J.G. Farrell wins Lost Booker Prize

Just announced, J.G. Farrell has won the Lost Man Booker Prize for Troubles. Further details and the shortlist are here.

Personally I'm delighted. I read Farrell's real-life Booker winner, The Siege of Krishnapur, in my teens and thoroughly enjoyed it. I read Troubles around the same time and, while I liked it, I have a feeling I ought to reread it as I may have been too young for it. I also read his unfinished novel The Hill Station, published (along with notes and appreciations and diary entries) after Farrell's untimely death by drowning in 1979, aged just 44. The Singapore Grip, the last and longest of his Empire Trilogy, I never got round to reading and I really ought to.

I haven't read Farrell's three earlier novels, which were all contemporary comedy-dramas which never really set the world alight, critically or commercially. I'm told they're examples of Farrell finding his voice. The sobering thought is that he'd probably have lost his publishing deal nowadays before Troubles would have been published. All three are out of print. Abebooks has copies of the third one, A Girl in the Head (and there's one copy of this in Hampshire Libraries). Good luck on getting hold of the earlier two - A Man from Elsewhere and The Lung. There are no copies available as I write this on either Amazon Marketplace or Abebooks of the former - one expensive copy of the latter on Amazon.

See the link in my original post. But briefly, in 1971 the Booker Prize rules changed - up to then, it was awarded to novels published the year before the award. From 1971 onwards it was awarded to novels from the same year. This meant that novels from 1970 were never eligible for the prize. Hence this "Lost" award - three judges produced a shortlist of six from a longlist of twenty-one, and the winner was decided by public vote.

It's a somewhat artificial exercise in that you can't second-guess what a 1970 jury would have awarded. The longlist especially includes some titles that would be unlikely to have been considered for a literary award at the time. But I can't complain about giving these novels some recognition.

Farrell had been neglected until recently, no doubt due to his early death, but The Siege of Krishnapur scored strongly on an earlier "Best Booker-winner" poll, and I guess word of mouth had had an effect.

Another writer on the shortlist who was a Nobel-winner in his day but who had also been neglected since his death is Patrick White. I read most of his novels in my teens but the Lost Booker shortlisted one of the two major ones I hadn't got to - The Vivisector. (The other major one I hadn't got to was The Eye of the Storm. They're his two longest novels. I also haven't read his very first novel Happy Valley, but White disliked it and it's not in print.)

The other shortlistees are: The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden, The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard, Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault and The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark.