Booker Prize 2000

Check out this Merritt Moseley article on 'The Booker Prize for 2000' [The Sewanee Review, Vol. 109, No. 3 (Summer, 2001), pp. 438-446]. It contains some interesting ruminations on the UK literary prize-giving scene, and on the particular Booker shortlist for that year. Moseley thinks only the Kneale and the Atwood titles had any business being on the list, although he also notes some striking features of the list as a whole:

Robert Crum, literary editor of the Observer, wrote in November that the present day is the "golden age of the arts prize"--and that (because England is "philistine, xenophobic and culturally underfed") such prizes serve a useful purpose. The problem is keeping people excited about them. Perhaps to inject some thrill, the Booker Prize judges took a "leap in the dark" by shortlisting four unknowns-- i.e. all but Ishiguro, a previous Booker winner, and Atwood, already nominated three times. McCrum concludes sadly that they then "equipped themselves with Very lights and parachutes, bumping down to earth with the predictable and disappointingly conventional choice of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin".

What do you think of McCrum's assessment of the UK, "philistine, xenophobic and culturally underfed"? (That's you he's talking about, you know). Here are some more contemporary journalistic responses:

Dalya Alberge observed in the Times that "none of the six novels contending for Britain's most prestigious literary award is set in modern Britain." ... The Independent's literary editor, Boyd Tonkin, pointed out that half the shortlisted authors live in North America ... Critics observed other oddities about the list: for instance, all the novels rely largely on interior monologue, and all but English Passengers disrupt and fragment chronology (and [English Passengers] uses multiple narrators); what is even weirder is that four authors use the resources of the detective story ...