Nilanjana S Roy: The Bluffer's Guide to the Booker

SPEAKING VOLUMES

The Booker is a bit like Elizabeth Taylor: it's been around forever, it's lost its mystery over the years, there's a faint worry that it's been commercialised and everybody knows the best bits of gossip anyway. With the announcement of the 2004 longlist last week, a bluffer's guide to the Booker seemed overdue.

Origins: The common or garden bluffer will know that the Booker Prize was founded in 1968 by the Booker Group, which then had an author's division that published Georgette Heyer among other luminaries.

The slightly superior bluffer will be able to mention the Russian Booker and the African Booker, both founded in the 1990s, and both in the process of separating from the Booker group (now the Man Booker group).

The truly annoying bluffer will be able to tell you who featured on the first shortlist""P H Newby, Barry England, Nicholas Mosley, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark and G M Williams.

The thoroughly insufferable bluffer will know that a) P H Newby won with Something to Answer For b) Murdoch and Spark were nominated for very forgettable books and c) if the Yanks had been allowed to compete in 1969, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Slaughterhouse Five would have made the shortlist sizzle.

The 2004 shortlist: The amateur bluffer will attempt to consign to memory the names of all 22 books on the longlist. This is tiring work; also, you might mix them up, confusing Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit with Matt Thorne's Cherry.

The moderately good bluffer will know that this marks the first year in the Booker's history when American authors are included, that David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is the odds-on favourite and that David Lodge, Louis de Bernieres and V S Naipaul didn't make the cut.

He might even know that the most precious behind-the-book story involves Nadeem Aslam, who took eleven years to write Maps for Lost Lovers, spending roughly four of those reading his sentences into a tape recorder so that they would sound perfect.

The practised bluffer will single out Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, about a magician and his apprentice tangled in the Napoleonic wars) as the dark horse.

She will recall the Amazon customer review of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty: "The bit where the hero dances with Mrs Thatcher high on coke and with a homosexual threesome waiting in the loft is absolutely classic."

She will know that Chimamanda Ngozi's Purple Hibiscus is also on the Orange Prize shortlist, that Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire has already won a Pulitzer, and that Colm Toibin's The Master is the best of the sudden rash of books on Henry James.

The really practised bluffer will also be able to quote from judge Tibor Fischer's tips on how to be a Booker judge: "Only a few key questions ought to be weighed up. Is this novel written by a friend of mine? A good friend of mine? What could they do for me in the future? Would they deliver? Isn't this novel by that reviewer who panned my last book?"

Controversies: The fledgling bluffer will be sure of his ground here, the Booker having thrown up more than its fair share of fights, spats, grumbles and moans. He might be able to tell you of Salman Rushdie's encounter with Booker Prize chairman Martyn Goff, after Rushdie's Shame lost out to Coetzee's Michael K in 1983.

Goff and Rushdie met in the gentleman's loo; Rushdie stopped dead and shouted "Fuck off!" It is possible there was a missing 'G' in there. Even the novice bluffer will know that judge Carmen Callil called Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things an "execrable book".

The practised bluffer might cite the curious case of the Booker shortlist in 1975, which featured only two books""Ruth Prawer Jhabvalla's Heat and Dust and Thomas Keneally's Gossip from the Forest. The skilled bluffer might even quote former judge Jason Cowley on alternate histories of the Booker.

Cowley pointed out that 1997 was the year of Don de Lillo's Underworld and Philip Roth's American Pastoral: "Either of these books could have won [if American writers had been eligible for the Booker]. Instead, it was won that year by Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, an admirably ambitious first novel but one singularly lacking the distinction of the American masters."

The truly professional bluffer will know that back in 1972, John Berger pioneered the tradition of speeches that bite the hand that award them: "And in the case of the prize the publication of the shortlist, the deliberately publicized suspense, the speculation of writers concerned as though they were horses, the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature."

This has now been said of the Booker by column writers for four decades; and what wasn't covered by Berger is handled by former judge A L Kennedy, who said that the winner is 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."

Booker Missteps: The amateur bluffer will zero in to 2002, when the Man Booker website posted Yann Martel's name as the winner a week before the formal announcement. They said it was a mistake, but no one believed them.

Especially not when Life of Pi won a week later. The rather better bluffer might know of the letter sent by Vikram Seth's agent, Giles Gordon, to the Booker judges the year A Suitable Boy was left off the shortlist: "May God and Literature forgive you."

The perfect bluffer will know that even by the standards of whiny judges, Julia Neuberger shocked us by calling James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late "crap" when it won in 1994. And he will be able to recount Martyn Goff's story of how Rushdie lost out to Coetzee: Fay Weldon, one of the judges, was waffling on the vote, cast it for Rushdie first and changed at the last moment to Coetzee.

Trivia versus trivia: At some point, the Perfect Bluffer's skills will be tested by the amateur who triumphantly shares the two pieces of Booker trivia everyone knows: that Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda, The True History of the Kelly Gang) and J M Coetzee (Disgrace, The Life and Times of Michael K) are the only writers to have won the Booker twice, and that Midnight's Children won the Booker of Bookers in 1993.

Depress the amateur's pretensions immediately by challenging him to name all the Booker winners who went on to win the Nobel as well. There are four""J M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, V S Naipaul, and William Golding. It's exactly the kind of information professional bluffers love, being simultaneously arcane and thoroughly useless.

nilroy@lycos.com