LONDON // "Intensely readable." "Page-turning stories that nonetheless raise highly thought-provoking ideas." "Ambitious and approachable." This year's judging panel, chaired by former British Conservative MP and cabinet minister Michael Portillo, was keen to stress the accessibility of the final six books in the running for the Man Booker prize - considered to be the foremost fiction award in the English language - in a statement accompanying the announcement of the shortlist. The prize has been, in recent years, accused of merely peddling middlebrow, unwieldy novels. And the judges' fondness for large-scale, epic narratives this time round, may do little to hush the hecklers. One ambitious tapestry narrative did, however, fall victim to the cull. Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, a carefully wrought, cross-continental fable in which Machiavelli and Medicis make their appearances, was deemed to be simply not good enough, according to Portillo. "I can say that the discussions we had about Salman Rushdie, as with all the other books, was a discussion about the book and not about the author. It was about the merits of the book," he said. In a list somewhat spiked with surprises, two other early favourites for the Dh350,000 prize failed to progress to the final round: Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, a post 9/11 tale of New York and current toast of the literati, garnering worldwide raves (including one by our own Kanishk Tharoor) - and Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog, which had novelist AS Byatt (recipient of the prize in 1990 for Possession) proclaiming it, "the best novel I have read in a long time," a Booker winner-in-waiting. In their place progressed Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, the first of a projected trilogy which opens in 1838, just as the original opium war is about to be waged. Portillo described it as a "big, rumbustious sort of a book". Equally as bold in scope and length is Philip Hensher's 700-page blockbuster, The Northern Clemency, a very different kind of period tome. An elegantly drawn, state-of the-nation novel, brimming with finely-tuned comic dialogue, it follows two families in northern England from the 1970s to the present day - which saw, among other society-shifting moments, the three-day-working-week, Margaret Thatcher's rise to power, and the miners' strike. "It's a huge book, but I don't want to put anyone off with that," said Portillo. "It's just a wonderfully developed story of ordinary people in Sheffield." It is, indeed, a well-deserved citing for one of the finest, yet often overlooked, of the current crop of young British writers. It is also my pick for the prize, sitting, as it does, comfortably alongside previous memorable winners like Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. However it falls on Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture to be installed as the bookmaker's choice for the win. An antiphonal, alternative take on 20th century Irish history, the novel is beautifully braided of two narrative strands: the secret journals of Roseanne McNulty, an elderly patient in a mental hospital, and the "Commonplace Book" of her psychiatrist, Dr Grene. Barry is the only previous nominee (for 2005's A Long Long Way) to have again made the cut this year. A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz - which, along with Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger, comprises the list's two debut novels - should also not be ruled out, owing much to JD Salinger stylistically, not to mention the 2003 winning author, DBC Pierre and his Vernon God Little. Adiga, a former correspondent in India for Time magazine, was the only author from the subcontinent to have made the final cut, with Mohammed Hanif left at the longlist stage. Hanif's debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes was another hot tip up until the announcement, a witty, magic realist reimagining of the circumstances surrounding the mysterious plane crash that killed Pakistan's military ruler, General Zia, in Aug 1988. Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs, a lovely character portrait detailing a young woman's secret history, completes this year's curiously retro ingathering. The shortlist in full reads: Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole The winner of the Man Booker prize 2008 will be announced on Oct 14 at the annual dinner held at London's Guildhall.
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