14/10/2011 The Review Show

The Book Review Special, our preview of the biggest event in the

literary calendar, once memorably described as posh bingo. The six

novels short-listed for Man Booker Prize.

Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English sees the tough world of the council

estate through the eyes of a young Ghanaian immigrant.

Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie travels on a more exotic adventure.

Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers describes a physical and

moral journey en route to a killing. Esi Edugyan explores racial

identity in his World War II novel Half Blood Blues.

Newcomer AD Miller phrupls the depths of the Russian underworld in

Snow Drops. And in his fourth appearance on the

short list, Julian Barnes minds the idea of memory in The Sense of an

Ending. What does our panel make of the

short list? And of accusations that the Man Booker is dumbing down.

Joining me tonight to discuss everything are four Booker

reviewers who couldn't be more bookish. The writer and academic

Germaine Greer, Cambridge English graduate now better known for

Downtonne Abbey, Dan Stevens. The former Telegraph literary editor

and tauter in his own right Sam Leith and Joanne Harris author of

Chocolate. Between us, Dan, Joanne, Sam and me

have thousands of followers on Twitter and you can find the Review

Show there, too. Jermaine has yet to join the party.

Time for the first two weeks on the short list, boeut of which feature

young boys but -- both of which feature young boys but in very

different world's. Stephen Kelman's Pigeon English

draws on the killing of Damilola Taylor for its description of gang

life on a South London estate. 11- year-old Harrison Opoku an

immigrant from Ghana decides he will solve the murder of a local

boy who has been stabbed, helped by a friend and a guardian angel in

the form of a pigeon, Harri sets out wide eyed but undeterred by the

violence around him. Some difficult topics are brought up in the book.

Were I to explore those through an adult's eyes perhaps the tempt

Taigs would be for it to become a sermon. -- temptation would be for

it to become a sermon. Harri is 11 years old, he doesn't that

sophistication about him, that agenda. I'm able to present the

world as he sees it, pretty much black and white.

Me "Me and the dead boy are only half friends, I didn't see him very

much because he was older. Co-ride his bike with no hands and and you

never even wanted him to fall off. I said a prayer for him inside my

head. It just said "sorry". That's all I could remember. I pretended

like, if I kept looking hard enough I could make the blood move and go

back in the shape of a boy. I could bring him back alive that way. It

happened before, where I used to live there was a chief who brought

his son back like that. It was a long time ago, before I was born.

That's why it was a Mir kepl, it didn't work this time." Pigeon

English is Kell man's first novel. He himself grew up on a council

estate in Luton so knows first hand how hard life can be for children

in a that world. Kids like Harrison they're presented with challenges

in that kind of environment. They're presented with a lot of

difficulties and temptations but despite all of that you can make

the choice. Harri represents that essence of self-determination.

In Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie, eight-year-old Jaffy

Brown also inhabits the backstreets of London, but this is a 19th

century slum, dominated by the stench of the Thames.

Jaffy's life is changed forever when he's carried away in the jaws

of a tiger. He escapes with his life and finds a new identity with

Mr Jamrach, the exporter of exotic animals. Before he knows it Jaffy

is on a ship headed for the East independenties, a journey that will

challenge everything he knows. incident propels him into the main

story. Basically he's going to grow up G to sea and have adventures,

the core of the story is how people behave in extreme situations, in an

extreme survival situation. It's about also coming through that,

coming back at the other side of this and how you live your life

after facing something more extreme than any of could you say imagine.

"A pod of dolphins joined us off an island of white sand and cocoa

palms, rode our bow wave joyfully for a mile or two. They left us,

and took with them the time of stillness. After them the breezes

got up in a jolly whistling kind of way. The waves began to rise

against a mountainous region to starboard, breaking hugely over

miles of shimmering strand that edged a dense green jungle." Birch

uses the ocean as an ultimate leveler when Jaffy and his fellow

crew's survival is threatened. was partly what interested me, how

different people behave in those situations, not necessarily how you

would expect. The people who turn out to be heroes are not

necessarily the ones you might expect.

