The Booker's narrative arc must change if its cultural dominance is to continue

A week is a long time in Grub Street. It seems only yesterday that the Man Booker was in the grip of an apparently terminal crisis provoked by the announcement of a rival, the Literature prize, and compounded by the worst shortlist in living memory.

Now, with Julian Barnes declared the 2011 winner for The Sense of an Ending, and the annual Guildhall dinner safely negotiated, the air of panic and atmosphere of annus horribilis has dissipated. Strangely, even Dame Stella Rimington's bizarre and defensive speech from the chair (aptly described by Sam Jordison) now seems like the buzz of interference you get on a radio before tuning into the right station. So how did the Booker get out of the locked room of "readability" into which it had incarcerated itself?
By a whisker, is the answer. On the night itself, it seemed as if former chairman of Booker plc Jonathan Taylor would continue his impersonation of those post-revolution Bourbons who had "learned nothing, and forgotten nothing". He insisted on telling the Booker's diners the sales figures for last year's winner, The Finkler Question, and providing details of its foreign rights deals. You could see people shaking their heads in dismay at remarks that were barely appropriate for the works outing of a book warehouse union. What about contemporary fiction? Whither the culture of the English-language novel?
Well, eventually, we were allowed to think about books – specifically, about this year's winner. As is often the case in the book world, it's the quality of the work that provides a reality check, and prevents a drama from becoming a crisis. Barnes's 11th novel is perhaps not his best, and nowhere near as original as Flaubert's Parrot, but it is a work of art, and conforms to the high standard set by previous winners.
This is not a negligible point. Say what you like about this prize – and most of the commentariat have done that pretty freely this year – Booker has a record of picking winners, from In a Free State (Naipaul) and Rites of Passage (Golding) to Oscar and Lucinda (Carey) and Disgrace (Coetzee). Among UK literary prizes, only the Orange comes close in providing an appealing mix of the literary and the commercial – choosing titles that stand the test of time, at least in the short term. A lot of the credit there, I think, goes to Kate Mosse, who is as spirited and youthful as she is tough and brand-conscious. The Booker could do worse than find itself a Mosse to enunciate its vision for the future.
And that brings up another thing: compared with all the other great literary prizes, even the Orange, the Booker is impressively global. This is why its choice matters, why so many readers around the world are exercised by it. Indeed, part of the trouble it has got into lately derives from the disjunction between its 21st-century appeal to a global English-language audience and its 20th-century, literary London origins and organisation. The one is contemporary, the other in danger of becoming hopelessly outmoded.
I wrote last week: "The forthcoming prize dinner at the Guildhall next Tuesday will be fraught with interest." That proved true. In the end, however, there was a palpable sense of relief that good sense had prevailed, and that justice had been done to the best book on the shortlist.
In preparation for 2012, let's hope the placemen and women of the Man Booker don't sit back with a sigh of relief, and refuse to address the issues raised by their critics. The prize is in need of some urgent reforms. Many close to the heart of the organisation are privately anxious to address the way to ensure another 25 years of prize patronage. The Booker's dominant place in the cultural landscape is neither guaranteed, nor automatic; it has to be earned. Otherwise others, such as the Literature prize, will step in and take its place. The Guildhall evening speaks of grandeur, security and a certain cultural arrogance. But it's completely out of sync with the reality of the creative society whose activity it adjudicates.
For instance, it's notable that, with the exception of the winner and his publishers, everyone associated with the shortlist – writers, agents, publishers and so on – was under 45. Contemporary fiction is, generally, not about the old. Yet the Booker persists in handing the judging process to pensioners and retirees such as Rimington, who will go down in the Booker annals as the woman who compared London's literati with the KGB.

Snuff (Discworld Novels) by Kindle Edition

     The new Discworld novel from the master features the popular Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch.

 

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse.And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies and an ancient crime more terrible than murder.He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, and occasionally snookered and out of his mind, but never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a finding, there must be a chase and there must be a punishment. They say that in the end all sins are forgiven.But not quite all...

The Conjurer by Hieronymus Bosch

The Conjurer, by Hieronymus Bosch, depicts a medieval magician performing for a small crowd, while pickpockets steal the spectators' belongings. The painting, on display at the Musée Municipal in St.-Germain-en-Laye, France, illustrates that magicians have long known how to hack into our mental processes. The principles of magic, refined and perfected over the centuries, provide neuroscientists with new ways to study the brain and could help them in their quest to reveal how the organ performs the greatest trick of all - consciousness itself.
Studies of inattentional blindness show that focused attention can make us oblivious to sights that would otherwise be glaringly obvious, while studies of change blindness show that dramatic changes in a scene can go unnoticed if they occur during a brief interruption, even when we look directly at the scene.

