First thought: It's not so good for women. After all the tea-cup tempestuousness of the Scotiabank-Giller long list and the fact there were 10 women and only 2 men on it, the shortlist has shaken down to a less-than-stellar outcome for the ladies.
Both of the men on the long list made the leap to its shorter cousin. And Canada's two greatest living female writers, both of whom released highly acclaimed books this fall, are not on the short list at all, one by choice (Alice Munro) and one at the discretion of the jury (Margaret Atwood).
Women do outnumber men on the shortlist, but this was a year where they could have held four or even all of the nominations. Some might have even expected it to work out that way, and they will be disappointed.
Most people, though, won't care too much about the gender issue. Of much greater interest is the novels that DID make the list, all of which are books that have earned high critical praise.
It is especially interesting to look at them in light of the comments of one of the judges, Victoria Glendinning, who wrote in the Financial Times a column that mocked the well known cliches of Canadian fiction but also took some condescending potshots, too. Do the five finalists rise above the "striking homogeneity" of the "muddy middle range" of novels that she and her fellow jurists rejected (such as this one, perhaps)?
I'd say yes, they emphatically do. These novels are set in Egypt, Cambodia, ancient Greece, Ottawa and Cape Breton. Some are historical, some are current, and some are both. Some are short and some are long. These five books have nothing in common other than the fact they are written by Canadians.
As for who will win, statistically speaking you have to go with one of the two men. Men have historically won the prize twice as often as women, even though as many women as men have been finalists. And it doesn't make a difference that women dominate the short list, historically speaking.
I'm going to ignore those stats, however, and put my money on Kim Echlin's The Disappeared. Call it a hunch, but her book has been hugely well received here and on Glendinning's side of the Atlantic. That's true of Anne Michaels's The Winter Vault, of course, but Echlin has real underdog appeal.