Literary prizes are great inventions. Marginally cleaner than bullfights, they inspire serious analysis, nasty comments, loads of hype and much righteousness. Above all, there is the spectacle of seeing what the lure of money can do to the most lofty of individuals. Triumph and defiance; the winners grin, the losers grimace and the readers invariably shrug and shout, declaring the best book didn't win.
Then there is the emerging realisation that at the heart of even the most sedate judging panel may lurk a defiant ambition to surprise, shock, maybe even attract public abuse - and all in the name of literature with a nod to the sponsors.
This explains the many times over the years that fine books, critic's favourites and obvious winners have been excluded from shortlists, while some turkeys have not only been nominated, but, in some instances, have run off with the loot.
There is also, of course, the politics of race, gender and cumulative achievement. The unexpected is more fun than the redhot favourite even if it is far less satisfying. Praise them or condemn them, prizes sell books. They also encourage reading.
The winner of the sixth International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award will be announced on Monday. To date, this prize - like most others - has done some good things but, true to the great tradition of literary gongs, has not always been awarded to the best book. That said, with a selection procedure far wider than the Booker or the Whitbread - nominations can include books written in English or translated into English from all over the world - IMPAC is powerfully international.
The most exciting and daring winner remains Herta Muller's terrifyingly surreal The Land of Green Plums, in 1998. It is an important and brave novel - and a good one.
However, IMPAC's long lead-in can sometimes leave one feeling "but I read that novel ages ago". Australian David Malouf deservedly won the inaugural IMPAC in 1996 with Remembering Babylon - three years after it had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Two of this year's contenders, Colm Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship and Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers, were both shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. Two years ago, Jim Crace's superb Quarantine was an IMPAC contender, having previously won the 1997 Whitbread Novel Prize and had also been shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize.
This year's IMPAC six-book shortlist includes, as well as the Toibin and the O'Hagan which have been extremely successful in these islands and beyond, two other critically acclaimed books. Scots-Canadian Alistair MacLeod's unforgettable No Great Mischief is one of the most beautiful and truly haunting novels of recent years. It was widely expected to walk away with last year's Booker prize - but was not even shortlisted.
The Clay Machine Gun by Victor Pelevin is more than just another impressive first novel by a young writer, it is the expression of Russia's new fiction.
This wry, magical and abrasive book has taken on what is possibly the world's finest literary tradition and has succeeded brilliantly if subversively. Considered dangerous and capable of "destroying the cultural memory" it was denied the Russian version of the Booker Prize on political grounds. It is this year's most exciting IMPAC nomination, and also one of only two contenders in translation.
Looked at this way, these four contenders have been given an interesting opportunity to again walk a public stage. Toibin (who was an IMPAC judge last year) has, in The Blackwater Lightship, presented a contemporary, uncliched view of an ordinary Irish family to an international audience. His Ireland is neither romanticised nor vilified - it is as it is. The ghosts evoked by an impending and complicated death are part of a country with two languages. It's probably the first time in modern Irish fiction that the Irish language has been depicted as having a natural right, and is not seen as eccentric or strange. I wouldn't pick it as the winner but The Blackwater Lightship, Our Fathers, No Great Mischief and The Clay Machine-Gun are all vastly superior to the final two contenders.
The debut of Jamaican Margaret Cezair-Thompson, The True History of Paradise, promises a great deal but seems to deliver little. Her sprawling family saga is melodramatic and suffers perhaps unfairly from belonging to such a rich tradition. It is also extremely predictable while the dialogue is stagey. Although, it is interesting reportage, as a story it is laboured, unconvincing and boring.
Silvia Molina's dull romance, The Love You Promised Me, translated from the Spanish is one of the most self-conscious books I've ever read. Set in Mexico during the 1994 elections, it is the story of Marcela who is recovering from a painful affair. "I loved Eduardo during those days. I was patient, tender and understanding; and his closeness filled everything with a delicate, transparent happiness like a baby's happiness. I heard him say more than twice that he was going to divorce his wife Ilona and live with me."
When IMPAC released its long list of submissions some months before its shortlist, which this year included some wonderful books, such as Gunter Grass's My Century, it was impossible to understand how this limp confessional arrived on the shortlist.
Andrew O'Hagan, as his recent essay `The End of British Farming' demonstrates, is an intelligent, controlled writer. Our Fathers says a great deal about society and sensitively deconstructs the issues of nationality, political and religious belief as well as exploring father/son relationships. It is overwhelmingly intense and real. If prizes are decided by profundity, this has a strong chance.
For the past two years, IMPAC judges have appeared to be looking to the future and selected young writers to win. Victor Pelevin is an original with a flair for the absurd. In his novella, The Yellow Arrow (1993), he used a packed train as a metaphor for Soviet life. His approach to reality is reached through realistic unreality. Humour and satire is there in abundance in his work but beyond the flashy, the brash, the nothingness and the modern, is the natural blackness, pain and truth of Russian writing. "Idiots" whispers Pyotr Voyd, poet, dreamer and politely bewildered narrator of The Clay Machine-Gun: "My God the idiots . . . not even idiots - mere shadows of idiots . . . Shadows in the darkness." Pelevin plays with technique, upends it in fact, defies time scales and logic, yet still defers to Russia's rich literature and history, as well as that always powerful, albeit battered, Russian sense of self. One needs look no further than the second paragraph for Pushkin. There is a reference to the famous bronze statue of him in St Petersburg, "looking a little sadder". The narrator's name Voyd - a play on void - is no coincidence, while his day becomes a variation of Crime and Punishment. The old and the dazzling new race through Pelevin's swaggeringly fresh but thoughtful vision. No Great Mischief is a celebration of oral family history as story and MacLeod is a magnificent storyteller. Pelevin, so aware of Russia's awesome tradition is inventing his own. Either would be fine winners. My heart says give it to MacLeod but my head says Pelevin should win.