The winner of the Man Booker prize is announced next Tuesday. As I haven’t read any of the six books on the short list I am perfectly placed to tip the winner. In the business of betting on literary prizes, there is nothing more contaminating than knowing too much about the runners and riders. In other words, actually reading the books.

This year’s short list comprises two English writers (Linda Grant and Philip Hensher), an Irishman (Sebastian Barry), an Australian (Steve Toltz), and two Indians (Aravind Adiga and Amitav Ghosh). The bookmakers’ previous two favourites to win, Salman Rushdie and Joe O’Neill, got no further than the long list of thirteen. Now the bookies seem split between Sebastian Barry, Aravind Adiga and Amitav Ghosh; the last time I looked Ghosh was marked 7/4 favourite by the bookie, Paddy Powers, while William Hill backed Barry at 2/1.

All Booker judges (and I have been one) are urged to reach their verdict purely on the quality of the text. In my year, the winner was Graham Swift for Last Orders; a good book, and I like to think the right decision. But the judges were split three to two and if one of the three — me, for example — had changed his mind then the prize would probably have gone to Seamus Deane for Reading in the Dark, which would have been an equally worthy winner. In fact, remembering the books under consideration that year (1996), I think it would have been no disgrace if the prize had been won by Beryl Bainbridge, Shena Mackay, Margaret Atwood or Rohinton Mistry, or a few other authors who didn’t even reach the short list. The idea that the text alone decides the winner is nonsense. Only in a very few years has a book so stood out from the rest of the field that it demands the prize; 1981, when Rushdie won with Midnight’s Children, is probably the best example. Otherwise, everything is arbitrary. Taste in writing is highly subjective and often hard to articulate. The chances of one judge persuading another are remote. Luck plays a huge part, as do all kinds of extra-textual considerations that no judge likes to admit to but must subconsciously exist.

Let’s consider some of these in the context of this year’s prize. First, how much do the judges feel their verdict has to cause a splash by, say, favouring a first novel by a not very well-known writer? Hard to tell. Michael Portillo, a former Tory cabinet minister, chairs a panel formed by one novelist, one literary editor, the founder of a bookstore chain, and (the wild card) a Scottish Sikh radio and television ‘personality’, Hardeep Singh Kohli. All we know about the sum of their tastes so far is that by rejecting Rushdie and O’Neill they seem to distrust ambition (or perhaps pretension) in writing and aren’t afraid to thumb their noses at conventional expectation. In interviews they’ve stressed ‘readability’ and ‘pleasure’ as the things they’re looking for in books. Both Adiga and Toltz are debut novelists and would supply the surprise factor, but to judge from the online blurbs Adiga’s novel sounds the one most likely to fulfil the pleasure principle.

Then again, the judges may feel some responsibility to writers who’ve served their apprenticeships and aren’t one-book wonders such as D.B.C. Pierre (the 2003 winner; a second novel was widely condemned as trash) or Arundhati Roy (who won controversially in 1997; second novel still awaited). The two writers with the best track records are Ghosh and Barry. But Barry is Irish. Last year’s winner, Anne Enright, is also Irish, as is John Banville who won in 2005. Could the Booker have three Irish winners in one four-year stretch? What about Britain? Over the last decade Britain has produced only two winners, Ian McEwan for what is probably his worst novel, Amsterdam, and Alan Hollinghurst for The Line of Beauty. Hensher and Grant are English, but some might feel that Grant has been sufficiently rewarded with the Orange prize a few years ago, and Hensher’s novel, The Northern Clemency, looks terribly long. Also, to judge from its title, our old friend ambition (or pretension) could be working hard on every page.