Jermaine, let's begin with Pigeon English, the novel set in a modern

council estate. How well do you think Stephen Kelman gets inside

the hid, the mind of this 11-year- old boy? He doesn't get insigh the

head of anything because he's making up the mind of this 11-year-

old boy. It's his literary construct. There is no boy out

there that he's examining and getting inside of. Isn't that what

authors always do? Quite. But this is part of it. He makes the boy up,

he also makes up the boy's naisent sexuality. He makes up the

exploration of that sexuality and the strange behaviour of the girls

who keep threatening to give him a blow job and all of that. He speaks

a strange language which again is Stephen Kelman's tissue of Yardie

speak and invented words and so on. I'm affray, I read it through the

first time and I thought hmm but I felt I had to read it again, the

second time I couldn't stand it. Sam were you as unconvinced? I was

in favour of the idea of an author making stuff up! I thought the

voice, with a great strength of this book is the voice and it is,

God alone knows if this is actually how a 12-year-old Ghanaian kid in a

London council estate would talk. But that doesn't really matter. It

persuades you, I thought. It sticks with you in a way his little

tpraigsz, heisation "I swear all the time" -- phrases. He says "I

swear all the time." All of this, in the same way, the voice is

entirely sustained for me. I thought it completely worked.

think there's enough charm here to deal with the suspension of

disbelief. You had to suspend your disbelief? A little bit. There were

areas I wasn't sure this was a Ghanaian child speaking. You had

the strong sense of it being a child. He had a huge charm and

innocence and a sort of weird street wisdom as well with it. He's

very appealing. I'm not sure I enjoyed the pigeon interludes,ity

thought they were slightly unnecessary and in a style which

rankled a little, I thought. But there's a lot of heart in there.

Pigeon, the magical realism where the pigeon talks to me.

Pious, dream-reading pathetic pigeon. It was completely

unnecessary, it shoe horned in a message that could have been told

with the narrative it was. Going back to what you said about getting

inside the boy's head, the structure of the in a narrative and

flightly nature of it was difficult to read at times but reflected that

wild imagination of an 11-year-old boy. Where the book was successful

was where you had this innocent childhood, almost just William like

desire to be a young detective and find stuff out begins this very,

very dark estate world, this Godless, hellish place that he's

trying to understand. I think that worked very well. I suppose this is

a world post-the riots, although the book was written before it,

post the riots we're all very interested in what goes on inside

the culture of gangs? Supposing that's what you find out. What

really worried me about the book on second reading when the charm bit,

I was no longer discovering this strange argo that the child thinks

in, he's not actually speaking, he's a narrator. But then I really

felt it was a co-option of a kind I couldn't go on with. The problem

with slang per se is that it einvolves so fast by the time the

book comes to publication, the slang is out of date. He's writing

about a non-literary world. it's not the genuine slang is

anyway. Some of it and some is not. Some is Ghanaian slang. Does it

matter, Sam. I don't think it matters at all. It is a literary

performance as you say. I think, actually, whatever weaknesses there

are in the book the patois is its great strength. But it is an

invention and we were tempted to take it for an insight which is

what it isn't. It's not an insight into gang culture, the boy isn't in

the gang culture. I never said that. Let's move on to the second book we

want to talk about at the moment which is Jamrach's Menagerie, again

a young boy but not against the background of a modern gang culture

and there the author is trying not just to get inside the young boy's

head but also Carol Birch needs to create the historical world as well.

It's interesting that you say this, because I didn't feel it was a

historical world at all. I felt it was a fantasy world, to me it was

Moby Dick meets the voyage of the dawn treader, there are so many

fantasy elements in there that are not really touch stones against any

kind of reality we know, they're these kind of strange he sodic

moments like fantasy set pieces. The realistic killing of whale,

very emotional but then you have the dragon which is not quite a

dragon which is pure fairytale, it is all evoked in this poetic

elegant language which is to me is the language of magical realism.

