The Golden Booker

Now that it's become humid and oppressive – and even hotter – this heat has made all physical and mental effort something of a challenge. However, my sluggish brain has registered a few blurry impressions of the larger world. Today I learnt that Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient has won the Golden Booker, having been voted (by 'the public') the best Booker winner in the prize's 50-year history – or, rather, voted the best of the five nominees, one from each decade, chosen by the illustrious judges.
  Well, something had to win, and it could have been worse (The Bone People, anyone?), but I remember reading The English Patient at the time, on the fervent recommendation of a friend, and finding it, for the most part, hard going and quite uninvolving, though a good many passages seemed rather brilliant. It is certainly a representative Booker-winning novel, a loose baggy monster with a wide sweep, big ambitions and a multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-everything mise-en-scène.
  To his credit, Ondaatje modestly – and surely accurately – declared on winning the award:
'Not for a second do I believe this is the best book on the list, especially when it is placed beside a work by V.S. Naipaul [In a Free State], one of the masters of our time, or a major work like Wolf Hall. I suspect and know more than anyone that perhaps The English Patient is still cloudy, with errors in pacing.' He also acknowledged that the big Oscar-winning movie of his novel 'probably had something to do with the result of this vote', and went out of his way to praise some of the fine authors who never won the Booker, naming William Trevor, Alice Munro and Barbara Pym. Good for him.