiled for me. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, it’s sort of interesting. I watched a bit of it. But so Arthur & George I think is quite a famous book/ and The Sea, possibly now less so, but I think it is brilliant. 

Just to give you a bit about Banville, that he was born in Wexford, 1945, didn’t go to uni, which he sometimes describes as a great mistake and sometimes not. He became a clerk for Aer Lingus, then became a subeditor at The Irish Times, and then eventually ended up the literary editor of The Irish Times. 

He was first shortlisted for the Booker Prize with The Book of Evidence in 1989, which has got a deeply unreliable narrator who lives up to the Nabokov thing that you can count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. 

Jo Hamya: 

Sounds familiar. 

James Walton: 

Yes. And it does… all his books, in fact. He was longlisted in 2002 for Shroud, which has got a deeply unreliable narrator. Not a murderer, but does have a fancy prose style too. 

My job of summarising the book is I think a bit easier than Jo’s, which is basically a bloke sits by the sea and feels sorry for himself. Or actually let’s- 

Jo Hamya: 

That genuinely is just it, though. 

James Walton: 

It’s not, it’s not, this is a cracking book. I’m going to be a bit more precise and a lot fairer. 

A bloke called Max Morden. His wife, Anna, has recently died. And he finds himself drawn to the village where he used to go on holiday with his parents every summer, which he calls Ballyless. It’s a little joke because the neighbouring town is Ballymore. 

And in particular he remembers one summer when he was about 11. One of the many things he’s never quite sure about is how old he was. But anyway, and he met this rather glamorous family called the Graces. Posher than his own, because they’re staying in this cottage called the Cedars. And he’s staying in a little chalet in a field of little chalets with his family. And sure enough it’s the Cedars, which is now a boarding house where he comes back to stay after his wife’s died and he returns to Ballyless. 

And in that long-lost summer, he first fancied the mother, Connie. And during the peak of his obsession with her, there was a very extended upskirting scene, I’m sorry to say, on the beach. And then he transfers his affections to the daughter, Chloe. 

Jo Hamya: 

As you do. 

James Walton: 

Who’s about 11 as well, I think. And throughout the book it’s hinted that the summer ended in some kind of tragedy, and we do find out in the end what that was. 

But most of the book consists of Max reflecting on that long-lost summer and the death of his wife in endlessly beautiful sentences, that possibly tend to the fastidious and sometimes even to the plain old showing off. 

But this is where I think the book is… So I think people who don’t like the book think it’s just a lot of fancy sentences. But I would suggest that while the sentences remain beautiful, it becomes clear just how much pain Max is in. And that in a way, the perfect surface of his prose is an attempt, and ultimately a failed one, to keep all the bad stuff at bay. 

There’s one of the more intriguing minor characters is Colonel Blundon in the Cedars when Max is staying there as an older man. And Max says of him, he has, quote, “The glazed flawlessness of an actor who has been playing the same part for too long.” I think that’s a great phrase, “The glazed flawlessness.” 

But I think the same applies to Max and his fancy style too, it does have a glazed flawlessness, including the flawlessness bit. But also there’s something quite funny about the way he keeps pointing to the Colonel as this sad old loser staying on his own in a boarding house when obviously he’s in exactly the same situation. 

And it’s also interspersed with glimpses of the things that Max is trying so hard not to glimpse, I think. So there’s one bit where he talks about the days his father left, left home. He said, he’s talking about the holidays, “We came here for many years until my father ran off to England, as fathers sometimes did in those days, and do still for that matter.” But it clearly is a trauma for him and destroyed his mother. 

So again, we get glimpses that his mother seems to have ended her days as more or less a drunken bag lady who Max didn’t invite to his wedding. In fact, we discovered one, I think, quite funny point, that his name isn’t even really Max. Because he goes to visit his drunken old mother at one point, doesn’t he, and she says, with his posh soon to be wife, and his mother says, “Why is she calling you Max?” 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. 

James Walton: 

So he’s obviously picked up some posh name along the way. We never hear his name in the boyhood scenes at all. And though it seems clear that he and Anna, his wife, did love each other, there’s plenty of regrets about the marriage too. 

And the famous thing that guilt prolongs grief and intensifies grief. And in fact, even the whole Graces business might be an attempt to look away from what’s really hurting him. As he says, “Everything for me is something else.” 

