Mantel Books the Booker

Who won, who lost, and how much it all cost—John Sutherland on his evening at the Man Booker Prize ceremony and Hilary Mantel’s victory. PLUS, view our gallery of the past 10 winners.

The winner of literature's prestigious Man Booker gets £50,000 for a work that can take years. It’s less than a third of what the Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney (who, I suspect, has never read a novel) gets in a week. Shortlisted candidates pick up a check for £2,500—and a year’s free membership in Soho’s Groucho Club. Pity the country, to paraphrase Brecht, that needs literary heroes.

Click Image for a Gallery of Booker Winners

The Man Booker ceremony is no longer, as it once was, televised. But there is still considerable excitement in the run-up and on the night. Unpredictability sharpens the excitement. The Goncourt, the French literary prize, has lifelong judges—often themselves novelists. Man Booker recruits a new panel annually. This year it comprised a radio journalist (Naughtie), a TV comedian, a professor of literature, a literary editor, and a professional writer of nonfiction. Throw in 132 novels and you have fireworks.

Every year there’s a flavor to the shortlist. Sometimes it’s postcolonial (no one with an English-sounding name need apply). Sometimes (twice in the last four years) it’s Irish. Sometimes it’s old codgers rewarded for long service and good conduct (Kingsley Amis and William Golding benefited with novels that were anything but their best). Sometimes it’s young hopefuls with no track record (last year’s Aravind Adiga).

The 2009 flavor was as English as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. All but one of the shortlisted six (Coetzee being the exception) hailed from the mother country. And each of those five novelists went deep into English history for their plots. The winner was Hilary Mantel, who went furthest back into the Tudor period with a bio-novel about Henry VIII’s adviser, Thomas Cromwell. It was also the people’s choice. Bookies had Wolf Hall at evens. Booker lore is that the favorite never wins. This year it did. Handily.

My guess is that, good read though it is, Wolf Hall won’t do outstandingly well in the U.S. or anywhere that 16th-century English history is not prominent on the high school syllabus. But symptomatically the surge behind the novel is telling. Britain, for the last few months, has been in a hysterical dilemma about whether it really wants to go into Europe—by signing up to the Lisbon Treaty. There’s a general election in seven months’ time. The electorate is paralyzed between a party it has come to hate (Labour) and one that it does not yet love (the Conservatives). The Queen of England is 83 years old. The heir apparent (a stripling of 61) is not universally popular. A succession crisis is possible. It’s the 1530s all over again.

Wolf Hall is a fine novel. I would happily have voted for it this year if I’d been a judge. But the ultra-Englishness speaks to me of a country that is going through one of its recurrent anxieties about what it is to be English. I am myself, as it happens.

When the Booker Prize was launched as the “British Goncourt” in 1969, it was met by a universal guffaw. “Not English” was the Podsnapian cry from the throat of Literary London. Britain despised French academicism. But at least the Goncourt, with its derisory 50NF cash reward, had clean hands. The purse (£5,000) pocketed by the first Bookers was a stain on literature. It wasn’t just the loot. Booker-McConnell was a firm with interests (principally sugar and rum) in the West Indies. The prize has since been taken over by the Man Group PLC, “a world leading alternative investment management business” (they get extremely annoyed if, as people commonly do, you call them a hedge fund).