Review: The Other Hand by Chris Cleave

So Sceptre ask me if I'd like this book. Quick check of the blurb on their website, and I'm envisaging writing a piece on publishing marketing strategy:

We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this:

It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.

The story starts there, but the book doesn't.

And it's what happens afterwards that is most important.

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

Hm, I'm thinking. Clever. Maybe. Maybe good: the latest - and perhaps inevitable - twist in the Cult of Overhype: a return to the concept of the book inside the cover, the book as an intellectual and emotional adventure rather than a box-checked lifestyle commodity. Or maybe just a cynical use of mystique.

The book arrives. No author photo, no author bio. Just a note from Senior Editor Suzie Doore passionately recommending the novel.

I start reading.

People, I don't want to write a slick clever review about marketing, or indeed literary technique. I want to tell you that when I finished this book (I was sitting on the floor leaning on the sofa) I turned around and put my head on my arms and I sobbed.

It's the story that so affected me, and although they ask us not to reveal it, the publishers are right that it's the story you want to tell when you've read the book.

It's a brilliant achievement since it's a story which on the whole in Britain we don't want to know, indeed don't want to believe, a fact which indeed motors the utterly engrossing edge-of-the-chair plot of this novel. And of course, after all, this is down to Chris Cleave's literary skill.

This story we don't want to know, we shut it up inside immigration detention centres, we fly it out again quick. But Chris Cleave, via an amazing and witty literary ventriloquism, monumental empathy and huge skill in plot manipulation, brings together the seemingly disparate worlds of two female narrators, Little Bee, escaped from certain death in a Nigerian oil war, and Sarah, a London-based working mother and lifestyle magazine editor, and in so doing illustrates to devastating effect our innocent complicity in political horrors we think of as remote.

Read it, is all. I'm just so glad I was given the chance to do so.

And if you want afterwards to read some real-life stories of women escaped from cruelty in other countries, I recommend Fragments from the Dark (to which I had the privilege of being asked to contribute).

Inflammatory Words

Suzanne Morrison provides me with a link to the Seattle Times article about the pulling by Random House of Sherry Jones's Jewel of Medina. The report makes clear that on being told by academic Denise Spellberg that the book was inflammatory and 'pornographic', Muslim website owner Shahed Amanullah did not take up the baton of alarm, as some British newspapers have (mainly by omission) implied, but simply sent out emails asking postgraduate students if they had heard of the book, presumably in order to discover Muslim opinion. He is reported as saying this:

"What I got back was a collective shrug of the shoulders. The thing that is surreal for me is that here you had a non-Muslim write a book, and you had a non-Muslim complain about it, and a non-Muslim publisher pull the book."

Well, now of course the British publisher of the book has been firebombed.

Looking back on this story it's easy to see whose words were inflammatory.

Where Are they Now?

Last week I immersed myself in short stories in preparation for workshops I would be conducting at a Short Story day hosted by the National Short Story Campaign. One of the things I did was revisit metropolitan, the short-story magazine I co-founded and co-edited with Ailsa Cox (and which the two of us co-published with John Ashbrook).

It was an experience both exhilarating and depressing, and a sober illustration of the problems which exist nowadays for unknown but talented writers of serious literature. I was newly stunned by the standard, originality and energy of the stories we published, and I have to say grabbed by them in a way I wasn't by the stories in many published collections. Several literary agents were too at the time, and picked up several of our writers. Yet what struck me last week was how few, even so, have yet made it as mainstream authors.

Some have made it into mainstream publication, although few are known for their short stories. Roger Morris is known for his critically-acclaimed Macmillan New Writing novel Taking Comfort and - perhaps better - for his Faber crime novels. Susan Davis and Paul Magrs publish fiction for young adults. [Edited-in correction: Paul has also published 10 mainstream novels for adults, two of which were already placed with mainstream publishers, along with a collection of stories, before we published his story, so doesn't in fact qualify for this list of 'unknowns'.]. Daniel Davies (if indeed it is the same Daniel Davies) has published a novel with Serpent's Tail. Art Corriveau's novels have been published by Penguin, but his short stories are published by an independent press. The agent of the brilliant Tamar Yellin failed to place her collection of stories or her novel The Genizah at the House of Shepher with any British publisher, but after they were published by the American Toby Press, the latter won the prestigious Sami Rohr Prize and the former was short-listed for the first Edge Hill Prize for the Short Story. The novels of Nigel Pickard, Robert Graham and Frank Downes have come from small presses.

And what about the others? One, Fi Francis, has sadly died - such a loss to literature - and I was recently astonished to be told that another, Penny Rendall, has given up writing. But even allowing for such tragedies and contingencies, it's a shameful fact that so few of the following names aren't better known as writers of fiction, although many have made names for themselves in other fields: Judith Amanthis, Marion Baraitser, Alex Barr, Kate Barry, Kirsty Brackenridge, Madeleine Cary, Dave Downes, Frank Downes, Michael Eaude, Molly Firth, Veronika Forster, Iain Grant, Vicky Grut, Atar Hadari, George Hawthorn, Hilaire, Graeme Hodgson, Rose Hughes, Robert Lawlor, Roderick Lowell Huntress, Mairead Irish, Simon King-Spooner, Kath Mackay, Camden McDonald, Menzies McKillop, Jim McLaughlin, Char March, Heather Leach, Georgina Lock, Paul Marshall, Mindy Meleyal, Rowan Metcalfe, S Morrisey, Graham Mort, Ravinder Randhawa, Karen Rosenberg, John Sitzia, Helen Smith, Amanda Szekely, Mandy Sutter, Kanta Walker, Cathy Wright.

Freedom of Speech

A small quiz:

Which of the following do you find most worrying?

1. The foiled firebomb attack this weekend on the home-cum-business premises of Gibson Square publisher Martin Rynja, who in a determined stand for freedom of speech is about to publish Sherry Jones' The Jewel of Medina, a novel about the Prophet Muhammad's relationship with his child bride, and which Jones insists honours the Prophet and his wife.

2. The fact that on being sent the book for a cover quote by a previous publisher, American academic Denise Spellberg, according to Shahed Amanullah, editor of a Muslim website, made a 'frantic call' to him denouncing the book as 'incredibly offensive', which resulted in a furore, with those who had not read the book also denouncing it and issuing 'warnings'.

3. The fact that 2. caused the book's previous publisher, the giant Random House, to withdraw from publication altogether.

E-Lit: a Red Herring?

Interesting article by Andrew Gallix on the Guardian books blog this week, asking whether e-literature can ever be innovative in the ways which have sometimes been supposed.

