Sixty per cent of our list of best young British novelists were educated at Oxford or Cambridge. This must be a tribute to the two Cs - confidence and connections
People love lists. Newspapers love lists. Who's in, who's out, 50 famous vegans, the world's tallest buildings. But when did it start to apply to writers? The now-defunct British Book Marketing Council (God bless it) invented the idea in the early 1980s, when it decided that writers were an ignored national asset who needed to be celebrated. The council did this by persuading a lot of distinguished and mainly elderly writers - "The Best of British" - to assemble for a group photograph in a studio at the top of several flights of stairs just off London's Gray's Inn Road. Snowdon took the pic and I went along as the reporter from the Sunday Times, which then had its offices just across the street.
The stairs were a problem for several of the cast. I helped carry John Betjeman in his wheelchair, and I remember how lively his smile and eyes were above his inert body. He was very good at pretending he knew who you were. "Yes, yes," he said to me - I'd interviewed him a few years before, "the Great Central Railway! What a marvellous line, bounding up through Leicestershire and into the Peaks! Do you recall those gas lamps at Ashby-de-la-Zouch?"
Later that day, I had a drink with Laurie Lee, until his publisher, Andre Deutsch, indicated to him that two half-pints of mild was quite enough. Lee is the only man I've ever met who produced "dirty pictures" - though they weren't all that dirty - from the inside pocket of his jacket, like Peter Lorre might do in a film.
The Granta list of best young British novelists is announced to satisfactory argument. Why include her? Why exclude him? Why no J K Rowling? All I can say is that the judges - Nick Clee, Alex Clark, Hilary Mantel and Robert McCrum, with me in the chair - took the job seriously and left their friendships at home. It would have been easier - socially more pleasant - to include all those writers you run into at parties. None of us know, or have met, more than four or five writers on the list.
About 150 were submitted. As a form, the novel is remarkably resistant to the frequent predictions of its death. Comparative numbers are difficult to quantify, but my guess is that more people are writing novels now than at any time in British history.
Why? Part of the answer must be an easier manufacturing process - the PC. No more scratch, scratch, crumple into waste bin, scratch, scratch, until at last you take the pages round the corner to that nice woman who will type it up and give you three copies, all of which will probably come back with notes of regret from a pipe-smoking gent in WC1.
The day after the list is published, I have three meaningless minutes on the Today programme with Philip Hensher, who is on the list but rather ungratefully has objections to it. His point is that it would be more sensible, and fairer to writers who come late to the trade, to have a list of new rather than young novelists; anyone who published his or her first work of fiction in the past ten years would be eligible. I agree: we should do that next time, in 2013. Collapse of discussion. Harmony is not what the Today programme is about.
To Broadcasting House again for Radio 3's Nightwaves in the evening. If only all radio were like this - glass of wine, a moderator who has actually read some of the books. I disclose what may be interesting demographics. Of the list, 40 per cent are women, 20 per cent have ancestry that is partly or entirely non-European, 15 per cent are Scottish, 5 per cent Northern Irish, and at least 2.5 per cent Welsh (Peter Ho Davies is half Chinese). But the most interesting, and of possible concern, is this: 60 per cent, so far as I can work out, were educated at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge.
This doesn't, in case you're wondering, reflect the composition of the judging panel; my alma mater, the un-ivy-clad West of Scotland College of Commerce, is now the HQ of the Strathclyde Police. So what can it mean? Possibly that writing novels requires confidence as well as intelligence and imagination. And that getting them published often requires connections. The two Cs - see many other branches of our island life.
Wednesday's Guardian "Fuck Cilla Black" cover for G2 is probably the stupidest thing I've ever seen in a broadsheet newspaper. I don't know why it makes me so angry - maybe because I expect the Guardian to scrutinise rather than exemplify the coarsening of national life, and here, plopping through the letter box just in time for the school run, comes this meaningless obscenity. Also, I think it's the opposite of courage - it suggests editorial funk ("Oh dear, we commissioned this modish artist and she'll say we're all scared if we spike it"). What would have happened if Gillian Wearing had been asked to do a cover to match a piece on, say, Islamicism, and the result had been "Fuck the . . . " The spike, I think, or a newspaper office reduced to ashes. We all make mistakes, but sometimes rejection is the braver course.
In the 1992 election campaign, a few of us at the Independent asked the poet Simon Armitage to supply a poem. He sent us a repeat-couplet - the same two lines repeated 100 times: "Simon will not write a single line or rhyme in dedication/To a year that crystallised in such a sickening direction". Rubbish. Definitely the spike.
Ian Jack is editor of Granta magazine
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