Bingo! Barnes hits Booker jackpot

They picked Julian Barnes as favourite to win this year’s Man Booker Prize – possibly because he was the only novelist on the short list that they might have heard of – and, at ten minutes to ten last night, that’s exactly what happened.

So concluded a selection process in which controversy was never far away, especially when the judges emphasised the “readability” of a short list which was held by some literary critics to be too populist.

Barnes – who in 1987 famously described Britain’s most prestigious literary prize as “posh bingo” – won the £50,000 award with his short novel The Sense of an Ending.

Last night, Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5 who chaired this year’s judging panel, said that Barnes’s novel “has all the markings of a true classic of English literature. It is exquisitely written, subtly plotted and reveals new depths with each reading”.

A deceptively simple story, The Sense of An Ending takes the risk of using a boring retired arts administrator as its central character.

His past catches up with him in the form of a bequeathed diary from four decades ago. This unlocks memories of the first girl he loved, and of the suicide of his best friend who followed him in her affections.

Barnes’s novel is not without its critics, and some have been alienated by its rather cold-hearted storytelling.

However, the elegance of its plot, which gradually unpeels the man’s past to make the reader realise how much of it has been mythologised and distorted – and, by implication, to suggest how much that is a feature of all of our memories – is hard to dispute.

Barnes has been one of Britain’s pre-eminent novelists and essayists for over 30 years, and was an easy choice for this year’s judges, who took only 31 minutes to make their decision.

Although the prize is always meant to be for an individual novel rather than a body of work, Barnes has been up three times for the award – for Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), England, England (1998) and Arthur and George (2005).

None of the other five contenders – including Carol Birch, whose epic work Jamrach’s Menagerie is Canongate’s best-selling novel – had been shortlisted once.