In today's Guardian Man Booker Prize judge and novelist Louise Doughty says [in reference to the Man Booker Shortlist she helped to choose]:
"The ability to come up with a good plot and create a good structure are great literary qualities - it is not just about how to make a finely turned sentence. The ability to move a story on in an engaging way, and the creation of character - these are great literary skills."
I don't think any other sentence could sum up in as many words just how out of touch/date and pointlessly antiquated the Man Booker Prize and its judges are. This is just further proof of a sanitised agenda that force-feeds an eager public the dross we see masquerading as literature these days. It is pitiful writing-by-numbers. Establishment literary fiction's transparent cipher: write books that are 'nice' (in the original sense of the word). Ultracrepidarian Louise Doughty is not talking about literature, she's blindly endorsing the smug, alarmingly hackneyed, myopic school of 'British Literary Fiction' she so obviously belongs to.
Why are we so crap in this country!? Why do Jobbernowls like Louise Doughty get away with such piffle? The Man Booker Prize is officially dead. But you all knew that anyway.
""A story assembled from everyday objects, unassumingly and quietly, that stuns and horrifies by increments...The Canal may look, at first glance, like a love story, but it harnesses the power of parable." John Wray, author of Lowboy.
