I WOULDN'T LIKE TO REVEAL exactly how many of the questions in Peter Straus's Man Booker Prize quiz - published exclusively in Books today to celebrate the prize's 40th anniversary - I was able to answer when the document first landed on my desk. Well, that would spoil it for you, wouldn't it? Yes, I agree, it's a pretty tough quiz: but we know you're a pretty tough bunch of readers. Next month, of course, you'll get another chance to participate in the history of the prize, when voting opens in the second shot at the Best of the Booker Prize. Fifteen years ago, when the prize turned 25, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children took the palm; this year, will Yann Martel's Life of Pi pip him to the post? William Hill, that famed arbiter of all things lit'ry, tells us that Martel's odds are 4-1, but Midnight's sneaking up on the inside at 5-1.

You might think I'm partisan regarding Pi: I was one of the five happy judges who chose it as the winner in 2002. It's true, I love the novel, but I'm glad I don't have the task of deciding this one. I'm amazed that I got to sit on that panel at all; for the Man Booker Prize has an aura that other prizes don't. When I came to Britain as a student in the mid-Eighties, it was how I became aware of the modern literature of Britain and the Commonwealth. I was reading The Faerie Queen at college (OK: I was trying to read The Faerie Queen...) but I was, I confess, more taken with Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger (winner, 1987) and Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda (winner, 1998).

Perhaps, if you're one of those readers of Books who enjoy joining the dots, you may be surprised to hear me say this; didn't I remark, in regards to the Orange Prize the other week, that no prizes were fair? Indeed, I did. I make no claims to fairness for the Man Booker Prize. As with any prize, the winner is decided by means of a strange alchemy of literature, timing, the queer business of how books are published and personal chemistry. There's a kind of voodoo about it, but made from the best kind of spells, the kind that means to do good for books and for readers. Prizes like the Man Booker are sometimes accused of being elitist - but I've always wondered what exactly is wrong with searching for what's best and highest in the human spirit? Wars rage, humans die, politics grinds on and yet there are some who think that art, and the stories it has to tell us, matter. I think - and I bet you think, too - that they're right.

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