The Count of Monty Cristo: "Justifying Existence Absolutely": JTB 2005

21 April 2005

"Justifying Existence Absolutely": JTB 2005

Okay, so I didn't end up scooping the dailies after all. But give me a break: it's the BBC. To quote my brother, also a journalist: it's their job to know.

When in doubt, begin at the beginning -- but as in this case the beginning, the initial selection process, actually poses some rather curious questions, I'll save those for a post tomorrow morning. Fast-forward to the part where for their books John Clare: A Biography and GB84, respectively, Jonathan Bate and David Peace win the 2005 James Tait Black Memorial Prize: a selection that, as Colin Nicholson of the University of Edinburgh, the final judge for the fiction prize, put it, "was never in doubt."

Strong words, perhaps, but I suppose one can't fault hyperbole on an evening such as this one. (Though it does surprise me that Nick would so grandly dismiss the rest of a shortlist containing, oh, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.) It really was a remarkable gathering, start to finish -- lovely venue, good wine, all of the Edinburgh literati and glitterati out to see and be seen. As I'm sure there will be a fair amount of coverage and discussion over the next wee while -- not least of which here in the 'sphere -- for time and sanity's sake I'll just put up a few of the observations that might not make it into wire copy.

Let's see. For one thing, Peace remarked how surreal the contrast was between the beautiful surroundings of the award ceremony in contrast to the horrific conditions depicted in the book receiving the award (his book is set during the miner's strikes of 1984-1985 in the west of England -- consequently a contemporary historical novel that The Little Professor would doubtless be interested in). The book was originally intended to conclude a quartet of novels set in Yorkshire in the 70's and 80's, but he says that over a period of about ten years he came to realize that this book had gotten too big for its britches, that it needed to stand apart from these other works. Peace said he researched GB84 by reading, while he was living in Tokyo, the Times of London for every single day of the year 1984 -- only after he had done that did he begin to write his novel.

Bate, on the other hand, rather than remarking on method or conviction, merely noted the pleasure of a quintessentially Scottish prize being given to an English biographer writing about an English poet who was said to be England's own Robert Burns (and who was in fact a quarter Scottish -- Clare's grandfather was from around Inverness, if memory serves). Insofar as England has always lagged behind Scotland in recognizing its folk poetry and ballad traditions, Bate said, the ironic folds present were altogether to his (and Clare's, he reckoned) satisfaction.

The Q&A after it was all over, far from the "Mr Writer, do you use pen or pencils? Oh, pencils? Mechanical or wooden?" norm, may have been the most interesting part of the evening. And not least because Ian Rankin (!), who was in the crowd, stood up and asked Bate at what point John Clare had begun to get on his nerves. "Never," Bate replied, "I admired him too much." Bate then went on to say that some biographers do ultimately suffer from Stockholm syndrome (a psychological condition in which the prisoner begins, over a long period of time, to identify with his or her captor), but that his own research into Clare's life, within the context of resuscitating a long-forgotten social history, showed just how difficult and complicated of a man Clare was, a fact that had never been known, much less stressed, by his prior biographers. In the end, Bate said, the process of desentimentalizing Clare from his legacy proved so demanding as never to allow any time for mental love affairs (however abusive) with the subject of his book.

Inevitably someone asked Peace how much of his book was taken directly from life (the old "fiction or fact?" fracas), to which he responded that he came from the school of you should "write what you know or what you have an emotional stake in" -- the emotional stake being, in his case, the guilt he felt that he hadn't paid more attention to the profound implications of the strikes when he was growing up in Yorkshire in the 80's. Doing the math revealed that the strike, initially of 160,000 workers, affected literally millions of people by its end; Peace said that for a time, this had been what life was. Yes, there was the strike, but there was only the strike. Nor, he said, do we now publicly remember the suffering and sacrifices people endured -- quitting their well-paying jobs and jeopardizing their families' well-being to support the cause of people they had never met. Thus one of the reasons he felt moved to write the book was to try to bring something back into the public awareness that had dropped so definitively off.

In this sense, Nicholson noted, there was consonance between the two books, in that they both gave accounts of individuals just as much as they were accounts of ways of life that had been lost. After it was all over I asked Roger Savage, the final judge of the biographies, to what extent he thought this prize endorsing particular types of books over others (such as Jonathan Coe's experimental biography of B.S. Johnson, in which the biographer becomes a character in the unfolding narrative -- biography from the school of Hunter S. Thompson, in other words) was a political decision; he responded by saying that in this particular case a straightforward narrative biography suited Clare more than any other, given that -- if you look at his previous biographies -- Clare had never had one before. I don't think that Savage meant to imply that righting perceived historical wrongs should be a selection criterion for a book award, but I have to say: that was the sense of his statement that came across to me. It might also have been his earlier statement that what he was looking for in the shortlisted titles was "a readable book that justified its existence absolutely." (Would that all books justified their existence absolutely.) Don't know. Jury's still out on that one.

And now for something completely different. We'll call it the "Closing quips that aren't woven into the above account" section, in the folder marked "Because it's late and I'm tired":

Savage, as he opens the envelope: "There's not nearly enough tension in this room. Is everything okay?"

Bate, in his acceptance speech: "Well, I have to thank the readers. I guess that's the first hurdle to get over, isn't it?"

Peace, in his: "Because I'd never won anything before, I was always a bit sceptical of prizes. Now that's all changed."

21 April 2005 in Books | Permalink