Philip Marchand ruminates, as Philip Marchand is wont to do, on what role awards like the Giller Prize (announced tomorrow night in a Harperesque televised gala) play in the formation of our shared (read: academically inherited) sense of value.

One thing required for the formation of a canon is time. Mount believes that the canon of Canadian literature is relatively stable for books published before 1980. After that, it becomes a shot in the dark. “I’ve rarely taught one of those big pre-1980 canonical Canadian novels and had them fall flat in the classroom,” he says. “But when I pick a new novel for the course, I often get it wrong. Every year, it’s like, how am I going to screw up this time, choosing a new novel.”

Mount, at least, doesn’t have the pressure of choosing a new novel for the Giller Prize. I always pity those Giller Prize jurors — so many novels to wade through, so much horse trading to arrive at a consensus. Then, at the end of it all, when the prize winner is announced, you’re accused of pursuing some agenda or exhibiting some hopeless bias. In the early years of the prize, the knock on the juries was that they favoured books published by McClelland & Stewart. Then critics, myself included, detected a tendency to choose books with big historical themes.

In reality, Giller Prize juries make the best they can of an impossible task, anointing one book as best of the year. It’s ridiculous in a way, but it’s also useful.