Booker Prize / Maxliu / 05 October 2011 /

After picking the winner at long odds last year, Max Liu returns with his guide to how to bet on the Booker Prize...

This is a weird Booker Prize shortlist. To label it controversial would be inaccurate as writers, critics and publishers reacted with more shrugs than chagrin when the six nominees were announced. Julian Barnes is the market leader at [2.0] but will the judges spring one last surprise on October 18?

I knew Alan Hollinghurst's pre-shortlist jolly The Stranger's Child would miss out. My hunch was based partly on the failure of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom to win either the US National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize even though it was hailed as novel of the year by American readers and reviewers alike. Franzen lost out in both instances to Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad, an excellent episodic fiction that slow-burned its way into collective literary consciousness. But Egan then failed to make the Orange Prize shortlist which suggests judges are in the habit of kicking against prevailing wisdom.

Last year, this column went against the grain when Tom McCarthy's against the grain C was heavily fancied. We backed outsider Howard Jacobson at [8.0] and collected handsomely after the Finkler Question triumphed. At a recent reading in Soho, I heard Jacobson call his win life-changing: "You realise that all the delusions you've always had about yourself are true." So there's a lot at stake.

That said, Barnes' standing as one of our most eminent novelists wouldn't be significantly altered by a Booker. He calls the prize "posh bingo" and he should know, having now been shortlisted four times. That should mean he's ripe for victory and The Sense of an Ending is a beautiful, complex short novel. But his record is the same as Andy Murray's in Grand Slam finals: played three, lost three. Would you back the petulant Scot? Exactly. But literature is not sport, it's not competition, thankfully, which is why prizes are ultimately at odds with its nature. The work is the reward but, as Jacobson says, winning helps a writer reach readers.

The judges - chaired by former spy and thriller writer Stella Rimington - have been rightly criticised for their populist rhetoric. Rimington and ex-Labour MP Chris Mullin's insistence on writing that "zips along" is crude and misguided but Gaby Wood, literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, is a serious critic so we must be wary of any assumption that pace will be favoured at the expense of all else. If Rimington and co. do stick to their page-turning guns then AD Miller's Snowdrops [5.8] will win.

Of the other four nominees, which include Carol Birch [3.85], Esi Edugyan [5.3] and Patrick deWitt [6.6], I fancy a bet on Stephen Kelman [5.2]. I neither enjoyed nor admired Pigeon English, it's full of cheap effects and I don't like talking birds, but betting on the Booker is not about aesthetic judgement. It's about following patterns and instincts and debuts, like this column, have form: four of the last ten winners were first-time novelists, most recently in 2008 when Aravinda Adiga's The White Tiger prevailed. Kelman says that his novel, which was in-part inspired by the stabbing of Damilola Taylor, has gate-crashed the shortlist. Back it to go one better and make off with the prize.

Recommended Bet
1pt Stephen Kelman @ [5.2]

'.$sign_up['title'].'

'; } } ?>

:

:

:

?

: