Booker Prize / Maxliu / 25 September 2010 / 2

Avant-garde anti-humanism is all the rage with Betfair's Booker Prize punters but Max Liu believes a seasoned outsider could have the last laugh.

With an exciting shortlist and scant liquidity in the market, the Booker Prize 2010 is fascinating to discuss and tough to bet on. There's no doubt who has the momentum though, with Tom McCarthy surprise favourite at [3.05].

C tells the story of Serge Carrafax, a man fixated on early 20th century technologies, who hears poetic signals of loss in radio transmissions as the novel takes in WW1, a narcotics-saturated London of the 1920s and the ancient tombs of Egypt. The book has attracted considerable interest from readers and provoked critical debate, with McCarthy described as an "avant-garde anti-humanist" who, like his influences Alain Robbe-Grillet and Thomas Pynchon, rejects conventions of character and debunks the middle-brow culture that the Booker has become synonymous with.

C is perhaps not as formally radical as critics have claimed. Jeanette Winterson called it, "rather a boring novel,"; I disagree but it was telling that when I saw McCarthy read to a packed London Review Bookshop, he rejected the label of experimentalism, talking instead about "Doing the old things better." It's terrific to have a novel steeped in theories of the avante-garde on the list and a sign that the appointment of former-Poet Laureate Andrew Motion as chairman of judges was a smart move. McCarthy could win.

Emma Donoghue trades close behind at [3.55]. Room concerns a child imprisoned for the first five years of his life and, while Donoghue denies that her seventh novel is based on the Josef Fritzel case, she admits she was seized by the idea of the wide-eyed child emerging into the world from captivity. The buzz which has attended Room since it was sold for an eye-watering advance shows no signs of abating, so have a small punt on Donoghue if the odds drift.

The question of whether the three stories which comprise Damon Galgut's In A Strange Room amount to a novel is an outdated one. It's an excellent book, which explores concepts of home and displacement, a rigorous symbol of the novel's capacity for renewal and reinvention. Galgut was nominated in 2003 and punters rate him third favourite at [4.6]; I suspect it might be second time unlucky for the South African.

Peter Carey believes Parrot and Olivier in America might be his best book. His two previous Booker winners were superb, Oscar and Lucinda for its beauty, True History of the Kelly Gang for its commitment to literary excavation through formal experiment. I'm going to shun Carey in the betting though because, as with JM Coetzee's hat-trick bid last year, I don't believe the judges will give the Australian a third Booker.

This is the first time Andrea Levy has been on the shortlist but she won the Orange Prize and the Whitebread Novel award for her last book. A popular success, which has also won critical acclaim, The Long Song is narrated by a slave girl born on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the 19th century. The author says she found giving a voice to the dispossessed to be an uplifting experience and reading the novel proves to be so too. At [7.0], I don't think this is her year.

Howard Jacobson is the [8.0] market outsider because of the myth that the Booker isn't awarded to funny books. Apart from the fact that no good fiction is devoid of humour, what is DBC Pierre's 2003 winner Vernon God Little if not a comic tour de force? The Finkler Question actually shares more in common with Kingsley Amis' 1986 winner The Old Devils. Observer literary editor Robert McCrum says the 68-year-old is worth a punt and I agree.

Recommended bet: Back Howard Jacobson @ [8.0].

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1. Anonymous | 24 September 2010

   Jacobson is 10 elsewhere.

2. Simon Rowlands | 13 October 2010

   Excellent and interesting work, Maxliu, topped off with a successful betting recommendation!

   SDR

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