Perhaps I shouldn’t encourage them, and literary prizes have not very much to do with literature, but the Booker (or Man Booker as they seem to want us to call it) still exerts an odd pull, though I long for the good old days when it was a little exciting, as when John Berger won with G and donated the prize money to the Black Panthers. Of course I haven’t yet read any of this year’s short list. The Times quotes prices from Hills and Ladbrokes this morning as follows, and I found BlueSquare offering prices as well, so I list them in that order, but no prices with Paddy Power, Victor Chandler or The Tote:
Achmat Dangor Bitter fruit 12/1 10/1 8/1
Sarah Hall The electric Michelangelo 10/1 10/1 8/1
Alan Hollinghurst The line of beauty 5/2 3/1 7/2
David Mitchell Cloud atlas 5/4 Evens 11/8
Colm Tóibin The master 4/1 4/1 7/2
Gerald Woodward I’ll go to bed at noon 10/1 10/1 6/1
The difficulty is that form has little to do with who wins the Booker. The team of judges changes from year to year, so one can’t look for patterns in their decisions, and the novelists themselves can hardly be said to run to form; and if that is so, it’s nonsense to try to look for value in any of the prices on offer. With those caveats, I’m inclined to avoid the favourite (for no good reason other than that it's too obvious) and back Alan Hollinghurst or Colm Tóibin