Much more Angela Carter than Sarah Waurtsz. I completely disagree. I

couldn't find anything to like in this book, I was appalled to find

it on the list. I thought the prose were overcrowded which at times did

resemble a menagerie, but one where the author hasn't cleared the cages

out for a while. The plot went nowhere, the narrator never

expressed anything, as if written by a bad tourist pointing at the

banal and missing the focus of these gorgeous adventures. They

cross the Atlantic in two pages! In the middle of hunting this whale he

has time to reflect back on his childhood, you think, no, this is

not Moby Dick at all, I thought it was a mess. Could you say the kind

of jostling or lightness of the prose was echoing Dickens in any

way? No. You know who I blame for this

book, I blame Peter Carey because what you do is, you take an

interesting historic something that happened, and you false faoeu it,

and then you add your own -- false faoeu it and add your own spin to

it. There is a real story there, which is true that they went

looking for the dragon and called it ora in the language of the

islanders and there are all these shards of historic journalistic

historic fact. Then you have the careful research into what the

Thames was like and it turns out there was a real menagerie and the

story of a boy taken by a tiger and so on and so forth. So it all gets

put together in this pseudo fact, fact lit. I think we're back to

pseudo fact, is it fiction? I think you're right, there is that graft

you both see between fact and fiction. I thought, I'm slightly

with Dan, the problem with it for me, it was fully imagine whether in

fact or not, the voice, the problem was that this was supposedly a kind

of middle 19th century urchin effectively going to sea and he

writes like a creative writing graduate from UEA. Massively

overwritten, great poetic descriptions of the moon and stars.

Yet, when you get to the amazing movements he constantly says "I'm

unable to describe this." You have these characters pop up on the ship

unintroduced, suddenly Jeffrey climbs down the riging, who's

Jeffrey? We're seeing a lot of this media this returning again and

again, Sarah Waters books, what is it about this period of 19th

century history or as would you say it, fantasy, why are we drawn to it

as readers? We fantasise it because we do it in real life, we see it as

a period where things are it still there to be explored and horizons

to be conquered. Things were emerging and being invented. I

think people think of it as a more exciting time than what we have now.

Of course it's very tempting to be able to fictionalise these kind of

Victorian streets we think we know from all sorts of other kinds of

literature and make it our own. We'll move on to different horizons

ourselves now. Both the aut Hearst of our next authors from our next

two books come from Canada but strayed from their home turf.

Patrick deWitt's second novel The Sisters Brothers follows the wild

West Odyssey of Eli and Charlie, no notorious hitmen heading on

horseback across the United States to gold rush California search of

their latest quarry. You'll often see this scenario in serialised

adventure novels, two grizzly riders before the fire telling

their stories and singing stories of death and lace. But I can tell

you after a full day of riding I want nothing more than to lie down

and sleep which is just what I did without even eating a proper meal.

." From start to enit was about taking liberties. That was the fun

of it. I knew from the beginning it wasn't going to be historically

accurate, necessarily. I never wanted it to be one of those type

of books, I didn't want to teach anyone about history. En route from

Oregon to San Francisco the brothers meet a number of Gothic

characters who spark doubt in Eli's mine over his murderous past.

has a temper whorbgs went activated it transports him and he becomes a

second person, his brother, who is very manipulative has been

utilising that temper and through this Eli has become very capable of

violence. But it's not something that he's

drawn to, it's not something that he relishes. He, at a certain point

just has his fill of it and feels he can't do it any more.

"Well, you kill a man, then his friend or brother or father comes

around and it starts all over again. So, it was that Charlie sometimes

found himself outnumbered, which was where I came in."

Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues is a story of friendship and betrayal

amongst a group of jatz musicians, stranded at the start of World War

II -- jazz. Spanning five decades, Edugyan moves us between jazz-

soaked Berlin, Paris and Baltimore as the guilty secrets of the past

overwhelm her characters. "Of course the recording's cult status

had to do the illusion of it all, not just the kid but all of us.