It's a point which writer and Art of Fiction blogger Adrian Slatcher and I have often discussed: the fact that while hypertext is so astoundingly non-linear, no real way has yet been found to apply this to fiction on the web without losing words in favour of other media such as pictures and music. Responding to the article, Adrian makes this point again, and notes rightly that my Manchester-Festival commissioned blogstory last year (which had to take the form of a real-time blog) was inevitably more conventionally linear than my writing for print, since the blog is essentially a linear, sequential form. (Adrian offers his own piece on this post, but the links don't seem to work, and I'm not sure if this is his joke...)

Blurbs Again

William Leith adds his thoughts to the debate on book cover puffs.

The Things You Can Sell and the Things that Make You Swoon

God in heaven help us, the Guardian magazine runs a feature today on fashion in literature: 'Chic Lit', actress Emily Mortimer dressed in clothes echoing female characters from fiction (she's a writer's daughter too - John Mortimer - geddit?); journalist Helen Gordon writing as if authors from Austen to Douglas Coupland wrote about fashion simply to relish it, rather than (often satirically) as signifiers of their characters' personalities and conditions; and - most telling of all - books recently in print displayed next to the latest fashion accessories (a full page spread, for instance, in which Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Life is suspended on a string next to a Gucci bag - why?)

Conjures some depressing images, doesn't it: publishers scrambling to be part of this latest, dummest kind of promotion, and editors turning manuscripts down because they can't quite see them on such a page... (You think I'm joking?)

Fortunately the Review makes up for this a little with an article from Nick Laird condemning just the kind of ethos in evidence here and showing how destructive it is for serious literature, though once again in making a special case for poetry he is rather dismissive of fiction:

A capitalist society ... teaches its citizens to think in terms of selling. Poetry manages, almost uniquely, to be outside of that, and this allows poets to make real art, without recourse to the market...

And there's a transcript of a speech by the sadly and recently late David Foster Wallace, which is so close to my own agenda in my current writing that (rather than those shoes and bags) it makes me want to swoon...

Three Sisters at the Royal Exchange

OK, so I'm off to the Royal Exchange to see Three Sisters, and I'm excited because I won't ever forget the great Uncle Vanya I once saw there with Leo McKern and Eleanor Bron - the scene where he brings the flowers is still with me, and I can still fill up remembering it. Pure Chekhov, it was, heartbreaking, utterly true to his insight into human longing and disappointment.

I take my seat in the first gallery. I look down. Why does this round stage, which can seem intimate even from the high-up second gallery, look so vast and far away? Across the other side, horizontally to me, is a long dinner table (the table where the soldiers will sit, their conversation undercutting that of the three sisters), and it seems immense yet miles distant, divided from us by (admittedly transparent) pillars. I feel I can't see it properly. I push my glasses up my nose, but I can't see it any better. Already I feel excluded from the space of this play.

The action begins, much nearer to us than the table, directly below: on our side of the stage Masha and Olga sit in separate spaces, Olga on a settle, Masha at a piano, Olga talking to Masha across the space. Well, I know this is the point, that Masha, churning with frustration, is cutting off, but somehow I can't join her, psychologically, in her space. I can't join Olga either, I'm watching them both from outside, and yet without focus: I can't take them both in at once and have to keep switching my attention from one to the other. Partly I think it's the performances, or Sarah Francom's direction, but most of all, I think, it's the set design of this production: presumably symbolically, but visually impossibly, the central space is constantly empty and the characters most frequently separated by this abyss.

It's like a tableau, this production of this play by this playwright whose concerns and approach were above all internal, psychological. And there's no moment of real stillness in a play which demands above all moments of stillness, and all that longing, all that desire, all that erotic tension between Vershinin and Masha, were - from my vantage point, at any rate - lost.

By the second act I had given up. Gauzes hung from the flies to the floor, shrouding the beds - set apart again around an empty space - and cutting us off from the characters and the action. Behind the gauze curtains the faces are indistinct and overall the characters are lost in the infinite space which the curtains define - which again may be symbolic of their condition but precludes the internal focus which the play requires. In the final act tree-trunks descended in true RX tradition, spindly but placed around the edges and cutting off the view of any actor directly opposite the ones you were sitting nearby.

Perhaps it was no wonder that the main laughs from the audience were at the outdated social mores...

Alfred Hickling thinks the problem is the play, but personally I think Chekhov and Stanislavski might just be having a bit of a twist in their graves.

A Bit Hard

Yesterday the Sunday Times review was devoted to The Future of the Book, yet I can't find a link on the website - which may seem confirmation of the view expressed by some contributors that print media is getting left behind by the web. But maybe it's me...*

[*Yes it was me: it was The Independent, as Adele Geras points out. No wonder I couldn't find it: silly me!]

Pretty depressing article by John Walsh who believes like Sven Birkets (who in 1994 examined how students now respond to Henry James) that the way in which the internet has taught us to read is resulting in a loss of the ability to engage with serious fiction:

It seems that we may be losing the capacity of "settling into" a book or - more importantly - in the stream of somebody else's thoughts in a way that readers (and writers) once took for granted ... Now, many serious writers complain, challenging fiction doesn't appeal; "difficult" novels don't sell. Adam Mars-Jones's massive and beautifully written novel Pilcrow, published earlier this year, sold only a few hundred copies, and there have been several similar casualities. Although, traditionally, every Booker winner invariably becomes a world bestseller, the 2008 winner, Anne Enright's The Gathering, made the briefest appearance in the top 10 before disappearing. It had a narrative of sorts, but was broken-backed in structure and its strength was the narrator's wry, funny, piss-taking tone - exactly the kind of thing that Prof Birkets' students hated in Henry James.

To sell now, books evidently need to be big on plot and incident, short on interior monologue - the sort of titles the Richard and Judy Club strenuously promotes.

A Question of Vulnerability

Anne Enright continues the week's Guardian theme of authors' vulnerability at public readings, particularly when it comes to the Q & A.

Apart from Norman Mailer, it once seemed to her:

I asked a question myself once. The writer was Norman Mailer, and I had just had enough of him - standing up there thinking he was someone, when every single thing he said was pants.

Enright challenged him:

He was advocating sex to the (manifestly anti-sex) audience. What a great activity. He couldn't praise it enough; metabolically, spiritually, possibly even financially. I put up my hand and waited to catch his eye.

I was a bit pink and tingly, indeed, as I got ready to break through the fourth wall that exists between performer and audience, between the one who is known and the one who is not. When my turn came, I found the act of speaking sort of mortifying and dreamlike. I said: "If you're that keen on sex, then why are all the sex scenes in your books so unhappy?" And he said: "Why are you so angry?"

