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Booker Prize 2004--various points
- Thread starter Shade
- Start date
novella
Active Member
I saw that someonee had tagged on a new post to last year's Booker discussion, but think it deserves a new thread.
Was anyone following the selection? I thought Cloud Atlas would win because of all the buzz. I am not planning to read Cloud Atlas or Hollinghurst. I'm interested in I'll Go To Bed at Noon but none of the others ring my bell.
On the gay thing, the winner is being talked about as a gay book. Okay. Is that fair? I have to say I was reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but put it down because I felt alienated by the gay thing, though the writing was good. But, as Kurt Cobain said, everyone is gay. I think I know what he meant, that it's a continuum, not two ways of being. Nevertheless, I don't plan to read this book.
I think in the future the Man Booker will be open to worldwide English-language submissions. What's the general opinion on that?
Has anyone read any of the books shortlisted this year? They're all quite new, so maybe not available everywhere.
Here's a link to the shortlisted books.
http://book.awardannals.com/award.php?name=booker&year=1
Was anyone following the selection? I thought Cloud Atlas would win because of all the buzz. I am not planning to read Cloud Atlas or Hollinghurst. I'm interested in I'll Go To Bed at Noon but none of the others ring my bell.
On the gay thing, the winner is being talked about as a gay book. Okay. Is that fair? I have to say I was reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but put it down because I felt alienated by the gay thing, though the writing was good. But, as Kurt Cobain said, everyone is gay. I think I know what he meant, that it's a continuum, not two ways of being. Nevertheless, I don't plan to read this book.
I think in the future the Man Booker will be open to worldwide English-language submissions. What's the general opinion on that?
Has anyone read any of the books shortlisted this year? They're all quite new, so maybe not available everywhere.
Here's a link to the shortlisted books.
http://book.awardannals.com/award.php?name=booker&year=1
Shade
New Member
No takers? OK, well I have read the Big Three on the list. My comments on Cloud Atlas are expressed elsewhere, I think (and if they're not I'll post them now), but I agree with others on Amazon etc who feel that it's hugely impressive but somehow stumbles under its own weight.
The Line of Beauty I read earlier in the year and my memories have somewhat faded. I do remember though that I thought the first section was absolutely terrific, full of life and some really good humour in a solid and satisfying way that few writers can manage - but after 500 pages I was just glad to get shot of it as it all seemed to add up to rather less than the sum of its parts. Someone did say that it warranted re-reading and that is doubtless right but I couldn't face it for another year or so at least. Perhaps it will be a stayer though. Oh and I really couldn't bear some of the ostentatious erudition, including all the crap about the 'line of beauty' itself, the ogee. Bah.
Last week I read The Master as I picked up a copy for a fiver in Bargain Books. I absolutely loved every goddamn page of it. It put me in mind of the much-praised first half of Ian McEwan's Atonement, which was similarly beautifully judged and weighed and seemed so utterly to immerse you in the reality described that each time you put the book down you came out into the real world blinking in surprise. Tóibín utterly convinces in his depiction of Henry James and I found much to love in his portrayal of him as a brilliant but frustrated cold fish paralysed by anxiety and surrounded by death. Not a thought or reaction is left unexplored and the book is a series of discrete incidents rather than a single pulling narrative, and it is most definitely a slow read, but I couldn't get enough of it. It just shone with brilliance from start to finish and was absolutely my favourite for the Booker. It was a far more complete and fully achieved performance than Cloud Atlas or The Line of Beauty - despite both those books' undeniably huge accomplishments. Still, I can't complain about the Hollinghurst winning as it is undeniably better than most.
The Line of Beauty I read earlier in the year and my memories have somewhat faded. I do remember though that I thought the first section was absolutely terrific, full of life and some really good humour in a solid and satisfying way that few writers can manage - but after 500 pages I was just glad to get shot of it as it all seemed to add up to rather less than the sum of its parts. Someone did say that it warranted re-reading and that is doubtless right but I couldn't face it for another year or so at least. Perhaps it will be a stayer though. Oh and I really couldn't bear some of the ostentatious erudition, including all the crap about the 'line of beauty' itself, the ogee. Bah.
