| I have a worrying presentiment that this is going to turn into the kind of nightmare where, four decades down the line, you have a Battle of the Best of the Bookers. If they would only give the authors suitable costumes and a mud wrestling arena, this would be worth the price of admission, but sadly high literature rarely runs to such lowbrow entertainment. |
| The top contenders for the Best of the Booker Version 2.0 are considered to be: Yann Martel (Life of Pi), Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children), Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient), Arundhati Roy (God of Small Things), Ben Okri (The Famished Road), Ian McEwan (Amsterdam), etc. |
| What the bookies' list reveals is that the winner will be someone the public remembers, rather than the best writer on the list. For instance, Anne Enright, last year's Booker winner, ranks higher currently than J M Coetzee (Life and Times of Michael K) and V S Naipaul (In a Free State). No offence to The Gathering, Enright's neat and sometimes hilarious riff on alcoholism in an Irish family, but it comes nowhere near the towering reputation of the other two classics. |
| The problem with the Best of the Booker is that it misses out on the real opportunity. You're restricted to picking your favourite from those who've already won the Booker. This is why Ian McEwan is represented by a middling work "" Amsterdam "" but not two of his masterpieces, The Comfort of Strangers and Enduring Love. The latter two were shortlisted, and are not eligible "" even though most agree that Amsterdam was inferior. But given a chance to overturn the judges' decision, what might you pick from the shortlists? |
| Here are five of my personal picks "" books I've read, enjoyed and gone back to over the years. |
| V S Naipaul, A Bend in the River (shortlist, 1979): I'm not a fan of late Naipaul, but early Naipaul is another matter ""especially this book, with its classic first line: "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." As he follows the life of Salim in an unnamed African country that closely resembles post-Independence Zaire, this is Naipaul at his most searingly observant. The Booker went to Penelope Fitzgerald's pleasantly idiosyncratic Offshore, about a group of barge-dwellers; bad call. |
| Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers (shortlist, 1981): This was the year Midnight's Children won, and despite the brilliance of that book, it can't have been an easy choice. I have a special soft spot for this novel, which featured 'Ian Macabre' before he fell out of love with darkness, morbidity, corpses and all that other great stuff. |
| Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (shortlist, 1987): Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger was an evocative but forgettable romance; Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah is still seen as one of the most important novels to come out of Africa in the last four decades. Naturally, the judges bestowed the Booker on Lively, in one of the worst calls in Booker history. |
| Mordecai Richler, Solomon Gursky Was Here (shortlist, 1990): This may have been the under-rated Canadian novelist's finest book. In his vision, the Gurskys pop up everywhere across two hundred years of history, and a book that can sustain your interest while making you hunt for the title character to make an appearance for over a hundred pages is a work of brilliance. He lost to A S Byatt's cerebral Possession. |
| David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (shortlist, 2004): My disbelief that the brilliant, wise and darkly funny Cloud Atlas didn't win in 2004 was shared by others "" especially after we read the winner, Alan Hollinghurst's enjoyable but slender parody of the Thatcher years. Perhaps what made the judges uncomfortable was that Cloud Atlas was not just excellent literary fiction but excellent science fiction. (Disclaimer: The author is chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar; the views expressed here are personal.) |
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