AND THE GREATEST BOOKER NOVEL IS...................

As a panel of literary experts prepares to decide which is the greatest novel from 40 years' worth of Booker Prize winners, Robert McCrum assesses the prize's impact on what we read

Sunday March 9, 2008 The Observer

The Booker Prize is a characteristically British combination of a great sporting fixture and a cultural jamboree. Autumn after autumn, it stirs up literary debate and makes people who would otherwise go to bed with a biography or a thriller open a novel, probably by someone they've never heard of. One of the Booker's best functions has been to promote a national conversation about what we look for in new fiction and what we think its purposes might be.

Now the Booker is at it again with a 40th-birthday promotion. Not for the first
time, either; in 1993, a panel of three ex-Booker chairs chose Midnight's
Children as the Booker of Bookers. Never let it be said that the prize lacks
confidence in its mission or its role as Britain's Goncourt/Pulitzer.

With some justification, ctually. When, after 40 years, we consider the prototype of that
contemporary phenomenon - the sponsored arts trophy - we find that the
Booker has three important achievements to its credit.

First, it now successfully promotes a global readership in British and Commonwealth fiction, from China to Peru. Television and the worldwide web transmit longlist, shortlist and
prize-night news to places whose idea of the British novel was previously
confined to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.

Second, the prize has helped to sell new fiction by unknown writers and to nourish the garden of
British (and Commonwealth) creativity. No big deal, you may say, in the age
of global English, but the Booker has carved out a useful forum in which
serious new fiction can be discussed. By making this latest promotion open
to the public (after the panel has drawn up a shortlist, the public will be
able to cast its vote), the Booker will demonstrate its accessibility which,
in view of that suspicion about metropolitan literary cabals, is no bad
thing.

Third, despite some notable duds, over which we shall pass in discreet silence, the Booker has
posted an impressive list of winners. By any standards, a roster that
includes VS Naipaul's In A Free State, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children and JM Coetzee's Disgrace is evidence of, at the very least, good judgment and good luck.

Lock 40 years of Booker shortlists in a time capsule, uncork
it 100 years hence, and you would hand the literary critic of 2108 a useful
representation of late 20th-century English language fiction - excluding
America. And that's the most glaring downside to this birthday party. The
bizarre exclusion of American writers (no doubt for sensible administrative
reasons) restricts the significance of the prize.
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