Shooting prize-dispensing fish in literary barrels

Edward St Aubyn’s new novel is a jauntily malicious satire on literary prizes in general, the Man Booker Prize in particular and, it may be presumed, the 2011 Man Booker Prize in especial particular. That was the year of the great ‘readability’ brouhaha in which — as every reviewer will point out — among many unexpected omissions from the longlist was Edward St Aubyn. He afterwards told an interviewer that ‘the Booker 2011 is of no more interest to me than the World Heavyweight Championship, which I’m not going to win either.’

Anyway, here’s this: a short little book about the ‘Elysian Prize’, whose sponsors are a ‘highly innovative but controversial agricultural company’ whose GM experiments are variously claimed to have ‘caused cancer, disrupted the food chain, destroyed bee populations, or turned cattle into cannibals’. Elysian are best known to the public, though, for their association with this prize, whose remit is ‘the Imperial ash-heap of the Commonwealth’.