Last week I read The Master as I picked up a copy for a fiver in Bargain Books. I absolutely loved every goddamn page of it. It put me in mind of the much-praised first half of Ian McEwan's Atonement, which was similarly beautifully judged and weighed and seemed so utterly to immerse you in the reality described that each time you put the book down you came out into the real world blinking in surprise. Tóibín utterly convinces in his depiction of Henry James and I found much to love in his portrayal of him as a brilliant but frustrated cold fish paralysed by anxiety and surrounded by death. Not a thought or reaction is left unexplored and the book is a series of discrete incidents rather than a single pulling narrative, and it is most definitely a slow read, but I couldn't get enough of it. It just shone with brilliance from start to finish and was absolutely my favourite for the Booker. It was a far more complete and fully achieved performance than Cloud Atlas or The Line of Beauty - despite both those books' undeniably huge accomplishments. Still, I can't complain about the Hollinghurst winning as it is undeniably better than most.
Shade
New Member
Well here's my review of The Line of Beauty as submitted to Amazon (hence references to other reviews etc.), for those who are interested:
Alan Hollinghurst's Booker win for The Line of Beauty is deserved on the basis that his second novel, The Folding Star, probably should have won ten years ago (the Booker judges then couldn't agree between it and another contender, so gave it to their third choice, James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late), so this is a late recompense. I'm not sure it's the best book on the shortlist (I preferred Colm Tóibín's The Master), but it's certainly a return to form for Hollinghurst after the underdone and clumsy The Spell.
The plot, such as it is, is well summed up by others: naive 20-year-old man (boy, really) lodges with Tory MP and his family at the height of Margaret Thatcher's power, from 1983 to 1987. Has various love affairs with various men and gets treated badly by the wicked Conservative family in the end. Its appeal of course is not in the plot, nor in the childish notion (espoused by a reviewer below) that characters should be likeable to make a book readable. It's in the writing: Hollinghurst is one of the best stylists there is, effortlessly tossing off scraps of description (Thatcher's "beaked and crowned" head) that others would kill for. He's also capable of punctuating the beautiful prose with brilliant jokes, which somehow have all the more force for their appearance in such carefully weighted sentences and structures.
This is enough to be going on with. However at 500 pages the book does occasionally drag, and I couldn't help feeling that - like Cloud Atlas on the Booker shortlist, but unlike Tóibín's fully achieved The Master - the whole was somewhat less than the sum of the parts, and that it was four parts achievement and one part momentum (and don't we anyway tend to praise a long book simply because we have got through it?); but for me the tipping point wasn't quite reached. I also admit, with full philistine shame, that main character Nick's constant displays of erudition on Henry James, the ogee (the 'line of beauty' of the title) and other things besides could have been a little less frequent for my liking. It may be, of course, that it's a grower and a keeper, but at 500 pages, you'll forgive me if I leave it a couple of years before I try to find out.
Alan Hollinghurst's Booker win for The Line of Beauty is deserved on the basis that his second novel, The Folding Star, probably should have won ten years ago (the Booker judges then couldn't agree between it and another contender, so gave it to their third choice, James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late), so this is a late recompense. I'm not sure it's the best book on the shortlist (I preferred Colm Tóibín's The Master), but it's certainly a return to form for Hollinghurst after the underdone and clumsy The Spell.
The plot, such as it is, is well summed up by others: naive 20-year-old man (boy, really) lodges with Tory MP and his family at the height of Margaret Thatcher's power, from 1983 to 1987. Has various love affairs with various men and gets treated badly by the wicked Conservative family in the end. Its appeal of course is not in the plot, nor in the childish notion (espoused by a reviewer below) that characters should be likeable to make a book readable. It's in the writing: Hollinghurst is one of the best stylists there is, effortlessly tossing off scraps of description (Thatcher's "beaked and crowned" head) that others would kill for. He's also capable of punctuating the beautiful prose with brilliant jokes, which somehow have all the more force for their appearance in such carefully weighted sentences and structures.
This is enough to be going on with. However at 500 pages the book does occasionally drag, and I couldn't help feeling that - like Cloud Atlas on the Booker shortlist, but unlike Tóibín's fully achieved The Master - the whole was somewhat less than the sum of the parts, and that it was four parts achievement and one part momentum (and don't we anyway tend to praise a long book simply because we have got through it?); but for me the tipping point wasn't quite reached. I also admit, with full philistine shame, that main character Nick's constant displays of erudition on Henry James, the ogee (the 'line of beauty' of the title) and other things besides could have been a little less frequent for my liking. It may be, of course, that it's a grower and a keeper, but at 500 pages, you'll forgive me if I leave it a couple of years before I try to find out.
