Fortune favours the Booker shortlist

MARGIE THOMSON looks at the odds for this year's Booker Prize finalists and the increasing tensions caused by an award which spells riches for publishers and novelists.

The "people", who are after all the arbiters of any book's popular success, have placed their bets ahead of the Booker Prize judging panel's announcement on October 17, coming down in favour of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang.

According to bookmakers William Hill, Carey pulled ahead of erstwhile joint favourite Ian McEwan's Atonement in late September while still a month out from the finishing line, Carey achieving odds of 15/8, compared to McEwan's 9/4. The other four finalists are some way back in the field with Andrew Miller's Oxygen at 9/2, Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room at 6/1, and David Mitchell's Number9Dream and Ali Smith's Hotel World both at 8/1.

More orthodoxly, the BBC since October 6 has been running its usual "People's Booker" in which readers can vote for their favourite contender, with the winner announced at the award ceremony.

Such is the Booker, that literary maelstrom: a frenzy of speculation, occasional acrimony and pure, goggle-eyed profit.

Things got heated in August when novelist and former Booker Prize judge A.L. Kennedy lobbed some incendiary language in the general direction of the proceedings. The prize was "a pile of crooked nonsense", she said, and the winner was invariably determined by "who knows who, who's sleeping with who, who's selling drugs to who, who's married to who, whose turn it is".

Rounding on her fellow panellists from 1996, she added: "I read the 300 novels and no other bastard [on the panel] did." Her fellow panellist Jonathan Coe seemed a little bemused by the outburst. "It was certainly not corrupt that year," he asserted (which sounds a little like damning with faint praise). "She has exaggerated the number of books we had to read by a factor of three, and maybe you should scale her other comments back accordingly."

Indeed, compared to France's Prix Goncourt which since 1903 has only ever been won by three publishers, each of which has two members on the judging panel, the Booker's probity has never been seriously compromised.

"When you are named on the panel you expect to be invited out to parties and to be sent early copies of novels with discreet notes from authors," New Statesman literary editor and 1997 judge Jason Cowley told the Guardian recently. "But nothing like that happened to me at all. I was anticipating champagne and cigars and £1000-a-night escort girls, but absolutely nothing was forthcoming."

Manipulation, especially British-style, can be less obvious than that, though, as he went on to say: "Some judges, especially those inside literary London, have a network of contacts and friendships which may lead them to act in ways that they don't quite understand. Certain judges tend to protect certain writers and they are skilful about manipulating positions. Nothing is ever made explicit; it's all about subtexts."

Booker Prize administrator Martyn Goff has himself admitted that things have changed as the status of the prize has risen. "Judges used to go into the judging very openly. 'Let's find the best book,' they used to say. Now it's gone way beyond that because it is front-page news all over the world. The judges go in loaded with a very different set of values; I've noticed they are tense from the start. They are affected by their own reputations. I have heard the phrase, 'I'm sorry, there's no way I can be associated with that being shortlisted'."

The Booker, now in its 33rd year, was set up by British cash and carry company Booker plc, and offers £21,000 ($74,350) for the winner and £1000 to each of the other finalists. But its true value is less measurable.

"Booker Prize winner" or even "shortlisted" carries a cachet that changes lives and creates fortunes, not just for the author and publisher but others, such as film directors, as well.

Now, there is some doubt about its future. Booker merged last year with Iceland plc and the new company has said it is prepared to fund only one-third of the £300,000 annual cost of administering the award. A new company called the Booker Prize Foundation has been set up by Goff to seek additional sponsorship, or even a new sponsor to replace Iceland entirely, and the finding of such a sponsor or not could indicate once and for all the level of public perception of the prize as tainted.

Or maybe not. Where money is concerned, scruples can be overcome, and the Booker certainly represents major money.

Nothing improves book sales the way the Booker does. British book industry magazine The Bookseller tracked the six shortlisted titles of 1998, proving that from the minute the shortlist was announced sales for all six books took an immediate and dramatic upturn, and that even a month after the prize was announced sales of all six books continued to increase.

As for the winner, Ian McEwan's Amsterdam was still selling a thousand copies a day in hardback and became an instant bestseller in paperback.

Bookshops also reported an increase in sales of his previous novels.

For books like J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, which was a remote number 1431 on the Times Bestseller list before the prize was awarded, the Booker is utterly transforming. It jumped to sixth place in the charts, sales leaping by 1784 per cent in just five days.

Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won in 1993, sold 27,000 hardback copies within half-an-hour of bookshops opening the day after the announcement.

Some major films have sprung from Booker winners, regenerating the stories, capturing worldwide audiences and breathing new life into book sales: think The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, for instance, or Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark (filmed as Schindler's List), Oscar and Lucinda by this year's favourite Peter Carey, Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawar Jhabvala and many others. Upcoming on the silver screen is an adaptation of the 1999 winner, Coetzee's Disgrace, and of 1996 winner Graham Swift's Last Orders, in which Sir Michael Caine will take the leading role.

In short, it's an industry in itself, and is taken very seriously by everyone from authors and publishers (who are each allowed to submit only two books) to book distribution companies (who must standby with their warehouses at the ready) to bookies and, finally, the readers who cut the shortlist titles from the newspaper and buy or borrow the requisite titles.

There will be some very tense people in London right now. The judges will be worrying about their reputations; authors about their place in history. How do you act if you win? How do you act if you lose? We can just sit back and place our bets.