Banville Bags The Booker…And Banker The Blogger Predicted It!

A reporter from Times of India, New Delhi, Sunaina Kumar, called me thrice in the past month, asking for the usual ‘quotable quotes’ about the books and authors nominated for the Man Booker Prize 2005.

Since I’d read several of the books in the running, I commented on various titles. You can read my review of one shortlisted title, Ali Smiths’ The Accidental elsewhere on this blog–use the search bar at the top of the page to find it. Typing in Ali Smith should do it.

But each time the TOI Delhi reporter called me, she always asked, “Who’s your favourite?”

And each time, I replied “John Banville for The Sea.” And I gave her several reasons why.

She laughed, wrote it down, published my comments, and I promptly forgot about it, as one should with quotable quotes given out to reporters.

But it turned out yesterday that Banville actually won. He was the dark horse in the Booker race, with odds of 7 to 1 against him, and the only one in the six-book shortlist that no major (or minor) critic in the UK or USA had picked as the winner, or even as a possible winner.

That’s not to say that anyone’s complaining. It’s not a case of some pulp novelist walking away with the prize when everyone else is a heavy hitter. It’s quite the opposite: Banville is so highly regarded and so much a ‘writer’s writer’ with his exquisite prose and mesmeric structure, that everyone assumed the Booker panel would pick someone more, well, popular.

Zadie Smith was a hot favourite, especially since her nominated book, On Beauty, was set in America, which means it has twice the sales and critical-acclaim a typically Brit book would have got.

They picked all the others. Except Banville. But now that he’s won, they’re all delighted, of course, even amazed and pleased in a way.

But nobody thought he’d win.

Except for one lone Blogger here in Mumbai, India.

I have proof too. As I said, there were three articles in which I was quoted. I couldn’t find links to two of them, but I found one, dated August 31st, and you can get to it by clicking on the title of this blog post (above).

As you can see, I even said “Expect the unexpected” when predicting that Banville would win. (I said a great deal more but as usually happens with quotable quotes, most of it gets left on the editing table for lack of space. Still it’s better than having one’s quote attributed to someone else entirely–that happened on one previous occasion and it can be quite irritating!)

I’m thrilled that Banville won. The only thing that might make me happier is if it had been an Indian novelist–and I mean, really Indian, as in apna bhadralok, writing about Indian characters, and Indian settings. It’s happened before of course.

I’m sure it’ll happen soon again.

Oct 13, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »