Everyone is saying that this year's Booker shortlist is even duller than usual, and I suppose one should have an opinion on the matter. However, it's difficult to have an opinion when one hasn't read any of the books in question and has no intention of reading them - except, perhaps, the Bernard MacLaverty, which a couple of reliable friends have said is the real thing.
But if it's the real thing, it probably won't win. John McGahern's Amongst Women was the real thing, and it didn't win. Neither (staying with Irish novels) did John Banville's The Book of Evidence or Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy, both manifestly the real thing. Instead, the Booker tends to go to stuff like Keri Hulme's The Bone People, Ben Okri's The Famished Road and James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late - how boring they were, how boring, books that would have found the obscurity they deserved if they hadn't been sanctified by the Booker.
In fact, this wildly over-hyped prize, far from being an indicator of public taste, merely highlights the ever-widening chasm that separates the kind of books that win literary prizes from the kind of books intelligent people actually care to read. And those novels of real merit that, once in a blue moon, do win the Booker (Pat Barker's The Ghost Road, for instance) only serve to point up the general aridity of the prize.
But maybe everybody is finally cottoning on to this fact. Certainly this year there is much less talk about what's on the shortlist than about what's excluded from it. For instance, J.C, the weekly bookchat columnist in the Times Literary Supple- ment, comes up his own preferred list of novelists (all of whom were eligible): "Ian McEwan, Brian Moore, Jeanette Winterson, Peter Carey, Caryl Phillips, John Banville - what a glamorous line-up that would have made."
And David Robson in the Sunday Telegraph offers his own shortlist, though not before dismissing the Booker panel's choices as "ranging in pace from the leisurely to the arthritic . . . picking a winner from this lot is well nigh impossible; none of the books is a winner."
Instead he opts for Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, Carol Shields's Larry's Party, George MacDonald Fraser's Black Ajax, Tibor Fischer's The Collector Collector, and for two Irish novels as well: "Father's Music, a heart-stopping thriller from the under-rated Dermot Bolger; and Anne Haverty's One Day as a Tiger, as brilliant and endearing a first novel as I have read in years."
Whether any of the novels actually shortlisted is either heart-stopping or endearing I don't know, but let's hope that the winner isn't one of those worthy, turgid efforts whose only effect is to put people off reading novels. In other words, let's hope that it's not a typical Booker winner.
Martin Amis's new novel, Night Train, as you can see, isn't on the shortlist. The reason for this is that it was ineligible, its publication date being two days after closure of the deadline for entries. But perhaps this was deliberate on the part of Amis and Jonathan Cape - it's well known that the author is somewhat tired of being overlooked by Booker judges.
If so, he joins another shortlist: those who say to hell with the Booker. Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark are among those who have instructed their publishers not to enter their work for the prize.
Kay Scarpetta has many Irish fans, so no doubt the prospect of this chief medical examiner from Richmond, Virginia, plying her grisly trade in dear old Dublin will find an enthusiastic audience here.
Patricia Cornwell's new Scarpetta mystery, Unnatural Exposure, which is due from Little, Brown on October 6th, is largely set back in the US, but it opens in Dublin with Kay and the Irish state pathologist Margaret Foley (is John Harbison finally to get the assistant he wants?) puzzling over five dismembered bodies unearthed in this land of saints, scholars and, apparently, serial killers. The victims, we're told, constitute "a racial mix". Hmm, not too much of a racial mix in this white, Catholic country, I would have thought, but no matter. Now read on . . .
The latest sale of "rare and interesting" books from Mealy's auctioneers takes place in the firm's Castlecomer premises next Wednesday at 12.30 pm, and there are some intriguing and reasonably priced publications among the 767 single items and lots on offer.
The 1859 first American edition of James Clarence Mangan's poems, along with essays by Mangan and four other books, is expected to make between £45 and £70. A 1935 first edition of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, with a 1938 first edition of his letters, is being offered at between £45 and £90.
First editions of Daniel Corkery's Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature and Stephen Gwynn's Irish Literature and Drama are available together from between £30 and £50, while the complete 131 editions of The Bell, from 1940 to 1954, are yours if you have between £700 and £1,100.
Jane Urquhart's new novel, The Underpainter, is due from Bloomsbury next week, and admirers of this Canadian-born, IMPAC-nominated writer (who has a holiday home in Kerry) can hear her reading from it in Waterstone's of Dawson Street next Wednesday at 6.30pm.
