A surprise choice on the Man Booker Prize shortlist may, as last year, be a good bet to win, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent.
Surprise, surprise: this year's Booker shortlist, culled from a 23-strong long list, of which 16 novels were by British writers, features four British contenders (albeit one Australia-born Irish resident masquerading as a US comic novelist) as well as one South African and one Canadian. Should you think this is a lofty endorsement of British fiction, please think again.
It merely suggests that the judges, in compiling that long list, were overwhelmingly drawn to that well-populated stockpile of typical middlebrow English novels of which Zoë Heller's heated second novel, Notes On A Scandal, is representative. So representative, in fact, that it made the 2003 Man Booker shortlist, announced in London yesterday to the usual chorus of "no Martin Amis" and loud groans.
Groans mainly, such as why were Peter Carey's My Life As A Fake, J.G. Ballard's Millennium People and Keith Ridgway's superlative Irish comic novel, The Parts, overlooked? The groans, though, do not extend to the inclusion, as expected, of Monica Ali's engaging first novel, Brick Lane. Even before publication, Brick Lane had won admirers thanks to the extract featured in Granta's Best of British Young Novelists.
Ali's engaging tale about Nazneen, a sympathetic young Bangladeshi village girl who has been despatched to London to serve as wife to an older and disappointed dreamer whose hopes never really amounted to much, looked to be the best of the class of 2003. Her novel duly now enters the final showdown as an attractive if not great novel blessed by a wonderful creation, Chanu, a man who thought he would triumph in England but instead is beaten into apathy.
If Brick Lane was expected, the presence of D.B.C. Pierre's virtuoso Vernon God Little on the list is probably the best move made by panel, who also made one other good move - the selection of Damon Galgut, the youngest of a trio of South African novelists, including J.M. Coetzee and Barbara Trapido, on the long list, for The Good Doctor.
Galgut, who was born in 1963, published his first novel, A Sinless Season, at the age of 19. This was followed by the novella, Small Circle of Beings, in 1988, which was published in the company of four short stories. His third book, The Beautiful Screaming of Pigs (1991), is a first-person account of a young man returning with his mother to visit Namibia, a year after completing his military service. The mother is visiting her lover, a black, and Galgut's study of white South Africans looking for answers and justification demonstrated how good he is.
The Good Doctor appears to draw on a theme that has been present in his writing from the start, that of the Graham Greene-like outsider searching for a place to belong. Less campaigning than Gordimer and not as graceful as the great Coetzee (the first double Booker winner, who yesterday failed, rightly, to make the final six with the intriguing if strange and ultimately disappointing Elizabeth Costello), Galgut is a writer of great intensity, with a feel for the physical heat, smells and light of his country. Laurence Waters, the good doctor of the title, emerges as less heroic than initially suspected and this, in combination with the jaundiced narrative of Waters's older and more sour colleague, gives the book a hard edge and toughens the shortlist.
Galgut's presence also partly compensates for the absence of Jonathan Raban's Waxwings, a narrative too gentle, too relaxed and perhaps too reflective for the whirl of the Booker. There is nothing gentle about Tim Parks's also overlooked Judge Savage, an angry, often bitter narrative that lives up to its title.
Another faller is Graham Swift, a former Booker winner whose The Light of Day may not be his best but is masterful when compared with Heller's surprise inclusion for a melodrama starring an attractive married teacher sexually involved with a boy student. Her downfall is gleefully chronicled by an older female colleague who also loves her. Yikes.
While no one fully expected Martin Amis to make this list, if there ever was a time when he would - having only been included once before with Time's Arrow - it could well have been this year with Yellow Dog, the worst book he is ever likely to write. But his presence on the long list was a red herring, a bit like Melvyn Bragg's.
I'm sure that, by this stage, most Booker statisticians will have noted the inclusion of four women, and also that there are three first novels. Well, who could doubt that the wry diva, Margaret Atwood, the Meryl Streep of Booker shortlists and finally a winner in 2000 with her fourth shortlisting, The Blind Assassin, would make a record fifth appearance for the eccentric Oryx and Crake.
It is true that second-guessing the motives of any Booker panel invariably means assimilating political and gender bias, while being a good betting man or woman always comes second to possessing clairvoyant powers. But there are times when it seems that private jokes rather than agendas decide Booker shortlists. At least there was sufficient collective humour to secure a place for D.B.C. Pierre's brilliant début, Vernon God Little, a worthy challenger for Ali and Galgut, and on many counts, including sheer linguistic energy and invention, a potentially worthy winner.
Half Bart Simpson and half every other quasi-philosophical kid who never got a fair hearing and whose timing is always just that little bit off, Vernon is the supreme anti- hero. As he says himself when on the run: "I fester and decompose in the back of a Greyhound bus bound for McAllen, under the tumour light, the twisted lava-lamp of sky, just a shell of meaningless brand names, a shelter for maggots and worms. Vernon Gone-To-Hell Little. All I did was hammer myself to a cross."
Who knows about crosses, but what he did do was to go to the bathroom just as his classmates were felled by a gun attack for which our weak-bladdered hero gets the blame. With shades of John Kennedy Toole's majestic A Confederacy of Dunces (1981), Vernon God Little could finally persuade the Booker powers it is time US writers were invited to join their British, Irish and Commonwealth counterparts in the fun, the games, the fighting and the indignation.
Even before The Handmaid's Tale (1981), Canada's Margaret Atwood had one eye on the futuristic and slightly offbeat and Oryx and Crake is just that. It is also dripping with mordant irony. It is funny and subversive and aims about 10 kicks a second into the stomach of society's complacency. But there were other more deserving novels among the established fallers, such as Raban (whom I half-thought would be there) or even Caryl Phillips, whose A Distant Shore keeps the reader turning the pages, as does Julie Myerson's black thriller, Something Might Happen. In a shortlist of four women, it is surprising that Myerson was not selected.
Among the many Booker traditions is the very honourable one of selecting books from small publishers. This year's list duly sees Clare Morrall's début, Astonishing Splashes of Colour, published by Tindal Street Press. It is tight, persuasive domestic realism in which the narrator, Kitty Wellington, settled in a remote marriage, decides to find out what really happened to her mother (who died in an accident) and to her sister (who ran away). Sustained by literary allusions and cross-references it succeeds through its narrative voice. It may have overshadowed Myerson's book, just as Vernon God Little may have displaced Mark Haddon's hugely impressive performance, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The winner will be announced on October 14th and, although neither a betting person nor a clairvoyant, I'd go for D.B.C. Pierre's Vernon God Little but expect the running to be made by Monica Ali.
