Have Rimington’s Booker prize judges got it wrong?

LONDON novelist Julian Barnes is the favourite to win the 2011 Booker Prize when it is announced tonight at the Guildhall. But many are agreed that Barnes's book, The Sense of an Ending, while not his best novel, is far and away the best book on the shortlist because the judges have used the the wrong criteria to pick their favourites.
 
Ever since Booker Prize chair Stella Rimington announced last month that the judges were looking for "enjoyable books" with "readability", the literary world has been up in arms. The view is that the judges -  former MI5 spy Rimington, author Susan Hill, Spectator editor Matthew d'Ancona, author and politician Chris Mullin and Daily Telegraph books editor Gaby Wood - are too lightweight in their own writing and their taste.

All of them except Wood have written suspense-filled thrillers, points out David Sexton in The Evening Standard, and Rimington's were ghost-written. They favour a "genre product", he sneers. "We really shouldn't be surprised when they botch up the Man Booker too."

They might as well have picked Jeffrey Archer for the Booker, writes Catherine Bennett in The Guardian. Deriding them for their "commitment to easeful enjoyment", she adds that their decision to look only at the book itself "blandly rebukes those readers who take an interest in authorial development or literary context".

The stated criteria "opens up a completely false divide between what is high end and what is readable," notes former poet laureate and current trustee of the prize Andrew Motion in The Guardian. Poet Jackie Kay adds, "It is a sad day when even the Booker is afraid to be bookish".

A rival award, The Literature Prize, has even been set up in protest, with its backers accusing the Booker judges of prioritising "a notion of 'readability' over artistic achievement".

Rimington has hit back, calling her detractors "pathetic" and reproaching them for living "in such an insular world they can't stand their domain being intruded upon".

One of the shortlisted authors, debut novelist Stephen Kelman, agrees that readability and quality shouldn't be mutually exclusive. But he argues that if the judges' choices make literature more acceptable to more people, "then surely that's an overwhelmingly good thing and should be encouraged and celebrated". ·