I wasn't surprised to hear Julian Barnes won the Booker for The Sense of an Ending. My head knew it was the one to win – although Pigeon English stole my heart. One of the things the panel of judges had been criticized for this year was the 'readability' of their list, as if a novel that draws you in and keeps you turning the pages was somehow a bad thing. So the Julian Barnes was – for me – a disappointingly safe choice, being by far and away the most 'literary' and potentially challenging book on the list. Having said that, it is beautifully written and packed full of thoughtful observations about memory and time. It often made me smile, and if at times I felt frustrated by characters I had trouble believing in, and underwhelmed by the solution to the mystery at the heart of the novel, overall I thought it was a masterful piece of writing.
Lovely to hear Julian Barnes make a special mention in his acceptance speech of the beautiful jacket design by Suzanne Dean – he's right, if publishers want people to buy physical books over e-versions, they have to make them something that people want to possess.
Because I've been thinking about them myself, I've been alert to other critical views of books on the shortlist. It was with great delight, then, that I discovered the special relationship between The Culture Show and the village of Comrie in Scotland. Every year they offer all the books on the shortlist to the villagers and ask them to vote on the ones that they read. An engaging cast of characters including the local laird, an eccentric rambler, the village farmer, the butcher and the bloke who props the bar up in the pub, offered their responses in a way that I found unaffected and enjoyable. If I didn't suspect there was a dark underbelly (no place could possibly be that perfect) I'd move there!
