Inside the Booker Prize

It’s been a great week for the powerful fantasies of fiction (see more below), but over the weekend no novel anywhere in the world could compete with the fantasy of British politics. Continental Europe watched spellbound as the Prime Minister and her Chancellor humiliated themselves and the standing of the UK. The reactions of the different nations were predictable, but none the less excruciating for that. In Germany, where journalists have disconcertingly deep knowledge of British constitutional history, the reaction was dismay, as a distracted friend inflicts yet further damage on themselves. As for France: King Lear is playing at the Comédie-Française for the first time in its history, so they now know how England manages an orgy of self-destruction when former allies fall out. Schadenfreude may be a German word, but after the decades of lectures Paris has received from London on the virtues of market capitalism, it has unsurprisingly crossed the Rhine.

President Macron is probably less inclined to smile at events on the other end of Europe, where Turkey has assumed the mediating role in the Ukraine conflict France itself was eager to play. A few days in Istanbul last week showed me an even deeper Franco-Turkish divide. Two years ago, Hagia Sophia, which had been a state museum since the 1930s, once again became a mosque. The Byzantine mosaic of the Virgin and Child in the eastern apse is now veiled from sight, and Islamic prayers are said every day by thousands of worshippers. Between the canonical prayer times, the vast spaces are open to tourists, who queue to admire Justinian’s great building. The Chora Museum, which houses one of the world’s greatest collections of Byzantine mosaics, is closed, while it too is converted to a mosque. It is not clear whether, or how, the mosaics will be visible in future. While Macron insists ever more loudly that laïcité is the bedrock of France, Erdogan continues the steady retreat from Atatürk’s secular republic. Sadly, neither is likely to be a helpful model for us, as we ponder the relation between church and state that should inform the coronation.

It was a splashy affair, Monday night at the Roundhouse, for the announcement of the winner of the Booker Prize, for which I was a judge. Nightclub lighting gave more than a whiff of the Brits, Emmys or Oscars. Elif Shafak spoke of the role fiction plays in defending freedom, not just of speech but of thought. She elegantly failed to mention she has herself been the subject of threats for her defence of human rights in Turkey. Hilary Mantel was honoured in a tribute from the Cambridge historian Helen Castor. The singer-songwriter Dua Lipa talked of the importance of Albanian literature in shaping her north London childhood in the early 2000s. The finale was the Queen Consort, a keen book-grouper herself and faithful friend to the Booker Prize, presenting the winner’s trophy.

For me, there were two big surprises in the entries this year. The first was about language. We hear a lot about the danger that English, all-conquering, hegemonic and homogenising, makes it impossible for local particularities to find proper expression. It is a danger that seems fanciful in the face of the range of different Englishes – not just British or American, but Caribbean, Indian, West African, Australian, and more – deployed in the books submitted, each with their distinct rhythms, syntax and phrasings. Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo is an outstanding example: although there are very few specifically African words, this is English as only a Zimbabwean can wield it, and (for the British reader) its otherness is the more powerful because its constituent parts are so familiar.

The other surprise was subject matter. Four of the shortlisted books – Glory, Small Things Like These, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and The Trees – deal with the effects of long, institutionalised injustice, how it deforms society and corrupts the citizen. In every case – the 1983 massacres in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, the Magdalene laundries in Catholic Ireland, the civil war in Sri Lanka and the lynching of Emmett Till – the defining events took place a generation or so ago. Is that a coincidence? Or is that the distance that must be taken before historic fact can be cured into matter for powerful fiction, the time that authors need, in my fellow judge M. John Harrison’s memorable phrase, to ‘polish their rage’?

In different ways, each of the six shortlisted asks the same question: what is the ultimate value of one individual life? And each affirms the significance of the moral choices the individual has to make. ‘The universe does have a self-correcting mechanism,’ says a character in the winner, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. ‘But it’s not God, or Shiva, or karma. It’s us.’