Giving up the standards of literary prizes
At the end of 2018, on October 16th, the 2018 Man Booker Prize was announced, and by a unanimous vote was awarded to Anna Burns for Milkman. Now you might be thinking that the end of February might be slightly late to talk about the award winner. And to be perfectly honest, I have been putting off this post. Simply because, while the novel received many praises, I could not and did not finish it.
The experimental novel tells the story of an unnamed middle sister who is harassed by an older married man known only as the milkman.
As an avid reader, I very rarely abandon books mid way through. In fact, in all of 2018, I can only count two that I deliberately decided to give up on. Which is in fact very different from taking a pause on a book with plans (admittedly vague plans) to return to it at a later date. However, with Milkman I knew that once I made the decision to leave it, I would not pick it up again. So for a long time, partly for the sake of wanting to finish this Man Booker 2018 series on the blog, I tried to force myself through it. But like so many readers will tell you, life is too short to read things you don’t enjoy.
And it was from that piece of advice that I got the idea for this post that would simultaneously enable me to finish this series. Let me begin by saying that I will always avoid negativity when reviewing books and authors, because as a writer myself I can understand the difficulty and sheer amount of energy that gets put into writing a novel. But that does not mean I will not share my opinions.
The Man Booker Prize is considered one of the most prestigious prizes for English novelists, and sets a standard of sophistication (rightly or wrongly) that results in many books from both the longlist and shortlist to end up in numerous readers TBR (to-be-read) lists.
Pressure regarding what kind of books you “should” read, or judgements on what are considered “good” books run rampant over the internet, and for those in school, in the academic worlds. More and more, we are finding book blogger and bookstagrammers rejecting these standards and judgments simply to read what they enjoy. The question is when will prizes like the Man Booker similarly take this into account.
In the first post of this series, Man Booker Dozen – The 2018 Man Booker Prize Longlist, I talked about my skepticism regarding the Prize that considers itself an authority on “quality fiction in English”, simply because of the historic lack of diversity. And in response to the shortlist, I similarly mentioned in the post Thoughts on the Man Booker Shortlist 2018, that the Prize seemed to favour fiction of a specific kind. While Burn’s Milkman can be considered experimental in many kinds of ways, its writing style was very reminiscent of the stream of consciousness writing of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce.
With minimal chapters and many deviations and trains of thought of the unnamed middle sister being entertained throughout the novel, the story was often lost and confusing. While demonstrating great potential in discussing the dangers of environments that do not acknowledge harassment or take women and young girls seriously, I found that it was hidden behind the chatter of middle sisters mind.
Now all this is not to say that the novel was not a good one. Nor does it mean that the I believe the prize was erroneously awarded to Burns. Rather, it has simply convinced me, more so than before, of the diverse opinions regarding literature that make a judgement on “quality fiction” intended to be universal quite untenable.
The best thing about literature is that there is so much out there, and while awards like the Man Booker Prize can introduce you to new authors and styles you may never have picked up before, it should not become the be-all-end-all decision making factor of anyone’s literary picks.
~S~
