Man Booker longlist is the triumph of the new and diverse

Literature isn’t a game of King-of-the-Mountain, but a book prize can be, since so much reputational capital (and sometimes a much-needed sales bump) is at stake. And so, those prone to talking about books in terms more appropriate to sports competitions will probably say that America won the 2015 Booker longlist round. It is the country most represented on the longlist, with five entries. But looking at the list that way only reveals how limited a lens country borders are starting to be, in looking at books, even just books in English.

Were I to personally organise the list into reductive teams, I’d prefer to divide the books here into Old and New. Drafted to the Olds would be the books whose writers, regardless of place of birth, have established reputations in western letters: Anne Enright, Marilynne Robinson, Andrew O’Hagan, Tom McCarthy, and Anne Tyler. The New team would draft those writers on this list who are still what you could call up-and-coming reputation-wise, regardless of whether they are debut writers or seasoned novelists: Marlon James, Laila Lalami, Hanya Yanagihara, Sunjeev Sahota, Chigozie Obioma, Anuradha Roy, Bill Clegg, and Anna Smaill.

Even if I admit that slicing things up this way provides only limited insight – and I do – this arrangement on my cutting board reveals certain things. First of all, numbers-wise, it shows us the Booker judges are more interested in New books than Old ones. (Jonathan Franzen goes unlaurelled for perhaps precisely this reason.) It also shows us that the politics of reputation in the literary world still skew towards, well, white people, in that the established reputations belong to them. And on some level, be it conscious or not, the Booker judges have leveraged the prize to confer more reputational capital on writers of colour.

This is not precisely a “new” trend for the Booker, which has always had a habit of bringing New-type authors to greater public attention. But perusing Booker longlists going back five years, this does appear to be the most racially diverse list in recent memory. Which tells you that after years of (righteous) complaining about the lack of diversity of these prizes and the overall whiteness of literature, people are actually listening.

That hasn’t stopped most news items on the list from leading with an Old writer’s candidacy or with Bill Clegg’s. Clegg is, as the Guardian’s Mark Brown points out, “interesting because he is best known for pushing other writers and for securing million-dollar deals in his role as an agent”. His inclusion on this list is also probably its biggest surprise to certain literary observers, in part because the book still isn’t out yet so only a limited number have read it.

I have only, myself, read about half the books on the longlist, and not the Clegg novel. I particularly enjoyed Robinson’s Lila and Yanagihara’s A Little Life. But my definite favourite among the ones I’ve read is Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, a multi-vocal novel which charts late 20th-century Jamaican history and politics through the rise of a drug gang and the people whose lives it destroys. (An attempted assassination of Bob Marley, whom the novel simply calls “the Singer”, anchors the plot.) James’s ability to whip between the distinct experiences, cadences, and emotional registers of his characters is dizzying. It gives new lifeblood to that hackneyed phrase “tour de force”. It was that oft-praised thing, a “novel of great ambition”, but unlike most of those it actually delivers on the promise by being a gripping read, with barely a word wasted.

Yet James’s book never garnered as much attention in the United States as it deserved. It was a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award, but it did not win. It was well-reviewed everywhere, but failed to catch on saleswise. The reason, perhaps, was that the audience for American literary fiction, as cosmopolitan as it likes to style itself, still has trouble with “ambitious books” that are not about white middle-class issues, and especially ones that are not set in their own country. Maybe that’s just another sign that the Booker judges really are right, this year, to point them in the direction of a more varied set of concerns.