The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 33: What makes a classic novel?

When does a book transcend from contemporary literature to a classic? Does someone have to confirm its classic status? And can all Booker Prize novels be considered classics just by being part of the Booker canon? This, and more, is what Jo and James are trying to get to the heart of in this week’s episode. Listen in as they discuss what makes a classic novel and chat about which Booker books should be known as classics.

• Autobiography by Morrisey

• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

• Crudo by Olivia Laing

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

• Ulysses by James Joyce

• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

• To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

• Glass, Irony and God by Anne Carson

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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James Walton:

Hello and welcome to the Booker Prize Podcast with me, James Walton.

Jo Hamya:

And me, Jo Hamya.

We are trying something slightly new today. It’s an episode on Booker classics and which indeed are deserving of the title. We’re doing this because Alex Clark, friend of the show who came on this podcast to talk about books we should all be excited for in 2024, you can listen to that still, has written an article for the Booker Prize website on so-called Booker classics. She lists many well worthy titles, such as P. H. Newby’s Something to Answer For and J. L Carr’s A Month in the Country. But there’s a very interesting conversation going underneath that in Alex’s article, which I suppose is how exactly do you define what a classic is?

Now, Alex brings up two points: one quite explicitly and one tangentially. The explicit point is that we tend to think of classics in terms of personal taste, and indeed a lot of Alex’s article revolves around her own reading habits. The second is a question of time, I suppose. At what point is a book allowed to become a classic?

Overall, I think this article is really interesting because it’s happening in context of the Booker Prize. Which I suppose begs the question, do you need an institution to sanctify a classic? Also, I suppose if you do, and the Booker Prize would be one of them, could we call all Booker novels classics? With that in mind, we’re going to be picking up those strands of conversation as we go.

James and I have brought along three books each that we think are worthy of classic status. We’ve done our best to choose as objectively as possible. But again, this might be a bone of contention between us both.

James Walton:

Now see, I think with enormous respect to a friend of the show, Alex Clark, she mentions books that she thinks should be classics, really, so the J. L. Carr and the P. H. Newby. I think we’ve gone for ones that we think just are, and-

Jo Hamya:

Oh, I don’t know. I’ve definitely gone for one that I think-

James Walton:

I’ve gone copper bottom.

Jo Hamya:

That I think will be in future, but maybe isn’t yet.

James Walton:

I’ve possibly gone for one that once was. That’s an interesting question as well. But otherwise, pretty copper bottomed. I do think it is time. I mean, I haven’t picked any books I don’t like. That is true. But I didn’t just pick books that I think are masterpieces, which actually I might have in that case gone for How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman, St. Urbain’s Horseman by Mordecai Richelieu, who I’m always banging the drum for. Slightly faded now Canadian Jewish author. I think that was ‘71 that one. It’s an amazing book about Canadian exiles in London in a way, but also looking back to his growing up in Toronto. Also, a quest for Josef Mengele in the jungles of South America. It all fits together beautifully.

But I think in a way classics aren’t necessarily up to us, that there is some sort of general agreement that’s taken place.

Jo Hamya:

Yes, we should talk about that in a second. But off the cuff and at the top, I think we should say there are many titles that I think readers will expect us to bring up, which we have either covered in previous podcasts or plan to in future ones, such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

I suppose what we’re trying to do is bring up titles that we haven’t discussed before, just for your listening pleasure and the diversity of what we’re able to achieve. More generally, James, I guess there’s this big question we haven’t still totally answered. What do we each think a classic actually is? What do you think a classic is?

James Walton:

I was really hoping you wouldn’t ask me this. It’s so hard. The more you think about it, the more it sort of falls apart in your hands, really. I am quite happy to settle for the shorthand of a book, as I say, generally agreed to have stood the test of time. I think time has to be evolved. I mean Shuggy Bane I think, I know I really, really loved it and you didn’t love it quite so much.

But I pondered that as even on a short list. But A, we’ve done it and B, that’s still only 2020, so who knows? I think there has to be a certain passage of time. Let’s be honest, there often has to be some other medium involved, really. Like the Remains of the Day, Atonement, Schindler’s Ark, English [inaudible 00:04:36] is it a coincidence that all of those were pretty high-level films as well?

Jo Hamya:

This is a really interesting point because I think basically part of what makes a classic, insofar as we believe in that term, is that it’s constantly reintroduced into cultural conversation maybe like once a decade or every two decades. I think you’re really right in that.

I think the idea of time is a really interesting one. People who are maybe publishing heads or keep abreast of book news generally might remember an incident in 2013 where Morrissey’s autobiography was published by Penguin Modern Classics and named a classic at the time of its publication. A lot of people objected to this, but the terms on which they objected are really fascinating ones for me at least to determine why something should be a classic. That was that point of not enough time has passed. Although I believe Penguin made the argument that since Morrissey has been a prolific songwriter since the ’80s and has definitely influenced the culture via his work with the Smiths, that’s taken care of.

