My Top Ten Man Booker Moments

I was privileged enough to go the (Man) Booker prize dinner for 11 years in a row. Here are my favourite memories.

1997 - The God of Small Things

My first year; I was overwhelmed by the scale of the event and blown away by the grandeur of the Guildhall with its gigantic statues of Gog and Magog standing sentinel. Arundhati Roy glowed with stardom and gave a heartfelt, gracious speech. Less thrillingly, Madeleine St John's shortlisted title The Essence of the Thing was my first Booker 'huh??'

1999 - Disgrace

The year I learnt an important lesson: if you're going to the dinner, try to read at least some of the books. It's embarrassing to wing it when you're a literary editor. I was placed on a table of charming Booker employees who had read all the shortlisted titles and wanted some top-flight critical discussion from me. I still haven't read J M Coetzee's masterpiece but to this day I remember the passionate debate: Is it misogynist? Yes... no... Yes... NO...

2000 - The Blind Assassin

So this year I invented a new Booker tradition: read five shortlisted books, run out of time and then find that it's the one you haven't read that wins. Tchah! The shortlist was chiefly memorable for The Deposition of Father McGreevy, otherwise known as 'the sheep-shagging novel'. I'm afraid so.


2001 - The True History of the Kelly Gang

The first year the longlist was published. I was, and remain dubious about this, but apparently it's 'good for sales'. Cracking shortlist this year, including McEwan, Andrew Miller (Oxygen), David Mitchell's stunning Number9Dream and Ali Smith's Hotel World. But I hadn't read the Carey. The long tables a la Hogwarts were uncomfortably crammed: Booker was outgrowing the Guildhall. As we all sat down I asked Ali how she felt. 'I'm just so pleased to be here AT ALL,' she beamed. The best moment for me this year actually came after the dinner, when I sloped off with my friend, Michele Roberts, one of the judges, and sat on her rooftop overlooking the Thames drinking red wine. I also discovered that knowing one judge does not necessarily mean you know in advance what the winner is going to be. I got the impression Michele thought the voting was going to go a different way...

2002 - Life of Pi

My memorable moment came long before Booker night. I was loafing around the Groucho club late
one night when a familiar tousled-haired figure hoved into view. Barely listening to the usual impassioned spiel, I let Jamie Byng of Canongate shove an advanced readers' proof into my hands. Months later it was still lying around unread, some book with a tiger in a boat on the cover. Eventually I read it and... wow!

This was the year the dinner moved to the British Museum, presumably for space reasons. While having the champagne reception among the Egyptian sculptures was fabulous, once dinner started it was hard to hear anything with the appalling acoustics (the tables were laid out in the central court, around the old reading room). 'And... (crackle) the (mumble crackle) is... (inaudible).' When Martel switched to French in his acceptance speech, it wasn't much more incomprehensible than his English over all the static. But how we cheered plucky little Canongate.

2003 - Vernon God Little

Back at the BM, announcements still inaudible. This year the organisers decided, unwisely, to focus on the judging process rather than the books, screening a short film showing A C Grayling reading on holiday, Francine Stock unpacking boxes of books, D J Taylor looking thoughtful... yes, yes, judging is NOT INTERESTING, please move on. I also remember a quote from the mountaineer judge Rebecca Stephens along the lines of 'I'm looking for a novel that makes me feel emotion'. It's not a great criterion, is it? I mean, Hitler made people feel emotion. As the announcements began, all the hacks left their tables and thundered to the front, cupping their palms round their ears. That crazy scamp DBC Pierre won.

2004 - The Line of Beauty

The concourse at Victoria Station presumably not being available, the ceremony moved, for one year only, to the vast and atmosphere-free Royal Horticultural Halls. Toibin, Mitchell and Hollinghurst were the favourites, my fellow Indy on Sunday writer (and judge) Rowan Pelling wore an eye-popping low-cut frock, and glamorous Sarah Hall (shortlisted for The Electric Michelangelo) created a stir with her tattoo-baring outfit. I was gutted about Mitchell (still am), but LOB was a worthy winner. It's a great year when there are three masterpieces on the shortlist.

2005 - The Sea

Possibly my finest Man Booker hour, and the only time I have been placed next to a winner. Not that anyone on the Picador table thought John Banville was in with much of a chance, what with Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith and Sebastian Barry to contend with. This was probably the best shortlist in all my Booker years (unimpeachably high-brow literary judges, that's why). The mood on the table was gloomy, relieved by the occasional comment such as: 'It's a great achievement to get this far, John. Just think of it like that.'

I wasn't even at his side when the announcement was made: I was up on the balcony doing a piece to camera for Kirsty Wark. We all leaned dramatically over to hear the result, only to see the table I had just been sitting at erupt with joy. Damn! Banville was swept into superstardom - you couldn't get near him at his Groucho club aftershow party - and I didn't see him again for a whole year, when his publishers had a reunion lunch. He was kind enough to say that everyone who'd been on the table that night was part of the magic. John, you are a gent and my favourite ever Man Booker winner!

2006 - I can't even bring myself to say

The announcement was made and moments later Edward St Aubyn and his entire contingent (including the actress Maria Aitken) rose and icily swept out of the room. Spotting Alan Hollinghurst, I did a Munch's The Scream face and he said, 'I know. SHIT HAPPENS.' My deputy texted me the single word 'Noooooo!'