I think it’s obviously a clever book and beautifully written and all that, and lots of great sentences, but also I think powerfully affecting. Were you powerfully affected though, is the big question? 

Jo Hamya: 

I wasn’t. 

James Walton: 

Okay. And why the hell not? 

Jo Hamya: 

But I kind of have the opposite view, in the sense that I don’t think the sentences are overwrought, I find them really beautiful. I think that the whole sentence structure in the first half of weaving between memories, to me is almost like a Virginia Wolf novel. It was just as good. I felt really envious reading this book, because I want to be able to write sentences like that. 

But I just couldn’t bring myself to care about Max in any way possible, and I still can’t tell why. But yes, he’s meant to be contemptible, he’s meant to be ridiculous, and he’s meant to be pathetic, and he’s meant to be sort of a fraud. And you’re meant to feel sorry for him, but I just don’t. I really don’t. I couldn’t find anything to kind of catch hold of in this book to make me care about him at all. And in fact, I was far more interesting in hearing about his wife Anna or Ms. Vavasour. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, who owns the… Yeah. 

Jo Hamya: 

The landlady of the home he’s staying in. And she goes around in all these fabulous clothes and cooks them really bad breakfasts and lunches. And the intrigue of that, of what had happened to her in the time between, why was she Rose then and now Ms. Vavasour, was so much more interesting to me than anything that Max was saying, even though he’s the one delivering these scenes. 

I think occasionally I felt this kind of jolt of him sort of turning away from his memories, especially in the early bits. So there’s this point where he’s recalling the fact that he had to go to a village doctor as a child, because he twisted his wrist or something. And the doctor kind of touches him up in this quite extended scene. And then all of a sudden he kind of flips over to saying, “In truth, I have only fond memories of that day. I can still recall the aroma of after lunch coffee on the doctor’s breath and the fishy swivel of his housekeeper’s eye.” 

It does bring you up short. But when he does that, I don’t know, it doesn’t make me feel pity. I’m just like, “I don’t know why I should care.” 

James Walton: 

Something he [inaudible 00:23:26] does. I mean, that’s clearly another example of him just using lovely language to disguise pain. 

Jo Hamya: 

And by the time he does sort of breakdown, I think he’s kind of been so… It’s almost like he’s covered up so much in that first part, that by the second part I’ve sort of lost interest in a breakdown. 

I don’t know, maybe it’s the case that because this is so beautifully written it’s almost like there wasn’t enough… I mean, it’s very short, there wasn’t enough room left over to work on character properly. 

James Walton: 

You see, I think that’s where we do disagree, because I think in a way it’s essentially a character study of- 

Jo Hamya: 

It is, but it’s a failed one, to me. 

James Walton: 

Okay then, this is fighting talk, Jo. Let me try and put the… I mean, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t like Arthur & George at all because it’s a terrific book. 

Jo Hamya: 

Go on, have at it. Tell me what’s wrong with Arthur & George. 

James Walton: 

Okay. It’s by far Barnes’s longest book. And does it earn its length? I suppose is my main question about it. 

Jo Hamya: 

That’s very fair. 

James Walton: 

There’s quite a lot of… You do feel, like that thing that authors have, which is basically, “I’ve researched this so it’s bloody well going in.” 

Jo Hamya: 

Which bits would you cut? 

James Walton: 

All the bits about the letters really get all a bit confusing. And the actual case itself- 

Jo Hamya: 

Wait, the letters… There are a lot of letters in this book. 

James Walton: 

There’s a lot of letters. 

Jo Hamya: 

The letters that are being sent to the Edalji family, or the letters at the end? 

James Walton: 

The letters that are being sent to the Edalji family. So it is quite confusing. I think one of the themes of that book is a yearning for certainty, they both… Doyle wants to know exactly what happened, and of course we want to know exactly what happened, and Barnes wants to know exactly what happened, and we never quite find it out. There are possibilities. But- 

Jo Hamya: 

Anson says this at some point, he says, “That’s a question from Detective Fiction. It’s what your readers beg and what you so winningly provide,” he’s talking to Conan Doyle here. “Tell us what really happened.” Which is actually a question that you’ve asked many times on this podcast. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, no, no. I mean, the question of what really happened is what we want to know. Anson, we should probably say, is the sort of Chief Constable of Staffordshire, a fantastically sort of racist anti-George figure. Who Doyle goes to see and ends up, despite what begins despising, but then becomes completely obsessed with. 

