If you’ve ever thought of challenging yourself to read the whole Booker Prize shortlist for a particular year, you might want to consider tackling 1975. That’s because 50 years ago only two novels were shortlisted – and they were pretty short themselves. Between them, Thomas Keneally’s Gossip from the Forest and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s winning Heat and Dust add up to just over 400 pages.    

In some ways, you’ve got to hand it to the Booker Prize in the early 1970s – not just for keeping the controversies coming, but also for giving them such variety. In 1972 and 1973, admittedly, there was some repetition, with the winners, John Berger (for G.) and J.G. Farrell (for The Siege of Krishnapur), both using their victory speeches to denounce the Booker company’s business practices. But in 1974 it rang the changes by having one judge, Elizabeth Jane Howard, ensure that her husband Kingsley Amis was shortlisted for Ending Up.    

So how could the prize follow that? Quite easily, it turned out – because the 1975 decision to go for a shortlist of two (at that stage, not against the rules but plainly against the spirit) enraged the publishing world.    

It also enraged one of the four judges: Susan Hill, then 33, who together with 25-year-old Peter Ackroyd made up the youth wing of a panel she found ‘daunting’. As Hill later recalled, ‘Roy Fuller [another judge] was acerbic and disliked being contradicted, and when it came to the shortlist he refused to join in on the grounds that we had agreed on a winner, so a shortlist was superfluous. The Booker management was, rightly, having none of this and insisted. Fuller grudgingly agreed to allowing the winner and one runner-up. Otherwise he was going to walk. We all argued with him, but Roy simply held his ground and got his way. I do wish we hadn’t caved in. I certainly wouldn’t now.’  

Looking back, the most obvious victims of Fuller’s scorched-earth policy would seem to be David Lodge’s Changing Places and Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, now published as Modern Classics. But there’s also Martin Amis’s Dead Babies, Margaret Drabble’s The Realms of Gold, David Nobbs’s The Death of Reggie Perrin and Beryl Bainbridge’s Sweet William – another novel that these days comes with the words ‘Modern Classic’ on the cover.    

One thing all these books have in common is that they tell us a lot about British life at the time, whether in academia (Lodge and Bradbury), in bohemia (Amis), in corporate offices (Nobbs) or for women (Drabble and Bainbridge).    

But this, it appears, might have been precisely the problem for the two senior judges. Certainly, Fuller (born in 1912 and a former Oxford Professor of Poetry) and chair of the panel Angus Wilson (born in 1913 and a leading novelist of the 1950s) seem to have shared a strong, if somewhat peculiar distaste for fiction that reflected everyday life.   

During the run-up to the ceremony, Fuller sternly declared that ‘Novelists have to get away from writing the diary which is what they’re doing at the moment: that is too easy. There is a public for it; but it is a television drama public.’ At the ceremony itself, Wilson’s speech identified the curse of modern fiction as ‘immediacy’ – which is best left to journalists and from which novelists should ‘escape’.   

Normally, Booker Prize chairs’ speeches take a rosy view of the contemporary novel. Wilson, by contrast, mostly attacked it: savaging both ‘the narrow London middle-class sophistication’ that is ‘one of [its] worst banes’ and the ‘dull and priggish proletarian self-consciousness’ in ‘the rather lesser number of working-class novels’. 

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. 

Jhabvala had far more experience of India than Farrell and Scott put together. Farrell visited once to research his book; Scott spent three years there as a soldier during the Second World War, returning later from time to time to gather material for his celebrated Raj Quartet.   

Jhabvala lived in New Delhi with her Indian husband from 1951 to 1975, having grown up in a German family who were among the last Jewish refugees to reach Britain in 1939. India is also the subject of many of her novels and renowned screenplays for Merchant-Ivory. (True Booker nerds won’t need reminding that Jhabvala is the only person ever to have won both the Booker and an Oscar.)   

All of which makes it rather surprising that, from the title onwards, the India she presents us with in 1975 is so clichéd. As well as the heat and the dust, we get the mutilated beggars, the smell, the crowded buses, the mysticism, and plenty more besides. Occasionally, I wondered if this was meant to reflect, even mock the narrator’s wide-eyed naivety – but, if so, there are no slyly undercutting signs of it.  

The narrator in question is a present-day, unnamed young Englishwoman newly arrived in India to follow in the footsteps of her step-grandmother, Olivia, who left her husband for the Nawab (a minor royal) in 1923. And follow in those footsteps the narrator certainly does.   

As the novel alternates between her experiences, recorded in her diaries, and Olivia’s, recreated from letters to her sister, the parallels prove eerily similar. Both women, for example, are impregnated at the same fertility shrine by Indian men with mentally disturbed wives.  

Weirdly, however, these parallels don’t seem to strike the narrator herself as eerie. Or, indeed, to strike her at all. Instead, the two stories are simply laid out side by side. I’m all in favour of writers letting readers work things out for themselves – but I do think here that someone keeping a diary might be tempted to marvel at how similar her life is becoming to Olivia’s. Or at any rate, to notice it.    

Then again, if I had to identify the narrator’s chief characteristic – not easy when she remains such a passive, motiveless blank – it would be how incurious she is.  

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.