What went wrong with the Big Jubilee Read?
(Shutterstock)
How did the Big Jubilee Read end up as such a mess? The intentions were good: to promote reading and books by British and Commonwealth authors written over the past seventy years as part of the Jubilee Celebrations this year. A number of admirable organisations got together and set up “a partnership between BBC Arts and The Reading Agency, with additional funding from Arts Council England and support from Libraries Connected and the Booksellers Association”.
So far so good. The problem is that the judges they chose seem to be completely out of touch with the vast majority of British readers. The list of absences is staggering. No Anthony Powell, William Golding, Lawrence Durrell, Paul Scott or Graham Greene, no Kingsley Amis or Philip Larkin, no Doris Lessing, AS Byatt, Angela Carter or Pat Barker, no James Bond or Harry Potter, no Lord of the Rings or His Dark Materials, no Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, William Boyd, WG Sebald or JG Ballard.
It doesn’t take long to find the pattern here. All twenty-one of these authors are white and British. Five are women but sixteen are men. The Big Jubilee Read might as well have put up a notice saying we don’t want many white Brits on our list. No popular genres either. No spy fiction apart from John Le Carré. No famous children’s authors, which might have helped reach out to children throughout the country during Jubilee year and got young children reading. Not much poetry: Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott made the cut but Larkin, Ted Hughes, Dylan Thomas and WH Auden didn’t. John Betjeman obviously not. Geoffrey Hill and Stevie Smith? Even Brian Patten and Roger McGough? No. Athol Fugard, a great playwright, makes the list but Pinter, Stoppard and Rattigan don’t.
Of course, some household names made the cut. VS Naipaul, Anthony Burgess and Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys and Chinua Achebe from the 1950s and 1960s; John Le Carré, Iris Murdoch, Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood are there from the 1970s and 1980s, a curious hotchpotch. The English Patient and White Teeth make it, so do JM Coetzee, Hilary Mantel and Andrea Levy; and a handful of recent prize-winning authors, including the last three Booker Prize winners, but not a glimpse of a host of others.
So, who exactly is the approved list aimed at? Not middle Britain, young or old. They will take one look at this list and say: no, thank you, not for us. People generally know when they’re not wanted or when their values are scorned. If you like Hornblower or James Bond, witches and hobbits, great children’s literature, popular poetry or drama, The Big Jubilee Read doesn’t care.
What it does care about is post-colonial, ideally non-white, literature. Take the first ten years of the Queen’s reign, 1952-61. The authors chosen are Amos Tutola from Nigeria. Roger Mais, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, ER Braithwaite, VS Naipaul and Edgar Mittelhozer from the Caribbean, RK Narayan and Attia Hosain from India. The one British-born writer on this list for the 1950s is Caradog Prichard, author of One Moonlit Night.
The people who will like this list are English teachers at inner-city comprehensives, trying to interest pupils who feel that English Literature doesn’t speak to them, or academics teaching post-colonial literature. That is probably it. All that BBC and Arts Council money will just go down the drain.
The real problem is that organisations like the BBC and the Arts Council are trying to seem in touch with licence fee payers and British taxpayers. In fact, the BBC desperately needs to reach out to ordinary British viewers and listeners and seem part of the same culture. Now more than ever. And, of course, they are right to promote neglected writers from the West Indies and Africa, Pakistan and India, who might appeal to all kinds of readers, young and old. It’s always a good thing to broaden the canon, to acknowledge that Britain is changing fast and so are its writers (and readers). Though, apparently, this doesn’t apply to Jewish writers. No Howard Jacobson, Bernice Rubens or Naomi Alderman, no Clive Sinclair or Linda Grant.
But it’s also a question of balance. Of course, it’s good to have a number of post-colonial writers from the 1950s — but nine out of ten? And would it have been so bad to have a better-known white writer than Caradog Prichard? Perhaps, say, Philip Larkin or J.K. Rowling, Doris Lessing or J.R.R. Tolkien? If Libraries Connected and the Booksellers Association want people flocking to their local libraries and bookshops, then why not choose a list of titles that most people have heard of and might be excited by?
Not that long ago Suzy Klein (the new head of BBC Music and Arts, the person at the BBC responsible for the Big Jubilee Read) and Lenny Henry presented a BBC documentary called “Black Classical Music: The Forgotten History”, which introduced viewers to a number of fascinating Black composers and musicians, including Chevalier De Saint-Georges and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.
It was a superb programme, exactly what the BBC should be doing. The Big Jubilee Read presumably aspires to do the same thing: introduce countless readers to names they don’t yet know but might be interested in. Yet it forgot to get the balance right, because they asked the wrong people to choose the best seventy books by British and Commonwealth writers. The result is entirely predictable: woke, alienating and disastrous.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.