I mean, there’s almost too many bits that I’d cut, I think. But there’s a guy called, I think it’s Dr. Butter, who was the… he provides the most damning evidence, which is there seemed to be some horse hairs on George’s jacket. And he doesn’t seem to be… he doesn’t know how they got there. And he also says, “This Dr. Butter seems fairly honourable,” he doesn’t seem on the sort of racist framers. There was blood on George’s jacket too, and he admits that could be from anything, that could be from roast beef or something. 

Jo Hamya: 

Mammalian blood. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, mammalian blood. That’s right, yeah. So it could be from roast beef or something. But he says, “The hair’s on it seem to be horse’s.” So Doyle goes to see him, and there’s about a 10-page discussion where he sticks to his story. And there’s bits where Doyle reinvestigates things and nothing changes. 

But anyway, how do you respond to that, first of all? Before I turn to my next charge. 

Jo Hamya: 

Thank you. Thank you so much. 

Okay. I respond to that by saying, I agree with you, but not on that point particularly. So I think, yeah… But I wouldn’t cut this book by more than something like 100 pages, to be honest with you. Because part of what it is, I mean it’s historical fiction, but it is trying to recreate this idea of a chunky Victorian book that you invest time into and care into. 

The bits that I got impatient over were the sort of Conan Doyle combing over Edalji’s case and everything remaining essentially the same. And I thought almost, this might be crass to say, but almost Barnes trying to do a little Sherlock Holmes turn towards the end of the book. 

That, I kind of felt… I mean, I get it, it’s literally a book partially about Arthur Conan Doyle. But I was so much more intrigued when it was a Julian Barnes novel rather than a kind of imitation of a Sherlock Holmes story. So I would’ve cut down all the investigating that happens. 

Although I think the scene between Conan Doyle and Anson, sort of after dinner when he visits Anson by the fireplace- 

James Walton: 

This is the raspy chief constable guy, yeah. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. Is thrilling, because you start- 

James Walton: 

It is great. Yes, it’s great. 

Jo Hamya: 

… to see Conan Doyle getting wrong-footed after this entire process of building up a case in his mind, and in his files, and to Edalji as well. And I kind of felt like I was at a football match reading this scene. I was a bit like, “Oh, Anson’s really got him now.” 

James Walton: 

Yeah. No, that- 

Jo Hamya: 

Like, “Oh God, I didn’t expect Arthur to falter at this point.” 

James Walton: 

No, no, that’s fantastic, isn’t it? 

Jo Hamya: 

And you kind of needed that whole preamble of Arthur becoming so certain in his analysis, and all the traipsing he does around Great Wyrley to gather evidence, and talk to George’s parents and all this stuff. 

James Walton: 

The other thing… So I don’t think it earns its length is my first objection. And my second is that it’s almost too perfect. 

Jo Hamya: 

That is ridiculous. You can’t charge a book with being too perfect. 

James Walton: 

Okay, okay. Let me- 

Jo Hamya: 

So the problem with it is that it’s too good? 

James Walton: 

No, no, it’s too- 

Jo Hamya: 

I think I win. 

James Walton: 

No, it’s too controlled, it never… Well, okay, let me try this. Barnes has said- 

Jo Hamya: 

So Banville should win because he’s imperfectly perfect? 

James Walton: 

Yeah, because there’s something slightly more to it than meets the eye, it’s… 

Jo Hamya: 

Mm-hmm. 

James Walton: 

Okay, try this. Barnes has said on a few occasions, I think, that his three favourite English novels of the 19th century, obviously his favourite French one is Madam Bovary, but his favourite English ones are Persuasion by Jane Austen, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, on the grounds that they’re all perfect. 

And one interviewer said to him, “Well, what about Dickens?” And he says, jokingly, “Oh yes, Dickens is pretty good too, but just not perfect. Those books are not written through, there’s too much wildness to them.” And I just think a bit of wildness in Arthur & George with it just… Yeah, that’s what I mean. That’s what I mean by too perfect, that it’s almost too controlled, every effect, everything. 

Whereas I think The Sea is slightly more out of control, in a way. But, as I say, there’s just sort of more to it than meets the eye. There’s some discussion that one of the things that… for reason books win the Booker Prize is because the way the system works is you read each book three times. And in fact, it’s the books that… Some books reward being read three times more than others, in a way. 