Think about it, a bunch of German and American kids meeting up in

Berlin, in Paris, between the wars to make all this wild, joyful music

before the Nazis kick it to pieces. And the legend survives when a lone

tin box is dug out of a dam wall in a flat which once belonged to a

Nazi. Man, if that ain't a story, I never heard one." Half Blood Blues

explores the experiences of three young Blackmen in Nazi Germany and

occupied Paris. "Me, I was American and so light skinned folks often

took me for light. Son of two Baltimore s I came out straight

haired, green eyed, a right little Spaniard. In Baltimore this gave me

a softer ride than some. I'd be lying if I said it ain't back in

Berlin, too. When we gone out together in that city, any cout

approaching us always comes straight to me. When Hiero cut in

which is native German, when the gent would damn near die of

surprise. Most ain't liked it, though. A savage talking like he's

civilised! You'd see that old glint in his eye, like knife turning."

Sam, here we have two, in a way familiar world's in fiction, that

of jazz, that of World War II. Do you think Esi Edugyan has taken a

fresh approach? I thought it was sort of, it was a competent, well-

told, involving but not astonishing historical novel. I think she'll go

on to right a great novel O go on to write a better novel, I don't

think it's...it carried me along, it didn't make me think this is

something really knew or fresh. The vocabulary, the kind of voice,

again, there was a slippage sometimes, it wasn't always

sustained. I think she didn't quite know how to end it, to be honest.

She gets to the end and then doesn't know what to do with the

characters and it was a perfunctory ending. I thought it was a

beautiful ending, it's one of the best books about music I've read.

The narrative works. The structure of it is almost like jazz, you

return to these themes and then break off into sort of wild

possibilities. The narrator, it drags the reader, implicates the

reader in this paranoid spiral of poisonous venom against this Hiero

character. I thought it was, I spent a long

time thinking about why I liked it so much. I think it's to do with,

it's a very clever structure and it works towards this strange kind of

ERMic independent, a blind, jazz musician who has ended up on the

edge of world. I thought it was Amadeus all over

again. You have the envious minor musician

who is the only person with enough insight to know how good this guy

actually is who then destroys him and has to, and betrays him and has

to live with the awareness that this thing that might have been he

had destroyed. But the things that make me twitchy about it was that

again it evokes a specific situation which is what was going

on with music in Europe with jazz in Europe on the eve of the Second

World War. The big name there is not Louis Armstrong. I don't know

why she decided to make it Louis Armstrong. It was duke Ellington.

She talks about Ellington as well. Louis Armstrong is an interesting

one because he was at the end of his days. She talks about a lot of

others as well but it's this strange sort of, because they're

American, I think. Talking all the time about how joyous jazz is, you

would have thought there was no such thing as the blues, she has an

odd way of writing about it. interesting thing about the fact

that they were jazz musicians is that these were men in the

nightclub of Berlin under a vaoeud mar were feted and then the whole

world is completely turned upside down by the Third Reich. Grain the

interesting thing for me wasn't specifically the historical context,

although it was interesting, to me it was the close relationship

between these men in this smoky- half-lit world and their

relationship with music which in some ways almost pwhrots out to the

historical impact around them. They're completely blind to the

danger and all that matters to them is the music and getting right. To

me I went, for this un, yeah, this has blood, it has haert. Some of

the others left me luke-warm, well written but without anything to

make me want to drive me to know what happened next. It's slightly

fuzzy at the end. But this idea of a road trip with these two sad, old

embittered men going in search of the third one and finding him in

the middle of these sculptures made of scrap metal and the wreckage of

his life is such a touching image. Our next book is about a road trip,

the wild West one, two men heading from Oregon towards van Fran. Sam,

did you see this as a classic Western, is it very much inside the

genre or does it do something else? I think this is one, probably the

most outright original book on the list. It's a Western in that it's

golt a sort of classic Western setting -- got a sort of classic

Western setting. The assassin, The Sisters Brothers, whore houses,

violent men and gold-diggers, but it's much more surreal than that.

