Tip for Booker: avoid favourite

Now the Booker Prize has turned 40, after years of dinners and high living, it's time for a health check.

This global trophy certainly bears little resemblance to the tweedy British prize that came on the scene in 1969, allegedly after a game of golf.

In its first decade, prize business was settled in the smoke-filled rooms of London clubs, where it remained resolutely insular. Commonwealth writers were eligible, but only two winners, V. S. Naipaul (1971) and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975), hinted at the potential.

But television changed everything. After 1980, the prize became a media event. Its horizons expanded to include winners from India (1981), Australia (1982), South Africa (1983), New Zealand (1985) - Keri Hulme's The Bone People - Australia again (1988) and Nigeria (1991).

Now, it was not only the premier literary event of the English-speaking world, it was also going global, and attracting high-brow scorn, probably a good sign. For Julian Barnes, it was "posh bingo", for Nicci Gerrard "a grand folly". Its power was having a decisive - some would say disastrous - influence on the contemporary novel.

By the 1990s, "Booker fiction" had become synonymous with "unreadable" and/or "pretentious". But a prize that recognised the importance of novels such as Offshore, Oscar and Lucinda, Earthly Powers, The Life and Times of Michael K and The Ghost Road was clearly on the side of the angels. That was the Booker's dilemma: should it focus on posterity or the marketplace? Ideally, both, which is an almost impossible double.

In its third decade, 1990-2000, the prize had it all: success, prestige, international renown. And blew it. Booker was in trouble. Throughout the 1990s, it traded on its past, got mired in controversy, lost its way and was challenged by brilliant upstarts like Orange.

Suddenly, it had to revitalise itself or surrender its supremacy. The arrival of the Man Group was like the entry of the rich aunt in Victorian melodrama. Overnight, the ne'er-do-well clubman had to brace up and address a contemporary audience.

For most of the past decade, it has done this. Globally, Man Booker is more dominant than ever. Prize verdicts continue to oscillate between the domestic library (The Line of Beauty, 2004) and the international marketplace (The White Tiger, 2008) in a brave attempt to fulfil expectations.

What, then, of the 2009 shortlist? At first glance, it breathes the spirit of the 1970s. Fiercely English, it is strongly inclined to the historical narrative.

Taking few risks, it offers J. M. Coetzee and A. S. Byatt the prospect of a return visit to the winner's podium. Occasionally the prize turns its back on posterity. This year, Booker is in denial, big time. Just as notable as its penchant for 16th-century (Wolf Hall), 19th-century (The Quickening Maze) and austerity Britain (The Little Stranger) is its neglect of a new novel of real distinction. There's one quite extraordinary omission here.

Colm Toibin's Brooklyn is, for my money, the closest Booker has come in years to a small masterpiece. Deceptively spare, with a profound simplicity, Brooklyn describes the experience of exile in a way that resonates far beyond the limits of a tale about an Irish girl's passage to postwar America and first love in a foreign land.

Not since John McGahern's Amongst Women, shortlisted in 1989, has an Irish novel moved so many readers. Among the other omissions from this list that deserve notice are Sarah Hall's How To Paint A Dead Man (Faber), William Trevor's Love and Summer (Penguin) and James Lever's Me Cheeta (Fourth Estate).

Returning to the reality of the shortlist itself, the novel that's exhilarating the punters is Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (HarperCollins). But there are no certainties. Only six weeks back, Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger was tipped as hot favourite.

If either Mantel or Waters has any interest in winning the 2009 Man Booker, they must hope that another dark horse (Simon Mawer's The Glass Room, perhaps) becomes the front runner. If the history of this great prize teaches anything, it is that the favourite never wins.

- OBSERVER