In the Eighties, central Scotland was hit with the kind of mass unemployment, addiction and poverty that often weakens school performance. By the time I started high school in the Nineties the classroom was, for many, nothing more than a box you were confined to while the clock ticked and the clouds moved past the window. Lessons regularly slipped towards chaos, and for the teachers who struggled to impose themselves, impenetrability became a survival instinct.

In the midst of this I remember an English class where the teacher made small and regular efforts to impart something personal to her pupils. “I’ve read a brilliant book,” she announced one afternoon, just as the bell rang. “By a new, young Scottish author, if anyone’s interested?” The classroom emptied in record time, but I was intrigued. At 15, culturally isolated in a small town, I had no idea that young Scottish people were writing novels. It would have been fatal to my credibility to be seen to be interested, but I memorised the title and walked to the local library after school that day.

Morvern Callar, by Alan Warner, tells the story of a 21-year-old supermarket employee living in a nameless Scottish port town. When she finds her self-serious boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor by his own hand, she steals the unpublished novel he has written and sells it, using the advance to go clubbing in Spain. It was first published in 1995; my teacher must have read it upon release, and I shortly after that.

Trainspotting didn’t enter my teenage consciousness until it’s adaptation for the cinema in 1996, so until Morvern Callar arrived my experience of literature had been strictly dustbowls and waistcoats — school texts like Of Mice and Men, To Kill A Mockingbird, and An Inspector Calls. Our teachers worked hard to convince us of the relevance of things that had happened in Salinas, California, or Maycomb, Alabama, but now we had a local book; suddenly it seemed as though Morvern Callar — dangerous, youthful, Scottish — was lurking right outside the classroom window. I devoured the novel, as did my friends, as, eventually, did my mum and dad and sister. The thing that captured all our imaginations was the strange familiarity of the protagonist’s voice: Morvern was an enigmatic and illusory presence, but she still spoke like someone we knew from down the shops.

We all speak a dialect and this, whether we like it or not, forms part of our identity. Yet the use of dialect in modern novels has fostered debate on many fronts. How to represent class and nationality in literature is a question that stretches back to Dickens and the Brontës and beyond to the 18th century, when authors began to experiment with a wider variety of local speech. Today, authors are often under pressure to tone down dialect in novels for the sake of reader accessibility.

One only has to consider the furore over another Scottish novel — James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late — to get a sense of the controversy surrounding dialect. The novel, written in what critics described as working-class Glaswegian vernacular, won the Booker Prize in 1994 to the horror of the columnist Simon Jenkins, who claimed it was “literary vandalism” and compared Kelman to an “illiterate savage”. One judge, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, said the book was not “publicly accessible” and threatened to resign if it won.

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Perhaps it was the swear words that did it: an estimated 4,000 fucks. But Kelman wasn’t the literary disruptor some people painted him as: “Most of my stories were written from within my own culture,” he said, “so you use the language as people use it.” His book, which tells a day in the life of a newly blind ex-con called Sammy, is a letter-perfect feat of ventriloquism. The reader is fully immersed in the thoughts and speech of the Glaswegian protagonist and every aspect of his life in Nineties Scotland — the DSS, the worn cassettes (Dylan, Kristofferson, Cash,), the pubs called Glancy’s. We are treated not only to Sammy’s personality, but the personality of place.

But for many readers, schooled on did, do and done and raised on prize-winners from a mainstream novelistic tradition, the dialect understandably made the novel a slog. It was hard for some to see beyond the spelling — ye for you, didnay for didn’t, wasnay for wasn’t — and there were suggestions that Kelman’s writing was inaccessible to the very people he was apparently writing about, and for.

While critics lined up to disparage Kelman’s stylistic choices, it was Jenkins who perhaps pinpointed where the real controversy lay when he claimed Kelman had done no more than “transcribe the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk”. As is so often the case, arguments about language and spelling were a flimsy cover for efforts to define who belongs in literature, which writers are worthy of the major prizes, and which emotional crises can be considered valid novelistic fodder. Can the alley-bound, newly-blind Glaswegian ever be considered the equal of the Hampstead fig-eater, gazing down from his nine-over-six window?

Perhaps, though, it all comes down to the mundane question of sales. The head of books at WH Smith noted snidely that sales of Kelman’s book had quadrupled after winning the Booker Prize — from eight to 30 copies a week! By contrast, the 2020 Booker Prize was won by another Scottish novel, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain — a no-less brutal tale of courage and love, but one that wielded dialect very sparingly. The book was an international hit, selling more than 1.5 million copies around the world. Despite his reluctance to write in dialect, Stuart spoke of his own debt to Kelman: “How Late it Was, How Late changed my life… It is also one of the first times I saw my people, my dialect, on the page.”

