HAS THE FUSS ABOUT THE Man Booker shortlist, announced on Thursday afternoon, died down yet – or is the frenzy of speculation only increasing? The bookies will be glad that Ian McEwan remains in the running, but there has been a surge of betting (how I love Britain, where there’s so little difference between horseracing and novel-writing) on Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip, which might prove to be a literary Seabiscuit.

Every year I sit by the phone, or at least, by the e-mail, waiting for the white smoke of the judges’ choices. Every year, in the days and weeks before the prize, I field requests for tip-offs – both from the press and from what I’ll be pleased to call regular people. I must know something, mustn’t I? Surely – Wonder Woman of the World of Books that I am – I must have some secret knowledge that would have enabled me to write this column (and the news piece that appeared in Friday’s edition of The Times) several weeks in advance. That assumption, I might mention, has been rather worse than usual this year, as two of the judges on the panel – the chair, Sir Howard Davies, and Dr Ruth Scurr – write for these very pages. I mean, inside track, or what?

But no – I promise. Why? Because I refused to have any contact with either of them since the process began? Since I knew that they’d have to cut me out of their lives for the duration and that I’d made my peace with that? Nope. It’s because – and this too, I can promise, because I’ve been there – the remarkable thing about judging a prize like the Man Booker is that no one knows, at this stage of the game, how things will pan out: not even, in my experience, the people walking into the room to do the judging.

By the time that the longlist has been reached, it can be confidently vouchsafed that while the books on it will be a varied lot, they will have passed that invisible bar that somehow marks out a piece of work that does what it set out to do. After that – it’s a question of taste. It’s also a question of how much people (by which I mean the judges, who are, of course, also regular people in their way) are willing to listen to one another. We all come at books with our own prejudices: are we willing to have them turned on their heads? To be open-minded in this way is a great gift for both readers and writers. So try the list yourself. Can you pick the winner?

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