Shade
New Member
And my review of Cloud Atlas:
Everything about Cloud Atlas – the elegant and allusive title, the heft of this 540-page hardback (which as well as providing food for thought, doubles as a good cardiovascular workout: mens sana in thingummy doodah and all that), the quotes and prize-tips it comes garlanded with, even the bold cover (so idiosyncratically contemporary it should achieve kitsch status within a couple of years) – says This is a significant book.
And so it is. As you begin to read it, first your opinion rises to meet your expectations, and then keeps on going from there. What Mitchell has done is return to the form of his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), in providing a loosely linked set of stories, but with a twist this time. The narrative is an onionskin: we get one story which is interrupted by another, and that by another, and so on as we drill through the flesh of the book. At the centre is a whole story, then we return to resume the story it interrupted, then the story it interrupted, and so on until the book ends with the conclusion of the story which began it.
But – in my best infomercial voice – that’s not all! As well as having the earlier stories enclosing the later ones, within the structure of the book, Mitchell also has – in the fictional settings and also temporally - the later stories enclosing the earlier ones. By this I mean first that the stories move forward through time, and also within each story, the protagonist is aware of the story which has just been interrupted. So we have first, the journal of a Pacific explorer in 1850; then the letters home of a bankrupt young composer who is blagging his way through 1930s Europe (and who is reading the Victorian explorer’s journal in its published form); then a cinematic thriller in 1970s California, all nuclear conspiracy and a hairpin or switchback on every page (in which the female lead has been reading the letters of the young composer in Europe); a vanity publisher in contemporary England who is being chased by gangland associates of one of his clients and ends up trapped in an altogether strange situation (and who is reading the nuclear thriller as a manuscript submitted by a client); then to the 22nd century – or thereabouts – where we get the death-row testimony of a fabricant in a corporate dystopia (who watches the film based on the vanity publisher’s story); and finally, the central section, a far-future narrative in a Riddley-Walker-style post-civilisation age, told in pidgin English, whose narrator finds the holographic testimony from the executed fabricant, who in his world has become a prophet.
Phew. Okay. So there is much to admire here, not only in Mitchell’s vast imagination – any lesser writer would have jealously hoarded these ideas to make up six novels and not splurged them all on one; clearly he has no fear of the ideas drying up, but then Iain Banks (of whose generously imaginative early work I was reminded) probably thought that too – but also in his execution of the stories. Each one is perfectly detailed and flawlessly ventriloquised. He successfully completes all of them (which was his stated intention, to reflect the frustration he felt on reading Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, where the many sub-stories all die hanging in the air). The stories have a unifying theme too, of subjugation and rebellion, deepening their superficial appeal, and also of course, we benefit from the dramatic irony of knowing the future for the planet that each character has such great hopes for in their own individual times.
I could end it there and leave you happy in the knowledge that Cloud Atlas was one of the greatest novels of our time. But that would be misleading, because much as I hate to carp on such a monumental achievement – I feel, anyway, like a vandal scratching at Uluru with a pen-knife – the book is firmly flawed. As the stories break into one another, the sole connection – that each narrator is reading/watching the story in the previous chapter – starts to seem a bit thin and gimmicky. There are attempts to bring deeper connections – two of the characters recur in successive stories, which is a good start – but they fall flat when all Mitchell manages otherwise is to have all the main characters share the same birthmark (a "comet-shaped" one, "between the shoulder blade and collar bone" – where is that exactly?), to suggest, rather glibly, that they are related or reincarnated. And I thought Mitchell did not put his best foot forward in starting and ending the novel (with the explorer story) and centring it (with the post-apocalyptic society, described in the blurb as "a young Pacific Islander witnesses the nightfall of science and civilisation" – wow! Sounds fantastic, but wildly oversold I’m afraid) with his least interesting, and frankly most difficult to read, stories.
I also had grave doubts about the decision to include the thriller story – not that it is not very well done and highly entertaining. The problem is that, as noted before, the thriller is (it turns out) a manuscript which has been submitted to the vanity publisher: a pure fiction within the fiction of the novel. But this throws the preceding chapters – which are all, presumably, supposed to be “real” within the fiction of the novel – into chaos. If the character in the fictional thriller is reading the letters from the composer, does that make him just a subsidiary character within the thriller? And indeed the explorer whose journals he is reading? Does this even make sense? At least David Mitchell can be satisfied that, if you want to understand what the hell I am talking about when I make these criticisms, you will have to buy the book and read it to find out.
