After all the speculation, the outcome of this year's International Impac Dublin Literary Award will be announced tomorrow. The focus continues to be on the original front-runners - Colm Tóibín with The Master, Ronan Bennett for Havoc In Its Third Year and London-based Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers.
Each of the three had been well reviewed and appeared on the 2004 Booker longlist. Only Tóibín, with his poised, atmospheric narrative based on the life of novelist Henry James, went on to feature on that year's Booker shortlist as the obvious winner.
He should have won. He didn't. Now he appears poised to becomes the first home winner in the 11-year history of the €100,000 Impac award, a prize no one could accuse of parochialism. He is not the first Irish writer to be in this position. In 2003 John McGahern seemed a likely winner with what was to be his final novel, That They May Face The Rising Sun. It was to be his final novel and, in hindsight, began the process of leave-taking which was concluded in Memoir (2005). Not even the lyric power of McGahern's prose could withstand the political and cultural weight of Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk's exploration of East meets West in his dazzling thriller, My Name Is Red.
Can Anglophile American Henry James, famous for his closed, solitary life, offset the challenge of a story as big as that contained in Maps for Lost Lovers? The austere beauty of The Master never quite matches the dramatic impact of Aslam's narrative about a Muslim community in present day Britain. Maps for Lost Lovers is superb domestic realism.
Tóibín can win; but should he?