Enright is telling this story ironically, first and foremost against herself, since earlier in the article she says, 'Long experience tells you that it is the angry people who ask about anger'. 'You have to hand it to Mailer,' she acknowledges, ' - now there was a man who was made for the Q & A.'

But she can't resist adding: 'The prose he read, I am delighted to report, was dire.'

Tee hee.

The Writing on the Wall

I was in the doctor's this morning (nothing serious) and for some reason nothing was moving, and the wait was an hour and a quarter. At one point I looked up from my book and there were eighteen of us waiting, all in silence. One other person was reading a book, two others were reading waiting-room mags, but the other fourteen were sitting staring at the walls for one and a quarter hours.

Maybe they were the deep thinkers. Or maybe they were just too worried about their health...

Just L'il Ole Me with the Power to Ban Books

I'm a bit late with this one, what with being stuck in the hills and that, but I can't resist it:

So on being presented by The Guardian with Carol Ann Duffy's poetic response to the banning of her poem Education for Leisure, Pat Schofield, the external examiner whose complaint led to the banning, had this to say:

"...a bit weird. But having read her other poems I found they were all a little bit weird. But that's me".

Correction: that's an external examiner whom we'd expect to be able to understand poems.

But then that's our education system, it seems.

Save Me from the Short Story

This week the books blog Vulpes Libris pays tribute to the short story while yet paradoxically providing an insight into the general prejudice against the form. Yesterday's post was a round-up of favourites (and the Bitch is pleased to have her own collection offered by the esteemed Dovegreyreader). However, the blog's coordinator Leena ended up asking for contributions from other bloggers, since she drew a blank with her fellow foxes, who confessed to little interest in or knowledge of the form.

While today's blog offers an appreciative review of the great collection The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets by Sophie Hannah, it also includes a contribution from Elaine of Random Jottings who, although going on to recommend several (canonical) short story writers (including the lengthy stories of Henry James), says this:

My main problem with this genre is that the narrative can be over far too quickly and just when you are getting interested in the characters and situation you turn the page and find that that is it, you have come to the end. I have lost count of the number of times I have done this and thought, oh damn just when it was getting interesting. When I am reading fiction I like something solid, something I can really get into so I somehow feel cheated with a short story and irritated that I am not going to know what happens next. I gather that short stories are regarded as being an art form on their own, incredibly difficult to write and anybody who can do them properly is regarded as a literary giant. This may be true but when I pick up a collection of short stories and find they are described as ‘exquisite vignettes’ (and yes this has happened), my main reaction is to run screaming from the room.

There is of course a whole essay to be written about the implicatons of this for the ways in which we read and our expectations of what we read...

Back to the Hills

I may or may not be blogging very much for the next 10 days or so. The usual reason. (There's still a cloud down on this hill.)

Get Thee to an Old Folks' Home

Nice article by Mark Lawson on possible signs that ageism in the arts may be on the wane...

I do wonder, though. I'll never forget the time I was teaching in a Glasgow comprehensive, not long out of college. I was twenty-three. We had cosy little individual staff rooms and the people in mine were a riot: swearers, drunkards, anti-establishment cynics who held parties in the school after hours - you know, you've seen them on Teachers. Well, I was telling them a story about some really stuffy people, and I described those people: straight-laced, tradition-bound, no sense of humour - well, what did I expect, they were all over thirty!

There was a gulping silence, and then everyone in the room said, 'Well, thanks!'

Well, of course I knew if I thought about it that they were all over thirty, but I didn't think of them as over thirty, for this reason: the image in my head of thirty-year-olds was pretty dire, and they simply didn't fit it. But such images are pretty hard to shift, and I do wonder sometimes what images are in the heads of the young people who seem increasingly nowadays to be running our arts organisations (and of course, in the theatre especially, funded to look for work by even younger people)...

No Point in Whispering when You Want a Shout

OK, so I looked up Blurbings.com, the service providing book blurbs (by which they seem to mean puff quotes), which has apparently caused some outrage. And thanks to Tania Hershman I found the hilarious article by Rebecca Johnson on Salon.com exposing the fact that nothing could be more potentially corrupt than the traditional way that such cover quotes are obtained.

Blurbings.com tells us:

Normally, a blurb will cost an author and/or publisher $14 - $23, which includes printing of the galleys, packaging and mailing fees. The standard 30 – 50 blurbs expected per book can range from $420 to $1,150. It is also very time consuming researching and contacting prospective authors as well as conducting follow-ups during the duration of the process.

Notice any figure missing? A fee to the poor 'blurbing' author! As Rebecca Johnson says, it's also a time-consuming business for the endorsing author, who is expected to do it for free. Once, I remember, the winning novel of a competition for which I'd been on the judging panel, which was now to be published by a small publisher, was sent off for a quote to a famous novelist well known for her left-wing feminist views. How amazed and shocked the publisher was when she wrote back that she didn't do quotes for free. But you know, in reality, it's their shock which is shocking.

Here's my own recent cringe-worthy experience, my search for a cover quote for my recent story collection. Would I ask people I knew? Would I heck! How could I live with myself (and them afterwards) otherwise? So what did I do? I sent initial queries to the agents of short story writers I didn't know personally but whose work I respected. Guess what? Back came nice polite letters from the agents telling me that their clients were fiendishly busy but wished me all the luck.

What next? OK, I would bite the bullet and ask a well-known short story writer I had met not so long ago. But I wouldn't put her on the spot by ringing her up, or suggesting the coffee we had vaguely mooted. Instead I sent her a postcard, in which I insisted (repeatedly) that she must refuse to do it if she didn't want to etc etc, she didn't even need to answer this card if she didn't want to.

Guess what? She didn't answer the card. I didn't get a quote, and yet I still may have spoilt a beautiful potential friendship...

What next? Well, there's that mega-famous author who's really close friends with some really close old friends of mine, and I've met her at their house more than once... that wouldn't be so bad, would it. I mean, it's pulling strings, but I can hardly be said to know her, and she wouldn't feel obliged to give a good quote whatever... So I email my friends and ask them what they think. Well, they'll read the stories first and decide whether to ask her. I email the stories. One of my friends reads them over a week on his train journey to work. He really likes them, he thinks his friend the mega-famous author will like them. He'll contact her and ask.

Days go by. Weeks. A month, two... I give up. (Nine months later, when the book is published, I'm at a party at his house - the mega-famous author isn't - and he tells me she never answered his query.)

Meanwhile, I have caved in completely. I have rung up my good friend who has agreed to look at the manuscript, and there I am in his kitchen on Sunday afternoon, handing it over and cringing inwardly, not nearly as sure as he seems to be that he'll like the book when he reads it... But then we're saved the embarrassment: for my publisher decides it's better he doesn't do it anyway, since he's already just provided a quote for another of her books.

