BANVILLE ON WINNING THE BOOKER

Ahh the weekend.  We're off on a secret mission today, and we're riding a 90-mile training ride tomorrow, so we're going to leave you with this groovy tidbit.  John Banville recently wrote an essay for the Irish Times on winning the Booker but it's all locked up behind paid registration walls.  Fortunately, thanks to Secret Agent A (who shall remain anonymous to protect him/her/them from the wrath of Irish lawyers), we're able to present the essay for you here, until the cease and desist letters start to fly.  Ahh, the things we do in the name of literature.  And yes, the conclusion of our own Banville interview is on its way.  See you all Monday morning!

The four or five weeks of Booker Prize frenzy are a yearly torment for the novelist, especially if he or she has a book in competition. The people who usually win the glittering prizes, such as sportsmen or actors, perform in public, but we poor scribblers are by nature shy creatures, crouching in our rooms laboriously blackening the innocent white pages, and when the searchlights of the media are trained on us we tend to wince, and utter faint squeaks of distress.

For the six authors shortlisted in this year's Man Booker stakes there was a half-hour of exquisite agony in Hatchard's bookshop on Piccadilly last Monday lunchtime. Hatchard's is one of the world's last genuine bookshops - the royals are said to buy their books there, which one imagines is more a source of cachet than of cash - and my favourite bookseller, Roger Katz, is a great and tireless enthusiast for good writing.

So it was into his shop that the six of us trooped on Monday, chaperoned by our vigilant publicists, to sign a raft of the shortlisted books. Afterwards we milled about for a while, trying in our agitation not to crush the plastic wine glasses that had been thrust upon us, making edgily bright conversation and trying not to bare our teeth at each other. Then came the photographers. Each of the six of us went forward in alphabetical order, which meant I was first. I cannot imagine how the real stars survive the repeated gauntlets of photography through which they must daily progress - somewhere recently it was reported that the celebrity of celebrities, Paris Hilton, hears camera shutters going even when there are no cameras about - for it is an atavistic experience, provoking the primitive's fear that the taking of one's image must involve the taking also of some part of the spirit.

The photographers - there must have been 30 of them - constantly shout out their victim's name so that he or she will look directly into their particular lens. Cunningly, they began by calling us by our first names, modulating into Misters or Mizzes, calculating, rightly, that a note of respect would produce a correspondingly warm regard. There is the problem, on Booker day, of getting through it without anaesthetising oneself with enormous, near-fatal injections of alcohol. Last time I was shortlisted, I was tipsy by 10 in the morning - thanks to free champagne on the morning flight from Dublin, for in those days Aer Lingus was still an airline - and footless by four in the afternoon. This time round I spent the morning sleeping, after an overnight flight from New York, drank no more than a sip or two of Roger Katz's wine, then took a decorous lunch with my publicist - she is the blonde beauty whose identity was inquired after by practically everyone who watched the television coverage from the Guildhall that night - and then returned to the Athenaeum Club where I was staying, and drank water throughout a long interview by an alarmingly perceptive and well-read journalist from the Los Angeles Times. Glass of water innocently in hand, I felt saintly.

I was to be collected at 6.30pm, by my publisher and blonde beauty, and taken to the Guildhall. After the interview I had an hour to spare and went for a walk in St James's Park, one of London's loveliest public spaces. I paused on the Princess Diana memorial bridge and watched five shrieking gulls and one small but determined duck competing for a morsel of bread: just like, I reflected, the Shortlist, as the six of us had come to be collectively known. The duck won.

THE GUILDHALL IS a peculiar building. It is old, but somehow looks fake. In the great hall a gowned and evening-suited throng was drinking champagne and eagerly scanning the faces of the Shortlist, faces which by now were each locked in a rictus meant to convey emotional degree-zero. Someone gaily told Kazuo Ishiguro that he looked inscrutable; shocked breaths were indrawn, but Ish is a mild man, and merely smiled. Zadie Smith's little black number was widely admired, while Ali of the same ilk debonairly displayed her scuffed sneakers. In my tux and bow tie I felt like a melancholy knight in close-fitting, hot, unbendable armour.

Booker night lasted for four hours - that is, from the champagne reception that started at 6.30pm through an agonisingly drawn-out dinner, all the dishes of which were to me indistinguishable from each other, and tasted of warmed-over cardboard - to the announcement, which would come at 10.25pm precisely. High in the choir loft the BBC folk were setting up their equipment. The presenter of the Booker show, Kirsty Wark from Newsnight, turned out to be, like everyone on the telly, shorter than one had expected; no doubt she was making the same silent observation of me.

What does one talk about at a Booker dinner? The one topic that must not, cannot, be mentioned is the judges' verdict, arrived at hours ago and known to no one save a handful of journalists who, in order for them to prepare their copy for tomorrow's editions, were told the winner's name at 6pm and sworn to secrecy for the next four-and-a-half hours. This must have been a rum predicament for them to find themselves in. Imagine: you are a committed newshound, you are told something that large numbers of people are itching to know, and you are not allowed to tell.

Somehow we all survive until 10pm, when the BBC coverage of the event begins. Huge television screens around the hall present us with the spectacle of ourselves, still rictussed and death-pale, trying to look unconcerned and hiding the palsied trembling of our hands. For a brief moment sanity breaks through, like a ray of wan sunlight over a surging sea, and the question presents itself: what on earth am I doing here, in this absurd outfit, sweating and fretting over a bloody prize? Where now is the poise, the concentration, the infinitely subtle intent which produced the book in the first place? Yesterday I was some sort of grown-up, tonight I am a child of impoverished parents hankering after that expensive, shiny red bicycle that Santa might just bring this year. I finger in my pocket the dog-eared envelope on which I have written out, in childishly big letters, the names of those whom I fear I might forget to acknowledge should I turn out to be the . . . no, I must not even form the thought. I catch myself on the television screen, a simpering, shiny-faced shop-window manikin.

AT LAST THE chairman of the judges rises to announce the winner of the Man Booker Prize, 2005. One has a sense of incipient falling. This is ridiculous. I am an artist, none of this matters. What's 52-and-a-half grand? Oh, about €70,000, a small voice in my head informs me, and then cackles tauntingly. I think of the printer standing in some distant factory, his finger hovering over the button marked reprint. I recall, with blithe inconsequence, a moment on a street corner in Paris long ago when I . . .

My name is announced, and the table erupts in cheers. Immediately there come to my mind those lines from Philip Larkin's poem The Whitsun Weddings, about the brides' seamy-foreheaded fathers who had never known "Success so huge and wholly farcical . . ." I wade through an acre of cloying, mud-like carpet, climb the steps, receive my prize, flash a ghastly grin for the photographer, make my little speech, and stumble back to my table, which is still swaying in euphoria.

What I feel most strongly is a spreading sense of relief at the thought that I shall never again have to worry about this prize; I shall be able to enjoy early autumns again; I shall never have to watch the anguished look in my publisher's face when the judges yet again pass over my latest book with wordless disdain; I shall be able to write in peace and calm through another September; for I have been, at last, Bookered.

Comments

[cj]

That was fun. Thanks!