[In the following essay, Hoffman describes the scene at the 1995 Booker Prize award ceremony at which Barker's The Ghost Road wins.]

On the evening of Nov. 7, the keeper of the Guild-hall, the magnificent Gothic building where the Booker Prize ceremonies are taking place, is mostly worried about security. In acknowledgment of Salman Rushdie's presence, he nervously confesses, 16 armed guards have been hired; and it must be said that the small phalanx of alert-looking men carrying walkie-talkies adds an element of extraliterary suspense to the atmosphere. Others in the black-tie crowd may have extraliterary worries as well, if they've put their money down on one of the authorial racers. At this last lap of the race, Britain's leading bookies have billed The Moor's Last Sigh, by Mr. Rushdie, as the “hottest Booker favorite ever,” with The Ghost Road, by Pat Barker, close behind.

George Walden, the chairman of this year's Booker Jury, is worried about the state of British culture. Mr. Walden, a Conservative M. P., delivers a darkly ironic speech, peppered with literate quotations, in which he contends that “the tyranny of ordinariness” reigns in Britain with a universally dampening hand.

Sir Michael Came, the outgoing chairman of Booker P. L. C., the company that sponsors the award, says a few understated words in defense of the Booker's importance and its integrity. His successor speaks with wistful gravity about the company's successful transition from a colonial to a modern company, specializing in food distribution and catering, poultry breeding and fish processing （fish fingers are specifically mentioned）.

In the meantime, television crews are in evidence—the evening's proceedings are broadcast live on BBC—and in an adjoining room literary pundits are discussing on camera the finalists' merits and chances.

One gropes for an American analogy to the Booker. The confluence of celebrity, culture and commerce, of high-mindedness and cheerful tackiness, of coziness, dignity and self-deprecation that characterizes the Booker institution is ineffably, peculiarly, contemporary British. But there is also in the mix an element of intense spectator interest, equaled in America only by the Super Bowl. For several months each year. Booker watching becomes something of a national sport—and the stakes in the game are high. First awarded in 1969, the Booker quickly gained a reputation as the most important prize for English-language fiction. The critical cachet of the Booker is enormous, not to speak of the cachet of cash. The award itself carries a prize of £20,000, and winning books have gone on to sell as many as 300,000 copies.

And yet, when after dinner the announcement of this year's winner comes, it is greeted in a strangely subdued way. The recipient is Pat Barker, for the third part of her highly acclaimed trilogy about World War I. The Ghost Road is a tough, vivid meditation on the physical and psychic wounds incurred by men in battle—a critically unexceptionable choice and, in fact, one that meets with wide approval. Why, then, the mood of slight uncertainty in the air? Ms. Barker herself makes a terse acceptance speech, and later some skeptical comments about prizes.

The Booker has met with criticism in recent years for making choices that were unpopular or eccentric. This year, skepticism arose more from perplexity than disapproval, from a nagging sense of arbitrariness. The Moor's Last Sigh—a narratively manic, verbally hyperenergetic, comical, fantastical, roiling multicultural mulch of a novel of India—would also have been a commendable winner. Why one book rather than the other? What were the judges' criteria for judgment? What was this year's Booker all about?

One thing it may have been about was good behavior, which may be where the perplexity first began. If scandal and polemic are to prizes what music is to love, then this year was a bit undernourished, especially by Booker standards. There were no irate judges walking out on the panel, as one did in 1991 because he disapproved of all the short-listed books. No writers scorning the prize on ideological grounds, as John Berger did in 1972, when he won for his novel G and declared he would donate half the money to the Black Panthers. No women's publishing cooperative coming from New Zealand and chanting in Maori, as happened in 1985, when the Maori writer Keri Hulme won the prize, and when her book The Bone People went on to become known in Booker lore as the least-read winner so far.

