Nicholas Clee on an absurd literary prize

Which contemporary author has made the greatest overall contribution to fiction on the world stage? Saul Bellow? Doris Lessing? Gabriel GarcIa Marquez? Kenzaburo Oe? You favour Salman Rushdie? I'm sorry: he's not in contention.

There are arbitrary, even absurd, elements to all literary competitions, which pretend that fallible and partial opinions can produce definitive judgements. But the Man Booker International Prize is surely the most absurd award yet. The inaugural shortlist includes the authors mentioned above - but not Rushdie - along with 14 others. In June, one of them will receive £60,000. The judges will have decided that, however great the contribution, "continued creativity" and "development" of the other 17, the winning author has contributed a bit more, created more continuously and developed more impressively.

In addition to Bellow, Lessing, Marquez and Oe, the authors

shortlisted are: Margaret Atwood, Gunter Grass, Ismail Kadare,

Milan Kundera, Stanislaw Lem, Ian McEwan, Naguib Mahfouz,

Tomas Eloy MartInez, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, Antonio Tabucchi, John Updike and A B Yehoshua.

The list contains five winners of the Nobel Prize. Five English-language laureates are absent: J M Coetzee, Nadine

Gordimer, Toni Morrison, V S Naipaul and Wole Soyinka. Many

readers will wonder why they are not there; all will point to selections and exclusions they find dismaying. That, however,

is part of the point of prizes: to prompt discussion. Most people

who care about literature think it worthwhile to debate the merits

of particular works and writers, while acknowledging the difficulty of determining absolute artistic values. The problem with this prize is not the question of who's in and who's out. The problem is the artificial nature of the judging process.

People sometimes say: "You can't claim that one book is better than another - it's all subjective." I don't accept that. It is possible to say that The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst is a better novel than Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer; and it is also possible to make the more difficult case that The Line of Beauty, which won the Booker Prize last year, deserved its victory. But how do you justify saying that any one of the authors on the international list deserves the prize more than all the others? While we might have an interesting discussion about whether Herzog is a better novel than One Hundred Years of Solitude, I don't think that we'll get very far trying to work out whether Saul Bellow has made a greater contribution to fiction, on the world stage, than Gabriel GarcIa Marquez.

The judges - John Carey, Alberto Manguel and Azar Nafisi - have another difficulty. No doubt they are polyglots, but I will risk libelling them by saying that I doubt they have read Oe in Japanese, or Kadare in Albanian. Can the distinctiveness of Bellow's or Updike's prose be measured against the approximations of even the most skilful translator?

Open to criticism as it is, the Nobel Prize avoids such shortcomings. It has been awarded each year since 1901, so it does not have to start from scratch and name one author above all others. The Nobel jury announces no contenders - though it sometimes fails to conceal their names; we don't spend time imagining the bizarre conversations in which the merits of Elfriede Jelinek (the 2004 laureate) are weighed up against those of Joyce Carol Oates. The Booker International could merely announce a winner, but then we would say that we didn't need another Nobel. So it has this shortlist, full of authors with distinguished careers, established reputations, and little need of further honour.

Nicholas Clee is a former editor of the Bookseller magazine

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