It has a bit of Cormack McCar knee in it, DNA, you can't really write

about that territory without having it. MP Cormack McCarthy. You move

throughout the landscape where nothing really, nothing connects to

anything else, characters will appear and disappear. It almost has

the feel of an algory, a Pilgrim's Progress landscape. It was

cinematic,ity thought. Yeah, it's written in sequences. This is one

of the interesting things about it, because they're very elegantly

constructed. It's a very sophisticated book that is casting

a strange light on the popular tradition of the Western. It takes

all the cliches and makes them into something else, something

disturbing. The description of the death of the horse, for example,

anybody who cares about horses, it's reading on...absolute chilled

horror as the incompetence of these two men means that this faithful

horse that had always done more than could have been expected.

Suddenly, the whole genre is seen athwart in a mad kind of way. It's

annoying in way, because you want to build up a narrative impetus

that will keep you going from one sequence to the other, so then they

say - interval - and then you have to go out and buy intellectual

peanuts before going on. Did it seem as he sodic, I kept thinking

Coen brothers? Absolutely, it was like a Coen brothers movie in a

book. I just thought it was inherently funny, it was delightful

to see such a Darkley comic book on the list. The theme of masculinity

and crisis taking the Western but having your protagonist, not sure

if he wants to be killing people any more, slightly falling in love

and desperately in love with his pathetic old horse as well, it's a

funny book. Joanne, did it make you laugh? Not at all. I kotz a kind of

exI say tense actualist humour but from this flat Monday tone going

for it, I found it tiresome after a while. I like Cormack McCarthy and

I kept seeing blood Meridian behind this with seemed to me stronger

with its bubblecal prose. What is it about the world of the

wild West, is it the immorality, the lawlessness, we see these

individuals pitted against each other without a cell or structure?

As a landscape and I think in this it's because it is a frontier, I

think that's what it makes, makes it attractive to this to people

writing extis tension comedy in which a landscape has nothing fixed,

in which they're making their own fate. I think that's probably why

it's attracted writers from Cormack McCarthy, who isn't funny. It has

Dylanesk, Nick Cave style poetry to it, a Lyricism to it. A boy being

hit on the spade constantly, God that made me laugh. A weird sense

of humour there! Our final two books come from authors at the

opposite end of their literary careers, AD Miller, we did review

the book back in January and the repeated bridesmaid, Booker

bridesmaid, Julian Barnes. AD Miller's debut novel Snow Drops

tells the story of Nick, a 30 something English lawyer working in

Moscow during the early noughties oil boom. Set against the backdrop

of a Russian winter, a chance encounter with a beautiful girl

sparks an infatuation that will lead to Nick's slow decline into

moral degradation. I described the Russian winter both as a physical

phenomenon with all its obstacles and joys and the way in which it

shapes your life when you're living through it, I also tried to use it

as a kind of symbolic thing sorbgs the snow in my book functions as a

kind of moral oblivion. "My nostrils froze together, the hairs

inside them hugging each other for survival. The electronic

thermometer outside McDonald's said minus 27, it was so-called there

was almost nobody smoking in the streets. The traffic police had

been issued with old-fashioned felt boots, an inshepbt Russian

precaution that kept their feet from falling off, while they hung

around extorting bribes from people." As his morals disappear

Nick pursues the good life with scant regard for the consequences.

