Author McNabs The Booker Prize
The critics may have been divided over the quality of this year’s short-listed books for the Booker Prize, but it was ex-soldier, Andy McNab, who eventually took away the fifty thousand pound prize for the year’s best work in fiction. In what has been one of the most keenly fought Booker Prize competitions of recent years, it was Avenger that finally emerged as the winner. The 450 page retelling of Henry James’ Bostonians is set in war torn Iraq where an SAS team has been cut off from their base. The book was commended by all judges as a ‘insightful study of female sexuality, conventional morality, and place of manners in the modern battlefield’. They made a special point of praising McNab’s handling of a sensitive issue. ‘We didn’t expect the hero to get cut down in an ambush right at the end. That was just pure class…’
McNab researched the novel for three whole weeks before sitting down to write it. ‘And then it was like being back in SAS boot camp,’ he admits. ‘I was glad to get it finished before my tea because I just didn’t know how much longer my power was going to last me on my laptop.’
The news of McNab’s victory is sure to shock many in the literary establishment who had mocked McNab’s inclusion in the shortlist. Said David Baddiel, critic for The Sunday Times: ‘When it was clear there were no scruffy comedians obsessed with their genitalia in there, I wasn’t really bothered who won.’ Other commentators have been more circumspect. ‘He’s not Richard & Judy friendly,’ said one, recalling McNab’s involvement in the Richard & Judy book club last year. It is a criticism that still draws a fierce rebuke from the author. ‘It’s true I’ve had a difficult relationship with Judy but that comes from our days together in the Paras,’ admits McNab. ‘It was Richard that really got my back up. He claims to be working on his own version of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu but I don’t know anybody who has even seen a first draft. Well he can come and kiss my black balaclava-clad arse the next time he wants help with an inner monologue.’
