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"What are people saying about ?" Melvyn Bragg asked me recently after I had interviewed him about Ted Hughes' poem Last Letter. He was interested to know how his friend's chances were being rated among the media.

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"They're not," I replied, in as much as nobody is discussing his book, The Finkler Question. Around me all the chatter had been about . Was it really an experimental novel? What's so different about it? Wasn't his last book, Remainder both more experimental and, frankly better?

Or the talk was about . Could it complete the hat-trick for the Australian-born, American-domiciled author? Or it was and her use of a five-year-old voice to narrate her story.

And once those books had been discussed came . Is it a memoir or a novel? And anyway, wasn't it published in three parts in the Paris Review, suggesting it is not one piece, but three and therefore ineligible for the Booker?

But of the Finkler Question - nothing. The bookies were equally uninterested, with one leading bookmaker having it down as the least favourite. Well, as we now know, they were wrong.

Howard Jacobson's book is the first comic novel to win the Man Booker Prize and, in doing so, goes some way to dispel criticism of the award that it is a "genre prize", interested only in literary fiction and sniffy about thriller writing, science fiction and the comic novel.

I understand it was a very tight decision with Peter Carey running Jacobson a very close second - the judges eventually voting 3/2 in the Englishman's favour after an hour-long deliberation.

Judging from his acceptance speech, winning it meant a lot to Howard Jacobson, as did only making it to the long-list on two previous occasions. Now I suspect he feels a sense of legitimacy for his style of writing, which could open the way for the Man Booker Prize to further broaden its stylistic horizons in future years.