Nick definitely makes choices. He is the author of his own misfortune,

or more precisely, the mispor tune of others. He's not an innocent,

naive, unwilling participant in the event the books describes. He knows

what's happening. Miller's Russia is a bleak country, rife with vodka,

vice and violence. It's true to say the depiction of Russia in my book

is not completely flattering but the things it describes are true

and real. The kinds of crime that happen in my book happen all too

frequently in Russia and corruption is endemic in Russia as it is in my

book. "I was already dizzy from the vodka and wanted to leave around

5.00 but didn't want to be first to quit. Finally he said, now we wash,

how do we wash, in snow, she said." "Isn't that dangerous U know,

gestureing, that it's for the heart "Life is dangerous." No-one

survived it yet." Julian Barnes makes his fourth

appearance on the short list with his latest novel, The Sense of an

Ending. Barnes splits the book in two, the first part sketching Tony

Webster's memories of his sex- starved sixth form year as he and

his three friends maf gate their way towards adult hood. -- navigate.

The second act picks up the story 40 years on, when Tony, now retired

is bequeathed the diary of one of his school mates. Suddenly he's

forced to marry his youthful recollections with the written

system of his friends. "As the witnesses to your life diminish

there is less corroboration and therefore less certainty as to what

you are or have been. What was the line Adrian used to

quote "his to Terry is that certainty produced at the point

where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of

documentation"." Through the voice of Tony Webster Barnes' muses on

ageing, memory and the malability of time? "We live in time, it holds

us and moulds us, but I've never felt I understood it very well. I'm

not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back or may

exist elsewhere in parallel versions. You know, I mean,

ordinary, every daytime which clocks and watches assure us passes

regularly, tick tock, click clock. Is there anything more plausible

than a second-hand?" Let agencies begin with Snow Drops,

Joanne -- let's begin with Snow Drops. The title, you learn at the

outside, it's Moscow Lang slang for a corpse that lies buried or hidden

in the winter snows emerging only in the thaw, we're taken into a

very immoral world from the start. We are, it's a dark atmospheric

kind of thriller but ultimately I found very coal. I think in some

ways it reads a bit like a protest owe screen play. It would be a kind

of superior screen play thriller, but to me all the characters were

sadly flat, the girls particularly, all the women in fact are terribly

stereo typical, I found it difficult to see them or care about

them in human terms. Is it because we're seeing them through the eyes

of Nick the narrator who perhaps sees them in a sexual way? Whether

we do or not it doesn't make me warm to them very much. It's not

really a thriller, though, there's a strange element, almost a

confessional, the character of the fee an you say back home, never

named and he's confessing this story to her. Not a thriller in the

conventional sense. It's intriguing, a strange -- there's a strange

breed of first novelists at the moment, which are very often guys

leaving the very unstable world of the City for the more secure world

of the novelist and writing about their experiences in that world

with the slightly ramped up exaggerated sexuality thrown in. I

don't think this book will be on the Moscow Tourist Board

recommended reading list. It's incredibly cynical, it's very, very

dark. I'm not sure AD came from the city, he was a correspondent for

the Economist in Moscow. Moscow is what the book is really

about, otherwise the narrative is Lembit Opik with the cheeky girls,

you just think, when are you going to figure this out you great lump,

that these girls have picked you out of a crowd and they're using

you will. I was never quite sure what they used him for. But the

feeling Moscow, I thought, Moscow is a mad house and it will

certainly was in the period that I think we're in, which is what, ten

years ago? The only thing is, of course, this idiot and he is

obviously an idiot is telling this story to his fiancee who's going to

dump him for sure because he's still upset by the woman. I'm not

so sure that he is an idiot, I think we know what's going on and I

think he really knows what's going on but just as the bankers did in

the financial crisis, he's shutting his mind off it because it's to his

advantage. Jaoe talks about that. The framing story, -- I talks about

that the framing story gives it an extra talk that you have, he's

confessing but as it becomes clearer it's a story, it's a kind

of, Graham Green territory. It's not a thriller, he's not being

menaced by people with guns. Nothing happened in it, the dead

body is almost off to one side of T actually. It's a story of how,

essentially,, he got bitten by the vampire and in the end it becomes

clear Moscow has not let him go. I thought it was well done. It's an

accomplished novel, beautiful turns of phrase, he captures the city

well, a city of knee on lust and prophetic sin. He's an accomplished

writer, I don't think it's the best book on the list but... Let' move

on from this first novel it a much more seasoned novelist. Julian

Barnes, The Sense of an Ending. What did you make of it? I think

he's a wonderful writer and in some ways it's a gripping story. But

it's very short and I think in some respects because it doesn't have

enough time perhaps to flesh out some of the characters, it does

read in a slight, a slighter way than if it were a fully fledged

novel. I think the second-half is much more gripping than the first.

