A balanced Booker shortlist

The most convincing aspect of yesterday's list is its refusal to allow celebrity to dictate, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent

Mother Ireland, that grand old octopus, invariably manages to surface in most pools.

Somehow, everyone usually manages to be almost Irish, as the Irish soccer team will verify. Even the Man Booker can't fully escape. Just when it looked like there would be no Irish involvement in this year's prize due to the absence of an Irish writer on the long list, along came a London-born Australian, MJ Hyland, whose parents are Irish, whose outstanding second novel, Carry Me Down, is set in Wexford and Dublin, and who could even win if it can offset the historical weight and eloquence of Kate Grenville's The Secret River.

Hyland's inclusion on this unusually balanced six-strong shortlist, announced in London yesterday, is exciting.

Whether or not Carry Me Down, which is published by the independent Edinburgh firm, Canongate, is "Irish" is academic. It does have echoes of an earlier Booker contender, Pat McCabe's The Butcher Boy, yet it is far more frightening because of its sustained tone of wistful and bewildered longing. John Egan is 11 going on 12, a boy inside a man's body. He observes his parents battling the demons inhabiting his father's tormented mind. Often violent but always thoughtful, it is a book about survival, and has much in common with Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Hyland, who was born in 1968, spent her early days in Ireland and first arrived in Australia before her third birthday. By the age of five, she was back in Ireland, living with her mother in a tower block in Ballymun. After almost two years, they moved to Firhouse in Tallaght, where they settled until she was 11 years old. Then they returned to Australia where she continued her schooling and studied at the University of Melbourne.

Her successful first novel, How The Light Gets In, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, and shared the Best Young Australian Novelist award. Carry Me Down was published last Spring with no fanfare and not all that many reviews. This is where literary prizes justify themselves, and justify the hype, when as here, an important "sleeper" novel breaks through the swollen ranks of fiction published each year by high profile writers.

Four of this year's shortlist contenders are women. Hyland's strongest challenge comes from another writer with an Australian connection, Kate Grenville, shortlisted for The Secret River, an historical novel about one man's struggle to survive.

In doing so, he takes part in the destruction of others - the Aboriginals. One of Australia's finest writers, stylistically, the heir-in-waiting to double Booker winner, the great Peter Carey, and increasingly to Patrick White, Grenville is the major international writer on what is a thoughtful, rather subtle shortlist. Included among her work is the Orange Prize winner An Idea of Perfection (2001) which is about how others perceive us and more importantly, how we perceive them perceiving us. It is often very funny and has numerous comic set pieces.

An earlier Grenville novel, Dark Places, which returns to the family horrors of her second book, Lilian's Story (1985), is one of the finest novels yet to come out of Australia. It tells the story of the abused daughter, Lilian, this time from the perspective of the self-hating abuser, her father. It should have won the 1994 Booker Prize and was not even shortlisted. The Secret River is a long, atmospheric and complex historical narrative, which begins in a Dickensian London and moves to a developing Australia.

It possesses real power and tells the story of Australia as much as it does that of the characters.

Two very British writers have come through from what was a strongly British shortlist.

In the absence of Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights, former Booker runner-up Sarah Waters, the Welshborn author of Fingersmith, is represented by The Night Watch, the first of her four novels not to be set in Victorian London. This time she follows three women and one man through their experiences in the Blitz. It is a lengthy narrative and as by now expected with Waters, draws heavily on the sexual lives of the characters.

Shaped by a very different style of British writing is Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk. Ignore the sickly title: this is a stylish narrative, again centring on that most beloved and reliable of themes, the family.

St Aubyn, who is well placed within the British literary establishment and revered for his nuanced reading of class, was expected to make the shortlist. His exploration of the trials of domesticity ranges from child-rearing to the cruel role reversals experienced by ageing parents.

This should not win, but is an engaging example of a less brash style of very English comedy of manners as perfected in a much earlier epoch. For all the laughs, there are also moments of almost profound sadness.

In contrast to Waters and St Aubyn, whose novels are well set within their culture and society, is Kiran Desai's dense and worthy second novel, The Inheritance of Loss.

Desai is the daughter of three-time Booker contender Anita Desai, whose grasp of multi-cultural complexities is central to her fiction.

Kiran Desai understandably has shared in some of that life that inspired her mother's books. Yet whereas Anita Desai's stylistic understatement proved a strength, her daughter allows issues to become polemical statements.

Her busy portrait of post-colonial India moves ponderously between a more deliberate discourse on globalisation and multiculturalism. It is surprising to see it included at the possible expense of Claire Messud's engaging and topical comedy of manners, Manhattan style, The Emperor's Children. Had it been selected, it would have marked the first appearance of a fully US voice in the Booker shake-up, as previous winner DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little was pastiche Americana. If there was only space for one comedy of manners, it was always going to be the very English Mother's Milk with its subtext of ironies.

Peter Carey and Nadine Gordimer featured among the 19 long-listed novels.

Neither were expected to make the final half-dozen, and it is arguable that the biggest surprise of this Booker bunfight was the failure of JG Ballard's Kingdom Come, which was not even long-listed. The most convincing aspect of this year's shortlist is the refusal to allow reputation, or rather celebrity, to dictate.

That the panel selected novels such as Carry Me Down and The Secret River, both studies in survival, confirms that there was a serious engagement with the fiction on offer. This is also reflected in the inclusion of Hisham Matar's taut thriller-like In the Country of Men, which draws on his Libyan childhood experience and the horror of his father's disappearance and bizarre reappearance.

I wanted to see Hyland and Grenville on this shortlist, equally I would have liked to see Canadian Mary Lawson's The Other Side of the Bridge, which is such a fine example of the technical application of narrative cohesion subtly at work. No big loud books won through; Jacobson was a surprise faller.

Kate Grenville must be the favourite with a profound, historical novel that is a memorial to a people, while Hyland has imagined a stark personal hell. The Booker judges have managed to do the impossible - satisfying critics and readers without resorting to compromises or token gestures.