Scanning the Horizon – the Review’s literary column, with Peter Robins

The list of complaints against the big novel-prizes – the Man Booker, the Costa and so forth – is long and familiar: the submissions process is capricious (it doesn't matter which prize you're discussing, because no fully fair submissions system is possible if everything must be read by only half a dozen judges); the judging is still more haphazard; the style of fiction honoured is basically unsaleable; the hype and gossip are unconscionably undignified. You can find a comprehensive and entertaining version of the case, directed specifically against the Booker, on Grumpy Old Bookman, the presently suspended blog of Michael Allen.

I could concede a lot of that, but my complaint about these prizes is rather different. They no longer offer enough gossip, enough scandal, enough florid caprice. They behave as if they wish to be taken fully seriously. And that's bad – for book culture, for book sales, even for the sponsors.

A big literary prize is a mechanism for transferring money from the marketing budget of a corporation to the pockets of writers, by which I mean the judges as well as the winners. Operated cannily, it can generate enough media interest to pay back the corporation, as well as delivering further gains to the honoured writers in the form of free publicity. This seems to me a good, if somewhat random, way of getting cash to a relatively unrenumerative branch of publishing – one that applies less constraint than the direct patronage either of the rich or the state.

All the advantages are eroded, though, if the prizes begin to present themselves as definitive judgments. Definitive judgments are dull. They bring less publicity, albeit of a more dignified sort, and the air of seriousness gives a greater risk of actually influencing what gets written and published, which isn't the idea at all. I want rumours of fistfights, and at least one judge a year confessing to not reading much – the kind of circus that the Booker delivered during the 1980s. The London Review of Books recently posted an old Julian Barnes diary on its website that gives the required flavour.

In this context, the survey organised recently by the Costa Book Awards, which named Enid Blyton as the most-loved author in Britain, is an encouraging development. “Don't listen to us," it seemed to declare. “No one really reads fiction past puberty anyway. Hold on, why are we saying this?” That's the spirit.