Sam Thompson’s Communion Town: A City in Ten Chapters is on the Booker longlist. Whilst I wasn't entirely convinced by it, there are some very strong passages, and Thompson is a beautiful writer of great style, able to shift perspectives and to pastiche everything from Raymond Chandler to Sherlock Holmes.

As a whole these loosely linked stories, designed to capture the many styles and sectors of an imaginary city, seem too elusive to offer any true insight. This is a shame, as it’s a wonderful conceit, and there is no doubt a lot to look forward to from Thompson. I would still recommend it, heartily so, as a strange, often absorbing, and often brilliant read.

Booker Prize: Barnes-storming

So, it being Booker night, of course the first thing we did was go to the Corinthia Hotel, for the launch of a new, warts- and-all  biography of a certain Boris Johnson. I wasn't really sure what the book was, but Ken Livingstone was there looking ineffably smug and carrying a tank of newts, as was Brian Paddick (looking less so and without newts). There were fish-and-chips canapés, which I would have enjoyed more if I hadn't managed to drop most of them on the floor, and champagne with blue sugar smeared around the edge of the glass, which meant that as we sipped our glasses we all looked either as if we were trying to seduce each other by slowly licking the rims, or as if we were, well, a bit simple.

It was apparently very difficult to get into the Rebel Alliance Party, what with the armed guards and everything (sorry that should be Independent Alliance - Faber, Atlantic, Canongate etc.), so we went first to the Jonathan Cape party, thinking that if august Cape author Julian Barnes won, we'd be in the right place, and if he didn't, then we were in striking distance of the other two. They always have their party in the same place, which is in an alleyway somewhere in the eighteenth century (you have to ask a taxi driver, they'll not be happy but they'll take you).

Julian Barnes: Solid stallion

Lots of young novelists were present and correct - Chloe Aridjis; Adam Foulds and James Scudamore (both wearing backpacks and looking as if they were about to climb Kilimanjiro); Leo Benedictus, with whom I chatted amiably about the Booker list; the literati were also out in force: Suzi Feay was there in a marvellous fur coat, as was Michael Prodger, although he didn't have a fur coat, as far as I know anyway.

I missed the actual announcement of the winner, but heard the yells of glee (from where I was standing outside) as it was announced that eternal Booker bridesmaid Julian Barnes had snatched the gong from the clammy hands of the other five. I must say, to give a prize to an established author for what isn't his best book when the list that you're intending to make is meant to be full of new and exciting "voices" which "reach out" to the general public is a little bit odd, but I am very pleased nonetheless.

Barnesy himself made an appearance, black-tied up (having of course been to the fancy Booker dinner). "Bingo!" he said as he came in. He is absolutely charming - I say this because when I found myself rammed up against him and said something ineffably inane ("I think you're like a really good novelist? And I really like admire you? Did I mention that I'm like a novelist too?") he didn't mind at all.

So well done Mr Barnes, it's well-deserved; my only reservation being that the competition wasn't much up to it. Thank the lord A D Miller didn't get a look in.

Booker Prize Contenders

I've done a rundown of the Booker Prize Contenders for The Daily Telegraph - check out my thoughts on the matter here.

The Booker Prize Shortlist: Are the judges out to get me?

Sophocles: Should be a Booker Judge

I think the Booker Prize judges are out to get me. Some of you may remember that I threatened to leave the country if A D Miller's Snowdrops got on the short list. I have no beef with A D Miller. I am sure that he is a very nice man, and I am sure that his novel will be enjoyed by many who like that sort of thing. But whether it deserves to be on the shortlist of what is meant to be the best novels of the year is another matter entirely. I have long since ceased to feel angry about the list. What's the point, after all? Perhaps it all comes down to taste, in the end, and who can argue about taste?

But the problem is, it isn't just about taste. There are objective criteria which can be applied to books to judge their quality. And it doesn't seem as if the judges have applied any criteria at all to this list, other than their own taste. In the Athenian festivals of tragedy, you wouldn't put up a satyr play on the same level as Sophocles. But that is effectively what these judges are doing. One can bang on and on about who the judges are – but I don't think that necessarily matters. It just seems as if they are trying to make some sort of statement about the state of books. But whatever it is, it's rather confused.

It makes the Booker (sorry, the Man Booker, as we are bound to call it) look silly. How can it be taken seriously as an internationally renowned literary prize when it allows a paper-thin thriller on? Where is the richness, the nuance? Giles Coren has written a piece about Julian Barnes in The Times, suggesting that Barnes is too good to win the Booker Prize. And sadly, it looks like he's right.

Perhaps the only way to succeed now is to write dross. Perhaps we are entering a world where 'content' is all, where style, substance and meaning come second to immediacy and thrills. Perhaps the Booker Prize next year will see "Shit My Dad Says 2" and the Beano Annual on it. After all, they're both entertaining, aren't they? And that's all that matters, to be entertained.

So I shall be leaving the country. I'll be going back to the past. If you need me I'll be with Sophocles.

An edited version of this piece appears on The Periscope Post

Read my review of A D Miller's Snowdrops for The Daily Telegraph here

The Booker Longlist: A Travesty - A D Miller instead of Edward St Aubyn? Madness

Hadley: elegant

I know a lot has been said about this already, but this year's Booker Prize Longlist is mostly entirely mad. It is making my blood boil to the extent that you could probably power an entire city off me. The point about a prize for literary fiction, one would have thought, is that it had literary fiction on its longlist - and by that I mean serious, well-written and thoughtful fiction that doesn't think about whether it will sell in Japan. Crime and thrillers have their own prizes - surely the raison d'être of the Booker is to give space to serious fiction that might not otherwise gain any press at all? I can't talk about the books I haven't read, but I know that I have read at least two novels this year that beat A D Miller's appalling Snowdrops into a cocked hat. Snowdrops, with its clunky prose and guessable plot, embarrassing stereotypes and cringeworthy similes, doesn't deserve to be on this list at all. What about Tessa Hadley's elegant and beautiful The London Train? Or Tim Binding's overlooked The Champion? Or, more potently, Edward St Aubyn's sterling At Last?

