OCTOBER IS the month when the betting halls talk books. First the Nobel and then the Man Booker spur up considerable literary dust. This year, after the customary debate about those overlooked by the Nobel committee and way-off-the-mark reports about poets being favoured for the 2010 Nobel, the focus is on the Man Booker
Prize. The announcement of shortlist had opened with much enthusiasm towards Peter Carey’s third run for the award. However, towards the close, odds favour little-known author Tom McCarthy’s C. Last week, Ladbrokes closed betting early on the prize, citing an inexplicable surge towards the McCarthy novel. At William Hill on Monday, C led with odds of 8/15 while Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room and Emma Donoghue’s Room were in a joint second place at 6/1.
The award is known to bring with it not only the award money, but massive recognition among average readers for whom the Booker tag translates into a reason to buy the book. Last year’s winner, Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, also went on to become a worldwide bestseller. This year’s Booker winner is due to be announced late on Tuesday night. Each of the six shortlisted authors will be awarded £2,500, and the winner of the Booker will receive £50,000.
The shortlisted novels:
1. Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America
Carey won the 2001 Booker for True History of the Kelly Gang and was successful in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda. He is one of just two authors to have won twice, the other being South African J.M. Coetzee. Carey is on his third run with fictional biography of the philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville. The Australian writer’s book is set in the 19th century, where Olivier is a French aristocrat sent to the New World to study prisons, but in reality to save his neck in a future revolution. Parrot is the son of an itinerant English printer who must spy on and protect him.
2. Emma Donoghue’s Room
The Irish writer’s inventive, disturbing book is inspired by the harrowing case of the Austrian girl Elisabeth Fritz girl who was held captive by her father in the basement of their family home for 24 years.
3. Andrea Levy’s
Long Song
After her much acclaimed fourth novel Small Island, Andrea Levy delivered her fifth novel a notch higher. The novel is set in the early 19th-century Jamaica, on a sugar-cane plantation, in the years around the abolition of slavery. The novel is in the form of a memoir written by an old Jamaican woman called July, once a slave on Amity Plantation.
4. Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room
The book in three parts: “The Follower”, “The Lover” and “The Guardian”, mainly set in Lesotho, central Africa and India has received much acclaim as a “travel writing of peculiar sort”. The protagonist of the story that shifts between first and third person goes through three different experiences which leave the reader with a baffled sense of life.
5. Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question
Award-winning Briti-sh writer and broadcaster Jacobson gives a spectacular work that explores the Jewish identity in Britain and male friendship.
6. Tom McCarthy’s C
In a 1960s-style anti-novel in which the central figure, Serge Carrefax, and his sister Sophie grow up surrounded by transmitters and insects. His father, an eccentric inventor, oversees a school for deaf children; his mother, who is deaf and was once the father’s pupil, manufactures silk. As Sophie’s death forms a part of the backdrop, the novel among many other “C”s looks at communication, language and technology.