Six lost Bookers emerge from the shadows of the past

J.G Farrell's <i>Troubles</i> and Shirley Hazzar's <i>Bay of Noon</i> are both finalists in the Lost Booker Prize. Photos / Supplied

I love Ian McEwan, but his memory sometimes plays tricks on him.

In a recent interview, the writer talked about his early work, setting his books in the context of what everyone else was doing. The novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s were, he said, polite, and a little dull. Hmm. I am not at all sure he is right about this.

As it happens, I have just read 21 novels, all of which were published in 1970, and while a few could be described as polite, none was actively dull. Two - Bomber by Len Deighton and I'm the King of the Castle by Susan Hill - were so exciting, I read them at one sitting, and one - The Hand-Reared Boy by Brian Aldiss - so filthy, I read it with the door of my office closed, as if afraid of being caught.

You want camp and agonised? Try A Domestic Animal by Francis King. Feminist and experimental? The Circle by Elaine Feinstein. Muscular and sweeping? The Vivisector by Patrick White. I could go on and on like this.

I even liked - or at least it had its moments - Melvyn Bragg's sentimental tale of working-class life, A Place in England ("Ee, there's dignity in work, lad!"). Only one book left me completely cold, and that was A Little of What You Fancy by H.E. Bates. I've never been keen on the bucolic Ma and Pop Larkin and their continually rising sap.

I read these books in my capacity as a judge of the Lost Booker prize. To cut a long story short, in 1971, two years after its birth, it was decided that the Booker would no longer be awarded retrospectively; it would be, as now, a prize for the best novel in the year of publication. At the same time, the date on which the award was made was also switched from April to November. Most novels published in 1970, then, were never considered for the prize. They were "lost".

Was this an injustice? Yes, thought Peter Straus, the Booker's unofficial archivist, who first stumbled on the omission. A completist to his very bone marrow, Straus suggested that the situation be remedied with a one-off prize. Any novel published in Britain in 1970 and still in print would be considered, and the judges for the contest would, like the books, all be 40 years old. They would draw up a shortlist of six, and the public would then vote for the winner.

I was happy to be asked. The Darwinian fact that these 21 books had remained in print for four decades meant that we did not have to wade through any dross - all our survivors had some merit.

I had the perfect opportunity to read several "genre" books I would not otherwise have picked up in a thousand years: the briny Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian, the aforementioned Bomber, which brilliantly describes the progress of an Allied air raid over 24 hours in the summer of 1943.

It was pretty clear that just as many historical novels were published in 1970 as now. Slowly, themes emerged. I suppose I already knew that in 1970 women were often thwarted, and that social class was more outwardly, and painfully, visible than now.

But it was a shock when a gay narrator referred to himself as an "invert", and I do not think that I'd grasped how heavily the war must still have hung over the Britain into which I was born, nor the fact that austerity did not just disappear overnight when rationing ended in 1954. There were no mini-dresses or bell-bottoms in these novels, and only a moderate amount of wife-swapping, but there was an awful lot of stew, and cold houses.

There were times when I could hardly believe they'd been written in my lifetime, and times when the world they conjured felt so uncannily familiar, I was filled with longing for my childhood, chilblains, black-and-white television, and all.

So, to the shortlist. We (the other judges were the poet and novelist Tobias Hill and newsreader Katie Derham) reached an agreement fairly rapidly on our first four books. The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard, a tale of Naples just after the war, is so exquisitely atmospheric - this Italy is both Third World and impossibly glamorous - that it would have been a sin not to shortlist it.

The same went for Troubles by J.G. Farrell, set in Ireland after World War I, where Major Brendan Archer is visiting his fiancee at her home, the crumbling Majestic Hotel (in Farrell's deft hands, a beautiful metaphor for the wider crumbling of empire).

Patrick White's The Vivisector, an account of an artist's life from birth to death, came at us like a punch, throbbing with rage and testosterone and some of the best writing I've ever read.

And then there was Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat, short and black and chilling. Lise is a lonely and strange spinster who will soon be murdered. But why? And by whom?

After this, it was trickier. It felt heady, almost sacrilegious, to chuck out Iris Murdoch's A Fairly Honourable Defeat, but in the end we decided that this long account of mischief among the chattering classes was probably not her best novel; and I was sad to lose David Lodge's sweet coming-of-age novel Out of the Shelter, set in Heidelberg, Germany, postwar.

In the end, though, we chose Mary Renault's Fire From Heaven, the first volume of her trilogy about Alexander the Great, because it is exciting and vivid and takes you into an alien world; and Nina Bawden's Birds on the Trees, a story about a middle-class family in crisis.

Who wins the Lost Booker is now in the hands of the international reading public. I've no idea which will triumph. All these books are truly fantastic. But if I had to pick one, it would be Troubles. It's funny, sad, and beautifully written; it's prescient, wise, original and unexpectedly eccentric.

Vote J.G., I say. Or, even better, just read him. Vote for your favourite Lost Booker novel at themanbookerprize.com. The winner will be announced on May 19.

- OBSERVER