The Booker 2006: Ringing in the new

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Yesterday, this column looked at three of the six novels on this year's Booker shortlist""some of them surprise inclusions. Here are the other three:

Kate Grenville, The Secret River (Canongate):
In novels Albion's Story, Grenville proved that she had the capacity to look without flinching at the human ability to justify evil. The Secret River takes her into the darker reaches of Australia's history. Grenville began writing The Secret River after she finally saw her great-great-grandfather's house; she wondered why his home had so many fortifications and defences.

Uncovering his history led her into a complex exploration of the clash between the aboriginals, who inhabited the land without needing to own it, and the original white settlers of the Australian frontier whose hunger to own land was so great that they would kill for it.

Interpreting a government directive in the early 19th century that allows settlers to defend themselves against "natives", one of Grenville's characters says: "Put plain, you may shoot the buggers any time you get the chance." This is a beautiful novel, despite its grim subject, with Grenville's love of landscape and language shining through. The Secret River isn't the popular pick for the Booker, but I must confess that it is probably my favourite of the six on the list.

M J Hyland, Carry Me Down (Canongate):
On the blog she briefly maintained after publishing her first novel, How The Light Gets In, M J Hyland wrote: "In my experience, the things worth saying about people and the world are often the things that are hardest to say; the things that make me nervous or even embarrassed before I say them." Carry Me Down is a disconcerting, compelling study of childhood.

John Egan's family is tall, and given to telling tall tales; John himself is close to being a giant, at the age of 11, and believes that he has the special ability to detect lies. "This exercise book is called Koob of Seil (Book of Lies spelled backwards) and in it I have begun to record the lies I detect. I have three headings: Major Lies (Rojam Seil) and Minor Lies (Ronim Seil) and White Lies (Etihw Seil). But white lies backwards isn't a good word, so I've changed white lies to Etuh Seil." Egan's life in an Ireland that Hyland knows well from her own difficult childhood, is not easy""marked by the death of his best friend, his mother's depression, his father's gambling, his mind starts to give way. Carry Me Down is always believable, but the novel unravels towards the end. It's curious how many authors create child protagonists who are marked by strange conditions or psychological disorders, as though the only way we can see childhood in the 21st century is through the lens of the grotesque.

Edward St Aubyn, Mother's Milk (Picador):
An inescapable condition of our age is that we often know the life of an author before we even get to his books in excessively intimate detail. Never having met St Aubyn, it's disconcerting to realise how much I know about him: he comes from an aristocratic family, was raped by his father at the age of five, put some serious effort into being a heroin addict and contemplated killing himself if he didn't finish a first novel, which is one way to ensure you meet your deadlines. His trilogy, Some Hope, explored the upper-class pursuits of addiction and snobbery-with-violence with the finesse and cruelty that Beardsley brought to his drawings.

Mother's Milk catches up with the superbly dysfunctional Melrose family""Patrick is now a heroin addict, his father has married rich and remains brutal, and all of this, mixed in with a keen eye for the rituals of social tribes, provides fodder for rich comedy. At times, the Melrose family begins to sound like the one immortalised in comic song: "Ours is not a happy family/ No one ever laughs or smiles/ Mine's a dismal occupation/ Crushing ice for father's piles./ Jane the under-housemaid vomits/ Every morning just at eight/ To the horror of the butler/ Who's the author of her fate." Indian readers brought up on the Wodehouse world of aristocratic England will blench at St Aubyn's rather darker view of what them toffs do for fun, but Mother's Milk is great fun. It would be an outside shot for the Booker, though; the judges of literary prizes usually have the same reaction to comic literature as a doctor has to flesh-eating bacilli""they view it from a safe distance with fascination, but would prefer it to be eradicated as swiftly as possible.

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