BRITAIN: Solid was the nature of the longlist. Solid was the nature of the shortlist. And as this year's Man Booker campaign was settled peacefully, if unexpectedly, by an earnest, traditional second novel which defers to both story and the post-colonial legacy, solid is again the word that best describes last night's announcement in London.
Few pundits backed it, but Indian-born Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss emerged as the surprise winner of the £50,000 (€74,000) prize which was established in 1969, and remains something of a literary golden fleece.
Sustaining the approach that has apparently shaped its selection policy throughout, this panel appeared intent on avoiding major established writers. With the exception of Briton Sarah Waters, none of the contenders, which included a first-time novelist, had been previously shortlisted. But Desai, born in India in 1971, could be said to have already had a particularly intimate relationship with the Booker. Her mother, Indian novelist Anita Desai, to whom the winning novel is dedicated, has been Booker shortlisted three times and is a gifted, subtle writer with an astute understanding not only of human behaviour but of the complexities of multiculturalism.
It is upon this insight that Kiran Desai constructs a dense, detailed narrative that at times shudders beneath the weight of intent. There is as yet little of her mother's lightness of touch. Anita Desai was born in 1937 to a Bengali father and a German mother. She was educated in India but has also lived in Britain and the US, where in turn her daughter received her schooling. This wide cultural experience has proved vital to Kiran Desai's fiction. The Inheritance of Loss, which shifts between India and New York, reflects those same cultural tensions and preoccupations that have dominated her mother's work. An elderly judge, set in his ways, represents the old culture. His life faces upheaval when his orphaned granddaughter comes to live with him.
The two are temperamentally in opposition and Desai balances their needs through the mediation of the judge's cook. Adding to the complications is the theme of flight to a new life in the US.
As these individual personal lives and needs clash, Desai looks to wider political and cultural issues. It is an idealistic, ambitious narrative which borders on polemic. Ultimately The Inheritance of Loss, for all its intelligence, has to contend with its obvious storyline, its stereotypes and the sheer quality of the best of contemporary Indian fiction which invariably achieves a masterful balance of domestic realism, characterisation and exasperated comedy.
If the bookies seemed to back Sarah Waters's The Night Watch, a tale of four Londoners dealing with sex and survival during the Blitz, reviewers were looking to the Australian Kate Grenville's historical novel, The Secret River, which traces the life journey of one William Thornhill, an Englishman despatched to the colonies, as the winner. English writer Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk, a stylish domestic comedy on the theme of family, introduced a much-needed element of barbed irony.
The success of the shortlist may well lie in its alerting readers to MJ Hyland's darkly original Carry Me Down, about a young boy transfixed by the problems dividing his unsettled parents. The narrative takes place in Wexford and the Ballymun tower complex in which the author - who was born in London of Irish parents and grew up largely in Australia - once lived. By progressing from longlist to shortlist, Carry Me Down, with its sustained tone of bewildered fascination, proved its considerable worth and is now earning the readers it deserved. The sixth shortlist contender, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar, is also told in the first person, although Matar's use of voice is far more conventional. Based on real life events - the author's witnessing of his father's arrest in Libya - it is an important book rather than an outstanding novel.
There is no denying that this year's Booker is one of the more low-key ones, and one which was deliberately pitched at fiction in general from the outset. The exclusion from the longlist of JG Ballard's prophetic Kingdom Come and Romesh Gunesekera's The Match sounded initial alarm bells, which reverberated as Howard Jacobson and Claire Messud fell at the shortlist stage - possibly because Messud's novel, The Emperor's Children, was so obviously American in tone. Also ignored by Booker were Jonathan Raban's Seattle-based Surveillance and South African Christopher Hope's epic, picaresque My Mother's Lovers. Most bewildering of all, though, is the absence of Martin Amis with House of Meetings, a major work by any standards, which was not even entered.
All of which makes Desai's workmanlike novel appear all the more ordinary. Still, there has to be an irony in that her win does endorse the title of St Aubyn's novel. Perhaps the judges wanted to make a point about inheritance and literary pedigree over reputation: Mother's Milk the novel did not win, but the concept suggested by it, in the case of the Desai mother and daughter, certainly did.