So despite its surface attractions and achievements – and they are many, and many people will devour the book joyfully and without complaint, and good luck to them – I am left with the feeling that Cloud Atlas will be a book I might return to in parts (the composer’s letters and the vanity publisher’s "ghastly ordeal" were my favourite parts, both tragic and comic and superb first person narratives), but not in whole, not to be lived in and loved over and over until either it falls apart or I do – which is what we want of all our books, after all - isn't it?
Everything about Cloud Atlas – the elegant and allusive title, the heft of this 540-page hardback (which as well as providing food for thought, doubles as a good cardiovascular workout: mens sana in thingummy doodah and all that), the quotes and prize-tips it comes garlanded with, even the bold cover (so idiosyncratically contemporary it should achieve kitsch status within a couple of years) – says This is a significant book.
And so it is. As you begin to read it, first your opinion rises to meet your expectations, and then keeps on going from there. What Mitchell has done is return to the form of his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999), in providing a loosely linked set of stories, but with a twist this time. The narrative is an onionskin: we get one story which is interrupted by another, and that by another, and so on as we drill through the flesh of the book. At the centre is a whole story, then we return to resume the story it interrupted, then the story it interrupted, and so on until the book ends with the conclusion of the story which began it.
But – in my best infomercial voice – that’s not all! As well as having the earlier stories enclosing the later ones, within the structure of the book, Mitchell also has – in the fictional settings and also temporally - the later stories enclosing the earlier ones. By this I mean first that the stories move forward through time, and also within each story, the protagonist is aware of the story which has just been interrupted. So we have first, the journal of a Pacific explorer in 1850; then the letters home of a bankrupt young composer who is blagging his way through 1930s Europe (and who is reading the Victorian explorer’s journal in its published form); then a cinematic thriller in 1970s California, all nuclear conspiracy and a hairpin or switchback on every page (in which the female lead has been reading the letters of the young composer in Europe); a vanity publisher in contemporary England who is being chased by gangland associates of one of his clients and ends up trapped in an altogether strange situation (and who is reading the nuclear thriller as a manuscript submitted by a client); then to the 22nd century – or thereabouts – where we get the death-row testimony of a fabricant in a corporate dystopia (who watches the film based on the vanity publisher’s story); and finally, the central section, a far-future narrative in a Riddley-Walker-style post-civilisation age, told in pidgin English, whose narrator finds the holographic testimony from the executed fabricant, who in his world has become a prophet.
Phew. Okay. So there is much to admire here, not only in Mitchell’s vast imagination – any lesser writer would have jealously hoarded these ideas to make up six novels and not splurged them all on one; clearly he has no fear of the ideas drying up, but then Iain Banks (of whose generously imaginative early work I was reminded) probably thought that too – but also in his execution of the stories. Each one is perfectly detailed and flawlessly ventriloquised. He successfully completes all of them (which was his stated intention, to reflect the frustration he felt on reading Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, where the many sub-stories all die hanging in the air). The stories have a unifying theme too, of subjugation and rebellion, deepening their superficial appeal, and also of course, we benefit from the dramatic irony of knowing the future for the planet that each character has such great hopes for in their own individual times.
I could end it there and leave you happy in the knowledge that Cloud Atlas was one of the greatest novels of our time. But that would be misleading, because much as I hate to carp on such a monumental achievement – I feel, anyway, like a vandal scratching at Uluru with a pen-knife – the book is firmly flawed. As the stories break into one another, the sole connection – that each narrator is reading/watching the story in the previous chapter – starts to seem a bit thin and gimmicky. There are attempts to bring deeper connections – two of the characters recur in successive stories, which is a good start – but they fall flat when all Mitchell manages otherwise is to have all the main characters share the same birthmark (a "comet-shaped" one, "between the shoulder blade and collar bone" – where is that exactly?), to suggest, rather glibly, that they are related or reincarnated. And I thought Mitchell did not put his best foot forward in starting and ending the novel (with the explorer story) and centring it (with the post-apocalyptic society, described in the blurb as "a young Pacific Islander witnesses the nightfall of science and civilisation" – wow! Sounds fantastic, but wildly oversold I’m afraid) with his least interesting, and frankly most difficult to read, stories.
