Howard Davies at the LSE
An interesting evening at the LSE, where Howard Davies – former head of the Financial Services Authority and of the CBI, and former director of the Bank of England - was talking about his experience as chair of the Man Booker prize judges this year – and in particular, about what subjects literary fiction is tackling these days, and what it’s not. Based on the hundred-plus novels Davies and his fellow judges (Wendy Cope was in the audience, too, and piped up answers to some of the questions at the end) had to read as part of their judicial duties.
What the novel is tackling, apparently, is World War II, and the immigrant’s experience. Davies was a bit critical of the fashion for the war: he thought most of the novels were less about the war itself than about testing human ethics and relationships in the extreme moral and personal conditions that obtained at that time. He seemed to think it a kind of fictional game rather than a reflection of real historical interest. As for the experience of the immigrant, I think he was right to say this is a very common theme for novels in recent times – though he didn’t sound as fed up of it as I am.
What was more interesting was what the novel’s not dealing with – especially, for Davies, the fact that it’s nearly silent about British politics and about the world of work and business. Davies wondered whether the lack of obvious politics in the novel at the moment might be due to the daunting background fact of Iraq, which may be scaring writers off; the need for time to fully come to terms with what Tony Blair was, and meant; and the broad consensus between Labour and Tory.
As far as business is concerned, Davies mentioned in his speech on awarding the prize that he’s waiting for the great hedge fund novel; he thinks the British novel is sadly short on descriptions of business, in contrast to the American novel – although he singled out Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which was of course shortlisted for the prize this year, as showing a real understanding of US consulting and capitalism.
I thought the most interesting points Davies made, though (which he mentioned in his Booker speech , but this time backed up with graphs – a rarity surely in a discussion of the state of the novel) were about the boom in the number of prizes available these days so that in America, apparently there is one prize for every ten books published; and about the increasing divergence, over the last forty or so years, between novels that succeed in getting prizes and those that succeed in the best-seller lists (a point first made by James English in his book The Economy of Prestige , which Davies strongly recommended). I’m interested in the economics of art forms and asked Davies whether he thought this divergence was a result of the increasing professionalisation of literary taste since the 1960s – because of the expansion of humanities and literature departments in universities and the expansion of the written media – and because the boom in the number of prizes that he identified distorts our ideas of literary taste by injecting into the world of books the kind of institutional and personal patronage more common in the world of visual art, dominated as it is by rich individuals and the staff and boards of well-endowed galleries. Davies was interested in these points and thought serious work investigating what’s going on would be welcome. But he thought a key factor may be the success of publishing houses on segmenting the book market and selling increasingly targeted genre fiction, whether it be romance, fantasy or horror – so that in effect prize-wining literary fiction is simply outsold, rather than unsold. Well, there may be something in that.
Certainly I agree with Howard Davies that it’s not the fault of book retailers that literary fiction doesn’t sell more. One of his themes both tonight and in his Booker speech was that the book world must stop seeing ordinary, “amateur” readers as passive buyers who can simply be told what is excellent, but must respond to readers’ tastes and be readable. In some ways what he said reminded me of Anthony Lilley’s recent RTS lecture The Me in Media in which he argued that broadcasters must learn from new media’s interactivity and learn to include and respect “the people formerly known as the audience”; Davies’s plea for the literati to show more respect for readers is a much older point about a much older medium - but the fact that he’s raised it now may be an indirect result of the power-shift web 2.0 is bringing.
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