Everyone’s elegant second favourite

Books - reviews and literary news from The Times and The Sunday Times: "“AGREED to award”: if you ask me, this has the ring of compromise about it, despite John Sutherland’s assertions to the contrary.
There is no doubting that John Banville’s novel is an accomplished one; I praised it over the summer. Yet then I wrote about it in conjunction with Ali Smith’s The Accidental: only in the sense that both used a summer away as a device to take characters out of their ordinary lives and forced them to confront aspects of themselves in isolation.



This is only one critic’s opinion, but one book has remained in my mind and the other has been elusive. The book that remains is The Accidental: vivid, quirky, inventive, original. Now twice shortlisted for the prize, Ali Smith — still a young novelist — will doubtless have her chance of the Booker; perhaps it could be agreed that it was “Banville’s turn”, as it was for Graham Swift when he won the prize in 1996 for Last Orders, his far superior Waterland having been overlooked.

But prizes shouldn’t work that way, and usually they don’t. Having been in many judging chambers myself, I know how prizes sometimes get awarded.

Was this any one judge’s favourite book? Something makes me doubt it. It is a beautiful book, extremely assured and elegantly written, and it has the mark of a “prize-winning novel”. But that can be a dead hand, too.

To my mind it is not the best of the novels on this shortlist but then I was not party to the mysterious alchemy that is always the most significant aspect of the judging process. "