Keep reading, the winner will turn up

By PHILIP HENSHER

Now that it's fashionable to knock the Booker prize - and everyone agrees it's not as good as it used to be at tracking talent - it's probably as well to think about the alternatives.

And once you've done that, you will probably come to the conclusion that it's not really as bad as all that.

In the case of the Booker prize, five or so well-intentioned and reasonably well-read people are summoned, and given 130-odd novels to read.

Twenty or so of these will reveal themselves as incompetent within the first five pages, through the ignorance either of English grammar or the meanings of ordinary English words, and may be discarded immediately.

A further 30 will, after 100 pages, be discovered to be wildly egotistical ramblings about the author's own love affairs, or thinly disguised acts of revenge, and can be dropped, too. Ten will be novels written by television gardeners and professional comedians, and needn't be read.

A further 20 will be obvious rip-offs of the book which won the Booker Prize the year before last. One lady on the panel, who hasn't read that book, will exasperate her fellow judges by declaring at least three of these, emanating usually from Canada, to be masterpieces.

Another 15 will be written by someone whom one of the judges detests; these books will be read for the satisfying purpose of ripping them apart at the meetings in rich detail.

That leaves about 35 novels which, with a fair amount of professional devotion, the judges will generally read to the end and discuss carefully.

Terrific prejudices remain. The Scottish judge will do anything to get a Scottish novel on the shortlist. Most people can't be doing with a novel with a green cover. When I judged the prize, I was determined that I wasn't going to have anything told in the present tense throughout, or which referred to a character as having "erect nipples".

If a homosexual author should come anywhere near the shortlist, someone will make sure that he gets no further, on the grounds of frivolity, or narrowness of experience ("I thought the women were just unconvincing").

At this point, five reasonably intelligent and literate people will find that they have read the same 35 or so books and can discuss them to find out which they think is the best. That is not a bad place to start.

Consider the alternatives to this rational process, particularly the vote-in television programmes on which the BBC now seems so keen.

The Big Read, a long-running series in which people phoned in and voted for their favourite book, was presented and perhaps even seen as a populist version of "highbrow" literary prizes such as the Booker.

The result was that people were voting for one book which they had read at the expense of 25 books which, generally, they hadn't.

Nobody seemed to think it absurd that a lot of ravening seven-year-olds could propel Harry Potter and the Bucket of Sick to the position of Third Greatest Book Ever Written when they hadn't read anything else.

Nobody in the ridiculous exercise ever felt it necessary to ask any of the "celebrities" promoting Winnie the Pooh as "their favourite" why they thought it a better book than, say, Bleak House for the obvious reason that they probably hadn't felt it necessary to read it.

The Big Read, and any other comparative exercise in which those contributing to the result don't compare the entrants, is not only worthless but actively anti-literature.

Whatever you may think of the Booker prize, at least books are being read reasonably carefully and compared in terms of quality.

It is terribly easy to look at the sometimes eccentric results and declare it to be largely a waste of time.

Martin Amis has been shortlisted for the prize only once.

V. S. Naipaul has won it only once, and has not been shortlisted for the past 25 years - in the year The Enigma of Arrival, one of the most important novels of the century, was published we were expected to believe that novels by Penelope Lively, Brian Moore and an almost incomprehensible late-period indulgence by Iris Murdoch were more worthy of acclaim.

Angela Carter never won it, nor Bruce Chatwin or Anthony Burgess.

Nor has Rohinton Mistry, or Tim Winton, or Jim Crace, or William Boyd, or Zadie Smith, or Doris Lessing, or Hanif Kureishi ... one could go on more or less indefinitely.

On the other hand, many completely harmless mediocrities have been rewarded with a place on the shortlist, or even with the prize.

But the Booker does just about stand up to the question of whether it succeeds in rewarding literary merit.

It is surprising to see how many previous winners retain a claim on our attention and maintain a kind of living presence.

Although many winners have disappeared from consciousness - who now reads a novel even as recent as Pat Barker's Ghost Road, which won in 1995? - a lot have been seen to deserve their prize and some are practically classics.

What we got this year was what we ought to expect from the Booker prize, and, if it's not really good enough, it is a great deal better than the alternative of popular canvassing.

The real competition isn't won when someone is handed a cheque, it is the result of years of consensus among readers. That, much more than the Booker, is the one worth winning, and the Booker matters only when it concurs with it.

- INDEPENDENT