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Of course, dialect is not the only way to create a sense of local identity. Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar is a far more accessible novel than Kelman’s, but it loses nothing in terms of intimacy and locality. Warner rejected the phonetic spellings (or “eye dialect”) used by Kelman, instead modifying standard English words with suffixes (silentness, queerish) to give Morvern a wide-eyed individuality that echoed the kind of front-room talk you might hear from your grannie and your auntie. The use of archaic colloquialisms (totey-wee, blethering, midden) and the proliferation of local nicknames — serve to illustrate the tight-knit informality of the community she comes from.

I hadn’t read Morvern Callar in a decade when I returned to it during the pandemic, bored and homesick on furlough in London. The feelings it gave me as a teenager in a small working-class town were undiminished as an adult in London — that there is darkness and poetry outside our front doors; that events worthy of literature can take place anywhere. I had probably decided I wanted to be a writer back in 1995, but as is often the case, school then jobs and life in general got in the way. With months off work I decided, finally, I’d have a go at writing my own book.

After living away from Scotland for such a long period, it wasn’t as straightforward as sitting down and writing from scratch. Dialogue is often mentioned as one of the trickiest part of writing to master, and if you are trying to replicate a specific dialect — even one you grew up with — it is doubly hard. I used my own way of speaking, the speech of my family and friends, as well as online resources like The British Library archives to polish the dialect of individual characters. The process revealed the threads of Doric dialect that I’d picked up from my father, who grew up in the northeast of Scotland: words like pechin (tired), birl (spin), and muckle (big), and the habit of dropping the “s” from the end of many pluralised words (“down the stair, seven year ago”).

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Reading a book written in dialect requires commitment from the reader. And yet so many of the attributes that readers prize in a book — atmosphere, authenticity, a sense of place — are enhanced by characters who speak and think in distinctive ways. The structure of our language defines not only our own identity, but how we experience the world, and opening ourselves to other ways of speaking can help us better understand other lives. For me, writing in dialect helps readjust the boundaries of who belongs in literature.

I never told my English teacher that I had been listening that day in class, or that I tracked down and read the book she recommended. Yet Morvern Callar is a book whose voice strongly informed my own attempts at writing. It taught me that there was profundity in my small-town experience. And it showed me that you could, in Scotland, write about those experiences.

This stance won him few friends among his fellow postcolonial writers. The Caribbean historian C.L.R. James spoke for many when he dismissed Naipaul as a colonial stooge who simply published “what the whites want to say, but dare not”. But while it may have been true that Naipaul provided comfort to Westerners licking their wounds over the end of European empire, he also offered something to those he critiqued: a challenge. Naipaul wrote about the pathologies of the downtrodden with an intimacy that could neither be faked nor ignored. Today, at a time when the American empire has entered its twilight, Europe is somnolent, and the long-marginalised are slowly attaining power commensurate with their numbers, Naipaul’s challenge feels worth reflecting upon.

“He had been fed by so many civilisations; so much had gone into making him what he was, but now, at what should have been the beginning of his intellectual life, he [had] cut himself off,” he wrote in his travelogue Among the Believers about a Leftist Iranian friend whose life he used to critique the culturally defensive trajectory of Iran after its revolution. The Iranians had wanted the amenities of modernity — fighter jets, medical technology, television. But the headlong cultural Westernisation of the Shah had unnerved them. Their passionate, unforeseen revolution had tried to turn back to the past while holding onto modernity’s material benefits, only to find that such a thing was impossible. The new regime they now lived with was ruthlessly modern in its style of oppression while still corrosive to the old values. In place of the Shah, they had not received the warm certainties of the past, but a gaping spiritual void.

It was these types of half-modernised peoples whose psychology Naipaul picked apart in his travel writings, from the Middle East to India, to Argentina. Even as he skewered the hypocrisy and brutality of empire, which he did with quiet effectiveness, Naipaul knew the pathologies of those on the other side. The child of an impoverished Caribbean society deeply shaped by the slave trade and colonialism, Naipaul, when he turned his sights onto his own people and those like them, knew how to press where it hurt.

Naipaul’s fiction, for which he won the Booker Prize fifty years ago this month, poked holes in the confidence of the newly liberated masses. In his 1979 novel, A Bend in the River, Naipaul depicted a fictional African country spiralling into the abyss after winning its freedom. At a time when cathartic violence was very popular on the postcolonial Left, he wasted no time pointing out where those furies would lead. “They’re going to kill all the masters and all the servants. When they’re finished nobody will know there was a place like this here. They’re going to kill and kill. They say it is the only way, to go back to the beginning before it’s too late.” These chilling words remind one of the apocalyptic visions of Isis. But they could describe any number of countries that have plunged into limitless violence after winning independence.

