How times change. When the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was first devised, readers and writers, as well as concerned citizens, expressed some doubts as to the justification of awarding any novel £100,000. Here was a literature prize approaching the level of football transfer fees, albeit fairly modest ones. Still, serious writers should not be paid too much, should they? Well, now five years old and still the world's richest literary prize, the IMPAC award does not seem overly excessive - considering the prize money would not buy an apartment, never mind a house, in the capital should the winning author feel like settling here.
Filthy lucre aside, IMPAC has justified itself, particularly on the issue of introducing outstanding foreign-language writers in English translation to wider audiences. Two of the previous four winners have been in translation - which means £75,000 to the winning author with £25,000 to the translator. The most exciting of these wins was that of Herta Muller's surreal parable, The Land of Green Plums, in 1998. The inaugural winner, Australian David Malouf's Remembering Babylon, will also endure. Last year's winner, Ingenious Pain, English writer Andrew Miller's elegant debut about an 18th-century man determined to experience pain, was, for all its craft, a surprise, ahead of Don DeLillo's Underworld, a magnificent lament for post-war America. DeLillo's strongest challenger had seemed to be Haruki Murakami. This innovative Japanese writer is a true original and his explorations of life in modern-day Tokyo are hilarious and profound narratives built upon equal measures of exasperation and bewilderment. His novel, The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, did not win, but its presence on the IMPAC shortlist won Murakami many readers. Therein lies the worth of this prize.
Another of IMPAC's strengths has been its international spread. Interestingly, however, this year all seven shortlisted - and already paperbacked - novels are written in English, and while the gender balance is an egaliatarian four women and three men, there are only four countries involved, the US with four contenders, and a domestic spread of England, Scotland and Ireland. Irishman Colum McCann's shortlisted second novel, This Side of Brightness, is far from being the rank outsider. It must be conceded, however, that two of the seven shortlisted writers would feature in any international list of leading novelists. The 1993 Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison is joined by another member of the world - never mind US - literary pantheon, Philip Roth. Should either of these high-profile writers win, it would be a further endorsement of the prize.
But even more interesting than that is the fact that Morrison's inclusion is proof of her extraordinary appeal as a writer. Initially intended as the concluding volume to a trilogy begun with the Pulitzer Prizewinner, Beloved (1988) and its sequel, Jazz (1992), Paradise is now the third of a proposed historical quartet plotting the story of Black America. As with Jazz, she takes the bold step of revealing her plot in the opening sentences: "They shot the white girl first.
With the rest they can take their time; no need to hurry out here." Life and its various subplots has driven a group of women to seek sanctuary in a deserted former convent, originally built as a rich man's mansion with decor to match. It all takes place on the outskirts of a town called Ruby, Oklahoma. It is the 1970s, Martin Luther King has already been sacrificed and Civil Rights have triumphed to such an extent that the new freedom has sustained rather than banished old hatreds. Paradise is a violent, though stylistically graceful novel of insight and much humanity. Morrison's prose is, as ever, full-blooded, lyrical and rooted in the vernacular. But the urgent, predictable Paradise is ultimately swamped by its many profundities and the fact that it fails to achieve the masterful balance between art and polemical intent so apparent in Beloved and Jazz, two of the truly great post-war novels.
Philip Roth is the longest established novelist of the list. Famous since the publication of his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, in 1959 and super-famous since Portnoy's Complaint (1969) defined the plight of the Jewish son, Roth has made a career of writing about his ego, his sexuality and his Jewishness. There have been wonderful performances en route, such as The Counterlife (1986), but this most autobiographical of leading US writers has always left some doubts about what his obsessions were doing to his gifts.
However, late Roth stormed to greatness with the gloriously human elegy, American Pastoral (1997). The shortlisted I Married a Communist (ignore the TV sitcom-sounding title) is a worthy successor. This is a rich, thoughtful novel of voices and tone shifts, with Roth's fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, again acting as narrator. It centres upon a heroic figure - radio actor, Iron Rinn, real name Ira Ringold, a giant of a man and a fallen public idol. Once young Zuckerman's hero, Ira in time has become a victim of his own violence as well as his dreams, most obviously that of his romance with a silent movie star with a dangerous flair for self re-invention. Most of the sorry tale is actually told by Ira's now elderly, elder brother Murray, a former high school English teacher who once taught Zuckerman. The old man is the truth teller; he is also the hero. Ira's story is his own and also that of a fallen America. This is a superb, surprising novel and, okay, I'd like it to win.
