“TIME HAS, MY LORD, a wallet at his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion.” It's a knotty Bardic quote from that knotty play, Troilus and Cressida. What the canny Ulysses means is “everybody forgets a loser, Achilles - wise up”.

This week the Man Booker Prize shortlist was announced and on October 14 we shall have another gilded winner on the great rostrum of the English novel. By the same token October 14 will create 120 utter losers. New recruits to the never-made-it-and-probably-never-will-why-the- hell-did-they-bother brigade.

One should modify that a little. There are, of course, other kinds of winning, or at least getting a sniff of the glory. These half-loaf-better-than-no-Booker winners include:

1.The bridesmaids who never make it to the altar, but who have trooped up and down the shortlist aisle so often that they've worn a hole in the carpet. Think Beryl Bainbridge.

2.The ones who should have won but missed out because of a collective brain collapse in that year's judges. “Glorious Losers”, Paul Bailey (himself a glorious loser) calls these unwinners. Empire of the Sun, for example, should have won in 1984. If there's a better novel about the Second World War I've yet to read it. What did win was Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac. If there's a wispier novel about Swiss hotels, I've yet to read it. By general agreement the Booker's most inglorious omission was Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, which didn't even make the shortlist in 1995. Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, a work that has steadily gained stature over the years, was disqualified on the ground that it was too much of a docunovel. That, of course, did not stop the even more docunovelistic Schindler's Ark winning two years earlier. There should, perhaps, be a subsidiary prize every year called “Oops!” in which Booker rewrites its history. As it is, posterity makes its own corrections to the catalogue of Booker bloopers. Barnes's book (unequivocally located on the fiction shelves) has lasted. Brookner's hasn't.

3.Novelists whose feet can't be jammed into the Booker glass slipper. David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury and Howard Jacobson have written novels that, by anyone's judgment, are glories of our national literature. But their fiction is comic - and Booker is as frozen-faced as Daniel Craig with constipation. If it had the tiniest sense of humour, Flashman would have won the first year's prize, in 1969, that went to old what-was-his-name-again? One comic novel has won, Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils, in 1986. But it's a comedy darker than black - all about geriatric incontinence and prostates the size of cantaloupes, ho, ho. The reading public has clocked the fact that Booker doesn't do comedy, and makes, as always, its own judgments.

4.If laughs are out, so is genre. The aforementioned J.G. Ballard may have lost out because of the career taint of science fiction (in passing, was there a better novel in 1973 than Crash?). Would one, in hindsight, have been shocked had (to return to that year again) William Gibson's Neuromancer been at least noticed by the judges in 1984? What odds would Ladbrokes give on Ian Rankin? Again, the reading public, after 40 years, appreciates that Booker has its funny little snobberies. Rankin not up there with Keri Hulme's The Bone People (1985)? Get serious.

5.Those on the mythical blacklist. Why has Martin Amis never won? Because, urban legend has it, there's a veto on him. He's up the nose of Booker. Just like Graham Greene and the noses of the Grey Men of Stockholm. Perversely, this supposed boycott has added to Amis's lustre as a writer (as it did to Greene's with the Nobel): the novelist too dangerous to win. Amis's sales, one suspects, would slump calamitously if they ever awarded him the prize. It would be like offering him his own testicles on a salver.

6.The novelists who can legitima-tely claim sod's law in the year they came up. Margaret Drabble, for example, should surely have won in 1972 but for the fact, as Antonia Fraser has recently revealed, she was battleaxed (as too young, pretty, and gifted) by the vindictive Dame Rebecca West (no longer ypg). Had there been been two Antonias on the committee Maggie would have been home and dry.

This year the “who should have won” game will be played as it has every year since 1969. What should one deduce from the annual furore? Not that those cretinous judges always get it wrong, but that we should be profoundly grateful to have a national literature that, year in year out, produces such a bumper crop of great books for us, the consumers, to quarrel about.

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