Literary cash and canons

In the Booker prize, literature, money and PR merge. Judge Valentine Cunningham discusses how the prize shapes our study of fiction

The shortlist for the 30th Booker prize is out. After 124 novels, several Savile Club lunches, and a certain amount of headbanging, the judges have finally gone public. It's not a bad list, I think.

It's especially good for the few who've made the cut - Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie, Julian Barnes's England, England, Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto, Ian McEwan's Amsterdam, Magnus Mills's The Restraint of Beasts, Martin Booth's The Industry of Souls.

Out now, definitively, are Barbara Trapido's The Travelling Hornplayers, Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun, Maggie Gee's The Ice People, Hilary Mantel's The Giant O'Brien, Alan Warner's The Sopranos, William Trevor's Death in Summer, Andre Brink's Devil's Valley, Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance, Les Murray's Fredy Neptune, Sebastian Faulks's Charlotte Gray, Adam Thorpe's Pieces of Light, Carlo Gebler's How to Murder a Man, D. J. Taylor's Trespass - all runners fancied by a judge or two.

Already the chorus of abuse resounds loudly. Never become a Booker judge if you don't also want to become an instant critical leper. Why aren't there more women on the list? Or Scots, or Irish, or blacks, or bus drivers? Or just more books that are Any Good? There never are.

More is in play here than a few misplaced bets. The Booker prize makes money - and makes canons. Schindler's Ark has sold more than a million copies. To date, 140,000 hardbacks of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things have been exchanged for the good coin of our realm. Before The English Patient achieved Booker fame it had been remaindered. With the film tie-in, a consequence of its win in 1992, it is now one of the best-known fictional titles ever.

The name of this game is being named. The author, the title and, of course, the good sponsor. A Booker book. A happy rhyme, a happy partnership. And being Bookered doesn't only get authors onto Josephine Public's lips, it gets them into classrooms. Twice in Booker 30, the 30th anniversary celebration volume, we learn of the hope of former Booker plc chairman and enthusiast for the prize, Sir Michael Caine, that winners will get onto A-level reading lists. They do. What's more, there are courses in European and US universities that not only teach Booker winners but define the contemporary English novel in terms of the Booker. Like Strangers in Fiction: Booker Prize Winners, on offer in Budapest University's English department. As Alasdair Niven, the British Council's literature boss, points out in Booker 30, Keri Hulme's Maori novel The Bone People, despised in England as an unreadable winner, "is taught on courses all over the world".

Cash and canons. It's a revealing blend. F. R. Leavis dismissed Edith Sitwell as belonging to the history of publicity rather than the history of literature. No such high-critical difference is possible with the Booker. The business of the Booker brings home the discomfiting alliance of Leavis's two sorts of history. Hence the news management arranged by the Book Trust's Martyn Goff, who contrives to keep the prize before the public all year round.

One of the reforms that I fantasised about achieving when I accepted the invitation to be a judge again was the official release of the list of 20 or so titles the judges draw up to focus their minds on the eventual shortlist. And I pressed for this innovation - a way of indicating what is really afoot in Commonwealth and Irish fiction in any year.

But the judges were assured that it is better for the long list to stay an in-house secret. We were enjoined to silence, only to find all the posh Sunday newspapers printing long lists attributed to "industry sources". Evidently the Booker's PR machine is as adept at unattributable briefings as any government department's.

My naive self is taken aback; and no doubt I'm too easily overawed by the "confidential" stamp on my official copy of the long list. But my cultural-student self is deeply impressed. Here are some smart corporate movers.

It wasn't me who squealed, but I'll be telling all when the winner is announced on October . That is a predictable part of the business: another bit of the rhetorical jigsaw that is Booker's deft scene of cash-and-canon warfare - what one excessively prideful contributor to Booker 30 enthuses over as the work of "making literary fiction pay".

Valentine Cunningham, professor of English at Oxford University, was a Booker prize judge in 1992 and 1998.

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