Well, once again my blithe predictions return to haunt me. Alan Hollinghurst has in fact won this year’s Booker prize–actually the only novel on the list that I’ve read so far. To bluntly rehash my previous reservations about this book, it’s not bad, but it’s been ludicrously overrated. If you want to read a novel about an uptight middle-class boy won over by the glamour of his social betters, why not go back to “Brideshead Revisited”? And as a satire of the 1980s, the politics are borderline adolescent. The message boils down to something like: Tory grandees are bad but amusing, black people are essentially good, and your timid bourgeois parents are boring.It’s also been described as the first gay novel to win the prize, which, when you come to think about it, is a very odd label.