Such prize excuses for bad art and worse books

Although ridiculously overpriced at £11, it enables you to see exactly what, through the eyes of its own organisers, the Turner Prize has been worth these past 20-odd years.

Nothing. This show is an exercise in humiliation for anybody still nursing any illusions about the worth of contemporary British art: fashiondriven drivel, mostly.

It exposes the dismal procedures of the prize itself, too. In the first room, it's admitted that all the artists nominated in 1984 went on to win in due course, enjoying Buggins's turn. In 1996, the judges selected an all-male shortlist and there was a row about "gender parity". In 1997, they duly turned out an all-female shortlist. No damn nonsense about merit, eh?

So this show clarifies, in just half an hour, what a farrago the whole thing has been. Making any assessment of the literary equivalent, the Man Booker Prize, to be awarded on Tuesday, takes longer, though. You have to read, not just look.

This year's favourite, Mister Pip by the New Zealand novelist Lloyd Jones, could have been devised to win a British Council bursary, with its admirable message that great literature can reach across centuries to shape lives. Fifteen-year-old Matilda has her life-chances transformed by an encounter with Great Expectations. A commendable lesson to us all. Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, about a catastrophic honeymoon in the West Country in 1962, would be a reasonable winner too.

On the other hand, I would not like Mohsin Hamid's much praised The Reluctant Fundamentalist to win. In fact, I'd genuinely mind. It's partly because the book's structure - a monologue, addressed to a person who does not speak but becomes implicated in the story - seems painfully derivative of Albert Camus's last work, The Fall (1956). Camus's first line: "My good sir, I wonder if I might venture to offer you some help?" Hamid's: "Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance?"

The comparison is damaging to Hamid. Where Camus's "judge-penitent" remains a morally troubling figure, Hamid's novella is a simplification. It offers to explain to Western readers how a successful young Pakistani man in New York at the time of 9/11 could empathise with Muslim resentment of America.

On seeing the Twin Towers fall, his hero Changez is remarkably pleased. He smiles, "caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees". He has always "resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world", he later admits. Changez may not represent Hamid himself, but, with his grievances, he is presented as a way for readers to understand that the origins of Islamic terrorism lie not so much within Islam as with the West.

In America, there have been punchy essays by the likes of Irfan Khawaja, taking exception to the book. Here it's been deferentially received.

So it really would be quite vexing if The Reluctant Fundamentalist won. Here's a turn-up then: prizes can still matter, after all. At least, when they go badly wrong.