The wealthiest short story prize I have judged was the Sunday Times EFG short story award, which presents the victor with £30,000. If the winning writer were to use every single one of the 6,000 words allowed them, that would work out at a fiver a word, which puts them on a par with that other well-paid writer of creative fiction, the columnist Boris Johnson.
In straitened times for writers, you would think a prize bonanza like this is a good thing – but it cuts no ice with Philip Hensher, editor of The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, published two years after his immense anthology-cum-survey of the British short story since c1700 and designed, in part, to compensate for some of the space-related omissions of the last project.
Prizes, writes Hensher in his introduction, are detrimental to the current practice and status of the short story in this country. He begins with a fairly inarguable point, that literary competitions of all kinds are “mostly harmless if they form part of a healthy ecology”; and it is that surrounding ecology – the decline in numbers of short stories appearing in newspapers and magazines, the fact that publishers have yet to properly exploit the possibilities of releasing single short stories in digital form – that is struggling.
But Hensher expands his argument into somewhat boggier territory. In the absence of a thriving market, he asserts: “The only readership many short-story writers seem to envisage is that of the members of a judging panel … Just as medieval princes paid monks to pray on their behalf, having better things to do, so we pay provincial dons and actors between engagements to sit and read a hundred humourless two-handers about war crimes in Taiwan before declaring them to be worthy of the cheque, though not of readers.”
This characterisation is funny, but is it fair? The truth of my experience is that much of the process is taken up with discarding pieces of work that miss their mark, or appear to have been hastily conceived and thoughtlessly executed. Sometimes, the ratio is problematic: too much chaff, not nearly enough wheat. And occasionally, one does alight on precisely the syndrome that Hensher identifies, which usually involves the collision of Big Ideas, the foregrounding of a style, whether it be minimalist or baroque, and a faintly desperate striving for originality.
But I would contend this is not a frequent enough occurrence to support the theory of a general and destructive trend. And in the specific case of the writer Jonathan Tel, who Hensher notes has enjoyed vastly more success at prize level – including the Sunday Times award in a year that I was a judge – than he has at actually selling books, I don’t believe it applies. We simply thought his story was really good, and we hoped that readers would, too.
One obscure fact of short story competitions is that they are often judged “blind” – handed to the jury in typescript pages, with no information about the author or publishing house; matching up work to names only comes about late in the process. This means that the work is freed from its context, shorn of assumptions, reputations, biographical detail; it confers a liberating feeling that is, alas, denied the anthologist or general reader.
Many of the 30 writers featured in this volume come with fearsome reputations and track records: Kazuo Ishiguro, Jane Gardam, Helen Simpson, Martin Amis, to name just a few. Even recent arrivals to the literary marketplace, such as Thomas Morris and Eley Williams, have built up a significant following in a relatively short space of time (quite right, too: Morris’s story, about a group of Welshmen ripping through Dublin, and Williams’s, a poignant love story set against the brutal practice of cooking ortolans, are excellent).
An interesting by-product of this is to see novelists exercising their talents over a shorter distance and, sometimes, with a quite different frame of reference. Zadie Smith’s story “Moonlight Landscape with Bridge” is a tense depiction of a politician making good his escape from a disaster zone; it echoes themes in her long-form fiction and yet is quite distinct from it. Elsewhere, Hensher reproduces the second chapter of David Szalay’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel All That Man Is on the accurate grounds that it works as a discrete piece; but it is also fascinating to see how much bleaker and more savage Szalay’s exploration of masculinity and the fear of the monstrous female body becomes when isolated from the longer narrative.
Anthologies of this sort appear to invite a consideration of the state of play of a particular genre or style. Hensher chooses 1997 as his starting point, arguing that the Blair government signalled a shift in the public mood, and it also chimes with the beginning of the era of internet and mobile phone dominance, which is certainly changing our modes of reading, interpreting and even creating fiction.
Unless one were to argue for a sort of metaphorical clairvoyance in the form of Mark Haddon’s “The Pier Falls”, which painstakingly details the collapse of a pier, and the ensuing chaos and loss of life, it’s hard to see the current political and social scene realistically depicted in these pages. Stories range from glimpses of personal life (apocalyptic in AL Kennedy’s opening story, “Spared”, and done with charm and compassion in pieces such as Jackie Kay’s “Physics and Chemistry” and Leone Ross’s “The Woman Who Lived in a Restaurant”) to more oblique representations of public events, such as Gerard Woodward’s narrative of the collapse of a political regime in “The Fall of Mr and Mrs Nicholson”.
In virtually all, though, there is a noticeable lack of formal innovation; many writers here may be drawn to the uncanny, or the liminal or subterranean, but they also still seem fairly convinced of the merits of putting words and sentences in a straightforwardly linear arrangement (there is no equivalent of the PowerPoint chapter of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad).
Allowing for the vagaries of personal taste, or of a piece of writing capturing you in just the right mood, Hensher’s selection is of solidly high quality and his thematic arrangement – Love, Story, Men, Women, War & Politics, Catastrophic Worlds and an Envoi, movingly consisting of a single piece by the late Helen Dunmore – nicely suggestive. But we have learned our lesson from the introduction: we shall not hand him, nor any of his writers, a prize, for fear it stops them writing altogether.
• The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story edited by Philip Hensher (Allen Lane, £20). To order a copy for £17.20, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