Magicians take advantage of this to manipulate their spectators' attentional spotlight. They know, for example, that the eyes give off important social cues, and that people have a natural impulse to pay attention to the objects that others are attending to. They exploit this 'joint attention' by using their eye movements to divert the audience's attention away from the 'method' – the secret action behind the trick – and towards the magical effect.
They also know that the sudden appearance of a new and unusual object will immediately draw the audience's attention. Hence, producing a flying dove gives them an opportunity to perform other hidden manoeuvres.

"11th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness," Martinez-Conde explains. "Traditionally, this was a very academic conference that had no impact outside the specialist field. We wanted to reach the general public as well, but we weren't sure exactly what to do."

The wife-and-husband team went to Las Vegas, where the conference was to be held. It was then, while scouting for potential conference venues, that the idea first came to them. "We saw a lot of ads for magic shows and realized that was the connection we were looking for. We contacted a number of magicians, such as Penn and Teller, James Randi and Apollo Robbins and invited them to a special symposium [at the conference], to share their insights into what makes magic work in the mind of the spectator."

Fighting talk from the prophet of peace

Pinker's assault on the common reader began in 1994 with The Language Instinct, an accessible introduction to the idea that humans are "language animals", biologically wired for linguistic communication. In 1997 he published How the Mind Works, which went beyond language to offer a similar portrayal of the rest of the mind, from vision and reasoning to emotions, humour and art. In 1999 he returned to the question of language with Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, which drew on his research on regular and irregular verbs as a way of explaining how language works in general.

And in 2002 he published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which is basically an attack on what Pinker sees as three great misconceptions about human behaviour: the idea that the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate that is wholly shaped by one's environment; the notion of the "noble savage", the idea that humans are intrinsically good but get warped by society; and "ghost in the machine" theories that postulate the existence of a non-biological agent in the brain that can alter human nature at will.

This is a big idea if ever I saw one, and it requires a massive tome (700 pages plus footnotes) to deal with it. In the first place, Pinker has to locate, analyse and explain the empirical and other data that support his thesis: that, however you measure it, the past was not just a different country, but also a far more violent one. And then he has to provide some explanations for why the long-term reduction in violence happened. To do that he ranges far beyond his own professional territory – into forensic archaeology, political philosophy, intellectual and social history, population dynamics, statistics and international relations. He identifies a number of forces that were key factors in curbing mankind's capacity for inhumanity: the slow emergence of states capable of playing the role of Hobbes's "Leviathan"; the pacifying impact of commerce and trade on behaviour; the impact of the Enlightenment on the way people thought about others; the evolution of notions of etiquette over the centuries; the way print and literacy expanded the "circle of empathy" beyond people's immediate family; the importance of women in civilising men; and the "long peace" that followed the second world war.

Orson Scott Card's novel Enders Game

Lavie Tidhar explores one of those realities in his new novel from PS Publishing, Osama. Tidhar is not a writer to mess around with half measures when confronting a ticklish subject. The Israeli born novelist's short story collection Hebrew Punk features thrilling tales of Jewish vampires, while Jesus and the Eightfold Path argues that Christ was actually a Buddhist. His recent short story The School, a satire of Orson Scott Card's novel Enders Game, started a minor internet meme when it called out a number of Tidhar's fellow SF writers for their militaristic and homophobic attitudes.

And now Tidhar gives us an evil-eyed, turbaned silhouette, standing behind the smoking name of the world's most hated terrorist, as the cover of a novel featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante, even if only in an off-stage role. If this brief introduction to Osama brings to mind Philip K Dick's seminal science fiction novel The Man in the High Castle, that is because Tidhar has deliberately co-opted a number of trademark Dickian techniques in his latest work. PKD's most accomplished literary novel describes a world where the German and Japanese Axis Powers won the second world war, and dominate the North American continent between them. The novel's central characters are fascinated by and slowly drawn into the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a novel within a novel which describes an alternative history in which America and her allies won the war.

One common problem for all science fiction writers is reconciling the wondrous world we could have with the one we have negligently stumbled into. At this exact moment in time, in an alternate reality governed by the Grandmasters of Sci-Fi, there is a version of you living a life of luxury in a post-scarcity paradise where your every whim is met by your own robo-butler. Of course, that may already be your daily reality if you are a hedge-fund manager or MP on expenses, while the rest of us are simply grateful to avoid stacking shelves in Tesci. There are certainly worse realities, but there are also so many better ones.

PKD was at his best when happily tinkering with the constructed nature of modern reality, in which he believed "spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups and political groups" and "we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms". Today, the sophisticated people manufacturing our reality have more sophisticated ways to do it than ever, through the television and computer screens, smartphones, the internet and social media. The collapse of our financial system is exposing just how spurious and manufactured, even fictional, much of our reality is. From banks using mathematical algorithms to extract vast sums of non-existent money from an automated stock market, to a presidential candidate whose main claim to power is his ability to execute wrongdoers, little of our contemporary history would seem out of place in the fiction of a paranoid, acid-tripping, hack SF novelist.