Booker shortlist: potential showdown between two of the year’s finest novels

Out of the unlikely mixed bag dominated by predictability that was this year’s Man Booker long list, an exciting potential showdown has emerged between two of the finest novels published in 2014 that also happen to be eligible, being written in English.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Tasmanian Richard Flanagan is outstanding and would prove a worthy winner that would restore much needed credibility to the notion of books competing for prizes. The other strong contender is Calcutta-born, London-based Neel Mukherjee's complex second novel, The Lives of Others. Both novels share a publisher, Chatto and Windus.

Flanagan’s dramatic novel, with its echoes of an earlier Australian master, Patrick White, is great in a way that very few modern novels could claim.

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Karen Joy Fowler. Photograph: Beth Gwinn/Serpent’s Tail/PA Wire

Inspired by his father’s experiences as a prisoner working on the building of the Burma Death Railway during the second World War, it is also a love story of unusual pain and savage fate.

Flanagan has written five previous novels, all of them impressive and shaped by a subtle moral grandeur and agonisingly powerful emotion.

Earlier this year he seemed poised to decide the outcome of the major Australian literary Award, the Miles Franklin, in a superb shortlist, superior to this Man Booker selection, in the company of another gifted writer, Tim Winton. Neither he nor Winton won, yet this Man Booker seems destined for Flanagan.

Clever

It is bizarre to see

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

featuring on a list that includes the 2010 Man Booker winner, Manchester-born Howard Jacobson’s futuristic

J

, or twice-previously shortlisted Ali Smith’s

How to be Both

.

It is the cleverest work to date from the undeniably clever Scot, who is widely admired for her playful, if invariably, and annoyingly, not quite experimental approach to narrative. Even admirers of the book, which is presented in two parts, the order of which has been deliberately reversed, will find it as forgettable as it is entertaining.

Sharing Smith's weakness for the comic gag is Joshua Ferris's often very funny third novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour.

No way as amusing as his terrific debut, Then We Came to the End, a satire on office life that will drag a smile from even the most world-weary drudge, Ferris's yarn about the trials of a successful New York dentist begins well but soon dwindles into endless sub-Roth rants about mistaken identity and Jewishness.

Never before has oral hygiene seemed so pointless.

Mild comedy

This mild comedy is one of the two contenders representing the widely hyped debut appearance of the US writers who have now been granted eligibility for the prize.

The other is the slight and predictable seventh novel from Karen Joy Fowler, We Are Completely Beside Ourselves, a family tale which heaps so much worthiness on the reader that consuming it is like attempting to eat a giant cake made out of glue. This may sound harsh, but considering that the remarkable maverick Richard Powers, author of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Country Dance and one of the most underrated of American novelists, had been longlisted for his 12th novel, Orfeo, her inclusion seems a serious mistake.

In the absence of Martin Amis's The Zone of Interest and Tim Winton's Eyrie, it seems like a travesty. Canadian Miriam Towe's finest novel to date, All My Puny Sorrows, is another work that is far more convincing than Fowler's yet, like Amis and Winton, she did not even make the longlist.

Flanagan does look the likely winner, with a classic novel that will endure, yet Mukherjee’s story of an Indian family is also sustained by traditional fiction and a feel for character.

The winner will be announced on October 14th and should either Flanagan or Mukherjee win, this year’s Man Booker will be remembered as a triumph for quality fiction as well as encouraging evidence that devastating stories are still being told.