We knew from the longlist that this was a Booker keen on surprises, but with the shortlist omission of Alan Hollinghurst the judges have sprung their biggest surprise yet. I loved The Stranger's Child, and no one could deny that it's beautifully written, but compared with the broad political and social engagement of his Booker-winning The Line of Beauty this saga of 20th-century literary reputation can be seen as a minority – and rather elitist – interest. Tweeting this morning, Nicholas Blincoe compared reading it to sitting the Civil Service exam; elsewhere words like "tweedy" and "fusty" have been thrown around.
And this is a Booker that wants to be anything but tweedy. The two debuts on the shortlist, Pigeon English and Snowdrops, look to survival struggles in contemporary urban battlegrounds. The first, narrated by an 11-year-old Ghanaian immigrant on a south London estate, brings a comic tone (and an ill-advised talking pigeon) to its child's-eye view of gang violence. The recent riots give it added bite. The second exposes the casual corruption that spread through post-communist Moscow in a boom that favours the ruthless. Both, in a sense, are crime fiction.
As is the strongest wild card on the list, Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers, a darkly comic wild west odyssey of two cowboy assassins. American novels are, controversially, excluded from the Booker – deWitt is Canadian – but juries have a weakness for their grand, sometimes lurid, horizons. (Remember Vernon God Little, 2003's surprise winner about a Texas high school massacre.) I'm surprised to see the other Canadian on the shortlist, Esi Edugyan; our reviewer thought Half Blood Blues, the story of a black jazz musician in Nazi Germany, fascinating material but a missed opportunity.
Of the remaining two, Barnes's The Sense of an Ending, looking back to philosophy-reading sixties schoolboys and forwards to the disappointments of middle-class middle age, is the only novel on the list that could fairly be called tweedy. Many are wondering if it could be his year at last, and this is a strange, powerful book, but it's also a very slim one. I'm still carrying my torch for Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie; she's an underrated author with an impressive backlist, and this tale of 19th-century naturalism and danger at sea is in some ways classic Booker material. She brings a freshness and vibrancy to the historical novel that is a pleasure to behold.
What's your prediction - and (often not the same thing) which is your favourite?
