Afternoon:
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The judges for the Man Booker Prize change every year, so although the award appears to have a continuous identity as the arbiter of excellence in English language fiction, in reality what you get each time is a bit of a toss-up.
This year's judges feature three Booker stalwarts, Alan Hollinghurst, Sebastian Barry and Julian Barnes - but the judges have de-selected, at this initial stage, at least a dozen other obvious contenders.
Eligible but not invited to the party this year were A.L. Kennedy, Aravind Adiga, Anne Enright, Philip Hensher, David Lodge, Amitav Ghosh, Hisham Matar, Ali Smith, Linda Grant, Graham Swift, David Lodge and Edward St Aubyn. For me, the most glaring error here is the omission of St Aubyn. At Last fittingly concluded his superb sequence of five books about the Melrose family, for which he should have been awarded the prize before, when he published Mother's Milk in 2006. Instead of sticking with the mainstream, the judges have brought in lots of previous unknowns, including four first-time writers (Stephen Kelman, A.D. Miller, Yvvette Edwards and Patrick McGuinness) and three Canadians (Alison Pick, Patrick deWitt and Esi Edugyan), American writers being arbitrarily excluded from the Man Booker for fear they would dominate it.
The subject matter of these books is certainly diverse too, ranging from Ceausescu's Romania, the fate of a Black German jazz musician in the war, the unravelling of an Englishman in contemporary Moscow, a Victorian Derby Day, a Western set in 1851, and a nightmarish future when becoming pregnant is fatal for women. Several of the novels, moreover, come from little known independent houses (Oneworld, Seren, Sandstone Press) and several of them have scarcely been reviewed at all. Yvvette Edwards's A Cupboard Full of Coats, about the aftermath of a stabbing in the West Indian community in Hackney, for example, apparently having been noticed only in The Hackney Citizen.
But by the time the shortlist has been winnowed out on September 6, the list may look more conventional.
It's just possible the frontrunner will become Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English, a story about gang warfare in Peckham, told in the charming voice of an 11-year-old Ghanaian boy, Harrison, who turns detective.
It is a gimmick novel but may well become as great a fad as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Emma Donoghue's Room - although reviewing it in the Standard, Nirpal Dhaliwal was only moderately impressed, praising its sensitivity and truth to life on London's estates but concluding that it is "fundamentally a book for young people", lacking in character development - "having crafted a plausible voice, Kelman then doesn't seem to know what to say with it."
