A few years ago, the books pages of British papers were filled with arguments about whether the Man Booker Prize – the U.K.’s most important literary award – should be open to American writers. There seemed to be a sheepish consensus that the prize must remain limited to British and Commonwealth novelists, since they would not quite be up to competing with their American cousins.

If the British envy our novelistic talent, in return, we can’t help envying their ability to make a literary prize such a major cultural event. The Pulitzers and the National Book Awards together do not command as much attention here as the Man Booker does in Britain. When the 2005 winner is announced on Monday evening, the ceremony will be broadcast live on the BBC, capping months of eager reporting, gossip, and even wagering. The prize helps to make fiction itself part of the national conversation, in a way that it seldom is here.

Maybe that’s why American readers experience their own form of vicarious Bookermania. Almost everyone who cares about literary fiction pays some attention to the prize, and the most devoted have spent the last months following the handicapping and reading the finalists. They are “The Sea” by John Banville, “Arthur & George” by Julian Barnes, “A Long Long Way” by Sebastian Barry, “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, “The Accidental” by Ali Smith, and “On Beauty” by Zadie Smith. The effort to read them all has been made a little more difficult by the fact that three of the six – the Banville, Barnes, and Ali Smith titles – have not yet been published in the United States. But only a little: In the age of Amazon.com and FedEx, London may be closer than the corner bookstore.

This year has been a rewarding one for Booker watchers. When the “longlist” was announced in August (the Booker judges first announce a group of semi-finalists, which is part of what keeps the press stories coming), British commentators agreed that 2005 was an exceptionally strong year for fiction – according to the Guardian, “one of the best years in the Man Booker prize’s 36-year history.” The requisite grumbling only began in September, when the list of 17 was narrowed down to six finalists, leaving several very famous names behind. Salman Rushdie’s “Shalimar the Clown,” J.M. Coetzee’s “Slow Man,” and Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” were the most noted casualties. The chairman of the judging panel, the critic John Sutherland, lamented that “there was sufficient quality for two distinguished lists.”

Did Messrs. Rushdie, Coetzee, and McEwan deserve to make the cut? The real question is whether a writer should be judged against the standard of his own best work, or against the talent of his competitors. None of these three major novelists produced his best work this year. “Shalimar the Clown” was Mr. Rushdie’s most impressive book in a decade, but not at the same level as his Booker-winning “Midnight’s Children.” “Saturday” was not as powerful as “Atonement,” while Mr. Coetzee’s “Slow Man” was an all-around disappointment. But talent is so unevenly distributed that even these writers’ lesser works – certainly Mr. McEwan’s, possibly Mr. Rushdie’s – are better than the best efforts of some of their peers.

Among the six finalists, two – Ali Smith’s “The Accidental” and Sebastian Barry’s “A Long Long Way” – could easily have ceded their places. Ms. Smith is a popular novelist in Britain and Mr. Barry a successful playwright, but neither is well-known over here. “A Long Long Way” is a historical novel, whose naive hero, Willie Dunne, is an Irish soldier in World War I. Mr. Barry succumbs to what might be called the Zelig temptation for historical novelists, assigning Willie a bit part in one major historical event after another (the Battle of the Somme, the Easter Rising). Worse, he writes about the

experience of war in exactly the style – sentimental, exaggerated, soupily metaphorical – that the Great War discredited forever. When Mr. Barry writes that “all around the River Somme, Death had been smiling his contented smile,” the reader longs for a dose of Robert Graves’s or Ernst Junger’s laconic realism.

“The Accidental” is built around an archetypal figure, the trickster who cures an unhappy bourgeois family through sheer mischievous exuberance (see “Boudu Saved From Drowning,” etc.).The effect of drifter Amber on the miserable Smart clan is told by each of its members in turn – self pitying mother Eve, philandering stepfather Michael, guilt-ridden son Magnus, and precocious daughter Astrid. Ms. Smith lavishes her powers on Astrid, making her a charming Harriet the Spy for the Internet age, while the others remain defined by a few predictable tics (math-nerd Magnus constantly uses math terms, and so on). The exuberance of the writing does not quite make up for the banality of the novel’s worldview, which boils down to the idea that everyone should just be happy – a prescription that only the adolescent Astrid could possibly find useful.

In the middle rank of the shortlist are two accomplished novels by highly regarded writers. Max Morden, the fastidious narrator of John Banville’s “The Sea,” would get along famously with one of Louis Begley’s intelligent, unlikable heroes. After his wife’s death, Morden returns to the Irish seaside resort where, as a child, he spent a formative summer whose shattering effects the reader only gradually learns. Mr. Banville’s conception of the past as revenant is familiar, but has undeniable power thanks to the cool virtuosity of his prose style: “So much of life was stillness then, when we were young, or so it seems now; a biding stillness; a vigilance.”

Julian Barnes has been one of Britain’s leading novelists for two decades, ever since evolving, in “Flaubert’s Parrot,” a new kind of writing that cunningly blends history, criticism, and fiction. Along with Martin Amis, he is the most famous British novelist never to have won the Booker, making “Arthur & George” an oddsmaker’s favorite this year. The novel retells an odd chapter in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was already famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes when he became a public champion of George Edalji, a young Indian lawyer falsely convicted of mutilating farm animals. The novel is strongest when Mr. Barnes turns the minutiae of the case into a kind of Holmes story, showing how the writer proved that racial prejudice was responsible for Edalji’s imprisonment. As a character study of two very different Victorians, however, “Arthur & George” feels programmatic. As in much of his work, Mr. Barnes’s tidily intelligent prose seems to shrink his characters into types, rather than expanding them into people.

The best books on the shortlist this year have little in common, except a deep understanding of character and an adventurous approach to genre. Zadie Smith, the prodigy who became famous with the 2000 bestseller “White Teeth,” proves in “On Beauty” that her talent has grown and deepened. Ms. Smith borrowed the novel’s deep structure from Forster’s “Howards End,” turning the bourgeois Wilcoxes into the Kippses, a pious and conservative Anglo-Caribbean clan; while the bohemian Schlegels become the academic-liberal Belseys, whose paterfamilias, Howard, is a radical art historian at Wellington College. The Forster homage, however, like the campus-novel trappings, is an unnecessary crutch for Ms. Smith. What makes the book live is her penetrating observation of all different facets of American, African-American, and British society. Whether she is writing about a faculty meeting or a Virgin Megastore, a poetry workshop, or a group of street hawkers, Ms. Smith makes us see things we would never have noticed – one definition of a genuine novelist. Her book is not as well constructed as Mr. Banville’s or Mr. Barnes’s, but it is more alive.

Finally, there is the book that most deserves to win, and very well might: Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go.” According to this novel’s science-fiction premise, cloning was invented after World War II, and present-day Britain has developed a system for raising clones in order to harvest their organs. What is amazing about “Never Let Me Go” is the way Mr. Ishiguro makes this conceit, which might have served Huxley or Orwell as a basis for blunt dystopian satire, feel both humanly true and immensely moving. As Kathy, the novel’s narrator, tells the story of her childhood at Hailsham, a kind of elite private school, she gradually and as it were inadvertently reveals the shocking tragedy in which she calmly plays her part. Mr. Ishiguro weds narrative suspense and emotional power in a way rare in contemporary fiction, turning Kathy’s world into a nightmare that is also a parable. If on Monday the judges give their prize to Mr. Ishiguro, they will confirm that, at its best, British fiction need fear no rivals.