The other part that people objected to I suppose was, again, a matter of personal taste. Some people just don’t like the Smiths, so they don’t think Morrissey is worthy or deserving of that.

James Walton:

I read that, I think Penguin-

Jo Hamya:

I read it, too. I thought it was amazing.

James Walton:

Sorry. No, I didn’t read the book, I read the… Sorry, I do love the Smiths. I even like solo Morrissey to be honest, but-

Jo Hamya:

Ooh, Controversial.

James Walton:

I know. There’s still a lot of cracking stuff.

Anyway, they published as a Penguin Modern Classic in my understanding, because Morrissey insisted that they did. I think Penguin are slightly embarrassed by that. They must know. Oddly enough, it had the useful side effect, I think, of restoring some meaning to the word classic.

Because I think on the whole, everybody said you can’t possibly be modern classic. It’s only just came out. It is far too early to tell, and that made people realise actually a classic does need a bit of time. This is silly. I think if you took a Penguin executive out and gave them a few glasses of wine, I think they’d admit that it was silly to publish that as a modern classic.

Given that we’re not in five minutes going to solve the problem for what is a classic that has taken up so much ink and so many volumes over so much time, let’s use it as a… Can we, Jo, as a shorthand for a book that we think is stunning?

Another test that you might want to think is a book that most people have heard of, even if they haven’t read it. Is that a bit of thing?

Jo Hamya:

I suppose each generation will have its own kind of pertinent issues or concerns. I do think there’s a way to go above this as well, such as a lot of classics you hear about are war novels. That’s because war is never really something that goes away.

But then I was thinking about this the other night. I think around the age of 16, I read the Count of Monte Cristo at school. It was unanimously agreed that it was a classic. But I asked around with my friends and they said, “Well, I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really think it’s a classic.” My theory is that we’ve all become, well A, much less religious and B, much more neoliberal than that book’s concerns really are. The only thing that keeps it being a classic now is the fact that it’s printed by a subdivision or an imprint of a publisher that says it’s a classic.

In some ways, I guess time either adds or takes away to from the notion of a classic, depending on whether the cultural conversation happening in any given decade or period is aligned with the book. At the moment, there’s this really interesting thing going on where there are a lot of efforts on social media to cancel what I thought we’d all agreed were fairly classic authors for failing to have entirely 21st century sensibilities. A lot of young women on TikTok object to Sylvia Plath being thought of as a classic author because they find her racist. Just very recently at the time of our recording, about 200 to 300 millennials on Twitter tried to cancel Kafka, but not because of his work-

James Walton:

Jo, please [inaudible 00:09:02] I’ll start weeping in a minute.

Jo Hamya:

But it’s got nothing to do with his work, which is deeply concerned with, I suppose, the more existential aspects of life, and everything to do with his sex life. I’m probably not allowed to talk about Kafka’s sex life on this podcast, but please do pause now to Google it because it’s amazing.

James Walton:

It was never going to be a carefree [inaudible 00:09:24] was it? If you read the books, there’s a clue there.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah. Yeah, there’s this question of enough time needs to pass for a book to become a classic, but then are our social and political and economic interests going to allow that book to remain a classic at any given point in time?

James Walton:

But I think we could get bogged down in the entire episode here. We’ve got six books to get through.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I know. Why don’t you kick us off with your first choice?

James Walton:

Okay, well, I’m going to kick off with a copper-bottomed classic, a book that’s become almost a Booker mascot, in fact. I’m going to let no one other than the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro introduce it.

Kazuo Ishiguro:

Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize win in 1981 for Midnight’s Children was an absolute turning point. That was a signal that a substantial key core group within the reading public had declared that they were interested in reading books written by people apparently from the outside about other societies from a different perspective, not from a British perspective.

Because I think something was happening in British society at that point, not just in the literary culture, but in the wider culture. People had suddenly moved on to a different era.

James Walton:

Yes, it is indeed Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, which has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone. Booker winner in 1981, although its Booker success didn’t end there. In 1994 for the 25th anniversary of the prize, there was a thing called the Booker of Bookers, where three distinguished, having said what I said before it must be said, men of letters were asked to name the best ever winner. They went for Midnight’s Children.

And then in 2008 for the 40th anniversary, although I made that the 39th myself. Anyway, there was a short list of six Booker winners drawn up by John Mullan, Mariella Frostrup, and Victoria Glenndinning. Two women even with the public-

Jo Hamya:

Let it go, James.