A list that has something as inherently bad as Snowdrops on it is not a list that I can take seriously. Perhaps it's time for the Man Booker to rethink its position. Why have thriller writers like Stella Rimington as judges (whose own last novel was reviewed rather, well, feebly). For publicity points? Why have Chris Mullin, whose only literary effort to date has been some rather amiable diaries? No Pepys he. This isn't a proper list - it's like the weird woman in the supermarket taking tins off a shelf at random.

We'll have to wait and see what the shortlist looks like: if Miller's on it, I'm leaving the country if that's what passes for decent fiction these days.

• Read my review of Tessa Hadley
• And my review of Tim Binding
• And of St Aubyn
• And A D Miller.

THE LONG LIST Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)
Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side (Faber)
Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)

The Booker Prize: An Omission

I'd been meaning to write about the Booker (or the Man Booker as one is meant to call it), but other things have slipped in the way: miners, the onset of winter, bills, and a children's round-up that I am in the thick of, (and Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, which I am currently obsessing about.) This year's Booker choice, Howard Jacobson, was a solid decision from an otherwise slightly odd shortlist: Galgut's In A Strange Room, a marvellous piece of work, being rather too slight; I don't think, however, that Jacobson's book has the broader appeal or heft of something like Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. It seems that this year the judges have based their opinions entirely on enjoyment of a novel: which all seems a bit book club to me. And the one book which should have been on the short list, and a strong contender for the title, was Paul Murray's enchanting, weird, brilliant Skippy Dies. Its omission was a huge mistake.

I went to the Booker party for Andrea Levy for about five minutes: it was in the Century club, and there were mounds and mounds of toothsome canapes; after a long chat with an editor about a misery memoir I ought to write about psychic pandas who can see angels, we slipped off quite soon to the Cape party. There I spent many an hour deep in conversation with an up and coming novelist, Leo Benedictus, about the pros and cons of electronic books; Tom McCarthy made an appearance, as did the elegant Chloe Aridjis, and Adam Foulds, whose beautiful book The Quickening Maze was shortlisted last year. The canape quality was excellent, I might add.

The Trouble With Roads

It's rare for a book to throw me into raptures, but J G Farrell's Troubles is one such. It's just won the Lost Booker Prize. Everything in this marvellous, meaty novel, is decaying. A taciturn Major returns from the trenches to claim his supposed fiancée from a crumbling hotel in Ireland. There are cracks in the wall, troops of wittering old ladies, an increasingly insane owner, and pulullating cats. Of myriad striking images, the most apt are a cold-hearted English officer consuming a rose, petal by petal, including the thorns; and a mournful peahen searching for her strangled mate amongst the wreckage of a violent ball. The hotel is a metaphor for the British Empire; the Major, post-Great War, tries his best to keep it standing. But the Irish Republican Army is advancing, and things fall apart. Farrell’s novel is so expertly controlled, with even the most minor characters (a well-dressed gardener, a Cockney officer) given vivid life, and the whole is spiked with such mournful humour, that it is a fine and fitting winner.

The second book to cause me to hyperventilate with glee comes from somewhere so totally left-field I was amazed at my enthusiasm: it is On Roads: A Hidden History
by Joe Moran. This is a marvellous book which delves deep into our collective psychologies to examine our obsession with motorways. For a non-fiction book which is basically about tarmac and asphalt to grip me until one o'clock in the morning is as rare as a pleasant service station. Buy, and read, and enjoy, although preferably not whilst riding on the Autobahns.

Lost and Found

The Booker Prize shortlist has been announced - but not for this year. Instead, because of some complexity in the rules, the year 1970 was missed out, so this year the balance will be reset and we will all jump into a time machine and zip back to the era of the flower child. This may sound like a marketing opportunity, but what it is doing is bringing into the news some excellent novels, and that surely is a good thing.

Out of the six books listed, I have read four - interestingly, all by women. Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven is a marvellous, sleek, intense piece of work, about the youth of Alexander the Great; Nina Bawden's The Birds on The Trees details the tragedies that befall a family whose son is expelled from school; Shirley Hazzard's The Bay of Noon is a sun-lit affair, all repressed emotion and smouldering sex, and Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat is poetic, dark and surprising. All these books might just as well have been written yesterday; it is a mark of their writing across the board that they do not rely on gimmicks or flashiness, just good, elegant, well-moulded sentences. Also, too, they deal with issues - homosexuality, incest, drug-taking, adultery - in clever, clear ways. They throw light upon the time they were written, and yet stand as comments upon human nature. What is rather marvellous is that they are all short. I wonder whether both these points could be applied to many of the books shortlisted for the prize in the last couple of years.

This week I have also been in contact with many South African writers, talking about a way forward for the country and its literature. It seems particularly appropriate in the weeks after Easter, with the sun rising and the story of the Resurrection ringing in our ears (whether you believe in it, or have been listening to the discussions about Philip Pullman's new book, The Good Man Jesus and The Scoundrel Christ). I attended a christening at the weekend: a new life, old friends, and hope.