The Unbearable Lightness of...Bean

The Costa Book Award for Book of the Year 2006 is announced on February 7, amidst what, by book awards standards, can only be described as a blaze of publicity. If this sounds like a new, peripheral occasion to you (which it did to me) you would in fact be wrong. The Costa Book Award is the heir to the Whitbread Prize. Only, it sounds worse on two fronts. Firstly, Costa is blatantly commercial; Whitbread is a company that owns lots of commercial brands, including Costa, and hence sounds as though it could be the name of a person, like the Nobel Prize. It gives the illusion of freedom from commercial concerns. Secondly - and this could just be me, Book Award sounds like a copy of Postman Pat given at a primary

school. A prize is something more substantial, something to be striven for and won; the well-earned spoils of a literary war.

However, the Costa Book Award it is and the Costa Book Award it shall remain until another corporation sees fit to don a literary mantle. And it is this, rather than the title, that I really want to question. Should this prize, this book award, indeed should any such event be sponsored by a profit making entity? Are these awards anything more than a bookish beauty parade, devoid of any meaning bar that of publicity? Most authors aren’t good-looking enough to set a red carpet alight; unless Zadie Smith is going to turn up in Prada to every book prize around. Call me old-fashioned, but these prizes, and lit-glitz in general, have a danger of privileging style over substance. And, frankly, in the day and age of the Richard and Judy Book Club and face-lifted, Bridget Jones-friendly Jane Austen novels, do books need more of that?

To return to Costa, the relationship between coffee chains and books has become an

increasingly strong one in recent years. Wander into any Waterstones and you’ll find a Costa in which to peruse your latest purchase. Saunter into Borders and it’ll be a Starbucks. Commercially and practically it makes perfect sense. Books and coffee go together. It is the booksellers’ nod to instant gratification—why wait to get home to read what you’ve bought when you can read it now… hint …but only in the coffee shop… hint …where you have to buy a coffee. It’s a profit making treadmill. The only thing that baffles me is that is hasn’t been thought of before.

But, taking a step back in time to the opening of the first coffee house in 1652 in London, proves that the coffee bean has always been harnessed to literary ideals. Some of the greatest minds of the Enlightenment formulated their ideas over a cup of the black stuff with fellow thinkers. However, whilst coffee shops used to be a hive of intellectual activity when they were first established, Starbucks is today seen as a corporate monolith (Dr. Evil’s a fan), an entity more likely to stifle than stimulate

individual thought. Literature and corporations have rarely been happy bedfellows—as Robert Graves famously said, “There is no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either”. So should literature stop pimping itself out to the Costa and Whitbreads’ of this world and stay aloof from such concerns? Probably not – an answer far from the conclusion I thought I would be reaching when I started this article. A great work should be introduced to as many as possible, regardless of method. The Costa Book Award rewards brilliant literature and also literature which reaches a wide audience. Both of these are admirable aims.

Obviously, Whitbread PLC has sensed a relationship between books and coffee which it seeks to cement. This is, of course, why it has allowed its coffee shop brand Costa to become associated with such a prestigious prize. But we should not ascribe purely mercenary motivations to all companies. Some do seem to want to try and take on a degree of social responsibility. And if I’m being hopelessly naïve and they profit from everything they do, does it really matter?

It seems to me that with the Costa Book Awards, everyone’s a winner (unless, of course, you only make the shortlist). Overall, if people are encouraged to pick up a book and read, it can only be a good thing. Who knows, perhaps when they finish reading it, they will be less inclined to visit Starbucks anyway.