Time was when the announcement of the shortlist for the annual Booker McConnell Prize for fiction would at least inspire a debate; at best, create the type of outraged `pistols at dawn' and `blood on the carpet' reaction at which literary people appear rather skilled. Excluded novels have always tended to stimulate more passion than the contenders. Considering that reviewers have been lamenting the state of contemporary English fiction for so long, it has become something of a surprise that it continues to be written and published.
But since its inception in 1969, the Booker has also included Irish, Canadian, Australian, Indian, Pakistani, and African and South African fiction. Because of its elastic rules of eligibility, self-conscious geographical distribution as well as political and gender juggling, the Booker manages to be both provincial and very colonial - albeit, in a slightly ramshackle sort of way - and, apparently, about more than books. Judges have been known to take sides, sulk, disassociate themselves from the shortlist and/or the winner and openly endorse their own favourites.
Surely it is time to include the Americans as well? And how about the rest of Europe? There have always been winners; some good, some doubtful, a few outstanding (such as J.M. Coetzee's Life And Times of Michael K (1983) and Pat Barker's The Ghost Road (1995)). Fine novels have lost, superb novels have failed to make the shortlist. Such is Booker, such is any list devised by any group of people other than oneself and one's like-minded friends.
This year, it seemed so certain the shortlist would include John Banville's assured and undeniably moving The Untouchable - despite the fact that it cuts so close to Establishment sensibilities - but it is not among the chosen six. Another contender was Arundhati Roy's wildly over-rated The God of Small Things, which has been so hyped since publication it seemed as if it was being published as the Booker winner. Jim Crace's glorious Quarantine, meanwhile, appeared to excellent reviews and little else. In recent weeks, Ian McEwan's Enduring Love appeared to be generating a support far beyond its merits. Few predictions were being made and as ever, much of the best of the new fiction has - as I've said - been American and therefore ineligible.
The best thing about yesterday's announcement is the inclusion of Jim Crace's Quarantine. Author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia and Signals of Distress, this likable, energetic, unpretentious writer from Birmingham caused an overnight sensation when his first book Continent, a series of five independent, interlinking stories was published in 1987. Each of his subsequent books since has confirmed his originality, vision and versatile literary voice. If he has a literary soulmate, it could be the Australian David Malouf. Arcadia is an ambitious novel about London which shares the stylistic diversity of Graham Swift's Waterland. Two years ago, Signals Of Distress showed that, along with all his other strengths, Crace is humourous and well able to create playful period pastiche.
Quarantine fulfils everything any reader and any judge of an invariably contentious literary competition should be seeking - beautiful, atmospheric prose, imagination, story, vivid characterisation, humour, deft irony, morality and humanity. Crace writes with such ease, the reader is immediately engaged and nothing else matters unless we arrive at the final word.
The book is set in Judea, at the time of Christ, so there are no prizes for guessing the identity of the mystery man arriving in the desert for 40 days of prayer and a determination to suffer. This book is so superior to the other five in every way, it seems there is no contest. Or is there?
Quarantine should win this, and so justify Booker if only by introducing this fine writer to a wider, new audience.
The competition will, of course, be provided by Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, which did indeed secure a nomination. Hovering between sentimentality, exaggeration, popular romance, the grotesque and a crypto-magic realism, this loose, humourless yarn centres on the accidental death of a small girl and its impact on the subsequent lives of her two cousins, tragic twins, surrounded as they are by a clan of caricatured Anglophiles. The mood is death-in-life and the objective is profundity. Roy's convoluted approach to narrative has to be experienced to be fully appreciated. Her limitations as a writer are manifold and she appears to believe that characterisation begins and ends with physical description, "she had absurdly beautiful collarbones". Throughout the book, she makes extensive use of coyly knowing asides, capital letters for emphasis and is three and four-word paragraphs.
There are occasionally effective set pieces, particularly where she is exploring the underlying cruelties of the trap known as family. All the women are losers; silent, beaten wives, doomed beauties or grotesques. Roy also makes a few gestures towards India's cultural complexities by referring to caste tensions.
The rhetoric, strained lyricism and laboured narrative adds up to an exercise in designer exotic which never approaches the genius of the best of Indian fiction. Besides the Crace nomination, the other good thing about the shortlist is that, apart from the Roy hype, the books are all quiet, almost low-key works. Shortlisted for his first novel in 14 years is the Glasgow-based, Northern Irish writer, Bernard MacLaverty. His book, the quiet, intense, crafted Grace Notes is the story of Catherine McKenna, a woman at the mercy of the culminative effect of trying to survive the confusions created by various competing pressures. She is a composer and while her artistic life is also under scrutiny, MacLaverty succeeds best when examining her emotional world.
The novel is a curiosity, not because of anything remarkable about the style, but because of the sureness of MacLaverty's creation of life through his realist's eye.
The inclusion of Tim Park's Europa is a brave decision and a good one. This is his ninth book - Parks, who lives in Italy has frequently explored the nastier aspects of human nature with humanity, black humour and a businesslike style. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This time, it did.
Jerry Marlow is an Englishman who teaches in an Italian university. When we meet him, he is sitting unhappily at the back of a bus bound for the European Parliament. His colleagues are launching a protest aimed at protecting their jobs as foreign nationals. His objective is to annoy his former lover - though he really tortures himself, as he sulks at the back of the bus, reliving their affair and his mishandling of it.
For all its sour humour and unsympathetic portrayal of one man's mid-life crisis, this is a skilful, shrewd performance from a daring, inventive writer.
Mick Jackson's debut The Underground Man belongs to the world of English gothic as mastered by Patrick McGrath particularly in The Grotesque. Barely existing on his isolated estate, the Duke struggles with his inner hurts as well as the combined nastiness of everyone else. As he attempts to confront his past, Mr Bird is busily constructing a system of underground tunnels. The story is told by a number of voices.
This is a surprise entrant, as is Madelaine St John's The Essence of The Thing. St John's third novel is the brisk account of a woman's life being upended when her boring husband reappears as an entirely different, very exciting stranger.
