Sometime, somehow, perhaps next week, next year or perhaps a century from now, in a galaxy out there, there will be a sufficiently intelligent life form capable of explaining the Booker Prize, not just how it is won, but why, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
The choices made in that process, the politics, the hype, the marketing and the final decision.
Ireland's Anne Enright won with The Gathering. Perhaps not the best book of the subdued final six, but certainly the loudest and the angriest - and this in a shortlist including novels about international terrorism, a real-life environmental disaster and a real-life genocide in New Guinea.
Rage fuels The Gathering, in which a large Irish family gather for the funeral of a wayward brother. It may well be the angriest book shortlisted for the prize since John McGahern's Amongst Women.
If McGahern's failure to win in 1990 was a surprise, Enright's victory last night in London, a mere two years after John Banville's, was a bombshell. No one expected another Irish win so soon.
But the day, or at least the prize, was won with what Irish writers do so well - eloquent outrage, or should that be outrageous eloquence. No one single tribe of humans, save the hillbillies of northern Tennessee, apparently do dysfunctional families with quite the aplomb of the Irish. Here is a book with sex, incest, attempted rape, clerical abuse, the demon drink, F words, the tensions caused by social aspirations, along with the new wealth it brings, and the ghostly literary presence of one James Joyce, along with a nod to the graphic social realism of James Stephens and too many echoes of Roddy Doyle's most compelling book, The Woman Who walked Into Doors.
From the announcement of the shortlist, it appeared that former winner Ian McEwan would have difficulties holding off the challenge of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalistand New Zealander's Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip.
Either of those books, although lesser literary achievements than On Chesil Beach, could claim the substance of important themes.
Sex is also an important theme, one of the most important, but McEwan had been criticised for writing a novella.
On Chesil Beachwas the best-written on the shortlist but ultimately it was concerned with one issue; love may mean romance to a girl, but for a young man, love usually means sex. The couple in McEwan's book discover this fundamental difference on their wedding night, with devastating results.
Most readers would agree that On Chesil Beachis beautifully done, a very moving, convincing small book - but McEwan, an author of big books such as The Innocentand Atonement, was not going to win a second time with a good small book.
Anne Enright's novel is also concerned with sex; the mechanics, the fall out, the guilt and the dissatisfaction. It also seems to be generated by the promise of a dark family secret.
But a far more serious problem with The Gathering, at least from a textual critic's viewpoint, is that Veronica, the narrator, never fully convinces as a witness because although Enright does occasionally permit her to speak like a grieving sister with difficulties of her own, Veronica invariably sounds more like a probing novelist than a disgruntled middle-aged wife and mother who is not interested in having sex with her husband. Her voice is inconsistent; swinging from harshly colloquial to high literary.
"I know I sound bitter", admits Veronica, "and Christ I wish I wasn't such a hard bitch sometimes, but my brother blamed me for twenty years or more. He blamed me for my nice house, with the nice white paint on the walls, and the nice daughters in their nice bedrooms of nice lilac and nicer pink.He blamed me for my golf loving husband, though God knows it is many years since Tom had the free time for a round of golf. He treated me like I was selling out on something though on what I do not know - because Liam did not allow dreams either, of course. My brother had strong ideas about justice, but he was unkind to every single person who tried to love him; mostly, and especially, to every woman he ever slept with, and still, after a lifetime of spreading the hurt around, he managed to blame me. And I managed to feel guilty. Now why is that? This is what shame does. This is the anatomy and mechanism of a family - a whole f...ing country - drowning in shame."
Ultimately Enright is writing to a formula about the brash new Ireland of today which still festers under the old baggage, and all juxtaposed with an account of one woman's sexuality.
Yet this tough, intelligent, aggressive narrative never really settles down into a cohesive novel. It is a performance, but more unsettled than unsettling.