And it was when I was going through The Sea again, I was sort of along your lines to start with, and then I read it again I just thought, “This is absolutely… There is a lot going on here that I hadn’t noticed the first time.” Whereas Arthur & George, I think you get it. 

Jo Hamya: 

I don’t know if I can believe in that as a compelling argument, because I just think… Well, we had a really interesting conversation yesterday with the Fiammetta Rocco, who’s the Administrator of the International Prize. 

And she was saying that the system of reading three times might be a death knell to books which are quite perfect on first read, so that you kind of glaze over them the second and third time, because you’ve gotten everything you can out of them. 

And maybe these are the books that you return to after five or 10 years to revisit as a pleasure, rather than kind of read really quickly in the span of a few months over and over again. 

And perhaps Arthur & George is one of those. And kind of all the things that you’ve charged it with to me were amazing sources of comfort. So yeah, it was really long, but I felt carried through all of it. I cared so much about these two boys, we literally meet them when they are boys at school. And it’s not like either of them are perfect. I don’t think there’s any other circumstance in which I’d care about a solicitor obsessed with railways, and a self-important, to be honest, womaniser, if we want to call a spade a spade, with Conan Doyle. 

James Walton: 

Womaniser is harsh for a bloke who looks after his consumptive wife while getting some female companionship that he doesn’t turn into sex. 

Jo Hamya: 

Okay. Fair enough, fair enough. Misogynist, because he is. I can’t imagine a novel… If you told me about these two men just out of context randomly, like, “Here is a book about these two guys.” I’d be like, “Oh, that doesn’t really sound that interesting. I don’t care,” that these aren’t people I would particularly take much interest or care over. 

But I felt so held by this book, and so I felt I was in the hands of someone who truly understands how to write a novel and how to pull on my heartstrings. 

James Walton: 

That’s absolutely, for sure. 

Jo Hamya: 

I used to work as a bookseller at Waterstones, and people would come up to me and they’d say the most stupid things. But they would say things like, “I need a really good book, like a real book, a book that I can really read,” which sounds vague, but now I know what they mean. After Arthur & George, I’m like, “Oh, you want Arthur & George, you want a perfect novel.” 

And I can’t view that as a bad thing. Because when I got it in the post and it was over 500 pages long, I groaned, I thought, “Oh God, this is going to be a slog to get through.” And then by page about 300, I was like, “It’s too short, I want it to last longer. This is so much fun.” I felt like I was a kid attempting to do Austen or Eliot again, sort of amazed at how brilliant storytelling can be. 

I don’t know, I just think that, for me, that’s something so much more special than The Sea. 

James Walton: 

In no way am a I champion of Banville. Am I going to… As I say, as I keep saying, am I going to pretend that Arthur & George is anything other than a really great book? 

Jo Hamya: 

I think there’s this really sweet passage where… In response to Edalji’s the English Court of Appeals was set up. And there’s this really sweet point where George is thinking like, “Oh, you know what? I’ll be a footnote in history, it’ll be great. They’ll talk about me as a solicitor who wrote that famous book on railway law.” And then after all of that, the man still just wants to tell people their fundamental human rights when they’re on a train. 

James Walton: 

That’s right, the man on the train. No, that’s fantastic. And Barnes really likes both of these people, doesn’t he? I mean, this is a much… If you had to say which is a nicer book, you’d be in no doubt at all. Barnes really likes George. And gives him his due, as you say. 

Jo Hamya: 

I think it’s interesting because- 

James Walton: 

Because now he’s more than a footnote in history, now he’s the character in a Booker shortlisted novel. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. But that’s sort of interesting in and of itself, because whilst the… I think Barnes did read A Railway Law for the Man on the Train, and he did read as many of the- 

James Walton: 

He said it was very charming and quite funny, and he really liked it. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. 

James Walton: 

He really does like George, doesn’t he? And he really likes Arthur. 

Jo Hamya: 

But he does, I think, say that George he had to invent a lot more than Arthur. And I just think it’s such an exquisite act of care that you’re witnessing when you read this book, of him trying to reconstruct this man from so little material. Trying to read between the lines of what he finds important in his book about railway law, trying to find out his sense of humour according to the case studies that he’s chosen for it. 

