Booker Prize / Maxliu / 17 September 2008 /

Max Liu looks for betting value in this year's Booker Prize shortlist...

"How sad," wrote Martin Amis in a 1981 essay, "that these days the great achievements have to be democratising." He was referring to English poetry but his words better describe the focus of our most prestigious literary prize.

It's hard to see why people still care about the Booker Prize, especially hard to see why writers still care about the Booker Prize. The number of great, era-defining fictions to have missed out is surely testament to the irrelevance of the prize. And who cares what Michael Portillo thinks of a book?

Well, evidently, people do. Readers certainly do. And not without reason because the list of winners is almost as impressive as the list of books which should have won. This is a prize which has, in its 40 year history, been won by novelists such as VS Naipaul, Iris Murdoch, J.M Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Kazuou Ishiguro and William Golding. So the Booker has maintained its lit cred while expanding commerically. Nowadays, prizes determine what we read almost as much as critics do.

The democratisation of the Booker is generally considered to have begun with the 2002 triumph of Yan Martel's The Life of Pi, followed a year later by DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little. Since then, judges have talked about giving the prize to books which can be enjoyed by "the man in the street" and this year a thriller even made it onto the longlist.

So it was in a tone of predictable tokenism, abuzz with phrases such as "readability" and "page-turning," that Chairman of the Judges Portillo announced this year's shortlist last week.

Equally predictably, much was said about the books which failed to make the list. Professor John Sutherland had vowed to eat a copy of The Enchantress of Florence if it did not win but Salman Rushdie's tenth novel failed to reach the last six. Joseph O'Neill's Netherland - a tale of post-colonial displacement which throws Gunn and Moore cricket bats into the New York melting pot - was the favourite to win and its absence, as well as that of Rushdie and former winner John Berger, makes for an open field.

Betting on the Booker is a perilous exercise but as Mr Portillo said in his previous life: "He who dares..."

The current market leader is Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, an historical adventure set in the build-up to the opium wars which spans the poppy fields of the Ganges, the high seas and the backstreets of China. It has won Ghosh comparisons to Conrad and Melville and can be backed at [1.66].

Sebastian Barry is the only writer to have been previoulsy shortlisted and The Secret Scripture, his alternative history of Ireland told through the diaries of a woman and her psychiatrist, is available to back at [2.42].

Like Barry's entry, Steve Toltz's Fraction of the Whole recollects things past to make a series of shocking discoveries and, like Sea of Poppies, is global in its hemisphere spanning scope. It is also an assured debut, amusing elegy to the agony of father/son relationships, physical comedy and epic yawp which could be this year's Vernon God Little, providing value at [4.2].

Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, which charts its protagonist's journey from rural Indian life to the fast changing world of urban entrepreneurialism, can be backed at [4.8].

At [5.2] Linda Grant's The Clothes On Their Backs, a London set story about concealed pasts, dark subjects, stark choices and how the clothes we wear define us all is well worth a look but my own tip is Phillip Hensher's The Northern Clemency.

Hensher was longlisted in 2002 for the Mulberry Empire and has gone one better with this long novel set in Sheffield which chronicles Britain during the turbulence of the Thatcher years through the fortunes of two families. Hensher is a distinguished writer of genuine Booker pedigree and where his prose was previously cool and refined, here his style is warm, unafraid to get about the entanglements of daily life. His paens to Sheffield are moving without descending into sentimentality and though this nomination might have come earlier than expected, this impressive novel is my tip at [2.28].

After tipping Elbow for the Mercury Music Prize a couple of months back, I am now more certain than ever that in books as in music, this is the year of the slightly rotund, bearded Northerner. As every year should be.

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