James Walton:

… with the public invited to vote on the winner. For the record, the six that they named in 2008, wonder what would it be like now, were the The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G Farrell, Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer, Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey, Ghost Road by Pat Barker, Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee, and Midnight’s Children.

As you know, Jo, I’m all in favour of democracy. The tool we have in a public vote is that yet people could vote who hadn’t read all six books. You didn’t have to prove you’ve read them or anything. I think the most famous-

Jo Hamya:

You just vote for the one you had read that you liked.

James Walton:

Yeah, exactly. The most famous and the most popular was always going to win, and that was Midnight’s Children. But I think that’s a fine example of a slightly dodgy process or questionable process leading to the right verdict because in 2008 I had to do a newspaper piece on those six books. I read them all pretty carefully, pondered them. While all of them were obviously indisputably solid choices, the one that still filled me with astonished awe was Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

Jo Hamya:

Go on. Why don’t you tell us what it’s about?

James Walton:

All right. The main character and narrator is Saleem Sinai, who begins the novel with this now celebrated passage. “I was born in the city of Bombay once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Dr. Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August the 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out. At the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.”

It’s a cracking start, isn’t it? And from there, we flashback to Saleem’s grandfather in Kashmir for an extended family tree, intertwined with the history of India to the point of independence, including the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, the partition of the British Raj into India and Pakistan.

As for the midnight’s children of the title, they’re the other people born between midnight and 1:00 AM on the day of independence. They all have some sort of magical powers or gifts. The nearer to midnight, the more magical they are. Saleem’s main gift is telepathy, making him able to hear the thoughts of all the other midnight’s children, 581 of them, by the time he discovers this power on his 10th birthday.

I would summarise the rest of the plot, rather dozens of overlapping, recurring, suddenly appearing or suddenly disappearing plots, but that would take most of the rest of this podcast and possibly the next. Essentially though, the intertwining of real history and endless, often wild, storytelling continues. With the storytelling ranging from the political to the comic, magic realism to satire and sometimes all at the same time.

Jo Hamya:

Interesting question now in context of this podcast. Why do you think Midnight’s Children is deserving of classic status?

James Walton:

Well, partly because it’s great.

Jo Hamya:

I’m going to push you, James. You’ve got to define great.

James Walton:

As I say, that whirling mix of stories, the language it’s written in, high-key register. Also as I defer to Kazuo Ishiguro, there’s something to do with the impact it made as well, I think.

By 1981, there’d been no shortage of books set in India that had done well in the book. There was wins for J. G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, Paul Scott’s Staying On. But all of these were about the British in India, and they’re all written on the hall in well-mannered British literary prose. That’s as opposed to what the critic John Walsh in his book on how the literary world changed in the 1981, thanks partly to Rushdie called Rushdie’s “tumbling cascade of words, the jumping, bumping, hyper-adrenalated, huggery-muggery, jiggery-pokery tsunami of special effects.”

It felt so new. It was noted at the time, I do remember this, that this was something new. This was an Indian voice writing about India, writing in a mishmash of Indian English and Hindu myths and all sorts of stuff. In fact, a lot of newspaper pieces at the time, all of which as I remember were headlined the Empire Strikes Back. So it-

Jo Hamya:

That’s terrible copywriting.

James Walton:

Yeah, so I suppose there might’ve been some criticism in India that he wasn’t quite as Indian as he made out, which I think is harsh because he was born in India the same year as Saleem, 1947. Although not at the time of independence, he was born in June, but then he did come to England. He was educated at a Rugby School public school and then Cambridge.

But that’s like saying Joyce is not an Irish writer just because he wasn’t in Ireland when he wrote Ulysses or something. In fact, English wasn’t Rushdie’s first language, which was Urdu, which is the language of the Muslims of India. He grew up rooted in stories of Hindu myths, the Arabian Night’s a big deal for him, all his family stories. He once said that it taught him that it’s best when stories are fabulous when horses do fly.

But anyway, for now I’ll just leave it there.

Jo Hamya:

I’m going to come back at you with something very similar that maybe backs up all your arguments for what deserves the status of a classic and say Ben Okri’s 1991 winner The Famished Road. I genuinely do think that The Famished Road is an incredible novel, and I think it’s one of the finer examples of that sort of category of author and category of book.

James Walton:

Can you tell us what category of author, category of book? Tell us a bit more about it basically.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, so The Famished Road is set in Nigeria. Its main character is called Azaro, and he is an abiku child or a spirit child. He exists between a world beyond life and he exists in life itself. He’s constantly going between the two.

I’m just going to read a little bit here because I just want to capture… It’s such a beautifully written book, and it captures the going back and forth between those two concepts very beautifully. This is Azaro who narrates the book, and I should also say that the thing about spirit children is that their parents are always inducing them to live and not to die and go over to the other side.

