This year, however, the prize has made the biggest change in its rules for 45 years, “abandoning geographical constraints” and making all English-language writers eligible, not just those from the Commonwealth and Ireland. Many suspect that the change was forced on the Man Booker by the arrival of a rival prize, the Folio, which has already chosen an American writer of short stories, George Saunders, as its first winner.
So this year’s longlist amounts to a verdict on whether British novelists can compete on equal terms with American writers.
However much the six judges may profess to be judging purely on high literary merit, they will undoubtedly have been fully aware of the pressures — and the list they have produced is remarkably tactful and obliging. Out of the 13 novelists, only four — Joshua Ferris, Karen Joy Fowler, Siri Hustvedt and Richard Powers — are American. In theory, they could still dominate the six-strong shortlist but effectively that danger has already been averted. Perhaps more controversial is the fact that only three of these 13 are women.
Many big names have already been excluded, including Donna Tartt and Jonathan Lethem from the States, and Ian McEwan, Nicola Barker, Will Self, Philip Hensher, Sarah Waters, and, yet again, Martin Amis from the UK. However, those who have made the cut are still nearly all fairly well-known names, including one previous Booker winner (Howard Jacobson) and two writers previously shortlisted (David Mitchell and Ali Smith).
Only two of these books could be considered left-field choices: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, an animal rights novel about a girl brought up as an experiment with a chimpanzee sister, and The Wake by the ecological campaigner and poet Paul Kingsnorth, about the Norman invasion in 11th century Lincolnshire, written entirely in a pastiche of early English and published by the new collective Unbound.
Surely the most surprising nomination is the most popular: David Nicholls for Us, the follow-up to his huge bestseller One Day, an unworthy romcom about a middle-aged couple whose marriage is in trouble on a European tour. But then longlists tend to be loose compromises — and it will be interesting to see what finally emerges from this grab-bag.
The six judges are chaired this year by atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling, whose own contribution to creative writing, a “secular bible” called The Good Book, is such a dog’s dinner, so hubristically presented, that it might well be thought to disqualify him from any pronouncement on literary taste ever again.