I think he writes much better as an old man than as a young man because

some of these teenage boys have some quite strange turns of phrase,

even for the very pretension teenage boys that they are, but I'm

much more convinced by him later on and by his view of the past and his

own regret. Dan, does saoeutz matter? I think

it's probably Size matter. I think it's the book with probably the

most philosophical depth of the entire list. The length is

irrelevant. It felt like a much longer book, there's so much packed

into it. It's so beautifully crafted. Every word is meticulously

placed. With regards to the pretentious young boys, I knew of

them in my youth and they're very, very well drawn. Germaine Greer did

you see this as a novel of ideas? thought that what happened here is

that Barnes gave himself an almost insoluble problem, which was to

take a hero who, a narrator who would also be a protagonist, who

was lacking in almost everything, perception, wisdom, in fact, my

favourite bit is where he did his apprenticeship in arts

administration, that a sentence so loaded with contempt. So you've got

the manipulation of this character who does not understand why anybody

does anything, who is constantly explaining other people away to

himself and strangely excusing himself. It's about the

falsification of recollection. The difficulty for me was, that when

you write a novel like that with a completely unreliable narrator who

doesn't understand anything, who is in an important encounter with the

only woman he has ever really loved and is simply fussing about the way

she drives, he never manages to establish that other dimension

where you understand what's going on and he doesn't. Sam, can't that

add to the dramatic tension the very fact that he is an unreliable

narrator sorbgs the story is moved as he begins to piece things

together, for example when the letter he has written as a young

man re-emerges later on. That's very effective, that's a little

acid bomb that debt naits in it, I think that's one of the most

powerful novels of the book. Julian Barnes is a writer who has

the difficulty where he has a character who understands nothing,

perceives nothing and gets everything wrong and as he says,

his great love says "just doesn't get it". At the same time he has to

become the vehicle for Julian Barnes to deliver a series of

extremely well thoughtout and well crafted success sayistic episodes

of time and memory and sadness and lost. You don't thit the character

himself is capable of. For a more universal, more universally themed

book, the fact that you have this central protagonist with no self-

knowledge. He goes on this journey, you have this haunting phrase "you

just don't get it" and then it builds up to the big moment at the

end where it does explode and the story just, it just absolutely

expands inside your mind. I think one of the problems is that Adrian

doesn't carry the weight he was given. It interested me that Julian

read that sentence about you know the documentation meeting,

recollection. It's not that clever. Prous isn't that clever and this

certainly isn't that clever. bringing this to our spbs of an

ending. Those are the books themselves because I want to move

on to talk about the prize itself. Now discussing the merit of

literary prizes can feel a bit like groundhog day but this year

everyone does seem to be a bit hotter under the collar than usual.

A year never passes without some kind of furore over the Booker man

prize, but even by Booker standards that has been a tempestuous year.

