The Booker shortlist: failing to write the present

A strong female trio dominate the Booker prize shortlist this year—Mantel, Waters and Byatt—with Coetzee competing for a record third win. But what's perhaps most striking about the list is its preference for history over the present: the six books on it are variously set during the late Victorian era, the 1970s, 1840, the 1520s, the 1930s, and 1947.

What's wrong with the present? As much as anything, the problem appears to be quality. It's difficult to say that any literary prize truly matters in an age so glutted with them, but the Booker remains both the king of the bunch and an honest attempt to find the year's best writing. And the cupboard of really excellent writing about the present looks remarkably bare at the moment.

Among decent writers there's Sebastian Faulks—never a Booker contender, much to his frustration—whose A Week in December sees modern Britain through Balzacian eyes and does a pretty convincing job of it (subscribers can read Julian Evans' review of the novel for Prospect here). But I do wonder whether it's increasingly hard to capture the texture and tone of much of contemporary living in the form of a novel at all.

Writers have always had to invent, beg or borrow new prose styles for new eras. Literature spent the 20th century making the language of cinema, radio and television its own, just as the novel itself evolved from epistolary and historical writing. The digital era is proving more intractable, however, and this may be because the virtues of the literary novel and of the online world verge on the incompatible: one concerned with form, sustained attention and the following of an author's shifting path from beginning to end; the other multiple, fragmented and constantly picking itself apart. How to convey mediated experience that is not just active but interactive—clicking, following, referring, commenting, navigating, sharing, playing—in any linear medium?

Genre books still work, dragging you delightedly on rails through a carefully calculated plot. Literary authors with genre in their blood, like Faulks, also adapt well. And miniature human dramas are, at their best, timeless. But there's plenty that lies beyond the scope of these disciplines and, perhaps, beyond the scope of most people now writing. And there's plenty that's rich and marvellous about a book like Wolf Hall that it's difficult to see something set five centuries later achieving—including the sense that the novel itself is the perfect way of capturing the essence of an age. Am I missing the point, and overlooking some dazzling gems of the here and now that the Booker is simply too timid to anoint as literature? Or does the best future for the serious English-language novel now lie in the past?