I was lucky in the end. I walked into the foyer of MMU for a reading, and Livi Michael, writer of wonderful novels for adults and children - and of brilliant short stories, one of which we published in metropolitan - came sweeping across the tiles to greet me. Livi! Perhaps I could ask Livi! But does she know my work? Would she hate my work? How could I put her through the embarrassment of saying no if she didn't like it? No, I can't ask Livi!

She sees the look on my face. 'I know what you're going to ask me,' she says, 'and the answer is Yes!' Turns out she did like my work already: turns out she loved the book.

Even so, it's not the easiest thing in the world, coming up with a quote that sums up and yet does justice to a book. Wouldn't surprise me if Livi, like so many of my writer friends, has since declared herself a blurb-free zone.

And I did only manage to get one shout.

It's All too Much for an Author

Got my head stuck in that bearpit the Guardian books blog this week, where, after writing a post on the problems of having to sell one's book via one's identity in this commercially-oriented literary world, Josie Henley Einion was torn apart by the resident purists for using both her identity and the books blog to sell her novel.

Sigh. I must get out more...

And in so doing, I missed an apparent web discussion about book blurbs... well, it happened according to the Guardian, but I still can't find it, or should I say I'm not prepared to spend a moment longer at this ruddy computer on this first hot day of August, and I'm off in to the garden.

Which is just as well, because if you ever got me started on the excruciating process of having to creep to your well-known friends and acquaintances for shouts... Can't think about it any more, I'm shuddering too much. I'm off to do some weeding...

Internet Widower

John Keenan responds on the Guardian books blog to John Updike's contempt for the internet, and links it to a fading relevance in his recent novels, in particular The Widows of Eastwick.

Thanks, Enid

In response to Enid Blyton's win in the recent Costa poll for the best-loved children's writer, Lucy Mangan writes in today's Guardian of her own childhood obsession with Blyton and the fact that while Blyton's books were once banned from public libraries as politically incorrect and culturally impoverished, she opened up for generations of children the 'promised land' of reading.

I've said it many times before and I'll say it again here: she opened up for me the promised land of writing. I wanted consciously to be a writer from the age of eight - in fact, I was a writer before that, and Enid Blyton played no small part in that. Like Lucy Mangan, while I was reading everything, including Dickens, I gobbled up Blyton - The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, and in particular the Adventure Series (The Castle of Adventure, The Valley of Adventure etc) - like a drug. You can say this for Blyton, which you can't say for Dickens: nearly every time I finished one of her books, I went off and wrote a story of my own.

Why was this? I don't have any Blyton books here to study for the reason: while I still have many of the books I read then I never kept a single Blyton; that wasn't the point of them, the point of them was what they triggered in me. I do of course remember though that they were, as Mangan says, formulaic and baldly told. It's interesting to me that Mangan reports that Blyton decribed her working method thus: '...simply a matter of opening the sluice gates and out it all pours with no effort or labour of my own.' Clearly, what is going to result from this is unthinking, cliched, repetitive. Yet there was something exciting for me, I think, generated by that, an energy - and a permission just to do it, which the classics, bound by their mature and rarified insights and more sophisticated use of language, couldn't give. The classics (after a certain age I never read any other books specifically intended for children; I stayed away from them like the plague) were exclusive in their consciousness (while of course being in the long term far more nourishing fodder), whereas Blyton did not even merely include me in hers, she allowed me to take over: so bald was her prose (as I remember) that it left infinite room for my own projections, my own imaginings of the settings and the inner thoughts of the characters. No wonder I would go off and write when I'd finished reading one: I was already writing as I was reading.

I must have another look at The Faraway Tree. So many people have told me that they hated it when I've said I loved it. I had chicken pox, I remember, and I suppose I was a bit delirious. But that notion of a tree you can climb to another world, the world of imagination (Yes, OK, I know it's derivative in the first place, but it's probably something about the very bald way she wrote it!) has been the basis of of my concept of writing ever since.

Creativity works in more complicated ways than we sometimes think, and all I can say is, Thanks, Enid.

It's Marvellous, Darling!

A nice post from Ms Baroque on the fraught question of reviewing for writers.

Business versus Literature?

Mark Liam Piggott writes interestingly (and bravely) for the Guardian blog asking whether literary agents are any longer helpful to literary writers, or whether the pressures of the market have turned them into gatekeepers barring work which, however excellent as literature, is unlikely to be profitable. The many comments are interesting. Susan Hill (with her publishing hat on) points to the Nielsen book scan which reveals the sales of any previous book by an author, and thus determines whether or not they are likely to be invested in again, pointing out as she has on previous occasions that publishing is above all a business and that 'fine words butter no parsnips'. Though whether this is a defence or a condemnation depends where you're coming from with regard to the matter of literary fiction, I guess...

Like Piggott's, Nasim Marie Jafry's novel the State of Me, which I review on my other blog, is another interesting case of a novel held back by the commercial requirements of agents and then making it to publication without an agent.

The View from the Mountain

So sorry – I hadn’t resolved my internet problems after all. I’ve been pretty cut off altogether: the radio hasn’t tuned in either, there’s no telly, and each day it’s been late before I’ve driven the 6 miles for a newspaper, and sometimes there haven’t been any left.

Anyway, through my tiny window of internet connection from the side of a cloud-covered mountain I’ve had one or two glimpses of our weird commercially-oriented literary world: John Sutherland on the sexual fantasies the BBC Drama dept finds necessary to invent to make our literary history palatable, and Molly Flatt striking despair into the heart of every novelist by taking a whoops-silly-me-but-what-a-lark attitude to the fact that she reads as a kind of addiction without attending much to what she reads.

And if you think that going back up the Welsh mountain has made me regress to the Wesleyan parts of my origins, I don’t care. (And when the flood comes, I’ll be OK, Jack, even if I will have to live in a silent, clouded world.)

Back and Eating My Words

Back in blogging business sooner than I expected.

And proved wrong by the Raymond Carver short story comp either that short story comps are universally conservative or about my own level of innovation...

Short Break

Just to say I won't be blogging much or responding to comments for a while. Back in 10 days or so.

Dressed to Kill the Market?

A year ago we were commenting on the tendency of publishers to 'brand' 'chicklit' novels with outrageously similar covers. Now Diane Shipley writes of an even more troubling move: having established that 'chicklit' books are the hot sellers, publishers are now dressing up very different novels to look like them. Shipley comments:

I hope publishers will soon realise that their tactic isn't working and could, in fact, backfire badly. If all book covers look the same, then none stand out. And if we know that how a book looks is no indication of its content, we might just become so dispirited that we bypass the bookstore and rent a DVD instead.