All of the contenders, however, will have to deflect the judges from Michael Cunningham's inspired fourth book, The Hours, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize. In a quiet, meticulously observed performance of subtle urgency, Cunningham draws on the life of Virginia Woolf, in particular her long battle with depression and her eventual suicide. In the flashforward prologue he watches her as she walks into the river, and describes her actions as if they were part of a surreal odyssey taking place in a Chagall painting. "She is borne quickly along by the current. She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming . . . She floats, heavily through shafts of brown, granular light." Further back in time, we see her through the eyes of the bewildered Leonard Woolf who notes, "she has aged dramatically, just this year, as if a layer of air has leaked out from under her skin . . ."
Against the tragedy, Cunningham balances domestic trivia such as the tyranny of the Woolf housekeeper and the visit of the dazzling Vanessa. But there are two further stories, that of Clarissa Vaughan, a variation of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, who is also preparing for a party in 1990s New York. And then there is Laura's story. She is a young, dissatisfied housewife in 1940s Los Angeles, pregnant again, who is also planning a party. And though she loves her husband and her small son, all she really wants to do is read Mrs Dalloway. Hugely persuasive, this is a study of time, love and loyalties. It also celebrates the business of reading fiction as much as the creation of it. A rare book with so much to offer, The Hours is a worthy winner of any prize.
Far less convincing is Alice McDermott's 1998 National Book Award winner, Charming Billy, which examines an Irish-American clan gathered to wake one of their own, the eponymous Billy. Slowly but relentlessly a complex portrait of the dead man emerges from the memories shared by the mourners. McDermott works hard at creating a set of believable and human characters who have lived and lost. Her prose constantly seems to be reaching towards philosophical conclusions. There is a powerful sense of a small community existing within a much larger one. But for all the acclaim it received, it is one of those novels you either love or, as in my case, find predictable and laboured.
Colum McCann looks to America in his ambitious saga spanning 70 years of New York's history. At times self-consciously poetic, his language is vivid and creates an atmospheric portrait of that city as an urban Hades. At the heart of the book is the building of the subway system and the men who laboured and often died in the process. Nathan Walker is an Adam figure, a black who left his native South for the bleakness of the North. Technically ambitious and daring, the heavily symbolic narrative, with its echoes of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, takes risks, not all of which succeed, but this is an important book and shows an Irish writer at ease with an international vision.
Far less exciting is Edinburgh-born Jackie Kay's debut, Trumpet, which takes love as its thesis and yet, though it tells the story of a cross-over jazz musician's life and death, or rather death and life, never quite achieves a sense of purpose. None of the several characters who share the narrative really convince as more than mouthpieces. Kay is aiming at a tough, non-sentimental tone, and with injections such as "If I stop talking you won't have a book. If I shut my fucking trap, you're grounded", the book merely succeeds in achieving a bravado and defiance at odds with its literary aspirations.
If IMPAC 2000 does nothing else it will have assured a readership for the youngest contender, 34-year-old English writer Nicola Barker's hilarious and strange Wide Open. Few books come odder than this bizarre tale about a bunch of troubled misfits who come together in, of all places, the Isle of Sheppey, some 50 miles south-east of London. The dialogue is wonderful, particularly the brutal exchanges between Lily, an angry, demented teenager, and Sara, her world-weary, boar-farming mother who appears to have lost her husband - or has she? Added to this is the story of two estranged brothers and some well-meaning women. Superb characterisation and a genuinely original use of language elevate this novel shoulder to shoulder with works by her more established peers.
So Cunningham's grace and intelligence should push Roth's virtuosity all the way, but don't overlook Nicola Barker's excursion into the diverse weirdness of ordinary life.
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist.