Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize with The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury) and joked that he was "speechless - so I'll give the speech I prepared in 1983", the year of his debut with Coming from Behind. Jacobson was long-listed for the prize in 2002 and 2006 but has never previously been shortlisted. His win, he joked, was "about time." Bloomsbury US has just released the title. Here's our review.
The outsider, Jacobson won by a three-to-two majority, and Andrew Motion, chair of the judges, said in the press conference following the ceremony that four of the novels fell away quickly in the final judging session, which came down to a discussion over just two - the second being, reportedly, Peter Carey's Parrot and Oliver in America (Faber). Motion described The Finkler Question as "a marvelous book: very funny, of course, but also very clever, very sad and very subtle. It is all that it seems to be and much more than it seems to be. A completely worthy winner of this great prize."
Jacobson's triumph gave Bloomsbury its third Man Booker Prize-winner following The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood in 2002 and The English Patient by Michael Ondaaatje, joint winner with Barry Unsworth in 1992. His rivals were, in addition to Carey (for whom it would have been a third win), Emma Donoghue with Room (Picador), Damon Galgut with In a Strange Room (Atlantic), Tom McCarthy with C (Cape), and Andrea Levy with The Long Song (Headline). Bloomsbury has 48,000 copies in print in the U.K. and on the back of the win Australia ordered 11,000. Bloomsbury US publishes this week, and George Gibson was in London en route from Frankfurt to New York to see Jacobson's triumph. It was a bittersweet moment for Cape Publisher Dan Franklin, who had published Jacobson's novels before the author moved to Bloomsbury with Finkler.
Jacobson, who has been described as an English Philip Roth, said he preferred to think of himself as "a Jewish Jane Austen", or perhaps the son of Roth and Austen. "I have been wanting to win the Booker Prize from the start. I don't think I'm alone in that, it's such a fantastic prize. It was beginning to look like I was the novelist that never ever won the Booker Prize. I have been talked about as underrated and I'm so sick of being described as the underrated Howard Jacobson. So the thought that's gone forever is wonderful."
Asked what he would do with the £50,000 prize money, Jacobson replied that, while mindful of the fact that John Berger had given it away, he would keep it. "I promised to buy my wife a handbag. Have you seen the price of them?"