“Hate oppression; fear the oppressed,” Naipaul once wrote, pessimistically. Too often this has turned out to be wise advice. Naipaul painted with a broad brush. He got his share of things wrong. Later in his life, he even succumbed to the same fanaticism and hypocrisy for which he chastised others. Even so, his writings — about the squalor of India, the prideful stagnation of most Muslim countries, and the dangerous fantasies of the recently liberated across Africa and Latin America — could not be brushed off as simple ignorance. They had the sting of truth.

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I started reading Naipaul a few years ago on the recommendation of friends. These recommendations typically came with a murmured warning that his politics were questionable, but that his books were worth it for the prose alone. I found that they were even better than that. Discovering Naipaul was like finding a curmudgeonly uncle who could point to one’s neuroses because he, too, had suffered from them.

Any reader who identifies with what used to be known as the ‘developing world’ will find in Naipaul’s writing a heavy dose of introspection. Naipaul’s first book about India, An Area of Darkness, was so pitiless about the country’s backwardness that its publication there was banned for several years after its initial release in 1964. His words seemed to open something up in people who were willing to listen. The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra said that the experience of discovering Naipaul as a young man left him “shocked and bewildered”. “I didn’t know that you could write a book like that about India,” he added. “I think it was the first book I read in English that contained the world I lived.”

Naipaul could be ungenerous to his subjects, most of whom were just emerging towards political independence after the long trauma of colonisation. But by shining a harsh spotlight on their failures, he also offered them a more comprehensive kind of freedom. Naipaul returned to those he wrote about moral responsibility for their own condition. This was the burden of independence, and accepting it, Naipaul suggested, was the only way that the formerly colonised would ever truly be liberated.

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There’s a lesson in Naipaul’s life story as well. As the son of a lower middle-class Indo-Trinidadian family, he had one of the unlikeliest literary careers in history. At a time when the Western publishing world was considered the racial patrimony of those who controlled it, Naipaul triumphed so thoroughly that his personal background became immaterial. By the time Naipaul finished A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, he had established himself as perhaps the finest writer of the English language to be published in decades.

Naipaul achieved this in the face of an atmosphere that was not just unwelcoming but actively hostile. He did not retreat into a defensive cocoon but instead conquered the English literary world on his own terms. Like James Baldwin, whose writings on race dwarf most of what is published on the subject today in eloquence and coherence, Naipaul’s writings were put up against the Darwinian test of an unsympathetic audience. “I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language,” he wrote to his father in an anguished letter while at Oxford. And he did.

The “bootstrap” mantra of modern American conservatism is correctly criticised for serving as a defence of unjust economic or social arrangements, often by those who fail to live up to the high standards they prescribe for others. But there is also something to be said for persevering in the face of a world that never has been and never will be fair. “The world is what it is,” as Naipaul put it in the immortal opening lines of A Bend in the River, and those who begin at a disadvantage must strive to be their best selves regardless. This, at least, was the world that he inhabited. “You couldn’t be a victim in the 1950s,” Naipaul observed drily. “There wasn’t the market.”

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If there was no market for victimhood in Naipaul’s time, even for a brown-skinned, lilting-accented son of Caribbean poverty, now it seems there is no market for anything else. These days I sometimes find myself involuntarily rolling my eyes at the mention of terms like “race” and “empire,” even though, objectively speaking, they remain important subjects. The deference that comes when these sacred terms are invoked feels too easy. No one has the courage to push back, to demand from the victims rigour and consistency. Without worthy adversaries to overcome, their writing devolves into cliché.

Like C.L.R. James and Edward Said, I likely would have been a political opponent of Naipaul had I lived in his time. But one does not need to endorse all of his views to recognise that he was a worthy critic of many who would conceive of themselves as members of an underclass — and that we, like everyone else, need such critics. I never met him. Yet reading his books decades after they were published, I’ve often had the feeling that that Naipaul was challenging me personally. His entire career was an argument against taking up the mantle of sainted victimhood.  To a reader of a particular background, he offers bitter medicine through self-reflection rather than the sugar rush of moral self-righteousness.

Fifty years after winning the Booker Prize and a few years after his own death, it turns out that this descendant of indentured labourers cast off by the British Empire still has something important to say.

Such an image macro we can now imagine being made of the photographs of Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo embracing on stage as last night’s joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize. BOOKER JUDGES, YOU HAD ONE JOB. Pick a sodding winner. One winner. That’s what the rules say. That’s what you’re formally empanelled to do, and paid to do, and trusted to do. That’s what the public are expecting you to do. That is the whole point of the prize.