Indeed, Suzanabrams, commenting on Shipley's post, says that she has been avoiding this apparent influx of the genre into the bookshops, unaware of this new practice.

Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Every so often - though not all that often once childhood is over, I think - you read a book which you know is going to affect your mental landscape forever. This, for me, is such a book. It's the story of Oscar de Leon, a New Jersey ghetto nerd struggling with the curse imposed by his family's history of entanglement with the cruel Dominican regime. It's a heartbreaking yet uplifting story, and the thing which will imprint it for me is the voice.

The overall narrative voice is that of Oscar's university friend Yunior (though two sections are narrated by Lola, Oscar's sister and ex-girlfriend to Yunior). It's a wonderful voice, colloquial, feisty and combative yet generous and humane. And direct, addressing the reader on familiar terms. Here's Yunior describing an episode from Oscar's teenage years (a passage which holds a subtle prefiguring of Oscar's destiny):

Those were some fucking lonely weeks when all he had were his games, his books, and his words. So now I have a hermit for a son, his mother complained bitterly. At night, unable to sleep, he watched a lot of bad TV, became obsessed with two movies in particular: Zardoz (which he'd seen with his uncle before they put him away for the second time) and Virus (the Japanese end-of-the-world movie with the hot chick from Romeo and Juliet). Virus especially he could not watch to the end without crying, the Japanese hero arriving at the South Pole base, having walked from Washington, D.C., down the whole spine of the Andes, for the woman of his dreams. I've been working on my fifth novel, he told the boys when they asked about his absences. It's amazing.

See? What did I tell you? Mr Collegeboy.

There's a special kind of authenticity about this voice. While it conveys a very particular character - Yunior, with his own shortcomings and blindspots as well as his warm heart - one suspects, as with the voices in Diaz's story collection Drown, that it is not too far removed from the author's own voice: there's an overriding tone and an energy which inform the sections related by both Yunior and Lola. The impression of authenticity is further reinforced by the piecemeal and non-linear way the story unfolds, as Yunior weaves together the information he has gathered from the de Leon family members, provides a retrospective introduction and footnotes (in his own inimitable style) on the historical background and lays bare the workings of his written tale:

Footnote 15: A favourite hangout of Trujillo's, my mother tells me when the manuscript is almost complete.

Indeed, the book itself is dedicated to Elizabeth de Leon. But it would be far too reductive to say that what Diaz has achieved here is a magical and explosive mix of historical fact and imagination: this book is something more magnificant than that. It goes beyond fact, it goes beyond fiction: it's a true voice, it's the searing dream and deep new knowledge that stays with you for good.

Oh, and I cried buckets.

Of Books and Beetles

Sorry about the gap on this blog which was due to internet problems. (How weird is that, not to be blogging?)

A couple of myths being shattered in the pages of The Guardian - firstly, the idea that the fact that we buy so many books means that we're all committed and omnivorous readers. Of the nine authors interviewed, though, only two, Lionel Shriver and Alain de Botton, confess as I do that it is writing their own work which sometimes makes it hard for them to read the work of others.

And I feel totally vindicated today by a 'Week in Books' piece by Kafka scholar James Hawes exposing the author as not 'the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on)' but 'a millionaire's son ... a writer backed by an influential clique ... who had no more inkling of the Holocaust than anyone else' and thus whose writing was not 'the gloomy stuff we Anglo-Saxons received via post Auschwitz French existentialists, but wonderful black comedies written by a man soaked in the writings of his predecessors and of his own day'. Vindicated because the last time I read Metamorphosis I laughed out loud: Gregor the dung beetle stuck up in his room was the spitting image of a teenager not too many miles from under my own nose.

(Sorry, but the search on the Guardian site gives up on me when I look for the link.)

Whose Feast Is the Lit Fest?

Susan Hill gives us the lowdown on lit fests. Will you ever feel quite so privileged to be at one again?

What's Happening to Short Stories?

Anyone who ever read Metropolitan, the short-story mag I co-edited with Ailsa Cox, will know that I am no hater of conventional short stories. When it comes to form I am open to all comers - conventional or experimental, stories written within a recognizable tradition or wildly innovative: as long as a story work on its own terms, as long as it makes exciting use of language and I like what it's saying it'll please me. I've written both ways myself - and both kinds of story find their way into my recent collection - though I suppose I have to confess to leaning in ambition towards the more off-the-wall, to needing ultimately to stretch the form for what I really want to say, and that when I have written more conventionally it has sometimes (though not always) been because of the pressures of the market.

Which is why my pleasure at the recent rash of high-profile short-story competitions - and the seeming resurgence of the short story which it seems to indicate - is somewhat tempered by a fear that it is the conventional short story alone which is being endorsed and that innovation is being given the thumbs down, inadvertently or not. If so, it's especially disheartening when one would expect competitions to provide a counter to market forces, but perhaps expecting competitions to be immune from market forces is naive. Others have commented on the classical nature of Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories (winner of the Frank O'Connor Award), and the same could be said for the stories in Claire Keegan's Walk the Blue Fields, winner of the Edge Hill Prize. Keegan's are wonderful stories in an Irish tradition I love and indeed feel a great affinity with, and I would urge everyone to read them. They are, though, very firmly within that tradition - elegaic yet wry, lyrical yet controlled - and Keegan's writing has been compared to that of William Trevor, John McGahern and indeed Chekhov.

I am especially thrilled that Clare Wigfall has won the BBC National Short Story Award. I have been recommending her book since I discovered it and what judge Martha Kearney calls her amazing 'ventriloquism': she seems able to inhabit any voice, any psyche and any world or historical period, and the stories are nothing if not moving. Her winning story, 'The Numbers', is marked by this chameleon-like ability and by a striking, original and deeply resonant motif. I defy you to read it without ending in tears. However. Personally, I wouldn't call this story conventional, yet superficially it displays conventional elements, and one wonders if without them it would have got so far in this competition. Although there are subtle foreshadowings the story is basically linear, and the narrator tells her tale in the time-honoured mode of intimate and homely recollection. Above all there's a (wholly admirable) classical authorial restraint. And here's Martha Kearney, writing about judging the competition:

The perfect short story arrests the reader’s attention immediately and then goes on to illuminate an entire life through one scene or a few actions.