“With passionate ritual offerings, our parents always tried to induce us to live. They also tried to get us to reveal where we had hidden the spirit tokens that bound us to the other world. We disdained the offerings and kept our tokens a fierce secret, and we remained indifferent to the long, joyless parturition of mothers. We longed for an early homecoming, to play by the river in the grasslands and in the magic caves. We long to meditate on sunlight and precious stones, and to be joyful in the eternal dew of the spirit. To be born is to come into the world weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an inextinguishable sense of exile. So it was with me. How many times did I come and gone through the dreaded gateway? How many times had I been born and died young? How often to the same parents? I had no idea so much of the dust of living was in me.”

James Walton:

That’s good.

Listen, I don’t want to give the impression I’m not entirely familiar with The Famished Road by Ben Okri, but as with Midnight’s Children, I might have given the impression that it is just wild storytelling. But actually there’s a lot of solid political anger as well, which I understand is true in The Famished Road. A portrait of an entire country over…

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know if I would’ve ever used the word anger to describe this book.

Yes, it is a portrait of a country, but I suppose more like the Odyssey than anything else. I mean, it’s true that Okri he creates a facsimile where he discusses political corruption in Nigeria and poverty and class inequality. But this is all very grounded through characters that you come to know and love in a very particular way. One of the most touching characters in the book for me is Azaro’s mother, who suffers greatly on account of sometimes losing her son. She never knows whether it’s permanent or whether he’ll come back to her.

I guess on the more political kind of side, there’s this character called Madame Koto who owns a bar that she frequently tries to entrap Azaro within because she believes that he will bring her good luck and financial fortune. As she becomes increasingly corrupt, there are these fantastic scenes of her buying tiny American cars and fitting her huge, massive, fleshy body into them and sometimes crashing them.

It’s a book that draws out an incredibly strong reaction in you one way or another. I actually interviewed Ben a couple of years ago now about it, and I think he can put it much better than I can. You can just listen to him talk about it.

Ben Okri:

It’s not the kind of book you can be in tune with that quickly. I thought maybe it would take about 20, 30 years. Reviews were divided. Some people were like, “What’s wrong with him?” there were some extraordinary reviews, Linda Grant’s about reading the Famished Road and going out, walking out into the street, walking out and seeing angels in the trees after reading it. I think there were about two or three reviews like that that did something amazing. They started a lot of curiosity.

When people got it, they really got got it. When they didn’t get it, they really didn’t get it.

Jo Hamya:

I think that’s so true what he’s saying because it’s a book that you have to read with so much generosity of soul, but also generosity of thought and time.

You can’t rush through a reading of The Famished Road, and I feel like Okri is completely vindicated in the fact that what I’ve got with me is a vintage classics edition now maybe 30 years after the fact. But also recently the book was printed as an Everyman Library classic.

James Walton:

It says it on the cover.

Jo Hamya:

There you go. It says that on the cover, and what more could you want?

James Walton:

Got one question for you, Jo. Some people might know The Famished Road from its appearances in the book of Bridget Jones’s Diary, which she’s always trying to read it as a part of her self-improvement. There’s one bit where she finds that she’s got no mates on Saturday night and she says, “Oh no, this is actually very good. Can now stay in and read The Famished Road by Ben Okri, in a full stop at 9:15. Blind date very good. Just getting another bottle of wine,” which gives you the impression that it’s essentially hard going.

Is it hard going?

Jo Hamya:

I would say two things to that. The Bridget Jones episode is not the only time that it’s re-entered or been re-imagined in a different medium. It also comes up in the episode of The Simpsons where a Nigerian princess visits Springfield. She starts handing out reading recommendations, and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road is one of them.

It does go to that thing that we were saying that a book has to reoccur or be re-figured in other ways pretty regularly across-

James Walton:

Famous enough to be in an episode of The Simpsons.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah.

Is it hard going? I mean, it’s not easy going. But I wouldn’t say that it’s hard in the sense that it’s difficult to read. I mean, his sentences are really immaculate. I suppose, A, it’s very long and the print in my copies, I’ve got two of them, are very fine so it takes a while. B, you have to give yourself over to it in the spirit that it’s written in, which isn’t totally intellectual and isn’t grounded in the kind of logic that you would expect a classic if we’re using this in a anglophone, Westernised sense to be grounded in.

This sounds a bit woo-woo, but I mean it very seriously. You have to open your mind to where Azaro is going between worlds because otherwise it won’t really have an impact on you. But I feel like A, Okri helps you do this within the novel itself, and B, it’s really worthwhile work. It’s part of what makes this book a classic to me. You won’t find yourself thinking, “Oh, I wish I’d never done that.” That phrase from Linda Grant about walking outside and seeing angels in the trees, I totally believe it because that’s what you get at the end of the book. Maybe not in such a literal sense, but I finished it and I just felt myself expanding in a way.