Usually the losers' parties are tumbleweed affairs, but that night it seemed like everyone stopped by to commiserate with Teddy. Eventually the room became so starry it was like a winner's party after all. There was even an odd moment when one of the judges turned up to apologise to the stony-faced St Aubyn. A surreal evening.

2010 - The Finkler Question

Bit of a jump, but I have no strong memories of the years White Tiger or The Gathering won, beyond meeting the extraordinary Indra Sinha, author of Animal's People and talking to Adiga's publisher beforehand, who confessed, 'We're trying to calm him down. He really thinks he's going to win.' And I unfortunately missed the Wolf Hall dinner.

The winner announcements are always dramatic, and you can instantly tell from the atmosphere when they've got it 'right'. You could really feel the love for Howard Jacobson. (As opposed to the 2006 announcement when it felt like all the energy had suddenly drained out of the room.) I even managed to grab hold of Howard's trophy and pose for a photo. I wonder what this year's Man Booker moment will be?

Dinner with Guillaume Musso

Guillaume Musso is a French literary sensation. His novels have sold 11 million copies world-wide. The French print-run for his latest was 400,000. He's big in South Korea. An anonymous kind of guy, he bashfully recounts that while paying for things with his credit card, it's not unusual for the sales assistant to gasp: 'The writer?'

To all of which a British reader is likely to say 'Who? Eh? What?' Unless they've been on the London Underground recently, in which case they may have seen one of the posters for his latest, Where Would I Be Without You? A woman in jeans walks away from us along a beach towards a hazy blue horizon. Nice image, but enigmatic. So what's the deal with Guillaume Musso?

As you might expect from the figures, this is commercial fiction. As I've written before in this blog, this can be a contentious distinction to make from literary fiction. Green is a different colour to yellow, but you can get from one to the other by infinitesmal additions of blue. There will always be a middle range where you could call it either way (and it doesn't make sense to say that green is better than yellow). John Banville is yellow; Jackie Collins is green; Sarah Waters is greeny-yellowy. And Musso is as vert as you can get.

My first thought on beginning the novel was maybe this would read better in French. I was puzzled as to why there needed to be two translators (Anna Brown and Anna Aitken). He's not Flaubert, that's for sure.

'The young flic was feverish with excitement. That night, he was going to arrest a famous thief, the kind a flic comes across once in his career. He had waited a long time for this moment and he'd replayed the scene over and over in his head. Interpol would be green with envy, as would all the millionaires Archibald had robbed.'

Interpol would be green with envy? Further down on the same page we get 'Martin's heart raced'. We're going on a cliche hunt! The art-loving cat-burglar villain 'really is a master of disguise'. The Velib (Parisian free bicycle) Martin uses in a low-speed chase, 'must have weighed a ton'. Surely not?

'Paradoxically, the police knew almost nothing about Archibald McLean - neither his nationality, nor his age, nor his DNA.' Really? No clue whatsoever about his nationality? Even when he says things like: 'For a moment there, you overestimated your strength, laddie?'

If it isn't obvious enough, Archibald also drives the very Aston Martin that James Bond drives in Thunderball and Goldfinger. Handily it still has 'machine guns concealed in the indicators... a mechanism that poured oil or nails onto the road and retractable blades to slash the tyres of any pursuing cars...' They weren't just props, then? Of course Archibald is planning One Last Heist.

The young French cop Martin Beaumont turns out to have more personal links with the art-thief than he suspects. They date back to his youthful romance in San Francisco with an alluring young woman, Gabrielle ('With her long straight hair and her green eyes flecked with gold, she looked just like Francoise Hardy'). The labyrinthine plotting requires their reignited affair to be artificially hindered by numerous misunderstandings, but fundamentally the dilemma is a sound one: Gabrielle must choose between two people who equally deserve (or don't deserve) her loyalty; Martin must choose between personal and professional satisfaction.

One thing becomes clear: Musso (who's a nice guy, by the way) is absolutely sincere. This is full-strength, heart-on-sleeve, shiny-eyed storytelling, not a cynical bid for massive sales, and therein lies its considerable charm. The Parisian scenes are stylish and thrilling, and although most of the book is set in the United States (Musso, who is in his early 30s, moved to New York age 19, and sold ice-cream to support himself), there is a refreshing European flavour to the adventure. It's hard not to warm to a thief who bags 'the original manuscript of Une saison en enfer' inscribed 'a P. Verlaine, A. Rimbaud'.

But the real secret to Musso's success, I suspect, lies in a particular aspect of his backstory. At 24 he came close to death in a car accident. This led to a personal metaphysical enquiry: consequently his novels overlay the genres of thriller and love story with a veil of the supernatural. In Where Would I Be Without You? the otherworldly element comes late but is thoroughly effective, and, despite the whopping coincidence it involves, rather moving.

For such a soppy romantic, it was not a surprise to learn that Musso is himself blissfully happy. Although, he pointed out, his wife is not entirely satisfied with his current regime of spending only one week out of three with her in Paris, then returning for two weeks to Antibes, his birthplace, to write.

I'm not sure this rather ploddingly translated novel (at least, I assume the French is sparkier) will be the one to break him in the English market, but it's a refreshing enough beach read. In the original I can see it being excellent language practice for anyone learning or brushing up their French.

'Where Would I Be Without You?' is published by Gallic Books (£7.99)