I also had grave doubts about the decision to include the thriller story – not that it is not very well done and highly entertaining. The problem is that, as noted before, the thriller is (it turns out) a manuscript which has been submitted to the vanity publisher: a pure fiction within the fiction of the novel. But this throws the preceding chapters – which are all, presumably, supposed to be “real” within the fiction of the novel – into chaos. If the character in the fictional thriller is reading the letters from the composer, does that make him just a subsidiary character within the thriller? And indeed the explorer whose journals he is reading? Does this even make sense? At least David Mitchell can be satisfied that, if you want to understand what the hell I am talking about when I make these criticisms, you will have to buy the book and read it to find out.
So despite its surface attractions and achievements – and they are many, and many people will devour the book joyfully and without complaint, and good luck to them – I am left with the feeling that Cloud Atlas will be a book I might return to in parts (the composer’s letters and the vanity publisher’s "ghastly ordeal" were my favourite parts, both tragic and comic and superb first person narratives), but not in whole, not to be lived in and loved over and over until either it falls apart or I do – which is what we want of all our books, after all - isn't it?
Shade
New Member
Astonishingly ignorant piece in the Daily Express last Thursday (my father gets it, OK? 
), by "Andrew Cunningham, doctor of literature and English teacher." The piece, which wonders at the outset whether Pride & Prejudice would win the Booker Prize today, contains among its crimes, the following:
Is this a good time to point out that the same Amanda Craig whom he cites, called this year's winner, The Line of Beauty, "the only genuine work of art to be published this year ... a masterpiece?" How happy would she be to see her words used to support criticism of the prize that was awarded to her favourite book of the year?
Is this a good place to rehearse the old line that if what most people liked mattered for anything, then The Sun would be the best newspaper?
Naturally I had to pen a letter in return to the Express:
Of course they didn't publish it, so I sent all the above stuff to Private Eye, who "enjoyed his idiocies enormously" and will be featuring it in the issue that comes out this week. Hurrah.
), by "Andrew Cunningham, doctor of literature and English teacher." The piece, which wonders at the outset whether Pride & Prejudice would win the Booker Prize today, contains among its crimes, the following:Is this a good time to point out that the same Amanda Craig whom he cites, called this year's winner, The Line of Beauty, "the only genuine work of art to be published this year ... a masterpiece?" How happy would she be to see her words used to support criticism of the prize that was awarded to her favourite book of the year?
Is this a good place to rehearse the old line that if what most people liked mattered for anything, then The Sun would be the best newspaper?
Naturally I had to pen a letter in return to the Express:
Of course they didn't publish it, so I sent all the above stuff to Private Eye, who "enjoyed his idiocies enormously" and will be featuring it in the issue that comes out this week. Hurrah.
novella
Active Member
Shade,
Agree with you on the whole, but would also ask, What do these prizes really represent? It's commonly accepted among those who follow them that the winner is usually three judges' third choice, and in the case of the Booker, the choices have already been very constrained. I'm not even sure that can be called a consensus.
Hollinghurst deserves the Booker as much as anyone (I don't see your Daily Mail writer offering up any alternatives). And among previous winners are some of my favorite books. The Bone People by Keri Hulme comes to mind.
But I read those excerpts and they refresh an idea I've long had about the difference between the English view of "literature" and the American view. I'm American, and many a time I have scanned the Literature shelf at WH Smith's and been amazed at the dreck therein. The common factor among the books there seems to be dreariness and melodrama, certainly not quality of writing or longevity in the market. Sebastian Faulks comes immediately to mind; Birdsong is one of the soapiest books I've ever attempted.
Agree with you on the whole, but would also ask, What do these prizes really represent? It's commonly accepted among those who follow them that the winner is usually three judges' third choice, and in the case of the Booker, the choices have already been very constrained. I'm not even sure that can be called a consensus.
Hollinghurst deserves the Booker as much as anyone (I don't see your Daily Mail writer offering up any alternatives). And among previous winners are some of my favorite books. The Bone People by Keri Hulme comes to mind.
But I read those excerpts and they refresh an idea I've long had about the difference between the English view of "literature" and the American view. I'm American, and many a time I have scanned the Literature shelf at WH Smith's and been amazed at the dreck therein. The common factor among the books there seems to be dreariness and melodrama, certainly not quality of writing or longevity in the market. Sebastian Faulks comes immediately to mind; Birdsong is one of the soapiest books I've ever attempted.
