This year's Booker shortlist, with its bizarre omissions, may have been a disappointing surprise but there was always a decided inevitability about the outcome.
Canadian Margaret Atwood's triumph last night with her 10th novel, The Blind Assassin, was obvious from the announcement last month. It was her fourth shortlisting. Atwood is, quite simply, one of the most widely read good writers in the world. Her fiction is intelligent, brilliantly observed and relentlessly well crafted. That said, even her many admirers, and Atwood is always readable, would agree this is not her finest novel. She should have won in 1989 with Cat's Eye.
Even so, The Blind Assassin was enough to dominate a poor selection and ensure this year's Booker would result in a life's achievement award - albeit a premature one - rather than a real contest. As the most internationally established writer on the list, Atwood's stature would be approached only by Kazuo Ish iguro, the Booker winner in 1989 with The Remains of the Day. This time he was shortlisted for When We Were Orphans, a poor, rather stilted performance from an undoubtedly gifted writer.
The Blind Assassin is a big book and is technically accomplished, meticulously detailed, deliberate and often funny - Atwood has a natural flair for irony. Much of the story is told by Iris Chase, now 82 and free to tell her version of a family history dogged by foul deeds. Iris's account spans much of the 20th century. The Chase clan is part of Canada's new rich in a country in which old money can never be older than recent. True to Atwood's irony, the Chase fortune was built on buttons.
Iris is as concerned with the business of being old as she is preoccupied with the truth. Having spent much of her life, and certainly her marriage, as a passive observer, Iris adopts an engaging conversational tone and it is this voice which makes the book a highly readable experience.
Though not the best of Atwood, most readers should be sufficiently engaged to read it at one sitting - I did. Ageing becomes an important theme in a novel which, though presented as a thriller, is about layers of story. It is also about power and the powerless. Class and snobbery also emerge as lesser themes. On yet another level it is a fairy-tale with a cast including a bad witch as her sister-in-law, a doomed princess in the lovely Laura and the passive narrator. At the heart of the book is another story, that of a pair of doomed lovers who sustain their romance through a story of their own. The authorship of that novel within the novel is presented as a mystery, except it is not as mysterious as we are led to believe.
Also shortlisted was English writer Matthew Kneale for The English Passengers. A lively multiple narrative set in the 19th century as the men of God battled the men of science, it tells the story of a strange collection of individuals setting sail for Tasmania with a contrasting set of agendas. It looked the likely dark horse.
Two US-based Irish writers emerged as surprise contenders in a year of good fiction, particularly good Irish fiction from John Banville, Mary Morrissy and Anne Enright. Michael Collins set his offbeat investigation, The Keepers of Truth, in small-town America and spoken through an American voice. Brian O'Doherty's stagy dark pastoral, The Deposition of Father McGreevy, having been quietly received on publication certainly benefited from the heated debate in Ireland surrounding his tale of dead women and a deranged youth intent on sex with sheep. The writer with most to win from this year's Booker could well prove Trezza Azzopardi, whose first novel, The Hiding Place, though also a surprise Booker choice, could do well in the forthcoming Whitbread first novel award. Not a vintage Booker campaign, however, and certainly a muted one following the popularity last year of J.M. Coetzee's magnificent Disgrace.
