Behind the Booker: Why some don’t make the cut

When a book is on an award juggernaut -- like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” -- things can seem predestined. How could the writer not win this or that award? Yet no book this year has “inevitable winner” stamped on it, as Man Booker Prize judge Giles Foden’s piece last week in the Guardian suggests.

Foden (author of “The Last King of Scotland”) means to illuminate the process of selecting the Man Booker shortlist -- and, I suspect, to vent a bit about failing to get his favorites, such as Pat Barker’s “Life Class,” recognized.

In the end, though, he only makes the whole thing sound confusing. Much has been said about the major names that missed the cut -- J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, Doris Lessing and Barker -- but I’m more intrigued by Foden’s mention, almost in passing, of all the books he admired that never stood a chance.

Why was Benjamin Markovits’ “Imposture,” a story of Lord Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, not worth consideration? Or Justin Cartwright’s imagining of the plot to assassinate Hitler, “The Song Before It Is Sung”? Not big enough in scale or concept? Why not?

“When five people have to agree on 13 books from a 110-strong original entry,” Foden cautions, “there are bound to be casualties.”

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