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| John Berger |
MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1972
Booker Club: G
Looking back at the Booker: John Berger
Few young men were angrier than John Berger on his victory. But although G.'s anger is rather outdated, its energy and invention remains alive.
Sam Jordison
Wed 9 Jan 2008
During its first few years, the Booker had drawn some press interest thanks to its comparatively large prize fund (£5,000), high calibre winners like VS Naipaul, and the presence of big hitters like John Fowles and Saul Bellow among its judges. All the same, until 1972, it was still very much in its infancy and received nothing like the media frenzy that surrounds today's award. It came of age rapidly, however, thanks to the political controversy provoked by that year's victor John Berger.
The Booker, you see, had a dirty little (open) secret. Its sponsors, Booker McGonnall, had garnered much of their wealth, as Berger related in his acceptance speech, from 130 years of trading in the Caribbean. "The modern poverty of the Caribbean is the direct result of this and similar exploitation," he said. He also later told everyone that he was going to give half his prize money to the Black Panthers - who were, as he explained, "the black movement with the socialist and revolutionary perspective that I find myself most in agreement with in this country". Right on!
Contemporary columnists huffed and puffed about this "kick in the teeth", labelled Berger a "literary thug" and generally described his decision as a Very Bad Thing. All the same, while it might not have been very good for its sponsors, the speech certainly garnered the prize some beneficial publicity and controversial interest.
In partial defence of Berger, another question is also pertinent: what else might the committee have expected in giving a platform to a man known fondly - even in 1972 - as "our one and only Marxist critic"? And what else, indeed, might they have expected from the author of a book as radical as their chosen winner, G.?
G. is the name that Berger gives - or rather, doesn't - to his "principal protagonist", the rich son of an Italian canned fruit merchant. G. is a libertine and a dilettante, and the determinedly non-linear narrative describes him being conceived under sordid conditions. In turn, we see his heartless raids on the the beds of women across Europe (including relatives), and his uninterest in great political events and movements of history. Eventually, he has something of an awakening and, instead of watching a rioting mob in first world war Trieste pass with his usual sardonic indifference, plunges into the middle of it. He is killed almost immediately for his trouble.
G.'s journey into class consciousness, coupled with the frequent demonstrations of how the old European order was to be washed away by great tides of dissatisfied workers and trampled under the march of technology, could hardly be a more blatant attempt to demonstrate Marxist principles - all of which gives the books the feeling of a lecture - and a dated lecture at that. Given the fact that imminent environmental apocalypse seems to have trumped class inequality as the most pressing political issue today, Berger's revolutionary advocacy reads as quaintly as a discourse on the qualities of lignin or the way the sun travels around the earth. An interesting curiosity, but hardly a pressing concern.
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| John Berger |
That's not to say, however, that even those allergic to Das Kapital-influenced homilies won't find plenty of value in G. - plenty, in fact, that remains urgent and radical. Berger has more than enough charisma and style to make up for any perceived deficiencies of theme and, like the best lecturers, is able to keep us with him by force of eloquence alone. He is not, as Francis Hope unkindly put it back in 1972, "inhibited by the fear of being pretentious". But for me, at least, his determination to experiment ,and readiness to expound complicated ideas make G. all the more interesting.
And it remains a live influence. Michael Ondaatje, most notably, seems to have learned an awful lot from this book, both in terms of its fractured narrative techniques and the way the fleshy frailty of human characters is so exposed by the technology of the early modern age.
Berger also shares Ondaatje's ability to produce wonderful set pieces. G. is worth reading just for its vertiginous description of the first crossing of the Alps by plane, its crushing examples of the first world war's futile slaughter and a barnstorming rendition of the Milan riots of 1898. The latter scene culminates in a suave refusal to finish describing the slaughter because stopping where he does is "to admit more of the truth". Of course, the space Berger leaves here is even more eloquent of confusion and chaos for the reader prepared to put in the imaginary work. It's a neat sleight of hand and similar clever little tricks abound in G. Sometimes, however, such metatextual interruptions are irritating. Try to read the following without groaning:
"I must emphasise that I have used the word 'play' as a metaphor so we can appreciate the essentially artificial, symbolic, exemplary and spectacular nature of the occasion."
Fortunately, more often, these authorial throat-clearings and finger-pointings enrich the text. Even the sample quoted above moves on to a vivid evocation of the very physical aspects of a hunt. Perhaps surprisingly for a writer so easily caricatured as a dry Marxist theoretician, Berger excels in such sensual descriptions. For all its high-minded experimentation and self-conscious stylistic quirks, this book remains firmly grounded in the physical world. In fact, G. is probably most memorable for its virtuoso descriptions of the sights, sounds and smells of a lost world. As such it's a rich and pleasurable reading experience, as well as an admirably uncompromising, not to mention provocative intellectual challenge.
More kudos, then, to the early Booker judges, whose choice was again far more daring than recent victors ... even if that meant the prize-giving was a bit of a mess.
THE GUARDIAN
Man Booker Prize
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