Who cares if an American wins the Booker?

Like some great and ruthless entity out of a Tom Wolfe novel, the Man Group is moving into literature. An enterprise with the perfect universal name, Man has decided that books are great news, promotion-wise. For what must for them be a relatively piffling investment, it has taken over the Booker Prize, which will now become known as the Man Booker.

Man Booker will be bigger, with prize money increased to £50,000, and it will also, it seems, be more international. This week, there were strong hints, more an authorised leak than an outright announcement, that, from 2004, it will be open to American novels. "The Man Group does a great deal of business in America," the prize's chief administrator Martyn Goff has explained. "It is a very international set-up which is why it needs that added reach."

There have been trills of outrage at this development, and most of the objections have been specious. Professor Lisa Jardine, chair of this year's judges, has complained that the prize will become "more blandly generic as opposed to specifically British" – an odd remark when one considers the winners over the past five years. It seems doubtful whether Peter Carey, an Australian, Margaret Atwood, a Canadian, J M Coetzee, a South African, or Arundhati Roy, an Indian, would regard themselves or their writing as being specifically British.

Indeed, if anything, it is the English winner of recent years that could be described as "blandly generic". Amsterdam was a slight five-finger exercise of a novel which hinted in an oddly hurried way at themes that its author Ian McEwan has addressed more fully and effectively elsewhere, and its success summed up for many what has been wrong with the Booker. Often, it can seem stodgy and institutionalised in its choices, rewarding the right, safe book from the right, safe author.

An injection of American fiction would shake up the system, upgrade the prize from what it is now, an award for English-language fiction written by anyone except an American. The opportunity to compare the best of British Commonwealth writing with what is coming out of America – Zadie Smith against Lorrie Moore, Martin Amis beside Jonathan Franzen, Alan Hollinghurst with Michael Cunningham – would sharpen up the debate about the different forms and devices of storytelling.

The problem, according to Lisa Jardine, is that the Americans will always win and here, one has to admit, she is right. But then, so what? Writing is not a competitive sport, in which spectators cheer on their own national team. If the Man Booker is for the best novel written in English that year, most readers will regard the colour of the author's passport as being of little more than passing interest.

It is for another reason entirely that the Man Group's initiative should worry anyone who cares about this country's fiction. At present, the British book industry is selling out to big bucks. Large publishers and their new masters, large bookselling chains, expend their energy selling large quantities of an increasingly small number of titles. It is this process which is blandly generic, squeezing out any work which is awkward or written by an author with an unacceptable publicity profile or sales record.

Allowing our most established prize to become part of this process is immensely depressing. The Man Group may be an international set-up but it is not motivated by a love of fiction; it is engaged in a marketing exercise. Today it is looking after its American profile; tomorrow it could well decide that the prize's criteria fail to conform to its strategy. The pressure towards populism, rewarding not the year's best book but its most promotable one, seems certain to increase. Ominously, Mr Goff has revealed that Man will have "a hands-on input into how the awards would work".

The great strength of the Booker Prize in the past is that its shortlist often includes good but relatively unknown writers who are lifted from the slough of anonymity in which most novelists work. If those who ran the Booker were really concerned about the future of British fiction, they would build on that effect by making the prize not bigger, but smaller. They would make it a truly and exclusively British prize. Other countries look after their authors by giving national prizes. Maybe we should try that too.

The organisers would also do well to free themselves from the contaminating embrace of big business. There is no need for a prize worth £50,000. Throwing money at Peter Carey or Margaret Atwood, rich authors about to grow richer on royalties accruing from their winning novel, is once again more about promoting the image of the giver than helping an author.

Smaller, less inclusive, and with less money attached to it: there is, of course, little or no chance of the prize heading in that direction. But, if it does not, the likelihood is that it will quickly lose its distinctiveness and become just another money-led stunt in which literature is the loser.

terblacker@aol.com