It was announced last night that Barbara Kingsolver had won the Orange Prize, for her novel The Lacuna. In view of the fact that many readers and critics were disappointed, and some of them take the view that Kingsolver's book 'does not have the scope and sheer audacity' of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, it's interesting to note that Daisy Goodwin pretty much said on Radio 4's Front Row last night that the judges couldn't ignore the fact that Mantel had already won the Booker. Listen here, at 20 minutes in:
I'd be lying if I said that we were really able to put that [Mantel's Booker win] out of our minds... I suppose my feeling is that competitions like these really exist to bring the best books to the widest number of readers, and you might think that possibly all the people who've bought Wolf Hall have bought it already and maybe it's time to introduce another book to the widest collection of readers.
To me, that's as good as an admission that the Orange Prize, at least on this occasion, was judged according to rigged criteria. They might as well not have had Wolf Hall on the shortlist. (I've read neither of the two books, incidentally.) It's more of this sort of thing. Or like obliging Shane Warne to bowl in some Test matches with a weight strapped to his right arm.