Now consider Ghosh. His books have become steadily more popular and ‘accessible’ since the knotty and difficult Calcutta Chromosome. His new novel has a nice title, Sea of Poppies, and he’s been writing intelligently for more than twenty years. And, contrary to the notion that the Booker has a disproportionate number of Indian winners, only four writers of Indian descent have ever won it, only one of whom, Roy, lives in India (the others are Rushdie, Kiran Desai in 2006 and V.S. Naipaul in 1971). True, three other winners were books with an Indian setting, by Paul Scott, J.G. Farrell and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, but the last of them happened as long ago as 1977.

So it’s Ghosh for me. Or, if not Ghosh, then the sprightly-sounding The White Tiger by Adiga. I will be wrong of course, but reading all six books wouldn’t help me to be any the righter. Books, unlike racehorses, have no objective measurements of their qualities that can be readily accepted by all. Who can tell what this year’s judges will like, or how many of them will like it, or whether in your view and mine the book is any good? Why should we trust them more than a friend whose taste seems dependable — like our own? The Booker isn’t so much a prize as a lottery, and one that very many good novels fail to win.

*****

The news that I’d died came by an unusual messenger from an unlikely place. My friend and fellow columnist, Ram Guha, brought it to London from Scandinavia where he’d been lecturing Lutheran bishops on Indian ecology (strange work, but somebody has to do it). It was almost the first thing he said when he sat down in our living room. “Do you know that Ian Jack’s dead? I read it online in Copenhagen.”

It was a jolt. I’d never met my namesake but we had our difficulties. The other Ian Jack (picture) — some might say the real Ian Jack — was a professor of English literature at Cambridge whose published work includes Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry 1660-1750, the tenth volume of the Oxford History of English Literature, and Keats and the Mirror of Art. He died on September 3, aged 84. The word ‘distinguished’ is overused, but Professor Jack seemed exactly that. He delivered celebrated talks on Browning: he was elected honorary fellow of Merton College, Oxford; he edited a definitive collection of the Brontë novels. According to his obituary in the Times, “his editorial labours won widespread admiration”. Given this eminence, why would he be bothered that a younger man, toiling through the foothills of the writing business, had the same name?

But he was. I got his first letter asking me to change my name in the 1970s. I replied saying I didn’t think there could be any great confusion between an expert on Keats with a chair at Cambridge and a reporter on a Sunday newspaper. Silence from academe. Then in 1980 all hell broke loose. Cambridge University ended the tenure of a young university lecturer in English — in plainer words, fired him — because he’d been teaching literary theory on the French model, a model that had few friends among the traditionalists of the university’s English department. Or that was the allegation at any rate, because when my paper asked me to go to Cambridge and find out more I discovered that everybody had different versions of events. The lecturer had been labelled a structuralist but he himself said he was a post-structuralist. It was difficult enough for me to get a grip on the first idea (the forbidding names of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes arose) without trying to tackle the refinement of the second. None the less, I put 2,000 words together and they covered a page in the Sunday Times.

Professor Jack read them in Washington, DC, where he was no doubt teaching Keats and the Augustine poets to an audience of entranced Americans. The paper’s telex machine burst into life and page after page of the professor’s complaint rolled out. I was a charlatan who had understood nothing. More important, I was a charlatan writing about the very English department that the professor taught in — people might easily imagine he was the author. I think the paper published a drastically shortened version in the letters page, but that wasn’t good enough for the professor, who circulated a notice to every university English department in the United Kingdom saying that this Ian Jack wasn’t that Ian Jack. Eventually he wrote with the same message to the Times Literary Supplement, to which I felt bound to reply the next week saying that this Ian Jack wasn’t that Ian Jack either and on no account did I want to be mistaken for the author of Keats and the Mirror of Art.

In Britain, I never have been. Professor Jack rarely appeared in the media and was unknown to most people beyond the walls of Oxbridge colleges. In India, however, people would sometimes make the mistake. Perhaps his books were set texts at universities. “I very much liked your book about Keats,” people would say, in the middle of conversations that might be about the fortunes of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Sometimes I corrected them, and sometimes I didn’t — to save them disappointment, you understand. Today I would have to apologize: “Nice of you, but I’m dead.”