"The Ghost Road," the third novel in Pat Barker's World War I trilogy, won the Booker Prize for fiction after a competition that was unusually free of conflict, by Booker standards.
Barker's novel, which competed against four other finalists, is the story of a working-class officer who returns to the war's front line after a period of shellshocked convalescence. She wrote it, she said afterward, so readers would think not just about the horrors of the war, but also about "why it happened and the effects it had on society."The other nominees were "The Moor's Last Sigh," Salman Rush-die's novel about three generations of a remarkable family, which most people, including the bookies taking bets on the award, had favored to win; Barry Unsworth's "Morality Play," about a runaway priest in the 14th century who falls in with a band of traveling players and becomes involved in murderous intrigue; Tim Winton's "Riders," about an Australian man's search for his suddenly missing wife, and Justin Cartwright's "In Every Face I Meet," the story of a drunken investment banker and a drug-dealing pimp in modern-day London.
The Booker, Britain's most prestigious literary prize, is awarded every year to a novel written by a citizen of Britain, Ireland or one of the Commonwealth countries. The prize carries a $31,650 purse and brings with it instant (or greatly enhanced) fame for the author.
The attention lavished on the Booker by literary London, which put on its formal clothes and gathered en masse in the Guildhall for the ceremony, is an indication of how seriously Britain takes its fiction.
- Sarah Lyall