And no Great Scandals like those of last year, when embarrassment piled upon imbroglio. First, early in the season, one of the judges tried to recommend a novel to his fellow panelists without mentioning that its author happened to be his wife. Then John Bayley, the chairman, expressed in print his general dislike of contemporary fiction. Almost as soon as the award ceremonies were over, one of the judges declared that she was horrified by her colleagues' choice, which was How Late It Was, How Late, a novel by James Kelman written in Glaswegian dialect. The title, as it happened, was prophetic, since the judges kept changing their minds on their favorite until the very last minute.

Nothing of the sort happened this year. With the memories of these goings-on still fresh in their minds, the jurors seemed determined to be above reproach. In interviews, they alluded to reining in their passions and trying to achieve sufficient consensus to safeguard against disaffection and breaking ranks.

Irreproachability, however, can have its own pitfalls, and as soon as the five finalists were announced in September—one fewer than the customary six—the panel was in effect accused of playing it safe. The Independent described the selection as “militantly uncontroversial” and questioned the wisdom of curtailing the list in a year that saw the publication of novels by such prominent writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, John Berger, Penelope Fitzgerald and John Banville, among others. Several newspapers singled out the omission of The Information, by Martin Amis, which had been considered a sure contender. The Times made the exclusion front-page news.

Booker panelists hastened to respond that there were several novels that had some judges' enthusiasm, but none that recruited majority support. As for the books that did get through the sieve, one discernible thing they had in common was a kind of blokeishness. Sensitive blokeishness, to be exact. Among the feats of Ms. Barker's novel is her ability to imagine her way into male sexuality, and to extend her sympathies fully to masculine trouble and pain. And part of Mr. Rushdie's achievement in The Moor's Last Sigh is to reimagine power relations between men and women in interesting ways, and to invent a convincingly larger-than-life female character, seen in the novel from the point of view of her multiply scarred son. The three other books on the short-list also feature chastened men. In Every Face I Meet, by Justin Cartwright, a wry comedy about male friendship and race relations in London, among other matters, gives us a congenially befuddled protagonist, who despite best intentions, or perhaps because of them, gets into terrible trouble and sees his best buddy killed. Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth, is a poetically written historical novel set in medieval times, about a priest who joins a troupe of actors and through staging a theater drama learns about the vexed complexities of good, evil, power and injustice in the real world. And finally, The Riders, by Tim Winton, a young Australian writer, follows the disturbing adventures of a man who has been deserted by his wife and who, in the course of pursuing her with his young daughter, learns how to heal and be healed by his child.

Is this, then, the season of the sensitive male, after so many seasons of insensitive ones? Or was the Booker panel practicing the newest form of political correctness? The jurors would certainly disavow such thoughts. In interviews and on other occasions, several members of the panel expressly disclaimed considerations of political correctness—especially of the currently correct kind. Ruth Rendell, the crime novelist, who served on the panel, said the authors' sex figured so little in their deliberations that the panelists noticed they had given the prize to a woman only after their decision was made. Indeed, they seemed keen to avoid all extraliterary criteria. They said they wanted novels that were readable, enjoyable, witty; they talked about well-constructed narrative.

This, too, may have been an attempt at purity, or a kind of critical innocence. But it may also raise a question: What does one want from fiction now? Marina Warner, a former Booker judge and short-listed author, says that the prize has served to bring attention to fiction in Britain in a period that saw an extraordinary efflorescence of innovative and cosmopolitan writing. It may be that after so much appreciation of experiment and extravagance, simplicity is becoming the last refuge of sophisticated minds. Oddly enough, only Mr. Walden, the one nonprofessional critic on the panel, referred to notions of literary ambition and worried about the “little England” mentality, in literature as in other things.

Well, pity the poor Booker judges, who at least implicitly have to answer such questions. This year they had to slog through 141 novels, a task that can surely addle the best critical minds. In the days right before the award announcement, they spoke with engagement and eloquence about their struggles of conscience and taste. After various swings of the pendulum, this year they took the middle road. But prizes are always exercises in arbitrariness, and it is the judges who really can't win.