IT WAS fourth time lucky for Britain's Julian Barnes, the favourite, as he won the Man Booker prize last night with The Sense of an Ending, the shortest novel among the six contenders.
For Barnes the win was almost inevitable. Once Alan Hollinghurst's hotly tipped The Stranger's Childhad 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 shortlisting 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 the judges last night described it as.
Most unfortunately of all though, it defeated a far better work, Canadian Patrick deWitt's highly original Western, the 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.
It is a daring, offbeat novel and one that will endure – the kind of novel that the Man Booker Prize badly needs as a winner, now more than ever with the award facing new criticisms over its failure to serve quality fiction.
The Sense of an Endingis a sonata, but the 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 visible 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.
If The Sisters Brotherswas overlooked because of the violence which would be expected of a Western, and because it is a genre novel, still deWitt would have been a worthy winner given the quality of the writing and the seriousness of several of its themes, such as loneliness, loyalty, trust and the moral weight of animals.
Equally, Barnes had a second worthy challenger in the shortlist's other 19th-century novel, Carol Birch's colourful Jamrach's Menagerie, with its shades of Peter Carey.
It is Birch’s 11th novel and she is one of the quiet heroines of British fiction.
It must be conceded the both deWitt and Birch will benefit greatly, and deservedly, from their shortlistings.
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, AD Miller's quasi-confessional thriller Snowdropsand Stephen Kelman's haphazardly conceived Pigeon English, partly inspired by the real-life murder of a young boy – nether of which were exceptional works – while Canadian poet Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Bluesnever 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 A natomy of a Disappearance. But it never even made the long list.