KEY POINTS:
Let's get a squall of outrage over first. Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman deserved at least a shortlist place in this year's Man Booker contest. Indeed, this beautifully observed, deeply affecting first-person portrait of a Glasgow childhood outshines Roddy Doyle's Dublin equivalent, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which won the prize in 1993.
No novelist in Britain - apart, that is, from Salman Rushdie - suffers more from snide and stupid caricatures of who he is and what he does than Kelman. But maybe the spikily radical Scot was never going to make headway against a panel chaired by a Thatcher-era minister, Michael Portillo.
The "Booker dozen" of 13 titles delivers some good news. The judges have saluted the awesomely smart and agile writing of the Sri Lankan-born Australian, Michelle de Kretser, in The Lost Dog.
They have registered how cleverly Amitav Ghosh merges colour, humour and adventure on the 19th-century high seas into the big historical picture in Sea of Poppies.
Later in the judging, though, its status as the first salvo in a trilogy might prove a problem. They have spotted the strength and subtlety behind Aravind Adiga's dissection of India's economic boom in The White Tiger. In the author's 82nd year, and 36 years after he won the Booker for G., they have have fallen under the hypnotic spell of John Berger's fable of war, plunder and resistance, From A to X.
Some of the choices almost made themselves. No fair-minded reader could deny the radiant panache, ingenuity and exuberance of Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence.
In my Booker-judging experience, however, the quarrels over Rushdie only get going at this stage. Off-the-scale rave reviews may have helped Joseph O'Neill's Netherland book itself a place, but perhaps the Irish-born writer's sumptuously elegiac novel of cricket in New York and the aftermath of September 11 peaked too soon. I sense that a backlash may be gathering force.
Some less predictable contenders merit a cheer. Modest in appearance, Linda Grant's The Clothes on their Backs quietly contains tumultuous stories of persecution, migration, social upheaval and moral compromise - much like its secretive characters.
With his Stalin-era investigator in Child 44, Tom Rob Smith achieves what has so far eluded the Rankins and Jameses: a penultimate-round Booker run for an upscale detective novel. And, with Gaynor Arnold's Girl in a Blue Dress, her as-yet-unpublished novel rooted in Charles Dickens' miserable marriage, the Birmingham indie house Tindal Street Press confirms its magic touch - seen most recently in the multiple triumphs of Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost.
Besides Kelman, I will miss several other notable absentees from the later Booker heats. David Park's wise and moving novel of the search for reconciliation in post-Troubles Belfast, The Truth Commissioner, should have caught the judges' eye. As should, arguably, a formidable trio of Australian fictions: Helen Garner's The Spare Room; Alexis Wright's Carpentaria; Tim Winton's Breath.
No matter: the critical dogs bark, and the Booker caravan moves on.
The Booker shortlist will be announced on September 9; the winner will be announced on October 14.
- INDEPENDENT
