The shortest shortlist ever: revisiting 1975’s Booker Prize

So, you might be wondering, what kind of books did Wilson like? The answer is those ‘seeking to find England today through its past’. And, he added, ‘no two events speak more of England’s past than the First World War and India’ – which, uncoincidentally, are the respective subjects of Gossip from the Forest and Heat and Dust.   

Keneally’s novel is a close-up account of the Armistice negotiations of November 1918. Leading the French delegation is Marshal Foch, who’s determined to make the Germans pay dearly. The Brits – perhaps reflecting Keneally’s Australian Republican views – snootily consider themselves above such Gallic vengefulness, but prove equally ruthless.   

At the heart of the book, though, is somebody who foreshadows Keneally’s most famous protagonist. Like Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s Ark (the 1982 Booker winner), Germany’s chief negotiator Matthias Erzberger is a historical character who’d become largely forgotten, but who fascinates Keneally as a ‘good German’, doing his best in an impossible situation.   

Keneally chronicles the Armistice talks in gripping, novelistic detail while providing psychologically acute backstories for all concerned. But there’s another aspect to the book,  too, with the whole process coming across as a prolonged anxiety dream for poor Erzberger. Usually, I’d be reluctant to go for the overused ‘Kafkaesque’ – but, luckily, Keneally used it himself about Gossip from the Forest.    

This blurring between the dream like and the violent realism of war provides a powerfully unsettling read – but it also makes some telling historical points. We’re reminded, for instance, that there was something inescapably dream like about the global future being decided by a few blokes in a railway carriage in the middle of a forest. And the sense of waking nightmare is a perfect fit for the traumatised Europe of 1918. 

It’s unclear what Gossip from the Forest tells us about 1970s Britain, but it’s a novel worthy of any Booker shortlist, I think, and deservedly boosted Keneally’s growing reputation. Yet we know it was only shortlisted in 1975 as a last-minute concession. The judges had already agreed that Heat and Dust was better. I therefore approached the winning novel expecting a towering masterpiece. What I found instead was a book that could be most kindly described as ‘superseded’.     

While we might now prefer to read novels about India written by Indian writers, this wasn’t the case in the 1970s. Indeed, Heat and Dust was one of three books set in India written by non-Indian authors that won the Booker Prize that decade, with The Siege of Krishnapur winning in 1973 and Paul Scott’s Staying On in 1977. All three books focus primarily on the experiences of white people.    

Although I think we need to fight the urge to judge old novels by contemporary values, it’s worth recognising that these three books are fiercely sceptical of British imperialism. But that alone fails to acknowledge all that’s great about Farrell’s thrilling, funny, endlessly astute account of a group of Brits under attack during the 1857 Indian Uprising; or about Scott’s tale – by turns comic, poignant, satirical and sympathetic – of an elderly English couple adrift in post-independence India. It also fails to make the judges’ love for Heat and Dust any less puzzling to me. 

Meanwhile, the Olivia sections have their fair share of familiar tropes and psychological inscrutability too. When we first meet her, Olivia is duly bored by the round of social events with other Brits, most of whom are obsessed with their servants’ shortcomings. So when the broodingly handsome Nawab starts paying her attention, she’s happy to receive it. Before long, he’s sending his Rolls-Royce to bring her to his palace where he makes remarks like: ‘You will hear many things about me. There are many people to give bad report.’  

No wonder that Olivia ‘felt drawn to him by a strength, a magnetism that she had never in all her life experienced’. But she also deeply loves her dependable, pipe-smoking husband, leaving it unclear how keen she really was on her eventual elopement. But again, this is something the narrator stays resolutely incurious about – just as she does about what happened between Olivia and the Nawab after that.  

And this, in the end, seems to me the obvious flaw in Heat and Dust: if the book isn’t all that interested in its own characters, why should we be?  

So how on earth did it win? The answer, I still think, must go back to those two senior judges. Both seem to have felt badly undervalued in later life and had resentfully decided modern fiction was mainly rubbish, drawn instead to more nostalgic pleasures. 

In Fuller and Wilson’s defence, their belief that the novel was in decline in the 1970s wasn’t unique to them. The correspondence from indignant publishers about the 1975 shortlist talks repeatedly about the tragic descent into ‘commercialism’. That belief is now more or less received wisdom, with the 1980s seen as the decade when the serious novel made a comeback, led by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.  

For the record, there was a lot of nostalgia around in the commercial end of the sector in the 1970s, too, with James Herriot scoring three of the decade’s bestselling books and huge sales for The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. Meanwhile, the era’s biggest novel, Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed, returned readers to Britain’s wartime glory.  

Even so, for all the continuing popularity – and possible truth – of the narrative of 1970s decline and 1980s rebirth, 1975 could still have had a proper and properly good shortlist: perhaps with Bradbury, Lodge and Keneally nailed on, and Nobbs, Amis, Bainbridge and Drabble fighting it out for the other three places.    

As things stood, the Booker Prize organisers decreed there could never again be a shortlist of two. But, as far I can see, it also wisely ensured that never again would a judging panel be at the mercy of people who don’t like contemporary novels much.