Now, with Julian Barnes declared the 2011 winner for The Sense of an Ending, and the annual Guildhall dinner safely negotiated, the air of panic and atmosphere of annus horribilis has dissipated. Strangely, even Dame Stella Rimington's bizarre and defensive speech from the chair (aptly described by Sam Jordison) now seems like the buzz of interference you get on a radio before tuning into the right station. So how did the Booker get out of the locked room of "readability" into which it had incarcerated itself?
By a whisker, is the answer. On the night itself, it seemed as if former chairman of Booker plc Jonathan Taylor would continue his impersonation of those post-revolution Bourbons who had "learned nothing, and forgotten nothing". He insisted on telling the Booker's diners the sales figures for last year's winner, The Finkler Question, and providing details of its foreign rights deals. You could see people shaking their heads in dismay at remarks that were barely appropriate for the works outing of a book warehouse union. What about contemporary fiction? Whither the culture of the English-language novel?
Well, eventually, we were allowed to think about books – specifically, about this year's winner. As is often the case in the book world, it's the quality of the work that provides a reality check, and prevents a drama from becoming a crisis. Barnes's 11th novel is perhaps not his best, and nowhere near as original as Flaubert's Parrot, but it is a work of art, and conforms to the high standard set by previous winners.
This is not a negligible point. Say what you like about this prize – and most of the commentariat have done that pretty freely this year – Booker has a record of picking winners, from In a Free State (Naipaul) and Rites of Passage (Golding) to Oscar and Lucinda (Carey) and Disgrace (Coetzee). Among UK literary prizes, only the Orange comes close in providing an appealing mix of the literary and the commercial – choosing titles that stand the test of time, at least in the short term. A lot of the credit there, I think, goes to Kate Mosse, who is as spirited and youthful as she is tough and brand-conscious. The Booker could do worse than find itself a Mosse to enunciate its vision for the future.
And that brings up another thing: compared with all the other great literary prizes, even the Orange, the Booker is impressively global. This is why its choice matters, why so many readers around the world are exercised by it. Indeed, part of the trouble it has got into lately derives from the disjunction between its 21st-century appeal to a global English-language audience and its 20th-century, literary London origins and organisation. The one is contemporary, the other in danger of becoming hopelessly outmoded.
I wrote last week: "The forthcoming prize dinner at the Guildhall next Tuesday will be fraught with interest." That proved true. In the end, however, there was a palpable sense of relief that good sense had prevailed, and that justice had been done to the best book on the shortlist.
In preparation for 2012, let's hope the placemen and women of the Man Booker don't sit back with a sigh of relief, and refuse to address the issues raised by their critics. The prize is in need of some urgent reforms. Many close to the heart of the organisation are privately anxious to address the way to ensure another 25 years of prize patronage. The Booker's dominant place in the cultural landscape is neither guaranteed, nor automatic; it has to be earned. Otherwise others, such as the Literature prize, will step in and take its place. The Guildhall evening speaks of grandeur, security and a certain cultural arrogance. But it's completely out of sync with the reality of the creative society whose activity it adjudicates.
For instance, it's notable that, with the exception of the winner and his publishers, everyone associated with the shortlist – writers, agents, publishers and so on – was under 45. Contemporary fiction is, generally, not about the old. Yet the Booker persists in handing the judging process to pensioners and retirees such as Rimington, who will go down in the Booker annals as the woman who compared London's literati with the KGB.
