Kingmakers

The Giller Prize is the most con­spic­u­ous exam­ple of cor­po­rate suf­fo­ca­tion of the pub­lic insti­tu­tions that built our lit­er­ary cul­ture. True, the Giller hasn’t done as much dam­age as the throt­tling of the book mar­ket by the Chapters-Indigo chain. Until the early 1990s, a Canada-wide net­work of inde­pen­dent book­stores made it pos­si­ble for a well-received small-press short story col­lec­tion to sell 700 to 1000 copies, and some­times more. Today the omnipresent out­lets of Chapters-Indigo make it pos­si­ble for a well-received small-press short story col­lec­tion to sell 250 copies. But if Chapters-Indigo is the dis­ease, the Giller Prize is the symp­tom. Nothing sig­nalled the col­lapse of the lit­er­ary organ­ism as vividly as the appear­ance of this glitzy chan­cre on the hide of our cul­ture. Year after year the vast major­ity of the books short­listed for the Giller came from the tri­umvi­rate of pub­lish­ers owned by the Bertelsmann Group: Knopf Canada, Doubleday Canada and Random House Canada. Like the three mus­ke­teers, this trio is in fact a quar­tet: Bertelsmann also owns 25 per­cent of McClelland & Stewart, and now man­ages M&S’s mar­ket­ing. From 1994 to 2004, all the Giller win­ners, with the excep­tion of Mordecai Richler, lived within a two-hour drive of the cor­ner of Yonge and Bloor.

The 2005 Giller Prize was won by David Bergen, a skil­ful writer who con­formed to type in that his win­ning novel, The Time In Between, was pub­lished by M&S and took place in an exotic for­eign locale (Vietnam). Bergen’s ear­lier — and, in my view, stronger — nov­els, such as The Case of Lena S., were set in and around Winnipeg, where, to the hor­ror of the Toronto media, the author still lived. “Winnipeg Schoolteacher Wins Giller Prize” read the baf­fled Globe and Mail head­line announc­ing Bergen’s vic­tory. This out­ra­geous breach of eti­quette was com­pounded by the fact that Bergen, a very tall Mennonite who looked like a seri­ous fel­low in pho­tographs, did not fit the teddy bear image — think W. O. Mitchell, think Farley Mowat, think Timothy Findley, even think Richler in his final, mel­lower years — expected of male Canadian writ­ers with a wide readership.

At first glance, the 2006 Giller short­list looked like a recant­ing: four of the five nom­i­nated books were pub­lished by smaller presses; three of the five authors were from Montreal and a fourth was from Vancouver Island; two of the titles were trans­la­tions of Quebec nov­els orig­i­nally pub­lished in French. Numerous peo­ple asked me why Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, which many read­ers thought clichéd and slop­pily writ­ten, was on the list when it obvi­ously didn’t attain the lit­er­ary level of the books by Gaétan Soucy and Rawi Hage. He’s pub­lished by Doubleday, I replied; they have to make one con­ces­sion to the Bertelsmann Group. I should have paid more atten­tion to the sig­nif­i­cance of Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood with­draw­ing their 2006 titles from con­sid­er­a­tion for the Giller. This canny strat­egy enabled the old guard to become kingmakers.

In 2003, an almost cer­tain vic­tory for Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake was derailed when the Globe and Mail reported two of the jurors’ close per­sonal ties to Atwood, draw­ing par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the fact that Atwood’s pub­lisher, McClelland & Stewart, had never failed to win in a year when David Staines was on the jury. The adverse pub­lic­ity, ren­der­ing an Atwood tri­umph poten­tially dam­ag­ing to the Giller’s cred­i­bil­ity, led to the uncom­fort­able com­pro­mise of giv­ing the Giller to M. G. Vassanji for the sec­ond time. Choosing Vassanji instead of Atwood did not dis­pel the grow­ing impres­sion that Giller night was the pre­serve of a small clutch of anointed insid­ers. Even the nearly beat­i­fied Munro faced a rip­ple of dis­con­tent in 2004, when she won her sec­ond Giller Prize.

Giller night 2006, which found Atwood in the audi­ence and Munro shar­ing jury duties with Adrienne Clarkson and Michael Winter, dis­played the Canadian estab­lish­ment at its most repel­lent. Host Justin Trudeau and cor­re­spon­dent Ben Mulroney swapped com­pla­cent quips about the plea­sures of being a prime minister’s son. The first four nom­i­nees were intro­duced by Canadian actors. As soon as Atwood stood up to intro­duce the fifth short­listed author, Vincent Lam, any­one who under­stood power in Canadian cul­ture knew that Lam had won. Margaret Atwood does not intro­duce losers. By plac­ing her author­ity behind Lam, she was giv­ing the equiv­a­lent of el dedazo, the crook of the fin­ger with which a Mexican pres­i­dent sig­nals his suc­ces­sor. The image was so pow­er­ful that the next day’s Globe and Mail mis­re­ported the event, stat­ing that Lam had received his Giller Prize from Atwood when, like every pre­vi­ous win­ner, he was handed his cheque by Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the prize. But in polit­i­cal terms, the Globe’s ini­tial report — later retracted — was accurate.

The pecu­liarly Canadian fea­ture of Atwood’s inter­ven­tion was her aston­ish­ing deci­sion to tell in pub­lic the story of how Lam had approached her to read his man­u­script while work­ing as the ship’s doc­tor on an Arctic cruise on which Atwood was a pas­sen­ger. The Family Compact takes for granted that adver­tis­ing pre-existing links between old and new mem­bers of the estab­lish­ment legit­imizes the next gen­er­a­tion in the eyes of the pub­lic. Our bour­geoisie, being weaker than that of other Western coun­tries, must assert its cohe­sive­ness in pub­lic. In the United States, the story of Atwood’s role in find­ing Lam a pub­lisher would have remained the prop­erty of a small group of acquain­tances edu­cated at pri­vate col­leges. In Great Britain, the story would have sur­faced weeks later in a tabloid news­pa­per. Only in Canada could it have been broad­cast on national tele­vi­sion, prior to the award­ing of the prize, to enable the old Wasp estab­lish­ment to claim parent­age over the new mul­ti­cul­tural estab­lish­ment. In an instant Vincent Lam, in con­trast to pre­vi­ous “mul­ti­cul­tural” Giller win­ners Vassanji, Rohinton Mistry and Austin Clarke — all of them rel­a­tive lon­ers, none of them born or raised in Canada, none of them able to boast an exem­plary inter­ra­cial mar­riage such as that between Lam and his Anglo-Greek-descended wife — became a mem­ber of the Family Compact and a poten­tial teddy bear.

But the real future of Canadian writ­ing lay on the ban­quet tables of the 2006 Giller din­ner, where each guest was invited to take home an indi­vid­u­ally wrapped party favour pro­vided by Chapters-Indigo. When the guests opened their favours, they found that all the pack­ages con­tained the same remain­dered Stephen King novel. The tragedy of Canadian cul­ture is that power bro­kers such as Atwood, Clarkson and Munro do not use their influ­ence to rebuild a less monop­o­lis­tic, more effec­tive sys­tem for sell­ing Canadian books. Without such an effort, the cur­rent generation’s legacy will be future Canadian read­ers who know noth­ing of either Margaret Atwood or Vincent Lam but are inti­mately acquainted with Stephen King.