James Walton:

The fact that it takes a bit of an effort to read is not something we’re against, is it?

Jo Hamya:

No.

James Walton:

There’s the Booker Prize [inaudible 00:23:58]

Jo Hamya:

A lot of people are these days.

James Walton:

Anyway, back to me, I believe.

Jo Hamya:

Back to you.

James Walton:

Is another thumper from me, I’m afraid. I’m sorry to anybody who thought they could knock off these six classics in the next week. It’s Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Shortlisted for the Booker in 2004 when it lost out to The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, which might have a claim to classic status itself.

Jo Hamya:

It does. I feel like it does because I thought of it in my shortlist and I was like, “Why?” I don’t remember anything about The Line of Beauty, and then I realised it’s the first book I ever got taught at university. In my mind, it’s like this big massive thing. It’s how I learned literature for the very first time.

James Walton:

Anyway, Cloud Atlas, this is the hard bit, explaining how it works. It consists of six separate novels cunningly interwoven.

We start with a pacific journal of Adam Ewing, which is narrated by an American lawyer in the mid-19th century who’s in the Chatham Islands, New Zealand, where he witnesses a Moriori slave being whipped by Maori overseer and then finds himself befriended by a villainous doctor. Then that cuts off mid-sentence to make way for the letters, I don’t know how to pronounce this, Zedelghem, Z-E-D-E-L-G-H-E-N. Anyway, that’s in Belgium. These letters are written in 1931 by Robert Frobisher, a penniless British musician who’s living in Belgium as an assistant to a once great composer. And who also comes across the first half of the pacific journal of Adam Ewing and now wants to find the second half.

Next, comes a pretty good impression of a pulp thriller, whose main character comes across the first half of the letters of Robert Frobisher. And then a more comic tale of a publisher in the present day Britain, who’s reading the first half of the manuscript of that thriller and so on.

You’re following this? Oh, you’re book read-

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, I read the book.

James Walton:

To anyone else is who hasn’t. So then there’s half a tale set in a dystopian future Korea, and a whole tale set in an even more dystopian and even more future Hawai’i. That tale we get in full, and that becomes a fulcrum because then we get the second half of each of the others in novels or sections in reverse.

There’s also a firm suggestion that all the main characters share the same soul. The moving of souls between characters is a big thing in David Mitchell. Also, there’s certain recurring themes to suggest these are in all times and all places aspects of human history, which are particularly the tendency of people to prey on each other, to form tribes and to treat each other as prey.

Jo Hamya:

We’ve gotten very spiritual texts, haven’t we? I’m interested because I’ve read Cloud Atlas and I wouldn’t have necessarily… Sorry David Mitchell, but I wouldn’t have necessarily put it on our list or shortlist.

James Walton:

Well see, I’m going to say that it sounds a bit complicated because it is. At one point, there’s the present day publisher, a pompous bloke called Timothy Cavendish says, “As an experienced editor, I disapprove of backflashes, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices. They belong in the 1980s with MAs and postmodernism.”

Of course, that itself, that remark, is a tricksy device because this is in a book full of foreshadowings, backflashes, tricksy devices of all kinds. In fact, just a little in-joke as well because David Mitchell got an MA in postmodernism.

Jo Hamya:

Yeah, it shows in the book.

James Walton:

I fear I’m making it sound as if it’s a book for academics to stroke their chins to and write about.

But actually the most remarkable thing about the book is that Cloud Atlas turned out to be completely world-conquering and a massive global bestseller. I would suggest one of the few intricately constructed nests of centuries spanning stories not just to have become a global bestseller, but also a movie starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry.

Jo Hamya:

And Ben Whishaw.

James Walton:

Yeah, made by the Wachowskis, who most famous for the Matrix. I think the reason it became so popular is that basically David Mitchell, he’s pulled off the same trick that the Beatles once did, which is hailed by the critics for their amazing experimentation and also just loved by the average bunter.

The reason he’s done it I think is for the same reason the Beatles did. Because no matter how experimental they got, they never forgot the basics of a bloody good tune. The books are filled with the literary equivalent of bloody good tunes. “I’m a plot and character guy,” he said, and I think he is. There’s cliffhangers, there’s just, again, great storytelling, goodies and baddies. At the risk of overdoing the Beatles analogy, but I’m going to go for it, at the end of Cloud Atlas, basically a rewrite of “Imagine” by John Lennon.

This is, if you’ve been following the second half of the pacific journal of Adam Ewing, the first half having kicked off the book. Now, we’re right at the end back with the second half. If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe diverse races and creeds can share this world as peaceably, as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable, and the riches of the earth in its oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.