James Walton: 

And even book we’re probably overstating it, it’s a pamphlet, isn’t it, really? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, yeah. In a way, these books are quite… Both of these books are in a way quite old school, aren’t they? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, they are. And that’s really interesting, because if you take the 2005 longlist as a whole, it’s full of big names. But I think, weirdly enough, the two big names we have here, I would consider Barnes a kind of… He’s approaching veteran status now, in my mind. 

I was saying, I went to this talk he did at Southbank where he looked over his writing career, starting from Metroland and leading up to Elizabeth Finch. 

James Walton: 

Oh, I’d love to have seen that. Oh, did you tell me he thought Arthur & George should have won the Booker? 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, he seemed really happy. He was in conversation with Claire Armitstead, and she said, “I really thought that Arthur & George should have been your winning Booker novel.” And he went, “I’m so glad that you think that. I’m so happy to hear you say that.” 

And apparently his wife, Pat, at the time she read the longlist and the panel of judges in the newspaper when it got announced. She kind of underlined all of it in the newspaper and put the newspaper next to him, and she went, “You haven’t got a chance.” Which is great, I just think, “What a solid marriage.” Mine wouldn’t survive that, I would divorce the next day. 

James Walton: 

It is a tough list. Because we haven’t really mentioned Ishiguro, and it’s great, Zadie Smith’s great. 

Jo Hamya: 

And Salman Rushdie’s on there. 

But anyway, what’s really interesting about it is that… So Barnes is sort of a veteran. Banville, to be really honest… It sounds like I’m waging a campaign on him, I’m really not. But I can’t think of a Banville novel recently, I can’t think of seeing Banville on the literary circuit. 

By contrast, other names on that longlist seem to me to have become much more relevant to our contemporary kind of literary landscape than either Barnes or Banville, sorry to them both, like Rachel Cusk, like Zadie Smith, like Ali Smith, Rushdie perhaps for more unfortunate reasons, Ishiguro who’s now a Nobel winner. 

James Walton: 

I think we should come back, have we changed each other’s minds? Are you still with the bookies that Arthur & George should have won? 

Jo Hamya: 

I think I’ve kind of come to why the Banville doesn’t resonate with me. I was asking myself why for the entirety of this book, and I just never got a satisfactory answer as to why. 

James Walton: 

Why what? Why… 

Jo Hamya: 

Why would he be doing this? Now, especially you’ve taken yourself to the sea to think about all of this, why is this facade so important to you, even as it’s slipping? Why are you still trying to keep it up? Why are you thinking about all of these things? It’s not enough for this book to tell me that, “The past is a foreign country,” and, “Memory is a terrible place to live.” 

James Walton: 

So it sounds as if we haven’t changed each others’ mind. I mean, I would add the slightly weird and confusing, to myself, rider, that if someone said to me, “Which of these books should I read?” I would probably say, “Arthur & George.” 

Jo Hamya: 

I think for me, the weirdest thing about this entire process has been that if I hadn’t read these books and you just described them to me, I would’ve said, “The Banville is my book.” That is instinctively so much more something that I would go for. In practise though, I don’t know, but it just disappointed me a bit. Sorry. 

James Walton: 

Okay, we’re just going to have to leave it there. So as far as our first ever Booker Versus the Bookies, a series we’ll be returning to because there’s been plenty of times where the hot favourite has been beaten by something else. 

And in fact, if you’ve got any suggestions for years where we might want to do that, please do let us know. But for now, it was score one to the Booker and score one to the bookies from me and Jo. 

Jo Hamya: 

This is very much Barnes’s, “In England no one ever does anything wrong,” both sides are right. Both win. 

James Walton: 

That’s right. We can pretend it all never happen. 

Jo Hamya: 

That’s it for this week. 

James Walton: 

You can find out more about The Sea and Arthur & George at thebookerprizes.com. And remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack at thebookerprizes. 

Jo Hamya: 

If we’ve persuaded you to give either of the books a go, do let us know what you think. 

James Walton: 

Also, we’ve recently launched a Booker Prize Book Club on Facebook, so head to facebook.com/thebookerprizes to find out more about that. 

And until next time, goodbye. 

Jo Hamya: 

Bye. 

James Walton: 

The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Meolo, and the executive producer is John Davenport. This is a Daddy’s SuperYacht Production for the Booker Prizes.