Shade
New Member
The aim of the Booker Prize is twofold. (i) to award a prize to the book that a fairly random selection of five people think is the best novel of the year, (ii) to promote 'literary fiction' and try to get people to try something they might not have done otherwise. This was hugely successful for example with Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which has sold over a million copies since it won the prize two years ago, and is unlikely to have done as well in the UK without it.
Of course the judges have their own foibles and prejudices so there's no suggestion that the winner will go on to be seen as that year's essential book in decades to come. And you're right to say that unanimity is rare: this year it went to a vote, although I think Vernon God Little last year was unanimous. Interestingly, I think The Bone People only won in 1985 because the judges couldn't agree so they chose it as a compromise candidate. That was certainly the case in 1994, where Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star had two supporters among the judges, and another book (whose name escapes me) had two supporters. So they went for James Kelman's How Late it Was, How Late as a third choice.
You may be under a misapprehension in relation to the WHSmith thing. They file their bookshelves by genre so anything that isn't classifiable as "Crime", "Romance", "Horror" etc. gets lumped under "Literature" or "Literary Fiction." Probably when American bookshops call something Literature they mean it in the same way that most publishers do - ie 50 years old at least so it has been proved to stand the test of time.
Of course the judges have their own foibles and prejudices so there's no suggestion that the winner will go on to be seen as that year's essential book in decades to come. And you're right to say that unanimity is rare: this year it went to a vote, although I think Vernon God Little last year was unanimous. Interestingly, I think The Bone People only won in 1985 because the judges couldn't agree so they chose it as a compromise candidate. That was certainly the case in 1994, where Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star had two supporters among the judges, and another book (whose name escapes me) had two supporters. So they went for James Kelman's How Late it Was, How Late as a third choice.
You may be under a misapprehension in relation to the WHSmith thing. They file their bookshelves by genre so anything that isn't classifiable as "Crime", "Romance", "Horror" etc. gets lumped under "Literature" or "Literary Fiction." Probably when American bookshops call something Literature they mean it in the same way that most publishers do - ie 50 years old at least so it has been proved to stand the test of time.
novella
Active Member
Shade said:
There's the rub. I don't agree that this is an incidental grouping together of anything that isn't genre fiction. There is a distinct "literary fiction" classification at UK publishers (my agent is in the UK and represents "literary fiction") that both the Booker and retailers adhere to. I can't see how this category is defined. It seems to have something to do with tragic introspection and melodrama. Being set in a foreign country doesn't hurt either.
Shade
New Member
I'll bow to your knowledge of the insides of publishers etc., novella, but certainly it's true that most publishing houses have separate imprints for 'literary' fiction. This is just as much a marketing thing as having an imprint for SF or children's books. Literary fiction is perhaps best defined as what it's not, ie not a genre like thrillers, horror, sci-fi, romance, historical, etc. etc. Everything left gets lumped into the lit bracket.
As for the Booker adhering to this view, well, again it's a function of the publishers' divisions. Each publishing imprint is allowed to submit two novels to the Booker panel each year, and in addition the Booker panel can 'call in' any books they feel are suitable. So it's a relative measure rather than an absolute one. Say the same imprint published Jeffrey Archer and Martin Amis; they would submit the Martin Amis because it would have a fighting chance of being shortlisted, whereas the Archer would have none. So whether or not Martin Amis is authentically literature, he's certainly closer to it than Jeffrey Archer is.
Incidentally, the last Harry Potter book got into the Booker longlist in the year it came out, as did Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass and Mark Haddon's Curious Incident, all nominally children's fiction and not 'literary fiction.'
As for the Booker adhering to this view, well, again it's a function of the publishers' divisions. Each publishing imprint is allowed to submit two novels to the Booker panel each year, and in addition the Booker panel can 'call in' any books they feel are suitable. So it's a relative measure rather than an absolute one. Say the same imprint published Jeffrey Archer and Martin Amis; they would submit the Martin Amis because it would have a fighting chance of being shortlisted, whereas the Archer would have none. So whether or not Martin Amis is authentically literature, he's certainly closer to it than Jeffrey Archer is.
Incidentally, the last Harry Potter book got into the Booker longlist in the year it came out, as did Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass and Mark Haddon's Curious Incident, all nominally children's fiction and not 'literary fiction.'