That is just “Imagine”, isn’t it? I’m not deceived. You may say I’m a dreamer, et cetera. David Mitchell’s book before that was number9dream, taking its title from John Lennon song. Cloud Atlas itself takes his title from work by the Japanese composer, Toshi Ichiyanagi, who was Yoko Ono’s first husband. Ah, there we are so that’s a little bit-

Jo Hamya:

Oh, we all know you’re a massive Beatles fan-

James Walton:

Little bit Beatles in here, but it-

Jo Hamya:

James, so that’s why it’s ended up here.

James Walton:

But there is fun in fitting it all together. There is a certain intellectual fun in that. But what you fit together is enormous fun to read too, I think.

Jo Hamya:

Right, so I’m glad you’ve brought up the concept of a bestseller feeding into things because I think that does introduce the question of how well a publisher produces and manufactures the book. Bestsellers don’t become bestsellers on their own.

My next choice is left of centre, but I’m going to try and explain it in those terms. It’s Autumn by Ali Smith, which was shortlisted in 2017. Arguably not enough time has gone by for this to become a classic. It hasn’t even been 10 years. It is about a relationship between two people, and it’s set in 2016. One character is called Elisabeth, and she is very much the book’s future-forward character. I think when she’s first introduced, she’s done so through a lot of numbers and metrics. She’s trying to get a passport visa. She’s thinking about what time she needs to get somewhere, and she’s getting a particular bus. But then in contrast to that, the second character is some art collector called Daniel Gluck, who is 101 years old at the time the novel is set. He actually spends most of it asleep. Through him, I suppose Ali Smith explores a kind of long journey of history.

Elisabeth belongs firmly to 2016, and through her we get a portrait of 2016 Britain, which was Brexit Britain. There’s a chapter which starts: “A, there was misery and rejoicing. All across the country, what had happened whipped about by itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm and was whipping about the air above the trees, the roofs, the traffic. All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost all. Across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up, Google what is EU. All across the country, people looked up, Google move to Scotland,” and so on it goes.

I think Smith attempts to capture the confusion of that time, but she grounds it in Gluck’s dreaming and also through the story of how Elisabeth and Daniel met.

James Walton:

Didn’t this come out in 2016? Wasn’t that the miracle of it?

Jo Hamya:

Exactly, that’s what I’m getting to. It’s a good book. Some people really adore it. I just like it, but I’m not basing my choice on the text itself. I’m basing it on the fact that the way that it was published is a miracle.

Smith had been saying for a decade, or possibly two decades, that she wanted to write books based around the seasons and they would be a quartet. She said this to her publisher who went, “Oh great, I’ll just mock up some covers then,” and he came up with these four really beautiful… I’ve got a paperback, but the hardbacks are amazing cloth-bound covers wrapped in a David Hockney print that shows the same tunnel or green land throughout differing seasons.

Once Smith and her publisher, Hamish Hamilton, had these covers, which existed first as casings until the books were actually printed, they embarked on this… I’ve never heard of this being done before and I’m fairly sure it hasn’t been. They embarked on this mission of essentially Smith would write the book in a matter of months, and then they would take six weeks to publish it.

Book publication schedules are usually a year, if not two years, long. I’m doing one now and it’s long. Six weeks is crazy. I think in this way Autumn really does belong to a niche of books that we’re starting to see emerging out of the 21st century, which are utterly devoted to the present moment, both in terms of their content and in terms of how they’re published. Olivia Laing’s Crudo is another one like that that reads like a Twitter fever dream in terms of plot. Maybe Patricia Lockwood’s Nobody Is Talking About This. It’s a much more hyper and funny and less meditative book, but still deeply attuned to the present. I think within the next 50 to 100 years, books like Ali Smith’s Autumn are going to be considered a very particularly 21st century classic.

James Walton:

A very interesting and a turning point to the whole of literature. I think Martin Amis said that one of the problems is that all novels are historical novels by the time they come out. But that this is something that’s trying to get around that, isn’t it?

Jo Hamya:

I suppose what really impresses me about this one is that it’s a historical novel, not just because of what’s inside it but the actual making of it. You could not do that in the 20th century. You could not just take six weeks to publish a book. This is in every aspect, including in its production, a 21st century up to the moment. My Twitter feed is refreshing, I have the latest news in my hand at all time, 21st century book.

James Walton:

Well, I see your attempt to get round the whole idea of historical novel by publishing a present-day novel almost. My final choice is a historical novel. Would’ve been a completely obvious choice of a Booker classic maybe 20, 25 years ago. I have a slight fear that it’s faded a bit since then. I think I checked with you, and it wasn’t massively on your radar, Jo. Although it is described in its Amazon blurb as a modern classic, so it definitely is.

