A few nights ago I took part in a time-honoured tradition of The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival – Before the Booker, in which a group of judges pretends that the Man Booker Prize existed before 1969 and choose a Pre-Booker winner from a selected year. As it happens, 1932 produced a pretty heavyweight crop. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons; Black Mischief, by Evelyn Waugh; and Stamboul Train, by Graham Greene. Can you pick the winner?

Tell me you chose Stamboul Train and I’d be plenty surprised – Martin Amis certainly was when I told him the result later that night. “But that’s one of Greene’s ‘entertainments’!” he exclaimed, startled that this seemly, slight, early thriller should have trumped the “classics” on the list.

Yet so it did, proving once again that the business of figuring out which novel is “better” than another one is a pretty sticky business.

Sir Howard Davies remarked that the judges were often “surprised by the reverential tone adopted by reviewers in relation to books which, to us, did not come off at all”.

An hour before the Cheltenham Pre-Booker gig, I’d been on stage with Jeanette Winterson (a columnist for my Books section, I should say, in the interests of full disclosure), asking her how she felt about Sir Howard dismissing her latest, The Stone Gods, as a “complete failure”. She noted that she’d never been shortlisted for the Booker in all her 20 years of writing; it wasn’t about to start bothering her now. She thought she might consider putting his quote on the paperback.

If he is concerned that critics overpraised Ben Okri’s latest offering, this newspaper’s Kate Saunders, at least, closed her short review by noting that she “couldn't read more than two pages at a time without losing consciousness and waking hours later, covered with dribble”. So there, it seems, that Sir Howard and the critics are in accord. It’s more pertinent, perhaps, to draw attention to what he calls “sins of omission” – books ignored by critics until the judges drew attention to them. Both as a literary editor and a former Man Booker judge, I can say, hand on heart, that what one dreads most is overlooking something wonderful – but when so many thousands of books are published every year, there is only so much any paper can cover. One can only be glad that between reviewers, judges, and readers there exists at least a kind of safety net to catch what might otherwise be missed.

It is very difficult, I have found over the years, to offer any coherent defence of how and why novels are reviewed. What a strange business! Novels, I believe, exist to move the reader, to change the way a reader looks at the world; the trouble is, and ever was, that every reader (and so, every reviewer and literary editor) is different.

Every group of judges is different; when Arundhati Roy won the Booker prize for The God of Small Things she was wise to say that she was certain that a different group of judges would have chosen a different book; it’s with no disrespect to Roy’s novel that I agree. Some critics argue more cogently than others, yes; and some are more willing to look out for what’s new; but open minds are what all novelists are after.

This year’s shortlist showed evidence of that from both chair and judges – for which we can all only be glad.

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