Well, so much for what I thought: I imagined that Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End would be at least down to the last two works in contention for the Costa book of the year award, announced last night. I wasn't, in fact, surprised that Sebastian Barry won for The Secret Scripture (my report is here), but it was certainly unusual, unheard of, even, for a chair of judges, in this case Matthew Parris, to be so very candid about how it nearly didn't get the prize – and how Adam Foulds's narrative poem The Broken Word just missed out on the £25,000 cheque.
In fact Parris, speaking to journalists last night, was almost brutally honest about the flaws that the judges had seen in Barry's novel. "The Broken Word jolly nearly pipped it to the post," he said. "The judges nearly all agreed that there was a lot wrong with it, that it was flawed. Almost no one liked the ending."
Sometimes you hear hints about judging later – as in how Anne Enright's The Gathering, winner of the 2007 Man Booker, was the outcome of a jury badly split over Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach; or how Grayson Perry, at the 2003 Turner prize, was the result of a group of judges split over Willie Doherty and Jake and Dinos Chapman. I like Parris's honesty, though. It will perhaps mean that Foulds's work gets a little more exposure than it would otherwise have done had it been just one among the others. It is, perhaps, scant consolation for him, but there again Sebastian Barry went through the same experience at the 2008 Man Booker prize, when it pretty soon emerged that he had only narrowly lost out to Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
What else can I tell you about last night? Well, at the dinner, Esther Rantzen irritated everyone on my table by running round and moving all the place-name cards so she could sit next to her date. Classy.
