THE MOST VENERABLE, competitive British prize for fiction is the James Tait Black Prize. It is better known among novel-readers than the donor it is named after, and organised by Edinburgh University, where literary criticism, as a discipline, was born.
The JTB made its first award in 1919 (Hugh Walpole: The Secret City - anyone read it?). In 1922, a year famous for Ulysses, the prize went to the excessively unfamous Lady into Fox, by David Garnett - a name almost as unremembered among the novel-rea
ding community as James Tait Black himself.
I have sat on seven big-name fiction-prize committees over the decades. The first was the JTB. It was the mid-1960s, I was an assistant lecturer in the English Department at the University of Edinburgh.
I was given three pounds ten shillings to open a borrowing account at Douglas and Foulis - a bookshop and lending library off Princes Street. I went every week and picked up half a dozen new novels, guided by reviews in The Scotsman and the Times Literary Supplement. I would then write notes for the Professor. He would read the novels which received my major commendation.
I think we (I, principally and invisibly) made the right choices. In 1966 it was the superb Irish novel, Langrishe Go Down, by Aidan Higgins (a writer who, for my money, was up there with his great countryman). The second year, 1967, that I did my behind-the-scenes adjudicating, it was Margaret Drabble's Jerusalem the Golden - a novel I still think her best.
All of which aimless reminiscence brings me to the matter in hand. The Man Booker Prize. Thanks, I would argue, to the efforts of Martyn Goff, the long-time administrator (just retired), it is the premier fiction prize in the English-speaking world.
Its area of eligibility is not the whole English-speaking world but the British Empire as it was in 1921 (so as to include Eire). The imperial reach does not go back to 1795: American fiction is excluded (about which there is regular argy-bargy).
Scotland regularly does well in the Booker, as does the Indian sub-continent. Ireland does less well - something noted last year, when John Banville won.
I am not a betting man. But if I were, I would place a bet on expatriate Scot Andrew O'Hagan (see review by Allan Massie on Page 15). I'm writing this before the longlist has been announced by Hermione Lee's team, but I'll eat my keyboard if, having received the reviews it has, Be Near Me isn't on the list. (It is - Lit Ed).
The point about the Man Booker (Booker, incidentally, no longer have a financial stake, although they still share the name glory) is that - unlike the JTB in my early days - it is done by a jury of equals. Five "judges" (they should, I believe, be called jurypersons) kept in order by a chair, who has no superior privileges. It's a chair, not a judicial bench.
There is inevitably argument - sometimes fierce, sometimes grievously so, with fist-waving gestures and "unforgivable" tant-rums. Does the dialectic and dispute make for better decisions than the JTB comes up with (the JTB still operates, I believe, under Colin Nicholson, a non-disputatious system)? No. It probably doesn't. Saturday (the 2005 JTB winner) will probably come out in 3005 looking as good - and conceivably better - than The Sea (the MB 2005 winner).
But, undeniably, as Martyn Goff would confirm, argument and dispute get bigger and better headlines. Prizes love those.
• John Sutherland was the chair of the Man Booker jury in 2005, and a juryperson in 1999. His latest book, How to Read a Novel is published this week by Profile Books, priced £9.99. Scotsman readers can obtain a copy for the special price of £8.99, including p&p. Tel: 0207 841 6301, quoting "Scotsman offer". John Sutherland will be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Tuesday, 22 August.
