Often the source of fraught disputes, the annual Booker Prize for Fiction retains the interest of readers, cynics, critics and bookmakers alike.
Announced in London yesterday, this year's shortlist by virtue of predictably including two fine novels by former Booker winners, Peter Carey and Ian McEwan, is less contentious than usual and has secured certain credibility through its range.
There are also some surprises and evidence of imagination with the inclusion of David Mitchell's surrealist quest novel, number9dream and Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room, which takes as its central thesis the tragedy and ambivalence of the legacy of 20th-century Germany for her people. Australian Carey, the only non-British contender and Ian McEwan dominate the list that for the first time since 1995 is without an Irish writer.
Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, published last J anuary, was enthusiastically reviewed and was always destined for this list. McEwan's eloquent account of innocence betrayed and betraying, Atonement, which will be published next week, is a beautiful and unexpectedly moving performance. Either would be deserving winners.
While Carey's technical mastery in creating the voice of a self-justifying Ned Kelly is remarkable, moving, humorous and utterly convincing, McEwan who, began his career specialising in gruesome, psychological perversions, has long since matured into a writer of intelligent explorations of emotion.
His new novel is superb. In it, he has perfected a tone of nostalgic realism in a heartbreaking narrative spanning some 60 years. It is Brideshead Revisited revised and based on new merchant money and class aspirations. There are powerful images of Britain at war. McEwan's descriptions of sexual tension are brilliantly vivid. Atonement includes one of the most convincing and human sex scenes in modern literary fiction. The central character, a young girl with a dangerously active imagination, is an extraordinary and sensitive feat of imagination.
Among the surprises, however, was the omission of five-time Booker shortlist veteran, Beryl Bainbridge. Never a winner, the Liverpool-born novelist, last shortlisted in 1998, had been the favourite for this year's prize with her imaginative and characteristically engaging According to Queeney, set in the Georgian London of Samuel Johnson.
Former Booker co-winner and 1991 Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer seemed likely for The Pickup, a shrewd examination of distorted love and desire in present-day South Africa. Also excluded is V.S. Naipaul's Half A Life, his first novel in seven years and one that would have enhanced any list. Naipaul won the Booker in 1971 with In A Free State and was also shortlisted eight years later with A Bend in the River.
Canadian Jane Urquhart had been strongly tipped for The Stone Carvers, a dramatically understated story, set mainly in rural Canada, about love lost, mourned and later rediscovered.
Considering the quality of such omissions it is disappointing to see Andrew Miller, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with his first novel Ingenious Pain, shortlisted for his rather ordinary third novel Oxygen. It is a book about death and although the narrative centres on the slow dying of Alice, it never fully achieves any emotional depth. Miller is at his most comfortable as a writer of ideas. His central character, Alec, is a translator whose intellectual strength has never been matched by any sense of personal identity. His lack of self-belief fails to convince, as does the relationship with his brother, a failed actor. Throughout the novel there is an insistent feeling of having read it before, whether in Michael Ignatieff's 1993 Booker contender Scar Tissue, or in any novel by, say, Penelope Lively or any English writer. The lack of engagement mars the novel leaving the reader accusing Miller of a bloodless, overly cerebral approach to feeling. English fiction is too often trapped by the dull and the clever, rather than the ordinary - Miller here appears too dull and clever to tackle the ordinary as real.
The appearance of Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room is very gratifying. This is an unusual, ambitious, not entirely successful performance - but an important and moral one. Told through three, unconnected narratives, the book is about Germany and that country's experience of pre-war and wartime life and, most difficult of all, of dealing with the aftermath of a legacy of guilt.
Seiffert, who lives in Berlin, is a quiet, determined writer of clear, simple prose yet the book is relentless and urgent. While the opening sequence, which centres on the life of a boy whose fate is marked from birth, is gripping, the heart of the book is dominated by a dramatic odyssey undertaken by the children of Nazi parents making their way to their grandmother's house in Hamburg.
Seiffert has a story to tell and it is vivid. Less convincing is the difficult final sequence in which Micha, a thirty-year-old school teacher, becomes obsessed with his beloved grandfather's role in the war. Seiffert should not win but this shortlisting will ensure this valuable, daring novel is read.
Ali Smith's Hotel World, in which five women, three strangers and two sisters, one dead, merge in a hotel, is clever. Not the most obvious of Booker nominations, the narrative engages through the characterisation and the fact that part of the narrative unfolds through the account of a ghost whose last battle appears to be with language as it drifts away from her. The hotel could be anywhere, and the five characters could be anyone. This is a novel without an agenda; it is about people, women, trying to live, to survive, to confront reality.
With only one non-British contender, Carey, Britain is well represented. David Mitchell's number9dream, as with Seiffert, has gone beyond traditional Booker boundaries. His novel is set in a modern-day Japan of fast food, gangs and high-tech. The experimental style places it apart as does the emphasis on brutal youth culture. In the midst of all this is the central character's search for his father. As quests go, this is hectic and different. Mitchell, who lives in Japan, has attempted to enter the consciousness of a young Japanese boy. This novel has energy, individuality and brutality.
Now in its 33rd year, the Booker Prize has managed, and has continued to be, all things - not necessarily good - to all men, or at least to readers and those with a liking for placing a bet. This was the first time a long list was published some weeks in advance of the traditional short list.
Among the long-listed novels were only two by Irish writers: Eoin McNamee's The Blue Tango, a sophisticated, forensically choreographed narrative based on a famous murder, had emerged as the most obvious Irish contender. Poet Ciaran Carson had also been long-listed for Shamrock Tea, a strange mixed bag of a book that one either loves or hates. Neither made the final six.
Three of this year's Booker contenders, unlike Carey (58) and McEwan (52), are still relatively young: Andrew Miller (41), Ali Smith (39) and David Mitchell (32), while Rachel Seiffert was born in 1972. Also of interest is that Mitchell and Seiffert have moved outside the more traditional settings of Britain, Ireland, Canada, Africa, India or Australia.