Barnes’s Booker: why do I get the sense of an ending?

SO, the Booker bookies were right. Julian Barnes, at his fifth attempt, won. Those who backed him (13/8 at the off) will be modestly content. Those who said the Booker was "dumbing down" will have to eat their polysyllables.
 
And Barnes (65, appropriately) will have secured himself a modest pension pot: fifty grand in prize money, plus the inevitable sales, not just of his winning book The Sense of an Ending, but of all his backlist, right back to his first Booker shortlisting in 1984, Flaubert’s Parrot, soon to be flying off the shelves of the Amazon warehouse.

Within an hour of the Booker result, The Sense of an Ending was No. 21 in Books on Amazon. By 02:00 this morning, four hours after the announcement, it was No. 2.

The wired word travels fast. Particularly when there’s money at stake. That’s the difference between the Booker and the Nobel Prize, which is awarded to someone you’ve never heard of, writing books nobody’s read, in a language no-one understands.

The current row, between a Booker prize which has openly espoused "readability" and a new anti-Booker gong, The Literature Prize, which launches next year, is about populism versus art. Given that "literature" is one of those words like "refined" and "vegetarian option" which simultaneously sets one’s teeth on edge and translates as "you won’t enjoy it but it’s good for you", I suspect I’m on the side of populism.

So let’s be populist and think about sales.

If all goes really well for Barnes, about one in a thousand British adults will read his book. Say 20 people in your average small town, popping down to their local bookshop.

Except, of course, there probably isn’t a local bookshop, and local councils are gleefully closing libraries, and a hundred thousand children leave school each year functionally illiterate. Book sales were down around two per cent last year, and continue to fall.

So who cares about the Man Booker Prize (apart from its sponsor, Man Group plc, which didn’t get its £3bn market cap from novels)?

Well... it works, for a start. Last year’s winner, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, has sold over a quarter of a million copies so far. His 2009 predecessor, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, has sold getting on for 600,000.

Yan Martell has sold 1.3 million copies of Life of Pi (2002). Good numbers. And astonishing, compared with the earlier figures: John Berger’s G (1972) sold 3,658; the first winner, P H Newby’s Something to Answer For (1969), just 361.

And yet. A Booker winner who racks up a reasonable 300,000 in sales could expect to see around £270,000 from that. Divided over an average five-year period - from start of writing through publication and then the prize - that comes out at £54,000 a year. And that’s for an author at the top of his or her game who has been lucky enough to catch the judges’ eye.

Compare that with a young woman I know, who has left university with an English degree and joined an investment bank. Starting salary, joining bonus and relocation allowance come to £60,000 in her first year. And she’s 21; Julian Barnes is 65.

So if money’s the measure of the value we place on something, then, as a culture, it’s fair to say we wouldn’t piss on an author if he were on fire.

Look at any enterprise – books, films, commercials, plays, you name it – which depends on a writer for its very existence. Now look at all the people involved. You can bet that the writer will be the poorest person there.

Yet we go on glamourising The Book as the foundation of our culture. Bemoaning its decline. Wringing our hands over the Death of the Bookshop even as we hit the "Buy with Amazon 1-Click®" button.

It’s all a bit like those old Prudential Assurance ads: "Without A Pension I Really Do Not Know What I Shall Do". Without books... well, despite self-interest, without books I think we’ll do fine. We’ll probably just do... differently.
 
Whatever happens, there’ll still be authors: people who like reading, writing, and the illusion that life can be spun and stretched into making sense. Some will be good; a few, great; the vast majority, a thousand-to-one, to judge from the web, unreadable.

But will those authors who should be, rather than insist on, writing, be able to live by their readers, or will authorship, in particular, go back to the earlier model of a cultivated pastime for people of leisure?

For that, we’ll have to follow the money, which is by far the most fascinating story in publishing right now.

And, without being pessimistic, I do suspect a marvellous symmetry – I’d say 'karma' but then I’d have to die – in this year’s Booker-winning title. The Sense of an Ending.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0224094153 ·