Chair of Judges' Speech 2015

Good evening. It’s my pleasure to welcome you this evening, and to thank all of you, for coming to celebrate my birthday. I hope you won’t feel too put out at my agreeing to let this little scribbling contest piggyback the occasion. In fact, I’m gathering from talking to some of you that this was your main reason for coming. Which is frankly a little hurtful.

But then I suppose, it’s not such a little contest. It demands, this Prize, a lot of quiet efficiency and dedication from many individuals, and so too, much gratitude to them. So let me express it, first of all to Kerstin Feurle for her unfailingly helpful and gracious administration of the devilish details; to Goldsmiths’ excellent Comms team for ensuring the Prize engenders maximal public curiosity and excitement; to the New Statesman, media sponsor of the Prize and especially its Culture Editor (and judge of last year) Tom Gatti, for its informed and serious commitment to the Prize; to my fellow judges Jon McGregor, Eimear McBride and Leo Robson, who throughout our expansive, impassioned discussions of small details and big ideas, have brought alive the meaty pleasures of agreement and of disagreement.

And of course to Tim Parnell, the elderly, bug-eyed maniac you might spot stalking the room hunched over a cane, shouting random phrases from Shandy. (Actually, he did casually let slip to the panel last week that his role model in life was Father Jack).

To go easy on the mad, broken old man for a moment: if this Prize, as Ali Smith and others have been suggesting, is helping to infuse writers and publishers of fiction with a new spirit of risk and possibility, we have Tim, the Prize’s architect and still its deeply involved (down to the preferred fruit choices of its judges) Director to thank for that more than any other individual. Feel free to applaud him.

Quixote, Shandy, Moby-Dick, Ulysses: from its very beginnings, the novel has persistently renewed itself, paradoxically enough, by dismantling itself, by a kind of vigilant refusal to let its readers get too attached to one way of telling a story, one way of perceiving the world. Fiction isn’t subservient to the world of received, common sense reality; while it can reflect the world we live in, it can equally unmake that world and make others. Reading a particularly good story to my five-year-old last night, it struck me that young children’s books and cartoons are far more in contact with this anarchic power of fiction to create and destroy than today’s well-made literary novels, with their fussy adhesion to the world as it supposedly is. It was about a crocodile who finds himself stuck in the book we’re reading and decides to leave – which, it turns out, he can do only by eating his way out of it.

It shouldn’t need a literary theorist, in other words, to point out what’s patently obvious to five-year-olds – that the strange pleasure of fiction is its infinite power to put in question the world we know, its refusal to be hemmed in by it.

It strikes me that one reason to admire and get lost in the six novels we shortlisted is that they each, in their very different ways, have made this five-year-old’s truth their own. I’m going to break with tradition here, and instead of proceeding alphabetically through the shortlist, begin with the novel that seems most irresistibly to evoke this power of estranging and reimagining the world.

Richard Beard’s Acts of the Assassins retells the founding story of the West as a police procedural, with a hapless detective of Imperial Rome seeking to penetrate the mysteries of the vanishing Messiah before His Apostles are picked off, each more savagely than the last. But what makes the novel so much more than an entertaining workshop exercise is its inspired twisting of spatial and temporal frames. Gloriously indifferent to historical and logical necessity, it sets smartphones and mass Holy Land tourism uncannily alongside the martyrdoms of the Apostle. The effect is not so much to update an ancient story to today, as to make today feel eerily ancient.

Magnus Mills’ The Field of the Cloth of Gold is equally but differently irreverent towards the realist piety of a consistent and recognisable world. A fable of territorial settlement and conflict, it’s saturated with allusions to the history of the successive and competing forces that have overrun these shores down the centuries. But the moment we think we’ve identified the real historical incidents and their allied lessons, it pulls the rug from under us. The novel is less an historical allegory than a comic and unsparing anatomy of the moral perplexity of the present. Or at least, that’s what I thought, but I’ve no substantial reason to think I’m right.

It’s hard to think of a novel less in thrall to dictates of narrative shape, tone and style than Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, notwithstanding its very familiar set-up of a widower and his two sons blindsided by grief for their dead wife and mother. Unfolding as verse drama in knowing homage to Ted Hughes and bravely borrowing the anarchic destructiveness and generosity of his great avian persona Crow, the novel is an explosive and beautiful expression of life’s mad and impossible defiance in the face of death.

There’s an abundance of the familiar too in Adam Thirlwell’s virtuosic ventriloquization of the brattish man-child who narrates his noir pastiche, Lurid and Cute. The generic tics, garish plot twists and dark moral shades are all in place, but the perceptual and linguistic distortions of our narrator, at once sinister and hilarious, saccharine and vicious, ridiculous and profound, induce a subtle yet decisive disorientation in us as readers, leaving us unsure of where we are and who we’re with, suspended between a daylit world we know all too well, and a nocturnal hell we’d rather not recognise.

Might an imagined incident in the penultimate year of one John Lennon send us back to more familiar narrative territory? Not when it’s told by Kevin Barry. Beatlebone is a novel that takes us to the edge – of the Western world, of sanity, of fiction itself, to the point where it meets its troublesome doppelgänger, autobiography. Beatlebone’s compulsive narrative of the one of the last century’s greatest musicians and pop icons transforms gradually from a portrait of his plunge into a geographical and psychic nowhere into a startling meditation on the enigmatic and ambiguous relation of a writer to his character.

And then there’s Tom McCarthy’s brilliantly compacted epic, Satin Island. Presented as a palimpsest of the impossible and interminable report of corporate anthropologist U., it’s a coldly seductive anatomy of our death-driven consumer culture and its nihilistic compulsions. Which risks making it sound po-faced, when its filled with an embarrassment of blackly uproarious set pieces – from amongst which, as a Professor of Literary Theory, I can’t resist highlighting U.’s fantasy of a conference lecture in which he skewers his environmentalist heckler and rouses his audience into siding with the despoiling oil drillers as the ‘real’ environmentalists.

Like its companions on the shortlist, it’s a book that turns the world upside down, that reminds us of the urgency of preserving and nurturing the novel as one of the sole available spaces, in a world given over to the consensual illusions of consumer culture and social media, to see, read and imagine the world differently.

Of these dazzling offerings, one had to blind us that little bit more sharply. It’s a novel that brilliantly fulfils the terms of the prize, weaving and blurring fiction and life – a novel of stunning lyric and cerebral intensity. That novel, the winner of the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize, is Beatlebone by Kevin Barry.