A broader Man Booker means narrower horizons

And the winner of the 2014 Man Booker prize for Fiction is … American. Or perhaps not. The odds for this week’s award are against Joshua Ferris, whose To Rise Again at a Decent Hour ingeniously pits a dentist against the internet, and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which is emotive, philosophical, and the only shortlisted novel not published by Penguin Random House.

But one of the reasons prizes are such fun is that bookies can only guess what judges think. They were wrong about this week’s Nobel literature prize winner Patrick Modiano. Favourites – in Man Booker’s case The Lives of Others by Indian-born Londoner Neel Mukherjee – are often disappointed. To me the futuristic J, by former winner Howard Jacobson, looks like the outsider.

This is the first year Americans have been allowed to enter Britain’s richest writing contest. So it’s the first time fiction fans have faced the prospect of an American – rather than one of three Brits or the Australian nominated – triumphing at London’s Guildhall on Tuesday, and flying home with £50,000. How do we feel about this?

Pretty good, by all appearances. A handful of critics have voiced doubts, as have former winners AS Byatt and Graham Swift. But mostly the mood has been jolly, and when just two American names appeared on the shortlist, former judge Gaby Wood declared, “I told you so … Why were people so worried?”

I don’t know why Man Booker changed its rules. If, as this prize does, you set out to identify the “very best book of the year” (written in English), I suppose it makes sense to range as widely as you can, to reduce the chances of missing The One. Perhaps the Folio prize, new last year and open to Americans and short stories (and won by American short story writer George Saunders), made Man Booker’s organisers feel fusty and outdated with their entrance criteria of Commonwealth, Ireland and Zimbabwe.

Whatever the reason, gone are the days when the glitziest literary competition was between British and post-colonial novels, from nations that gained independence between the 19th and mid-20th centuries. South Africa, Nigeria, Ireland, India, Australia, Canada and New Zealand have all supplied winners, along with a majority (29 out of 46) from the UK.

I love American novels. I am not arguing with the 2014 shortlist, and will salute the winner. But the globalisation of the prize looks to me more like a narrowing than an expansion of horizons. The US culture industries are vast and prosperous. The American century may be over but American music, films, TV, books and games are everywhere. American publishing already has, in the Pulitzers and National Book Critics Circle, internationally prestigious awards. The danger for books by unknown writers who come from and write about less familiar places is that they never find a toehold in the marketplace.

The point of prizes – more important than choosing between Colm Toibin and Eleanor Catton as the Man Booker did last year, or between JG Farrell, Beryl Bainbridge and Iris Murdoch in 1973 – is to give books what bestselling author and Bailey’s prize organiser Kate Mosse calls “a fighting chance”. That is, to save good books that no one knows about, perhaps because they are not immediately likeable, from sinking without trace.

Trying to find the “very best book” of the year is fun, and fiction is most interesting when people disagree. But the idea that it was no longer worthwhile to conduct this search in a field – the Commonwealth – of around 2 billion people, from more than 50 countries whose roots are so deeply entwined with our own, is ridiculous. If the stories written by almost a third of the world’s population can no longer hold our attention, what does that say about us? That we’d rather read about America, I guess.

Susanna Rustin was deputy editor of Guardian Review and has judged the Costa first novel prize