On Tuesday night, Howard Jacobson’s laugh-out-loud exploration of Jewishness, The Finkler Question, became the first unashamedly comic novel to win the Man Booker prize in its 42-year history.
There will be cries of “about time too” for a funny and warm writer, now 68, who has long been highly regarded but unrewarded when it comes to major literary prizes.
The Booker prize chairman, Andrew Motion, said it was “quite amazing” that this was the first time Jacobson had been short-listed. But he was not, in any way, being rewarded because it was his turn.
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“It never came into our minds,” he said. “Having said that, there is a particular pleasure in seeing somebody who is that good finally getting his just desserts.
“It won because it was the best book. You expect a book by Howard Jacobson to be very clever and very funny and it is both those things. But it is also, in a very interesting way, a very sad, melancholic book. It is comic, it is laughter, but it is laughter in the dark.”
Motion agreed it could be called a comic novel but said it was much more. It was “absolutely a book for grown-ups, for people who understand that comedy and tragedy are linked.”
It will be a sweet victory for the Manchester-born Jacobson, who has lamented the fact that comic fiction is not taken more seriously. “There is a fear of comedy in the novel today,” he wrote in the Guardian. “When did you last see the word ‘funny’ on the jacket of a serious novel?”
Motion said times were changing and while he would go to music gigs when young, his children now go to comedy gigs: “The place of comedy in society has changed — so maybe we are more accommodating of it than we have ever been in the past.”
Having said all that, The Finkler Question should not, he said, be seen as something that was “relentlessly middle-brow, or easy-peasy” because it was comic. “It is much cleverer and more complicated and about much more difficult things than it immediately lets you know. Several people have used the word wise, and that’s a good word.”
The book — Jacobson’s 11th — follows the lives of three friends, Julian Treslove, Sam Finkler and Libor Sevick, and tackles not just what it is to be a British Jew, but also the nature of friendship itself.
Published by Bloomsbury, it beat a strong field including a novel that had unexpectedly and surprisingly become odds-on favorite with the bookmakers. Ladbroke’s even stopped taking bets last week because of the betting patterns surrounding Tom McCarthy’s C.
The others that missed out were Emma Donoghue’s Room, Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song and Peter Carey’s Olivier and Parrot in America. Victory for Carey would have made him the only three-time winner and hopes had been high, with the Australian novelist believing it his best work and Motion praising him as a modern-day Dickens. Jacobson, meanwhile, has described himself as “a Jewish Jane Austen” while others have called him a “British Philip Roth.” His victory means he is the oldest winner since William Golding won in 1980, aged 69, for Rites of Passage.
The judges were much brisker than in previous years in taking just an hour to agree Jacobson should win, with a three-two split. “It was a pretty intense hour. It wasn’t unanimous but it was a decision that everybody is entirely happy with,” said Motion.
He declined to say which side he was on or which book just missed out: “I don’t want that person to go to bed tonight and eat their pillow.” He did reveal, though, that the one book that narrowly missed out on making the short list was Alan Warner’s The Stars in the Bright Sky.
The judges, who this year also included dancer Deborah Bull, journalist Rosie Blau, broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe and writer Frances Wilson, read more than 140 novels before discarding books by big hitters including Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.
There was controversy when the long list came out because it included Christian Tsiolkas’ The Slap, which chronicled the lives of often unpleasant and misogynistic suburban Australians. The Booker judges contended that he was writing about misogynists rather than it being a misogynistic novel.
Winning the Man Booker means US$79,000 in the bank — unless Jacobson decides to follow the example of John Berger who, when he won in 1972, donated half his cash prize to the Black Panthers. More importantly, it will guarantee an extremely healthy spike in sales.
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