MARCELLA EVARISTI unpeels a controversial award for fiction which is giving many prize pickers the pip
THE fuss over the women-only Orange Prize for fiction was a bit of an inflated media storm in a lady-like teacup really. Good publicity with the literary lads spluttering about reverse sexism and A S Byatt, a recent Booker Prizewinner quoted as saying: ``I am against anything which ghettoises women. That is my deepest feminist emotion.'' Pity the poor winner, Helen Dunmore, ghettoised to the tune of #30,000, having to rationalise her deepest feminist emotion at those humiliating book signings, as she sees the all-female queue in front of her being ostentatiously penetrated by swaggering blokes holding their Hemingway and Hughes aloft (or Harold Robbins if they were into cock-schlock). Some Orange lines being scarier to cross than others.
In a culture whose gender values are so askew, it seems fakely high-minded to imagine that we have passed into a happy bias-free universality - balances of history have still to be redressed, and those counter-checks are inevitably going to oxygenate the very prejudices which inspired them. It is premature to cry - We've made it into the big boys' league, womankind, so if we plead a special case we lose that hard-earned respect. But what exactly are we risking? The late Sir Kingsley Amis gave it away when he declared: ``If I were a woman I would not want to win this prize.'' The implication being that disqualification from the true competitive arena is not worth risking, and that implies women writers are still only provisionally licensed to drive on the main thoroughfare.
In 1991 there were no women on the Booker shortlist and regardless of whether any that year ``deserved'' a place, I don't remember any male writers declaring that they would not want to win a prize in such a fixed set-up, and quite right too. Prizes are patently limited as a gauge of excellence, and tend to reflect existing prejudices and fashions: European connections one year, colonial repercussions the next. Was Martin Amis's London Fields misogynist? I disagreed with other feminists who thought so, it is high on my re-reading list - unlike Hotel du Lac, Brookner's Booker winner whose exquisite delicacy left me hungry for more solid fare. But it is all good for business and if they encourage and widen literary interest, then fine.
Two of the Orange Prize judges were appalled at the low standard of the entries, but then the Booker has paraded some lulus before us too often for that to nudge us into surprise.
I loved watching the Late Show Special on the Booker, and they all seem to merge into one programme now. The guffawing at the awfulness of the majority of the novels, Germaine Greer's open jaw shifting into dismissal gear, like a Munch painting made confident with Prozac, Sarah Dunant more measured and unpatronising, Paulin shifting in his corduroys in astute wonderment at the great circus of thing: the poet looking at the novelist's new clothes allowance. And it would be a version of the same if the Orange received similar media treatment. And I would watch avidly - wouldn't miss the chance to escape the real writer's world of sitting in front of the disdainful flickering screen, cursing the cursor.
Woody Allen boycotts the Oscars to play the clarinet, the press notices that James Kelman did not wear a dinner suit for the Booker dinner. Anita Brookner finds the Orange Prize gender qualification distasteful: to each his and her idiosyncrasy, style and merit-ethics. Polly Toynbee, Sarah Dunant, the publishing editor Liz Calder - supporters of the controversial prize - are not hypocritical separatists, intent on a rigid ideological agenda, though that makes for an easier and more simplistic story. They are highlighting one valid way of looking at representations, not making any claims that women's writing must be read in any forewarned way, corseted with the bones of the sisterhood and veiled from muscular head-on competition.
I find all this talk of insult and offence rather misplaced and unconvincing, like objecting to the existence of Virago Press because of its exclusivity. The imprint exists, the premise of its existence is rather to include, to make a space for the hitherto hidden and if that means the press gets a laugh and a bit of copy when a chap changes his name to a female one and gets published by a feminist publishing house, so what? A good scam hardly discredits an imaginative venture.
The original sponsors, Mitsubishi, chickened out when the debate began to rage, pretty short-sightedly considering the ensuing publicity. Commentators pointed out that two of the novels were written from a male perspective as if that was a great irony. Helen Dunmore's winning entry, A Spell of Winter, has a first-person female narrator from whose perspective we view a family's disintegration in the years before the First World War. Incest, death, and departures viewed with an intense poetic eye, are its subject. It has a dreamy sexual quality, the detachment of adolescence, self-absorbed and volatile, never quite shifting us into the consciousness of the adult woman who finally tracks down the mother who abandoned her. Loss and recovery are explored through image and the senses - a perfume, the delineations of a face - meticulous and free-floating. This unanchored quality ultimately, for all its atmospheric revelations, left me hankering for a more tangible destination.
Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years would have taken up most of my time allowance for a televised Orange discussion. The novel tells of a middle-aged woman's sudden departure from home and family, an impulse she proceeds methodically to inhabit; new town, new job, the insights which come from dislocation. The book rings with a delicious energetic observation, drawing us into the fabric of connected lives, dazzling us with her modest wisdom. What can we reasonably expect from others, what unspoken contracts did we embark on with those decades-old marriage vows? The old questions are the most testing. The children in the book chant an old riddle I had never heard of:
``What's life?''
``Fifteen cents a copy.''
``But I only have a dime.''
``Well, that's life.''
``What's life?''
``Fifteen cents a copy.''
``But I only have a dime.''
And round and round it goes, like the babble of the lit-pack, pierced through with the sporadic joy of reading a wonderful book.