Me, I would say that that's one type of short story. And that idea of the 'perfect short story' worries me dreadfully, both within this sentence, where it implies that there's only one kind of excellence, and generally, implying possibly a certain kind of stasis, a stylistic impasse. Yet surely the short story is precisely the place where we can tear down our traditional expectations of prose. Really, the last thing I want to write is a 'perfect' short story, and whenever people describe any of my stories as 'perfect', while I'm always pathetically flattered, I have a sneaky feeling I've failed.

Rushdie Avoids Literary Oblivion

It may seem a bit mean to pick on one hapless original publisher's reader for Midnight's Children (announced yesterday as the winner of the Best of the Bookers), but I can't resist it, and anyway it's a serious matter:

'The author should concentrate on short stories until he has mastered the novel form,' The Guardian tells us he/she reported.

OK, it's a long time ago, and I'm not even sure if publishers have readers any more - by most accounts, nowadays they generally rely on agents to do the reading for them - but in spite of Midnight's Children's phenomenal success (fortunately another reader, Susannah Clapp thought differently, though what if it hadn't fallen into her hands?) - I wonder how many potential works of fiction still founder on the knot of literary prejudice, conservatism, ignorant misconception and illogicality wrapped up in that sentence?

First, the illogicality: what, you master one form by concentrating on another? How does that work, exactly? Ah, I see, because (here's the misconception) short stories are just mini-novels, limbering-up things. I don't know about you, but I think that any reader ignorant enough to believe this about short stories should not be trusted on his/her view of anything much literary, including novels. And so it proves, and here's the lethal conservative prejudice: Rushdie has not 'mastered' the novel form, apparently, because mastering the form here means by definition fulfilling the conventional parameters he specifically set out to flout.

But this tendency - for those judging fiction to look for the recognizable and tried in fiction, and to shun the different and strange - is no longer even a hapless error but is institutionalized by the cult of the market and a cynical ploy.

Just Not Good Enough

Hm. Not really sure what to say about the furore - well, furore by short-story standards - over the decision by the Frank O'Connor Award judges to skip a shortlist and announce the winner early: Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. My first decision was to say nothing: my own book was on the long list and so I felt it would be hard to be or at any rate appear objective, and the matter would be better left for others to discuss. Nicholas Lezard quickly posted his disgust on the Guardian books blog and the commenters agreed pretty unanimously, and today Susan Hill expresses hers and quotes from her experience as a Booker judge when her fellow judge Roy Fuller also wanted to omit a shortlist.

A main objection has been that, however much a judging panel knew who their eventual winner was going to be, it was mean to deprive those who would have been on the shortlist their hour in the sun and the increased sales (and, I would add, reputation) which would have followed. People have noted that it seems especially perverse when the Frank O'Connor Award was specifically set up to draw attention to the short story collections published yearly (and which usually get scant attention), and in the service of this aim its long list is generous (39 books this year). Some, including a previous Frank O'Connor judge, have commented that to decide on a winner so soon is arrogant and that the purpose of a short list is to allow judges time for reflection and reconsideration via closer reading and rereading, and a Guardian blogs commenter points out that innovative or subtle short stories are more likely to rise to the surface at such a stage (the general consensus seeming to be that Lahiri's stories, while excellent, conform to conventional expectations). (I haven't read them myself.) Some have seen the choice as pandering to extraneous authority, since Jhumpa Lahiri's book, her second collection, is already an American bestseller and she won a Pultizer for her first, especially in view of the fact that member of this year's judging panel Eileen Battersby complained after last year's off-the-wall choice of Miranda July that the prize was not doing enough to acknowledge internationally acclaimed writers of short stories.

Actually, I think the meanest bit is this section of their statement:

"Not only were the jury unanimous in their choice of Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth as the winner, they were unanimous in their belief that so outstanding was Lahiri's achievement in this book that no other title was a serious contender."

So the rest were crap, eh?

Regular readers of this blog will know of my reservations about literary competitions per se (or any ruddy competitions for that matter). And you know what, these judges have only gone and put into words what I keep saying is the unspoken implication of all competitions. It's great for the winners, but for those who don't win there's that other judgement: Less good.

But you know what, too? OK, so four or so people were deprived of being on the short list. But guess what, 34 others of us were saved having been labelled not good enough for the short list and, more to the point, being dropped immediately from the collective literary consciousness. Quite the contrary: look how it's all still being discussed.

Martin Amis, Literature and Religion

Literature and Terrorism in December, and now in July our celebrity professor tackles Literature and Religion. On Tuesday of last week Martin Amis talked about this subject with critic James Wood in Manchester University's Whitworth Hall.

I was late - a bus and a little car had collided on Princess Parkway and the traffic was at a standstill. When I finally arrived outside the hall with my two companions, running, there was no one about, everyone else had gone in. Two stewards standing there said - with something of an excited air of occasion - 'Martin Amis?' and pointed to the door. Inside the building a huge guy like a bouncer said rather sternly, 'Martin Amis?' and pointed the way down the corridor. An Evening News photographer followed on our heels. Up the blue-carpeted stairs and then into the back of the huge hall which was unbelievably, out of term time, crowded, and where the speakers were being introduced.

Who were all these people who had given up a warm early evening to hear a debate on such a serious subject? From where we found seats near the back all I could see were strangers. Straight ahead of me was a woman in a straw Sunday hat.

Urbane as ever, even bored-seeming, Martin Amis spoke first. He was a confirmed secularist, he told us, but not an atheist. He told us that to be an atheist was an arrogant and illogical position since there is so much that we can't know, and yet I could swear that he used the word 'humiliating' rather than 'humbling' to describe this last fact. I thought he then said that religion may have solved the problem of death and evil (with the concept of heaven) but fails to solve the problem of panic - though Phillip Olterman, writing for The Guardian today (Saturday) has a different account of what Amis said on this precise point. Literature, Amis went on, has been a 'rearguard action' against this. He quoted smoothly from Milton' s great poem as the work of literature par excellence in this regard, and from some other classic English texts, I can't remember what.

James Wood sat semi-slumped over the table, leaning on his elbow and with his hand on his chin and almost over his mouth and said that his parents had become evangelical Christians, a background he had strongly rebelled against, which history had always informed his attitude to literature. He said that the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century had paralleled a decline in belief and the nineteenth-century novel was in this sense a slayer of belief - or well, maybe, he would need to think about it a lot more. There is something inherently secular about narrative, he said : a novel paradoxically requests belief (in itself, I think he meant - or maybe he meant in story) while being aware of its status as fiction. To make a narrative is to destabilize doctrine and the Bible begins with a totally unconvincing story, that of Adam and Eve and the serpent - well, I got a bit lost about his logic here. As far as Wood was concerned, it is not panic but evil which religion has failed to solve (well, this is what I heard anyway), and this has been the central theme of narrative.

