This year’s Man Booker Prize winner was the most cheering award win since Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. The 2015 winner, Marlon James’s The Brief History of Seven Killings, whirls the reader through a thundering narrative of Jamaican socio-political events in the years after an attempted assassination of Bob Marley, combined with a spellbindingly avant-garde use of form and structure. Yet headlines over the shortlist announced in September – like the Guardian’s "Man Booker 2015: shortlisted novels full of ‘terrible stuff’, admits judge" – remind us that the prize often provokes controversy. In such cases, the media is broadcasting scandal over the ultimate literary critical question about the winner or shortlisted books: are they any good?

Perhaps the most significant instance of this controversy was in 1994, when James Kelman won for How Late It Was, How Late. I believe this is the greatest novel ever to win the prize, typical of Kelman’s distinctive approach. It is a raging, bewildered and bewildering stream-of-consciousness monologue in expletive-strewn Glaswegian dialect, from the perspective of Sammy, a petty thief and ex-convict. As in all his writing, Kelman shows himself to be the heir to Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Endgame), with a narrative that eviscerates cosy sensibilities as it rams the terrifying meaninglessness of life right into the reader’s face.

How Late It Was, How Late won the prize thanks to 1994’s good judging panel. But because Kelman’s writing shows as little interest in the niceties of ‘standard English’ as it does in jaded conventions, his victory precipitated a maelstrom of controversy. Julia Neuberger resigned from the judging panel in fury when the others voted in Kelman’s win, while Simon Jenkins declared that it was “literary vandalism” to award the prize to Kelman, “an illiterate savage”. And – in what must have been a sublime occasion to witness – Kelman gave an acceptance speech asserting that “my language and my culture have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that”, before raising his fist in a power salute.

Some outstanding novels won the Booker Prize both before and after Kelman’s 1994 victory, such as Midnight’s Children in 1981, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace in 1999 and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty in 2004. Yet, all too often, this preeminent literary prize rewards the staid, the stuffy and the sedate. One of the most prominent Booker winners, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989), epitomises this. Reading this novel is like having afternoon tea in the John Lewis café: it is a mildly pleasant way of passing the time, but the experience is hardly Kafka’s “axe to break the seas frozen inside our souls”. Ishiguro’s prize-winner is the tale of a socially awkward butler who could marry the housekeeper but doesn’t. Its most famous and supposedly interesting aspect is the fact that the butler is an unreliable narrator: it is only implicitly revealed that he is – as Salman Rushdie has described him – “a man destroyed by the ideas upon which he has built his life”. But by 1989, it was far from a radical move to build a narrative around the conceit of the unreliable narrator. It is just a bog-standard old device that has been used ever since Aristophanes first tried it out in The Frogs in the 5th century BC. It has even been used by Agatha Christie.

This penchant for the traditional and cosy among Booker Prize juries reached its apogee in 2011. This year’s panel under Stella Rimington – former spy and author of populist thrillers – caused a stir by placing importance on the “readability” of novels and their ability to “zip along”. With those criteria, one wonders why Lee Child’s blockbuster that year, The Affair, didn’t win: like all of Jack Reacher’s adventures, what it lacks in verisimilitude and thoughtfulness it amply makes up for with eminent readability, zipping along faster than Concorde. In the end, though, the 2011 prize went to Julian Barnes for The Sense of an Ending, which critics regarded as a positively surprisingly literary victor. But like The Remains of the Day, this 2011 prize-winner is driven by the tired old unreliable narrator conceit.

2011 was the emblematic year of Booker judges rewarding the unoriginal, but too many other recent winners also champion the derivative and the conventional. Hilary Mantel won in 2009 and 2012, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – both good novels, both deftly portraying the close coexistence of Thomas Cromwell the ruthless Machiavel and Thomas Cromwell the good family man. But they are not great novels. They are square, commercial retellings of England’s favourite soap opera – the reign of Henry VIII. The difference between good and great is the difference between these two works and two far more radical novels that made the 2009 and 2012 shortlists: Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (a cold postmodernist examination of the self) and Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil (a searing portrayal of the underworld of 1970s Mumbai). 2015 is an opportunity for judges to answer the question: “What makes the best novel in the English language this year?” with a much better answer than “it zips along”. It is disappointing that Lila by Marilynne Robinson wasn’t shortlisted: Robinson’s ability to use an unadorned prose style to make the mundane and virtuous as scintillating as the fantastical and salacious is the closest thing contemporary writing has to Sylvia Plath’s phenomenal ability to make the ugly beautiful and the unpoetic poetic. But overall the shortlist was promisingly bold, and two works particularly stood out: Satin Island by Tom McCarthy and the victor Marlon James’ The Brief History of Seven Killings.

As an uncomprehending Guardian reviewer complained of Satin Island, “there’s not much plot” – that is to say, the novel has moved on from a particular form of realist narrative that worked wonderfully in the nineteenth century but has become timeworn after being used ad nauseam by writers like Hilary Mantel. Satin Island is about a corporate anthropologist – known only as “U” – whose role is to “unpick the fibre of culture (ours)” – and rips straight through to the heart of late capitalism. And, even better, reading The Brief History of Seven Killings is like looking into a kaleidoscope of revolutionary literary techniques. The 2015 judges have broken the old mould of the typical Booker Prize winner by awarding the prize to this groundbreaking masterpiece. And rightly so: prizes like these should be awarded to writing capable of blowing down the whole house of postmodern post-everything society, and the Anglophone literary establishment with it.