This year’s Booker Prize shortlist is one of the least controversial in years, reports ALEXBELLOS
THIS year’s Booker Prize judges have fought shy of populism. In London this week they announced a predictable shortlist that includes four previously shortlisted authors.
The judges, chaired by Carmen Callil, decided to exclude comedian Ben Elton’s satire on Hollywood violence, Popcorn, which was widely thought to have been the most downmarket book ever to have made the “long list”.
Instead the contenders for Britain’s most prestigious literary award are Margaret Atwood, Beryl Bainbridge, Seamus Deane, Shena Mackay, Rohinton Mistry and Graham Swift.
Bookmakers William Hill opened the odds with Bainbridge’s Every Man for Himself the favourite at 5-2. She has been shortlisted three times before. The winner of the o20 000 prize will be announced on October 29.
Bainbridge’s main challengers are expected to be Atwood’s Alias Grace and Swift’s Last Orders. Both writers been nominated before and are joint second favourites at 3-1.
The least favoured is Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, although William Hill said the first Booker bet taken was o100 on Deane.
Former Booker Prize chair John Carey said it was one of the least controversial lists for years. “I think it is a very good list. There are no obvious omissions and there are very strong books. The Swift is a marvellous book. The Atwood is superb too. A list like this is a tremendous opportunity to make people aware of good writing.”
Jonathan Coe, one of this year’s judges along with Ian Jack, AL Kennedy and AN Wilson, said Elton’s bestseller almost made the final six. “Popcorn was put forward and discussed at great length and very vigorously. It was on our long list and had strong advocates. But it was in a pool of a dozen from which we had to make a painful reduction.”
The list is interesting because it is the first time in six years there have been as many women on the shortlist as men, according to Richard Todd, author of Consuming Fictions, a book on the Booker Prize. He added that it was unusual for four of the nominees to have been previously shortlisted.
For some, the list does seem a little too predictable. Critic Terry Eagleton said: “I am delighted to see that Seamus Deane is on the list. Otherwise it does look a bit like the usual suspects. It’s a worthy list in both positive and negative meanings of the word.”
SHORTLISTED:
Every Man For Himself By Beryl Bainbridge (Duckworth)
GAINING her fourth Booker nomination, 61- year-old Bainbridge presents a story of doomed Edwardian endeavour similar to that of her last novel, The Birthday Boys, which followed the ill-fated 1912 expedition to the South Pole. In Every Man for Himself, she chronicles the disastrous voyage of the Titanic, also in 1912. Although there are glimpses of possible causes for the sinking, large-scale conspiracy theory is given over to individual human dramas. (Odds: 5-2)
Last Orders By Graham Swift (Picador)
ACONTENDER from the moment it was published in January, this has been received as Swift’s return to the form he displayed in Waterland, shortlisted for the Booker in 1983. The appeal of Last Orders lies in its combination of the demotic and the philosophical. An insurance clerk, a motor dealer, a pugilist and an undertaker meet to carry out the last wish of a friend. “Swift’s best novel so far,” wrote Adrian Poole in these pages. (3-1)
Alias Grace By Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury)
CANADA’S most famous living writer, Atwood has twice been shortlisted before, for The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and Cat’s Eye (1989). Alias Grace is the story of Grace Marks, a young girl who was found guilty of the murder of her master in Toronto in 1843. The novel gruesomely mixes the external social detail of emerging Canadian society with promiscuity, madness and the occult. (3-1)
The Orchard On Fire By Shena Mackay (Heinemann)
BORN in Edinburgh in 1946, Mackay has applied a considerable comic intelligence to the moral questions that underpin her novels and short stories. The Orchard on Fire is the history of young April Harlency, uprooted from Streatham to rural Stonebridge, where her parents hope to fulfil dreams of chintz and crumpets through their stewardship of the Copper Kettle Tearoom. But sinister forces are at work: April’s friend Ruby is seen to be strangely bruised when donning her costume as a mince- pie for the school play … (5-1)
Reading in the Dark By Seamus Deane (Jonathan Cape)
THE semi-autobiographical narrative of a working-class boy growing up in Derry in the 1950s, this the first novel by Irish academic and critic Seamus Deane. The hero suffers a triple haunting – by the consequences of a family secret, by the political enmities of the period, and by the fairies and warriors of Irish legend. Lyrical and sad, the account is also humorous, as with the Spiritual Director, whose chat about the facts of life leaves the boy thinking that you lust in English but make love in Latin. (6-1)
A Fine Balance By Rohinton Mistry (Faber & Faber)
MISTRY shot to prominence when his first novel, Such a Long Journey, was shortlisted for the Booker in 1991. Born in India in 1952 but now living in Canada, he has a humane talent for portraying the pity and the comedy of those in dire straits: in this case the urban poor of Bombay. Mistry has produced a work with “the social depth and span of a novel by Balzac or Tolstoy,” said Laura Cumming in these pages. (5-1)