The Booker Prize shortlist has been announced. On Saturday the Guardian carried an entertaining feature collecting the experiences of former Booker judges. Picking out some of the highlights, Alex includes this comment from James Wood:
[I]t is almost impossible to persuade someone else of the quality or poverty of a selected novel (a useful lesson in the limits of literary criticism). In practice, judge A blathers on about his favourite novel for five minutes, and then judge B blathers on about her favourite novel for five minutes, and nothing changes: no one switches sides.
I think I can understand that. When you read a novel two things are going on - well, two things at least. On one level, you may be noting strengths and weaknesses of characterization, ditto on plot construction, use of language, the writer's perceptions about the world, wisdom (or not), humour, dramatic tension or lack of it - and the rest. At the same time, though not entirely unrelated to your judgement on these several aspects, you're also 'in' the story, living it so to say - and that either grabs you or it doesn't. If it doesn't, argument about qualities isn't going to change your subjective experience of reading the book, though it may persuade you to re-read it. If you've loved it, someone else's picking it apart may make you wonder whether you should have, but there's some residue all the same of the way it came across to you.
I now stick my neck out on to the chopping block to tell about the effect of what seems to be a highly-regarded book on me: The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. As many as three other readers I know, with whose literary taste my own overlaps extensively, praised this book to me in the highest terms, and that is to say nothing of the opinions of it quoted on the book itself from reviews. Every laudatory epithet you can summon up, it has. For me it was just lost time, though I have no one but myself to blame because I should have stopped reading. But I wanted to see why, how, others could have so elevated a view of it when I felt I was wading, straining, struggling... So I persevered, in order not to make too quick a judgement, in order to be able to know, on the basis of all the evidence available, why I didn't rate the book.
Now, the crunch point. I could enumerate the novel's literary failings as I perceive them: amongst the five narrators, at least two whose voices aren't internally coherent; the repetitiousness in having the same story told by five different people; the fact that the novel signals and re-signals (and then some) its main punch... and then some. Conversely, those who think well of the book could no doubt come back at me with defences on all such points. But what I know deep within my inner being is the unutterable tedium I experienced through the 600-plus pages of The Poisonwood Bible. Nothing on earth could ever get me to re-read it.