the prize

I have been reading The Prize by Irvine Wallace which came to me as part of my World Books subscription in 1964.

It employs a common structure. Take half-a-dozen or so apparently unrelated people. Introduce each of them in turn, then proceed round and round with episodes in each of their stories. A crucial event brings them together in the same time and place. They interact with each other with twists and turns as the excitement builds towards the dénouement. A grand final peroration is optional. Wallace exercises this option to send a message to the wider world.

Five of the principal characters are about to become recipients of Nobel Prizes. Their backgrounds are exposed for inspection. We are introduced to the supporting cast of players. Count Bertil Jacobsson, the Assistant Director of the Nobel Foundation is the anchor man. The majority of the action takes place in Stockholm with a considerable emphasis on the names of streets, districts and buildings, as though the author is obliged to show a detailed knowledge of the locality. The year is not specified. It reminds me of those theatre programmes where the action takes place in Time : the Present. On the other hand, there is notably careful specification of the exact time of day at which each event takes place and, as we approach the crucial date of the Tenth of December, there is a growing sense of an inevitable diachronic intensity spreading out to take in events maturing more or less simultaneously in different parts of the city.

In places the writing resembles high-class journalistic reportage – as though Irvine Wallace had a file drawer neatly filled with 5 x 3 index cards queuing up, each waiting their turn to be copied into the text. As a result, I find the characters more like the contents of a collection of dossiers than lifelike beings created in the mind of the writer. As to the city itself, I am left with little more than an impression of a northern winter’s cold and darkness – quite appropriate, for this is the time of the Cold War between the Eastern Bloc and the West.

So what is the story about? I find it difficult to say. The craftsmanship of the writer is there. Certain characters express their individual thoughts in extended paragraphs but most of the time we are concerned with the interaction, the verbal and emotional duelling between the two characters temporarily occupying centre stage. The basis of this duelling is, more often than not, the unresolved sexual tensions between a man and a woman. I recall some other novels by Irving Wallace that I read in the ‘60s where the sexual element is very near the surface. In my recollection of those days, sex was something we frequently read about but seldom actually talked about – and certainly not in public. A message that seeps through from Wallace is that there are more open and enjoyable ways of sex than are commonly experienced in his home country.

I certainly enjoyed this book back then in the 1960s. Today I marvel at the craftsmanship of a best-seller writer; feel that the profusion of topographical detail was almost a requirement of the times; notice that while attitudes to sex are freely scattered, descriptions of sexual activities are almost entirely absent. Such are the fashions of passing time. I did feel a need to keep turning the pages until I reached the final page when we could almost have added that reassuring bedtime message :: and they all lived happily ever after.


© francis cameron
oxford, 17 january 2009