Has the Booker Prize cancelled England’s white working class?

Will there ever again be a time when to be white, working-class and English is regarded as interesting?  

In the nineteenth century, the lower orders (then overwhelmingly white) were almost as popular a subject for novelists as the Downton Abbey school. The works of Dickens, Hardy, the Brontës and George Eliot were filled with memorable working-class characters, whose origins, struggles and ambitions to better themselves, or simply to survive, held the reading public rapt.  

The twentieth century showed no let-up. D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and Graham Greene kept the tradition going before giving way to the Angry Young Men of the Sixties: Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, John Braine, Stan Barstow and the rest.  

But these days, to be white and working-class in England is to exist at the rusty bottom of the literary barrel. There are no more working-class heroes. If you grew up white in an inner-city tower block, you are seen as the raw material from which Anthony Burgess fashioned the Droogs in A Clockwork Orange. Publishers of “serious” fiction, still drawn massively from a public school and Oxbridge background, would never from one year to the next set foot in a majority-white housing estate in Stevenage, Widnes or South Shields and see no reason why their readers should have to do so either. 

Like the latter-day BBC, top-drawer publishers are much more interested in stories featuring West Indian, African, Asian and mixed-race characters. Give them a young man who has arrived in London after fleeing civil strife in Nigeria, or a Muslim woman from Rochdale trying to make it in a man’s world, or a gay Chinese teenager who isn’t interested in the family restaurant because he wants to play for Arsenal, and they’ll bite your hand off. Such stories are seen to reflect the huge changes that have taken place in England in the twenty-first century. And that’s true. But what if you’re born white and working class and left school at 16, full of dreams, only to end up stacking shelves at Lidl? Well, I’m sorry, but that’s real life, you see, not literary life, so “not one for us”.  

If British publishers were to publish The Canterbury Tales today, it would have to feature The Asylum-Seeker’s Tale, the Indian Merchant’s Tale, The Nigerian Prince’s Tale and, of course, The Polish Electrician’s Tale. Comic relief, complete with farts and vomit, would be provided by The Millwall Supporter’s Tale.    

Not that the effective cancellation of an entire ethnic class is the only issue. Britain itself, and England in particular, is steadily fading from view in the literary world. Consider the 13-strong long-list for this year’s Booker Prize. Only two of the novels contending for our biggest and most prestigious literary award are set in the UK: Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford, a what-if that begins in a V2 bomb crater in Woolwich, and The Fortune Men, by Somali author Nadifa Mohamed, exploring what happened to an African immigrant found murdered in Cardiff in the 1950s. Of the rest, six are set in America (New Mexico, Wisconsin, San Francisco, Georgia, the Mid-West and Hollywood), two in South Africa and the remainder in Canada, Sri Lanka and India.

Of the 48 authors shortlisted since the Booker Prize took its current form, 18 were American, 13 from the Commonwealth and one from Ireland. Sixteen finalists, including four with dual citizenship, were British, of whom five were Scottish. Just six of the total were born and raised in England.

Contrast this with the Pulitzer Prize for literature, the pre-eminent prize in its field in the US. It is restricted to “distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life”. In France, the Prix Goncourt is restricted to writers of “French literature”. The only non-French person ever to win the award is the American-born Jonathan Littell for his 2006 novel Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones). Littell was raised in France and writes in French. He is also a dual US/French citizen. 

The Booker, currently sponsored by the charitable foundation Crankstart, established in San Francisco by the Welsh-born venture-capitalist Sir Michael Moritz and his wife Harriet Heyman, has been open to American, Commonwealth and Irish writers for many years. But since 2013 the only condition for entry has been that the books under consideration should have been written in English, which led to a further precipitous drop in winners actually by the English.

The last English writer to win the Booker (shared with the Canadian Margaret Atwood) was Bernardine Evaristo, of mixed English, Nigerian, Afro-Brazilian, German and Irish heritage, for her 2019 novel Girl, Woman, Other, chronicling the lives of 12 Black-British women against a pervasive backdrop of racism, class bias and misogyny. Douglas Stuart, whose Joycean doorstop Shuggie Bain won last year, is Glasgow-born but now an American citizen. Anna Burns, the author of the 2018 winner, Milkman, is from Republican North Belfast and wrote her novel in the Belfast Vernacular.

The conclusion is inescapable: the lives of white English men and women are too boring for words.  

If I were a successful novelist, and English, I would be distinctly miffed about this. But if I wrote books located in Teeside, St Helen’s or Romford, I would be livid.  

The Booker’s marked predilection for overseas and ethnic minority authors reflects the growing distaste, amounting almost to disgust, that the English Establishment itself feels for the white underclass and its prevailing culture. The make-up of this year’s Booker judges is typical. Maya Jasanoff, who chairs the panel, is an American historian and authority on the decline of the British Empire; Horatia Harrod is associate editor of the Financial Times, educated at Oxford and the LSE; Natascha McElhone is an Irish movie-actress, step-daughter of the IRA apologist Roy Greenslade; Chigozie Obioma is a Nigerian novelist and academic, himself twice short-listed for the prize; and Rowan Williams is the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who once mused aloud on the virtues of sharia law.

A distinguished bunch. Nothing wrong with any of them (though I do wonder how McElhone got the gig – why not Danny Dyer?). But only Harrod is English and you would probably not expect to find them meeting down The Murderer’s Arms on a Friday night. They are stalwarts of the new alternate Establishment, bent on promoting a one-world culture, in which the UK, if it has any place at all in the modern world, should spend its time apologising for past mistakes.

Good luck, meanwhile, to whoever wins the prize this year. I confess I haven’t read any of them. Maybe it will be Spufford, whose principal characters in Light Perpetual – all white, all working-class – are, according to the review in the New York Times, not only gifted with rare literary insights but fated to be matched up over the years with non-white partners. Just know that the classic English novel, like English football, will not be coming home anytime soon.