And then Amis said that religion doesn't actually solve death with heaven anyway, and that heaven itself may be the real problem: the idea of it was 'repellent'. Where would the dramas and tensions be in such a bland world?

Both agreed that the debate surrounding Richard Dawkins' view of the universe was 'officially over', and theologian chair Graham Ward suggested with somewhat unctuous hopefulness that there was going to be a return to the 'sacred' in literature, whatever he meant by that.

Then there were questions from the floor. A woman stood up and spoke for a long time about her faith and how it had led her to write a novel which she hadn't yet had published and she wondered if Wood and Amis could imagine a heaven which we think of as heaven but which for the people inside it wasn't heaven at all - which seemed to be the subject of her novel; but it was hard to follow what she was saying and she realized it and finally said 'If you follow me,' and the people behind me started giggling, but Amis suavely said he followed her perfectly and gave an answer which in turn I couldn't follow since I couldn't fully work out how it related to her question before he had finished it and the next questioner was invited.

A man stood up and said he was a Pentecostal Christian and he wanted to write a religious novel, and would it be a good idea? Amis rudely told him to ask his 'heavenly father' for help, and Wood came in and in a conciliatory but tentative way suggested he write an allegory, like Tolkien or CS Lewis, who did actually write religious allegories, or well, sort of. And then a woman stood up and said Amis and Wood had been representing religious people wrongly, not all religious people just followed an institution and went to church on Sundays, but I had a funny feeling she was with the woman with the Sunday hat.

And then it was over, and we were told to sit in our seats till the panel had left because 'they had books to sell' and needed to be sitting with them at the bottom of the stairs before we filed down.

I'm sorry, but really I can't give you a good account of what was said. I was far too busy being gob-smacked and sitting there thinking how no one felt the need to couch their references to religion with the word Christian or to literature with the word Western, or mostly to the point, English and American. That in the age when religious fundamentalism should be of urgent interest to literature there was no acknowledgement of this or any sense of the need to address how literature might tackle this now. Indeed, there was only one reference to Islam: in his final condemnation of heaven Amis said he thought that the Muslim heaven was perhaps a good one, and some of the audience laughed. All I could think was that we were sitting there trapped in a Christiancentric universe, with a Christian theologian for a chairman, surrounded by Christian Neo-Gothic carving and soaring wooden arches, and overlooked by the massive organ which, on the occasion of the Literature and Terrorism debate, Tom Chatfield compared to the underside of a fighter plane, but which seemed to me on Tuesday like the towering bars of a gigantic prison.

I tell you, we couldn't get out of that place quick enough - once they let us - and we rushed down the stairs, my companion from UCL telling me in disgust that the open lectures at UCL never had such a low level of engagement or debate - and they didn't make you pay or try and make you buy their books, either.

Short Stories in a Vacuum

I'm invited this Thursday to the award ceremony for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and I've been thinking again about the comment made by last year's judge A L Kennedy:

The magazines that used to print stories have largely disappeared and they're left to be harried by endless small-scale competitions that merrily dictate size, content, themes and title options.

I rather think that that word 'merrily' sums up the shift in culture which this situation reflects. I've won one or two short-story competitions, and some writers of my acquaintance have won several apiece, and I won't deny that it's great publicity for the writer and great acknowledgment for individual stories when this happens, but this doesn't stop me thinking that a short-story culture primarily generated by competitions is never going to be as serious as that mainly supported by serious literary magazines.

One can't easily write into a vacuum and I would suggest that that's what this recent culture has created, a vacuum, in spite of those defining strictures - titles, themes, etc. These are simply not serious parameters. As I've said before, a serious piece of writing is not primarily characterized by its subject matter (although current marketing trends could have you thinking so). Take any subject - as these single-story competitions do - and you can approach it via any number of literary modes, traditional or experimental, any number of voices or narrative approaches. Writers entering competitions are basically taking pot luck: who knows if the one or two judges (so often writers) brought in, or indeed the anonymous early sifters, will share your literary agenda - or, more to the point, if they don't (since the odds are that they won't) how likely would it be that they'd be prepared to give it a prize however brilliant your story may be on its own literary terms? Personally, I'd never send a story into a competition which I hadn't already written anyway, but I hear all the time of writers writing stories specifically for competitions, and, as I've said before and as I think A L Kennedy is indicating, one wonders what this - a writing life of adapting to expectations which are after all usually only second-guessed- is doing to deflect them from their own potential literary agendas (and to very little avail when they don't win).

A serious literary magazine, on the other hand, will be based on a recognizable literary agenda and provide a nurturing community. (It's true that magazines sometimes run these competitions, but when they do I'd say they are a departure from truly literary concerns and are simply money-making schemes: we don't want your story really - though we'll stick the one the judge chooses in - what we want is your cash. When we were running the short-story mag Metropolitan our funders frequently suggested to us we ran competitions to raise money; for the reasons I'm outlining here we never did). In a climate where a lot of different literary magazines exist the talented short-story writer will usually find a home for his or her stories. I'm thinking of Ambit and the London Magazine, I'm looking back further to mags like Bananas and The Transatlantic Review. But I'm also looking forward and hoping that the forthcoming Horizon Review heralds a new flowering of serious lit mags supported by the web. This new online journal espouses the tradition (it's named after Cyril Connelly's 1940s Horizon) yet its editor Jane Holland looks forward to even greater possibilities afforded by the web:

I’m not interested in becoming too prescriptive about the sort of poetry, fiction, critical prose or literary oddities I’d like to receive from contributors. I’m not positioning myself either left, right or dead centre of the mainstream. What I will be seeking, however, in the work received, is an openness: to the physical, to the wider world, to ideas and language, and to the possibility of failure.

It may seem strange to be discussing failure here. But a willingness to take risks, even quite dangerous ones, is something I admire and encourage in writers. Literature without risk is like a meal without salt: predictable and unappealing. It’s important to bear in mind though that any risks should be based on the percentages, not taken at random or to extremes. Don't try this at home, etc.

I don’t want Horizon to be a cosy refuge for writers looking for allies and a comfortable place to sleep. I want it to prickle with energy, both negative and positive; to challenge preconceptions about the writing of poetry and fiction; to question methods of criticism and modes of thinking in a frank and open manner.

I tell you, I read that and I knew this was the place to send my most recent story (and indeed she accepted it) and I didn't have to send it off to some competition with that sinking feeling of chucking a bottle with a message off a cliff into the sea...

