At last, the best Booker won

Everyone’s elegant second favourite

Reviews of the 2005 Man Booker Prize shortlist

THE bookmakers and publishing world were proved wrong last night. Julian Barnes, the novelist they had widely tipped to win the Man Booker Prize, was beaten to the £50,000 award by John Banville, one of Ireland’s best-known novelists.

Although he had been dismissed as the third-least-likely author to take the prize, the judges were won over by The Sea, about an ageing alcoholic who confronts loss and trauma.

The contest was between Banville and Kazuo Ishiguro, who beat him to the prize in 1989 with Remains of the Day.

At an awards ceremony at Guildhall in London, attended by 550 guests, Banville, 59, got his revenge. He also saw off competition from some of the darlings of the literary world: Julian Barnes, Sebastian Barry, Zadie Smith and Ali Smith.

Accepting his prize, Banville said: “This is a great surprise and a great pleasure. I must thank the judges, who are suddenly my best friends in the world. And to my friends — it’s a cliché, but it’s true: any one of these books could have won.”

Dedicating the award to his children, Banville added: “I do say to my colleagues: just hang in there, it will come. I hung around for many years.”

The chairman of the judges, Professor John Sutherland, Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, described The Sea as “a masterly study of grief, memory and love recollected”.

He hailed the quality of Banville’s writing: “You feel you’re in the presence of a virtuoso. In his hands, language is an instrument.” But he said that the melancholic subject-matter made it a “slit-your-throat novel” that was perhaps too difficult for some readers — and some of the judges.

Professor Sutherland likened the hour’s judging session to a fiercely argued seminar: “There were six novels that were all good, and then a bloody guillotine is coming down on your head in an hour. The discussion could have gone on for three days. There’s something abnormal about these novels competing. It’s very sad that you have to have a gladiatorial combat to get people to read good novels.”

In the end, once they had whittled down the fight to Ishiguro and Banville, they were forced to take a vote. Professor Sutherland had the casting vote. It was that close.

Banville, who was born in Wexford, had always wanted to be “an artist of some kind”. He worked as a sub-editor for 15 years “to make money”. He is a former literary editor of The Irish Times and published the first of 14 novels in 1970.

Having been given odds of only 13-2 by Ladbrokes, he became the first Irishman to win the Booker since Roddy Doyle took the prize in 1993.

The Sea has divided critics. Although The Guardian was impressed by literary allusions that “play hide and seek in this very literary novel”, Tibor Fischer, a former Booker judge, wrote in The Sunday Telegraph: “The Sea has some sharp vignettes and its characters occasionally jerk into life, but story deficiency would, I’m afraid, be my final diagnosis.”

THE SHORTLIST

John Banville The Sea
Julian Barnes Arthur & George
Sebastian Barry A Long Long Way
Kazuo Ishiguro Never Let Me Go
Ali Smith The Accidental
Zadie Smith On Beauty

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