According to reports of proceedings, the judges were deadlocked between the two eventual winners. They asked Gaby Wood, the literary director of the prize, whether they could split the prize. No, she said: you can’t. They specifically changed the rules in 1992, after the last time this happened, precisely to prevent judges wimping out and splitting the fifty grand between two. The rubric says in black and white: “the prize may not be divided or withheld”. The panel returned for another hour of deliberation. They asked, again, whether they could split the prize. Gaby this time booted the issue upstairs to Helena Kennedy, Booker’s uber-poobah, the chair of the foundation’s trustees. She, too, said firmly that, no: their job was to pick a single winner.

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Did that do the trick? No.The panel ignored her too and insisted that they were going to split the prize anyway. “We were trying to accommodate the rules that were given to us,” the chair of the judges, Peter Florence, said afterwards. “How do you equably and fairly resolve something that seems irresolvable? You find a way of changing the game.” Fine words, but the first sentence is pure humbug. Rules aren’t there for you to “try to accommodate” — just ask Boris Johnson about his prorogation scheme. 

But the nature of Booker is such that — given the final judging meeting happens on the day of the prize — the judges had the whip hand. I can’t speak for the Booker trustees, but you can make a pretty good guess as to why they had to cave. Public-relations-wise, firing the judges and/or cancelling the prize two hours before it was due to be awarded — with Katie Derham all done up to the nines and the Guildhall already filling up with tipsy blokes in black tie — would have been completely unthinkable. Cave they did. Shame on Peter Florence, who as chair had the power and responsibility to use his casting vote, for putting them in that position.

I don’t make this complaint from a literary point of view. Moaning that the judges should have picked a different winner is the traditional form of fatuous post-Booker comment; indeed, that’s the piece I’d rather be writing. For what it’s worth I’ve read Bernardine Evaristo’s book, Girl, Woman, Other and I think it’s terrific. I haven’t read Atwood’s The Testaments but I have every faith that it’s terrific too. Maybe there were better books; maybe not. The deal with the Booker Prize is that each panel of judges gets to choose the winner they damn well please, and literary pundits fill a quick few column inches and make a quick few quid grumbling about it or defending the decision according to taste, and the whole jolly cycle begins again. 

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And, yes, of course every chair of judges makes — as Peter Florence did at some length — a speech in which he or she formulaically laments the cruel artificiality of the prize process. Every chair, as Peter Florence did, wrings his or her hands about how, really, they wish they could have given every book on their stellar longlist a prize. Every chair, as Peter Florence did, says how hard it was to choose. That, too, is part of the game. It’s gracious and right and it’s expected.

But then you’re supposed to say: “But at the end of the day there could be only one winner…” Absurd it may be; unfair it may be; even philistine it may be — but that’s the game. That’s what you sign up for. 

Here’s the problem. Within moments of the win being announced, I found myself in a conversation — I expect one that will have been replicated all over the hall in various forms — with some fellow guests. One wondered aloud whether the double win had been because the judges had felt sentimental about Margaret Atwood: they wanted to give the prize to Evaristo, she speculated, because hers was the better book, but they didn’t feel they could snub a writer of Atwood’s undoubted greatness and loveableness.

Well, possibly, someone else countered. But isn’t it equally possible that it was the other way around? Perhaps they thought Margaret Atwood had written the best book but they wanted to give Bernardine Evaristo’s profile a much needed and much deserved boost; that giving the prize to a book whose vast sales were already guaranteed and whose author was already as famous as authors get would be a waste of the power at their disposal.

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Either of these positions might be true. And neither position might be true: perhaps, indeed, quite independently of any extra-literary consideration, the judges considered both books so equally good that you could not get a cigarette paper between them.

But by choosing both, they immediately open the verdict to that sort of speculation. That’s unfair on both authors. Bernardine, on stage, spoke very graciously about how thrilled she was to be sharing the prize with “the legend that is Margaret Atwood”. But as she was too gracious to say, it obviously would have been even more thrilling to have beaten that legend into joint second place.

The suspicion in the reading public’s mind will be that one or other of these considerable authors was being patronised; that something extra-literary had entered into the considerations of the panel, that the judges were trying to have their cake and eat it. Had they given it a single one, that would not have been possible in the same way. They could have said, simply: this book is first among equals. Pundits may say what they like, may accuse us of what they like, but we have made the hard decision that every panel of Booker is tasked to make — and this is the best novel published in English, in our opinion, this year.

That they did not presents a tremendous headache for the prize going forward. The rules were put in writing. They were reaffirmed, unequivocally, at the highest levels of institutional authority. And the judges demonstrated that they could, effectively, blackmail the organisers into ignoring them.

This sets a rotten, rotten precedent. The handshake agreements that have previously governed the judging could well firm into legal contracts; the valuably theatrical tradition that the final meeting takes place on the day (also practical since it helps prevent leaks) might well go by the board. And even with such notional safeguards established, what’s to prevent judges throwing a similar strop in future years. You let them split the prize two ways: why can’t we split it three ways this year?

Epic fail.

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