Britain: Humour and surrealist flair decided this year's Man Booker Prize as D.B.C. Pierre, less widely known as Peter Warren Finlay, won the six book race with his virtuoso comic debut, Vernon God Little, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
The announcement, made at a ceremony in London last night, finally decided what had become a two-way battle between Pierre or Finlay and Monica Ali. Brick Lane, her engaging account of a young Bangladeshi girl's personal odyssey, also a first novel, was seen as an obvious Booker challenger even before its publication last spring.
Ali had had a strong critical reception to the inclusion of an extract from Brick Lane in the Granta Best of Young British Writers selection. Vernon God Little succeeds in being sharp, atmospheric and original although it also draws strongly on the genre of youthful subversion extending from Huckleberry Finn to The Catcher in the Rye.
Set in crummy small-town Texas, its genius lies in the bewildered voice of Vernon. His is a candid, believable first person narrative told by a "why me?" 15 year-old-boy who has the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In his case the wrong place proves to be the men's room as his classmates are mown down in a high school massacre. Not only does Vernon get the blame, he is then destined to be held responsible for every subsequent crime that occurs. Vernon Gregory Little is possessed of a philosophical streak and though depressed by his fate which eventually sees him bound to the electric chair, bears his sufferings with sufficient stoic wit. As a comic novel it is a superlative performance. Vernon emerges as a likeable anti-hero, part Bart Simpson part every other outsider cursed by ill luck and poor timing.
Its inclusion on an otherwise largely conventional shortlist, that in truth reflected a conventional long-list dominated by British writers, was one of two important choices made by the Booker jury
The other wise selection was the inclusion of Damon Galgut, an outstanding South African writer whose understated and evocative novel, The Good Doctor with its echoes of Graham Greene's theme of the outsider searching to belong, looked the strongest dark horse.
One of contemporary fiction's most respected figures Canadian writer and literary matriarch Margaret Atwood - the Meryl Streep of Booker shortlists with five shortlistings and one victory, The Blind Assassin in 2000 - was another contender. However, Oryx and Crake, a blackly futuristic and apocalyptic parable offering possible glimpses of McDowell's Ireland, is for its wild imagination, contrived, oppressively ironic and wears its clever intent far too obviously.
Neither Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal nor Clare Morrall's Astonishing Splashes of Colour, the first published novel by a writer whose previous books had been rejected, ever looked likely threats.
Booker prizes have come and gone with many a bitter dispute or at least a lively debate to heat its passage. Few have unfolded as quietly as this year's.