So How Come Enright Got It?

In today's Guardian Booker judge Giles Foden gives a fascinating insight into the discussion that went on about the shortlisted books behind closed doors and how the winner was chosen:

... Judges applauded The Gathering for its controlled prose, sentence by sentence. They were impressed by its figurative language. They wondered at how unflinching Enright was in the face of what was pretty grim, unappealing material. Would the subject matter deter readers? asked one judge. Was that a literary question? asked another. ... Enright's novel had the support in depth and range other titles were not able to muster. It is, perhaps, a book people admire rather than immediately warm to, and this admiration won the day for her. Admiration for the unflinching ferocity of her vision and her skill with figurative language, admiration for the way in which she conveys feeling in carefully modulated prose which, sentence for sentence, matches anything being written in English today. Together we were happy to award her the prize on that basis. It was a collegiate decision. That is how it should be for the Man Booker. I hope many other readers will join us in our admiration for the many fine books on the shortlist and longlist.

Would certainly agree it isn't a book one warms to immediately, and that it is in many ways admirable, and the judges made the sensible decision from the literary standpoint ... which is really the only criteria they should be employing if they are doing their job properly.

*Sigh*But still ...

The paper is also featuring an exclusive Enright short story The Caravan.

P.S. Don't miss Starmag tomorrow for the full set of Booker reviews.

The-Didn't-Make-It But-Excellent Titles

The trouble with major literary awards is that while attention is drawn to some excellent books, other works that don't make the lists can slip below reader's radar ... despite being equally good.

Author Giles Foden, one of this year's Booker judges looks at some of the excellent books that didn't make the longlist for one reason or another and which really could have. There are some very good recommendations here, and I've stuck in Amazon links so you can check the titles out:

Other novels I admired include Trezza Azzopardi's Winterton Blue, Ben Markovits's Imposture and (a particular favourite) John Burnside's The Devil's Footprints. And what about assured outings by authors any writer in Britain would be proud to count among his peers: Adam Thorpe, Robert Edric, Jonathan Coe and Justin Cartwright? Then there were the books to be read for pleasure: Peter Behrens's The Law of Dreams and Sujit Saraf's The Peacock Throne. The brightest show of future talent was by Tom McCarthy (Men in Space).

But they were all out, along with the big guns, Michael Ondaatje, JM Coetzee and Pat Barker. Ondaatje's Divisadero was brilliant in parts. My personal view of Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year is that it's a piece of radical literary theory offered as a (no doubt well-deserved) subversion of the whole commercial and promotional mechanism whereby books are distributed. But theory is not fiction. As for Barker's Life Class, I wish I'd been more persuasive about that.

Adaptation

Books provide filmmakers with ready-made plots on which to base screenplays (useful when plagiarism claims start to fly), and a proven audience. But unless they are global mega-sellers like Dan Brown, J K Rowling or Michael Crichton, the actual authors are lower on the food chain than the screenwriter ...

Danuta Kean talks about the real deal is for authors when their novels are "optioned", in a piece written for Myslexia and reproduced in the Independent.

Some time ago we talked about the film adaptations we liked and those we thought sucked. Great clearly minds think alike (!) and one or two of Kean's choices echo my own. (Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a clunker, and Mingella's take on Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient is so good it actually does the novel a favour.)

She also highly recommends another film of the book which I think is the cleverest adaptation from book to film I've ever seen - Adaptation:

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman turned Susan Orlean's 'unfilmable' book The Orchid Thief into a jaw dropping satire about writer's block.

and which is itself about the whole process of adaptation from book to screenplay!

Kean also points to the large number of novels which have made it to the big screen this year. I'm pretty dreadful at getting myself out to the cinema and my conscience hurts when I buy pirated DVD's ... but I am so looking forward to seeing the adaptations of Zoë Heller's Notes on a Scandal (one of my favourite novels) and Giles Foden's The Last King of Scotland (which I still have to read). I'll probably catch them on Astro a year or two down the line.

Postscript:

Leon also has a post up about adaptations he's looking forward to.