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The 2003 Man Booker Prize for the outstanding novel published in the UK and its former colonies (excluding the United States) was awarded in October to a novel called Vernon God Little written by an author who calls himself DBC Pierre. Some observers expressed delight, conceiving the choice of Pierre's book as a daring, forward-thinking step, disproving allegations of stodginess on the part of the establishment involving the thirty-five-year-old prize. Furthermore, since the novel is American in subject and, for the most part, idiom, it seemed to respond to some of the yearning over the past few years for a Booker Prize opened to American authors. Pierre is Australo-Mexican and has lived in the U.S., though he now resides in the Republic of Ireland.
Others saw the selection as the final step in the Booker's surrender to the machinery of hype, the ascendancy of sensation over substance, and a restless craving for novelty and the outrageous, not unconnected with the publicity agenda of Man Booker and the television broadcasters who report on it. These observers may take too apocalyptic a view: it is too soon to tell. But this is the first time in my memory that the judges have turned-almost unanimously, according to later published accounts of their deliberations-to the worst book on their shortlist of finalists. The self-satisfaction with which they celebrated their choice was in direct proportion to the mediocrity of the novel itself. How this came to be is an interesting story.
Many authors deplore book awards, complaining that they wrongly create competition among artists. They must be even more troubled by the metacompetition among the book awards. The Man Booker Prize-this is its formal name now but most people still call it the Booker-is still, by almost any measure, the most prestigious award available to a British novelist (British in its broad sense, including citizens of Eire, the Republic of South Africa, and the old British Commonwealth, so long as their books have been published in the U.K. in English). In recent years, though, there has been increasing distraction by the Whitbread Prizes (five awards given each year, including two for novels, and one chosen later as the book of the year) and the Orange Prize ( only women novelists...