It is Waterland by Graham Swift. One of the biggest novels of the 1980s; later a film with Jeremy Irons. Booker shortlisted in 1983, Graham Swift actually went on to win with Last Orders in 1996 when the following morning he made a famously hungover appearance on Radio Four’s the Today Programme. It’s fantastic. After a while, he just gives up. He says, “Look, they’re asking me about the nature of fiction with a literature.” And he just says, “Look, give me a break.”

Anyway, I read Waterland at the highest of Waterland mania, and I thought it was amazing. But I hadn’t read it since. I was a bit worried returning to it as you always are to see if it would stand up, but it really, really does. I mean, it is quite like Midnight’s Children in a way with a life of one man intertwined with a wider history, with loads of stories, tonnes of incidents, including but not restricted to murder, suicide, madness, and incest. This is a guy called Tom Crick, who’s a history teacher in London in his ’50s. He’s just lost his job because the headmaster is cutting back on history. It’s quite [inaudible 00:35:50] book, actually. There was a time where everything had to pay its way, so what good is history economically-

Jo Hamya:

I think we’re in that time again now.

James Walton:

His childless wife, Mary, has also stolen a baby from a local supermarket, so the question is-

Jo Hamya:

As he do.

James Walton:

His question is why.

One of the themes of the book, partly because he’s a history teacher, is that the history of anything is the history of everything. I’m really interested in this as an idea that’s always appealed to me. I mean, just take for example let’s say me. Centuries of Irish history I needed just to get my mum and dad to meet in Liverpool in the 1950s. Their whole life depends quite a lot on the welfare state of the post-war Attlee government, which came about because of the war, which came about because of, let’s say, the first World War, which came about because of so-and-so.

All of that, and he has an attempt in this book to sort of do that. It’s set in the Fens actually despite… This is where Tom and Mary grew up. We get a whole history of the Fens and how they met there, how his father came to live in a lockkeeper’s cottage. But the idea, I think, the way it mixes the story with… We find out eventually what trauma lay behind why Mary stole the baby, but it’s linked to the Fens themselves because the Fens were once water and then they reclaimed as dry land. But that reclamation never lasts very long because the water always comes back.

That’s what happens to us too I think the book suggests. Tom says at one point, “Whatever moves forward will also move back. It is a law of the natural world and a law too of the human heart,” so that reclaiming any solid ground is always going to be temporary because the waters will sweep back. It’s done with beautifully. The literal way in which that happens is fantastic because the Fens themselves are, as we literary critics like to say, become a character in themselves, Jo.

But the story itself is great, and the ideas that the novel wrestles with and ponders are very interesting if hat’s not too weedy a word. It’s a great book.

Jo Hamya:

But you’ve suggested at the top that it’s fading out of people’s imagination. Do you think it’s going to come back or are you… This is very interesting. This is very meta, actually. Are you making a case for it here, and potentially this will feed into the Waterland becoming a classic?

James Walton:

Again, so it’s not a book that had been on your radar particularly, then?

Jo Hamya:

No, not at all.

James Walton:

Oh. Oh, it’s sad.

Jo Hamya:

But it’s-

James Walton:

I mean, I’d like to think that what appears on the Booker Prize Podcast and pow, it’s back on top of the bestseller list.

Jo Hamya:

I just think it’s very interesting to imagine a world in which someone goes out after this podcast, reads the Waterland, potentially they work in publishing, and they’re like, “Let’s re-jacket it as a classic.”

James Walton:

Well, actually there was a 25th anniversary book, but even that’s I suppose what, 2008? What’s interesting in that, what I really like about this book, and I think it’s true of Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie is it’s great when a writer hits his stride, isn’t it? Just goes for it.

This was his third book. He’d written two pretty good books before, but this one you just get the sense that he’s just going to go for it. In the introduction to the 25th anniversary, he says, “I was flexing my literary muscles.” He says at one point, “It was a bit of a show-off book in a way that slightly embarrasses me now.” I just love him showing off. Again, Midnight’s Children, Rushdie is showing off. It’s just marvellous to see a writer in absolutely full flow just thinking” Sod it. I’m going for this.”

Jo Hamya:

Okay, well, interestingly, James, my final pick is probably, you could think of it as a historical novel as well, it’s John Berger’s G. I think John Berger has always had either a mass or a cult following, but I think sometimes you’d be surprised just exactly where he pops up, most recently in the intro to supermodel Emily Ratajkowski’s book prologue.

G. though I think is genuinely very genuinely deserving of classic status. It’s re-imagining of the Don Juan figure against the backdrop of a 20th century. There are, I suppose, two modes or three modes really in which the book happens. You’ve got G., who is the central character, I suppose. It’s a build-ins grown man in respect of us watching him come to maturity. We hear about the circumstances of his birth. He was born to a very rich Italian father and his English mistress, and we hear about the first time he ever has sex with a much, much younger woman against the backdrop-

James Walton:

Not the last, I believe.

