It was fourth time lucky for Britain's Julian Barnes the favourite as he won the Man Booker Prize with The Sense of an Ending, the shortest novel among the six contenders.
For Barnes it was inevitable. Once Alan Hollinghurst's hotly tipped The Stranger's Child had failed to make the shortlist, it was as if this year's outcome had been choreographed for Barnes and the British literary establishment.
In fairness to Barnes, who had seemed poised for victory in 2005 on his third short listing, with Arthur & George, only to lose out to John Banville's The Sea, The Sense of an Ending, which tells the story of Tony Webster a man reviewing a life dictated by his failure to live, is a crafted work.
Not only does it defer to the importance of narrative voice, it pulls off an impressive twist that really does take the reader by surprise. It is calm and controlled, and moving, if far from the "classic of English literature" the chairman of judges last night described it as.
Most unfortunately of all though, it defeated a far better work, Canadian Patrick deWitt's highly original Western and unforgettable The Sisters Brothers in which as two siblings set off on yet another brutal mission, one of them, Eli, the narrator, begins to have second thoughts about his life – thanks to the bond he forms with his maligned horse, Tub, the hero of the book.
The Sense of an Ending is a sonata, Man Booker should have gone for the concerto.
Barnes's win also makes it three in a row for British writers; Hilary Mantel won in 2009 with Wolf Hall, while another highly visual writer and commentator, Howard Jacobson took the honours last year with The Finkler Question.
Previously the prize had international credentials, now its critics are dismissing it as domestic and tainted by literary politics.
Barnes's win with its hint of predestination is unfair to him, but is far more damaging to the prize itself. The other half of this year's shortlist, consisted of two English first novels, A.D. Miller's quasi-confessional thriller Snowdrops and Stephen Kelman's haphazardly conceived Pigeon English, partly inspired by the real life murder of a young boy — nether of which were exceptional works.
Canadian poet Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues never looked a serious contender. Admittedly this year's prize, aside from including deWitt, seemed caught between several stools and while looking towards independent publishers rather than the major houses was a commendable gesture, the campaign never recovered from omitting an obvious winner in Libyan author Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance. But it never even made the long list.