The first rumpus came with the judging panel, featuring an ex-MP,

political journalist and former spymaster. The press and critical

reaction was immediate and damming. Memorably stating in the New

Statesman that Daily Mirror Stella Rimington was an able and

intelligent woman but you wouldn't ask John Bailey to be a consultant

on Spooks. Matters weren't helped when Chris mulligatawny ipbs

admitted readability was one of his criteria. Several panelists made

comparisons to some Man Booker judges in the past, for instance

George Connolly. The debate has become so heated that a group of

literary protesters has set up an all terpbtive prize, the literature

award for writers who aspire to something finer, who won the

support of former winners. With Dame Stella Rimington describing

the criticism of her as pathetic and the chairman Booker welcoming

the establishment of a literary prize, is this a real challenge to

the nation's most famous literary prize or is it just the annual

storm in the Booker tea cup. Subtle graphic there! So, Sam, what

seems to have got people going is the idea that a couple of judges

have talked about readability being a criteria for the prize. Heaven

forbid. I for the judges. Ipblg readability is a good thing to look

for in a prize. It's not the only thing to look for in a Booker

winner by any means, but if you start defining literary as a praise

term in Contra distinction to things like readability that make

books popular you end up with a narrowing and regressive and

Philistine description of literary. If you were giving hypothetical

book prices how far would Ulysses get in readability? It depends what

kind of reading you're doing. You have to read Ulysses outloud and

it's an unstable text. In the end you Rayise you're boxing with

shadows. -- realise you're boxing with shadows. I would argue the

opposite, the Booker Prize has always been snobish. It has always

taken art novels. It was never possible for someone who wrote a

quintessential mystery that was beautifully written, wiblgy Collins

would not qualify for consideration. Wilkie Collins.

The other thing is that publishers put forward books for consideration

for the Booker. They're not always the best judges. People have it

written into their contracts that they have to be put faor for the

prize, yeah. And it's a way of advertising a book that doesn't

have any obvious immediate appeal to the people who buy their books

in airports, for example. I don't think there's anything wrong with

publishers putting forward books, I think it's great that there are

smaller and less well-known publishers on the list. I think

it's absurd this subject of readability. Of course the book has

to be readability. But I think Chris Mullins said the book

shouldn't be admired, of course it should. There are plenty of

literary prizes and the Man Booker historically is works of great

literary fiction. If it can't provide it somebody else has to do

it. I applaud the others. Looking at this short list, do you

think people have accused of it being dumbed down I think that's

wrong, I think they've accused it of being dumbed down for the wrong

reason. Because of readability thing, readability should come

standard with books, you the might as well construct a car that

doesn't drive. The argument of plot somehow sub trabgts from literary

merit is a complete fallacy much -- subtract. Readability can't be

one of the criteria because Jamrach's Menagerie is on the list.

I know what will happen, it will win now. Any books left off that

should have been on, do you think Sam. I have to say the obvious one,

Alan holg Hurst book was extraordinary. The strangers child.

If I read only seven of these including Alan holg Hurst, I would

have picked a different list. There were huge oversight for some

beautifully written books. Does it still matter tow an author.

wouldn't know. I think it's always great to be nominated. I'm sure.

Somebody great is going to win this, but I just hope that they win it

for themselves and there won't be a lot of people it's not holling

hurst. There is not a Starbucks, there's no loyalty card for

entering several times. That's what our panel thinks of the Man Booker

line-up for 2011. To fine out what the judges themselves win, you'll

have to wait until the glittering award ceremony on Tuesday night.

That's all from us, thanks to my guests for ploughing through

thousands of pages you have I hope for your enlightenment. Germaine

Greer, Sam Leith, Joanne Harris and Dan Stevens. You can find out more

on our books on our website. In the background in the green room

will be jaols hole land who's up next with performances from Peter

gaib real and Knowa and the Whale. Next week Tim Marlow is in the

chairs to discuss the highlights and low lights of the London film

festival, including George Clooney's new film and the film

adaptation of We Need To Talk about Kevin. Here's a taster of what

you'll be seeing. I need a drink of water. Hey, kef.

-- Kev. Listen buddy, it's easy to misunderstand something when you

hear it out of context much What could I not know the context,

I am the context. It says we're going to help people get an

education, create national unity, teach young people a trade and get

them out of debt with college loan. That's all right, governor, but

it's just that if you're going to do it, do it, make it mandatory not

voluntarily. That will poll well. Mandatory, everybody who turns 18