Jo Hamya:

Sorry?

James Walton:

Not the last time he has sex, either.

Jo Hamya:

No, not at all. The pertinent thing is the first time he has sex, it’s happening against the backdrop of a worker’s strike. This is a recurring theme in the book, that G’s philandering is always grounded in some sort of greater historical event. Whilst he may be cavorting with another man’s wife, the Boer War is also happening, or the world’s first aviation attempt, which is going to map landmasses in a geographical sense, is also occurring. G comes to maturity in a much more spiritual way than just having sex. But I suppose the sex is important because when you have these two things coming together, you…

It’s that very hackneyed phrase, isn’t it? The personal is political, so you will never find G having sex in a non-political moment in this book. Berger quite frequently interrupts the narrative with voice. It’s partly his voice, partly the voice of a quite humorous narrator to discourse at length about various things, so socialist politics or why it’s impossible to write about sex in the first place, why it always ends up so lacking. There are several very funny illustrations of a penis going into a vagina. They’re incredibly crude in every sense of the word.

Actually, there’s an article on the Booker website that calls it potentially paternalistic, but not in a professorial way. More in a sort of Berger wants to hold your hand while he takes you through the world in a quite open way.

James Walton:

Because he’s also famous as an art critic, isn’t he?

Jo Hamya:

Yes. Yes, he is.

I suppose the thing that also makes this book famous is what happened when it won the Booker Prize in 1972, which is that Berger got up on stage. There are quite a few people present at the ceremony already didn’t like the book itself for being so filled with sex and inappropriate and socialist shock horror. But Berger got up on stage and announced that he was going to give half his prize money away to the London Black Panthers and that he would use the remaining half travelling across Europe in order to write, I can’t remember whether at the time it was already going to be a novel, but a book that would essentially create a history of socialist workers in Europe.

I would argue that the kind of notoriety of that ceremony is a large part of why the book remains in people’s cultural imaginations. If you say John Berger’s G., they’re not going to talk to you about Don Juan myths and sexual escapades and socialism and war in Europe and part of Africa. They’re going to say, “Wasn’t that written by the bloke who gave half his money to the London Black Panthers?”

James Walton:

But you think just as a book, just free from all that, it’s a great book?

Jo Hamya:

I think it’s an amazing book, but I think it’s really important… I think as we’ve been saying in the vein of film adaptations, et cetera, there has to be something about a book that keeps it in your cultural imagination. And for G., it’s this then scandalous now massively honourable context of what happened when it won the prize.

James Walton:

Anyway, we better leave it for that. I think we did manage to cram in six solid classics into one episode. It was pretty good.

Jo Hamya:

Quick question. Just out of curiosity, outside of the Booker library, what would you have chosen as a classic book?

James Walton:

The top three, which might actually restore the gender balance, would be Middlemarch by George Eliot, I think Jane Eyre might just sneak past Ulysses, and then David Copperfield, definitely.

Jo Hamya:

Lovely. I think I probably would’ve gone for Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I’m always banging on about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I would’ve gone for Glass and God by Anne Carson. Which isn’t a novel, it’s a book of poetry, but still. I would’ve gone for Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Which I’m always again banging on about, but it’s just a flawless book.

James Walton:

Still one of my favourite memories of last year was you on the red carpet at the Booker Prize ceremony with that Gen Z magazine, saying, “Any [inaudible 00:44:45] young readers, what would you suggest?” You said, “There’s got to be Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. This was not the answer she was expecting.

Anyway, we really must leave it there. Thanks very much for listening. That is it for this week. To read Alex Clark’s article on the classic Booker books that inspired this episode, head to thebookerprizes.com.

Jo Hamya:

You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack at thebookerprizes, and you can also join our book group on Facebook. Which yielded some interesting results for this episode, didn’t it, James?

James Walton:

Yeah, there’s frenzied voting going on there at the moment as to what Booker books should be considered classic. By all means, join in that debate. I hear at the moment that Milkman by Anna Burns is ahead at the moment, which would’ve failed our other strict criteria.

Jo Hamya:

No, that makes me so happy. I don’t have criteria because-

James Walton:

We did. We had a criteria, which was-

Jo Hamya:

Spoiler alert.

James Walton:

… it can’t be too recent.

Jo Hamya:

I don’t know. I don’t believe in classics is the big reveal at the end of this episode, so I’m really happy for Anna Burns.

James Walton:

Until next time, goodbye.

Jo Hamya:

Goodbye.

The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by me, Joe Hamya, and by James Walton. It is produced and edited by Kevin Muyolo, and the executive producer is John Davenport. It is a Daddy’s Super Yacht production for the Booker Prizes.