I was surprised to find in my morning Guardian an interview with Stella Rimington not on spying but on the Booker Prize and in the main section of the paper, not the Review section. Apparently she cannot tolerate personal abuse. Who can? Tony Blair? However, she must be aware that she is in a highly political position (Chair of the Man Booker Prize Committee for this year, if you have sensibly kept away from the all the prizes) but has made some very odd choices. In particular, she and her committee have been roundly condemned for omitting Alan Hollinghurst‘s The Stranger’s Child, a early favourite with the bookies and the public. Moreover, she has been accused of being homophobic for omitting both the Hollinghurst and Philip Hensher. I have not read the Hensher but I have read the Hollinghurst and while it certainly was not bad, it was not a great novel, either. The problem is that many of the likely contenders this year – Anne Enright‘s The Forgotten Waltz, Jane Harris‘s Gillespie and I, A L Kennedy‘s The Blue Book, Hari Kunzru‘s Gods Without Men, Graham Swift‘s Wish You Were Here and Barry Unsworth‘s The Quality of Mercywere less than brilliant, so the Committee had a real problem.
I have not read any of the short list and do not expect to. Julian Barnes, I feel, peaked with Flaubert’s Parrot, which wasn’t a novel so I have no great desire to read A Sense of Ending and none of the others inspired me, though I may be persuaded to change my mind. Books sometime can seem better later. They can also seem worse. Maybe this year is just not a very good year, with the English (and Scottish and Welsh and Irish) novel being of the same calibre as their respective rugby and cricket teams.