(Originally published: Oct. 17, 2009)
With the announcement of this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist the annual game of guess-the-winner began in the media and in those social circles that still understand just how cool and exciting book talk can be. Trying to pick the Giller winner is always a bit of a mug’s game. Very occasionally a shortlisted book gathers so much public and critical adulation that the jury need only nudge the title over the finish line at the awards ceremony, but 2009 ain’t one of those years. Stocked with mid- and early-career authors and demonstrating no thematic or aesthetic principle, this shortlist will not offer up an obvious choice, no matter how many times you shake the Magic 8 ball.
Analyzing the jury is as good a place as any to start your educated guessing. Does Juror A have a long simmering animus with the author of Book B? Does Juror C favour work with a strong historical bent, and has Juror B publicly stated that the fiction of his or her home region, which just happens to be represented by Book E, has not received sufficient recognition? And though literary jurors the world over would have us believe they are above such petty concerns, don’t underestimate the pull of nepotism and careerism on individual juror’s selections.
Unfortunately for punters, the make up of this year’s jury is as varied and esteemed as any in some time. The sole Canadian member, Cape Breton author Alistair MacLeod, is something of a CanLit outsider and is too deep into his esteemed career to have anything to gain doling out favours to current or future allies. MacLeod’s spare almost monumental fiction is so steeped in his home province you can almost smell the salt air on the page, but save for Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man the shortlist lacks East Coast content.
Juror Victoria Glendinning, a British biographer and novelist, made Arts section headlines here in the colonies after she wrote about her Giller jury experience in a column for the Financial Times. A few of her candid remarks about the novels rejected for the longlist – which, she wrote, displayed “a striking homogeneity in the muddy middle range of novels, often about families down the generations with multiple points of view and flashbacks to Granny’s youth in the Ukraine or wherever” – sent nationalist columnists and authors to the barricades to defend CanLit’s honour. British literary prize jurors and commentators make these kinds of remarks all the time, and Glendinning’s column was otherwise largely complimentary in tone, facts that went unnoted in all the huffing and chest puffing this side of the pond. What does this say about Glendinning’s possible preferences? Not much. She probably won’t be as easily seduced by the somber to the point of preciousness prose stylings often favoured by Canadian jurors.
American novelist Russell Banks is one of his country’s most revered authors and though he has dabbled in historical fiction the majority of his work is aggressively contemporary. He has written about race and class in American life and art but his fiction could hardly be classified as didactic. His novels often experiment with narrative and rely on the testimony of unreliable narrators, so he may put his vote behind a title with a strong but unconvential plot structure.
With a such a diverse jury, the best betting strategy may be to pick a novel that may not be any of the jurors’ first choice but would be an acceptable winner for all three. Individual jurors often choose a title they want to win, another they are determined to keep off the podium and a third they wouldn’t mind seeing grab the prize.
So which novel would satisfy the demands of this year’s jury? Furrow those brows, folks, and guess away. Here’s Torontoist’s odds sheet:
The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon: With more recognizable historical personages than an episode of The Tudors, Lyon’s The Golden Mean is this year’s “sprawling” epic. The novel also showed up on the Governor General’s Literary Award and Rogers Writers’ Trust shortlists but it’s hard to imagine MacLeod throwing his weight behind such an exotic tale.
Odds: 5-1
The Bishop’s Man, Linden MacIntyre: It’s probably too early in The Fifth Estate’s co-host’s incarnation as a literary fiction author to grab the glory this time out. The Bishop’s Man is MacIntyre’s second novel, and though it dangles the shortlist’s biggest non-fiction hook – the story is based on real-life child-sex scandals in the Catholic Church – don’t expect any of the jurors to bite too hard.
Odds: 20-1
The Disappeared, Kim Echlin: With words like “elegaic” and “obsessive” dominating the juror’s shortlist citations, this multicultural tale of obsessive love on two continents has a good chance of mounting the podium. Echlin has been building up a dedicated readership and a file of postive reviews over the last decade. A Giller win would catapult her onto the A List.
Odds: 3-1
Fall, Colin McAdam: A novel with a possibly sociopathic protagonist is probably a little too dark and morally ambiguous to bag the Giller. That’s too bad, because on a line-by-line basis this may be the best novel on the list, and it may be the favourite of Banks, whose novels and short stories feature sympathetic criminals and broken, violent men.
Odds: 10-1
The Winter Vault, Anne Michaels: Michaels’ style of dense overtly poetic fiction was all the rage when her debut novel hit the bestseller lists in 1996 but then again so was the Burning Man Festival and tech stocks. The minor cult of critical acclaim around Michaels has made her fiction and poetry titles must-owns if not must-reads but this jury will not be swayed by indigineous acclaim, past or present.
Odds: 7-1
Torontoist’s Odds-On-Favourite: The Disappeared, Kim Echlin
