Scots hopeful for Man Booker

Published on Tuesday 15 August 2006 01:54

TWO Scottish novels are in the running for this year's Man Booker Prize, it was announced yesterday - both about clergymen having breakdowns.

In James Robertson's The Testament of Gideon Mack, a Perthshire minister - who, despite his job, is not a believer - meets the Devil when he falls into a chasm while trying to save a dog from drowning.

Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me tells the story of an English Catholic priest adrift in a decayed industrial Ayrshire town.

The announcement of those on the list for the prestigious award this year saw David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, which recreates the world of a 13-year-old boy growing up in Worcestershire at the time of the Falklands War, named as 5-1 favourite to win. Sarah Waters's The Night Watch, set in and after the Second World War, was also being tipped as a likely winner at 7-1 to take the top prize.

O'Hagan's depiction of brutish, prejudiced working-class Scottish lives has already caused controversy. Critic Ian Bell called it "a deep-fried Mars bar of a book: myth made reality by force of defiant repetition".

The Scotsman's chief fiction reviewer, Allan Massie, hails it as "so good it left me wishing I'd written it". John Sutherland, last year's chairman of the Man Booker judges, said even before yesterday's longlist was revealed that he'd "eat his hat" if O'Hagan's novel wasn't included.

There are three past winners of the most prestigious prize in British fiction - South African Nadime Gordimer, with Get A Life, Peter Carey, with Theft: A Love Story, and Barry Unsworth with his still-to-be published The Ruby in Her Navel.

Edinburgh publisher Canongate, which won the prize three years ago with Yann Martel's Life of Pi, has double cause for celebration, as two of its Australian novelists - MJ Hyland (Carry Me Down) and Kate Grenville (The Secret River) also made the list.

Indian novelist Kiran Desai (with the Inheritance of Loss), Canadian Mary Lawson's The Other Side of the Bridge, US-born Libyan Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men) and Claire Messud (The Emperor's Children) also feature, but the list has a more English slant than usual.

Jon MacGregor's So Many Ways To Begin, Naeem Murr's The Perfect Man, Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk, Howard Jacobson's Kalooki Nights and James Lasdun's Seven Lies complete the most Anglo-centric longlist for years.