* Postscript: Jane Holland's statement about risk is an important one in relation to the competition culture. As she is implying, the risk of failure is built into experimentation - not only the failure of acceptance created by the conventional expectations of others but true aesthetic failure. But who wants to risk failure in a competition? Thus competitions can contribute towards a conventionalization of our short-story culture...

The Confusion of Misery

Decca Aitkenhead profiles the original misery memoirist David Pelzer for today's Guardian and uncovers a possibly clarifying confusion....

Fiction as Thesis

I like the way The Guardian gives the right of reply to (admittedly selected) artists criticized in its pages, and today I'm particularly taken by Anthony Neilson's reply to Michael Billington's critique of his new play Relocated (Jerwood Theatre Upstairs). I don't know the play, and I tend to admire the thoughtfulness of Billington's writing and his commitment to championing political writing, but Neilson says something which strikes a deep chord with me, and which I believe also has implications for the ways in which we read prose fiction.

Billington complains about the 'general thesis' of the play, thus, says Neilson, not only misunderstanding the nature of his play but revealing an acceptance of the kind of play - the 'play-as-thesis' - which Neilson goes on to condemn:

This is the great danger of the play-as-thesis. It assumes that the play is an expression of the playwright's character. And, since playwrights desire approval as much as the next person, it leads to dishonest and complacent work. A play should reflect life as the playwright sees it - not as they, or anyone else, wishes it to be. If one sees a world in which there are no permanent truths, it is dishonest to fabricate them for the sake of approbation. Worse, it is a dereliction of duty. A play-as-thesis is by nature reductive, an attempt to bring order to the unruliness of existence. But bringing order is the business of the state, not the artist.

Interestingly, a Guardian book blog yesterday by Sam Jordison echoes something of these sentiments in relation to JM Coetzee's Disgrace in particular (which he finds too much a novel-as-thesis) and Booker winners in general.

The Fantasies of Real-Life Readers

Another novelist complains about the tendency of readers to read her books as autobiographical. Self-described 'mum-lit' author Kirsty Scott joins the protest on the Guardian books blog.

It's Just a Middle-Class Money Thing...

Reviewing The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness for The Guardian today, Frank Cottrell Boyce makes an articulate case against the 'age-banding' of books for children. Actually, he says, the disaster has already happened in the categorization of books for 'young adults': there have always been adult books which teenagers have enjoyed, but these were books which teenagers chose for themselves. Then:

Some time ago, someone saw that trend and turned it into a demographic. Fortunes were made but something crucial was lost. We have already ghettoised teenagers' tastes in music, in clothes and - God forgive us - in food. Can't we at least let them share our reading? Is there anything more depressing than the sight of a "young adult" bookshelf in the corner of the shop. It's the literary equivalent of the "kids' menu" - something that says "please don't bother the grown-ups". If To Kill a Mockingbird were published today, that's where it would be placed, among the chicken nuggets.

This is not just a question of taste. It seems to me that the real purpose of stories and reading is to take you out of yourself and put you somewhere else. Anything that is made to be sold to a particular demographic, however, will always end up reflecting the superficial concerns of that demographic.

Exactly: books are for stretching you, growing you, educating you - for adults, too, which is why I've always questioned any publishing marketing philosophy based on the notion of simply catering for an already established need, of which the proposed age-banding is just the latest form. Simon Juden, chief exec of the Publishers Association is being disingenuous when he argues for it as a philanthropic gesture towards children and their parents: 'We don't want a child not to be bought a book as a present because the adult doesn't know where to start'; and it is depressing that critics of the 'No to Age-banding' campaign on the Guardian books blog appear to have swallowed this wholesale and in their clamorous endorsement of such 'help' for parents have revealed a regrettably blinkered - if not I'm-alright-Jack - view of the matter of children and reading:

In another comments thread on a post by Michael Rosen on what might be done to encourage the enjoyment of reading, commenters repeat the view that it's the parents' responsibility to teach children reading, not the government (and this is why age-banding is such a good thing: to help parents in this task). Well, I don't know which world these people are living in, but in the one I taught in for several years and in which my partner still works as an educational psychologist, there's a whole population of kids out there who don't and/or can't read because their parents don't or can't read and in some cases, particularly with boys, actively discourage reading as effete and middle-class. There's a very thoughtful post over at Juxtabook (recommended by one of the Guardian commenters) which I too would recommend to you as a wholly accurate and moving depiction of the relationship such children have with books, but I disagree with his conclusion that age banding would be useful to their parents. In my view it's about as useful and attractive to them as fags to non-smokers, because they simply won't be going into bookshops in the first place. And Simon Juden of course knows this last - it's the already book-oriented classes (and the publishers' golden goose) which age banding is targeting.

And as for those children's-book buying middle classes: do Simon Juden etc really think that aunties going into the bookshop to buy presents for Christmas and birthdays constitute the main bulk of the children's book market? And not those kids let loose in the children's departments on Saturday afternoons seeing and grabbing and ignoring or influencing the adult choices (and dropping like hot bricks anything labelled with an age range other than the ones they'd like to be identified with, which might well not include their own)?

Amazon Trickery

I replicate the blog written by Clare Sudbery for Bookarazzi:

Amazon has been removing the “buy button” from some of the Hachette Livre books and also removing some of their titles from promotional positions such as “Perfect Partner”, in order to apply pressure on them to give Amazon even better commercial terms than it presently receives.

Larger British book retailers already receive the most generous terms in the English-language world from publishers, including Hachette Livre. Of the “cake” represented by the recommended retail price of a general book, major retailers including Amazon already receive on average well over 50%. Despite these advantageous terms, Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another making increasing demands in order to achieve richer terms at the publishers' expense. (You may have read in the press a few weeks ago of Amazon’s penalties against Bloomsbury and its authors). If this continued, it would not be long before Amazon got virtually all of the revenue that is presently shared between author, publisher, retailer, printer and other parties. (Again, you may have read that in the USA Amazon has been demanding that it should take over the printing, initially of print-on-demand titles, dictating its own royalty terms to publishers and authors). Hachette Livre are politely but firmly saying that these encroachments need to stop now. Declining all additional terms demands is the approach that HL take with all major retailers, and it is particularly important in relation to Amazon.

Amazon has grown very rapidly since it launched and it now makes some 16% of all book sales in Britain. The creativity, value and range offered and the standards of service that have made Amazon so successful, are respected. At its present rate of growth, which was 30% last year, Amazon would become the largest bookseller in Britain in about three years. The retail market for book is not increasing and therefore much of this growth would inevitably come at the expense of “bricks and mortar” booksellers. This is of course not a criticism of Amazon, and no publisher can or should tell the public where to shop. However, it is a concern that more and more traditional booksellers are having to close their doors, with skilled individual booksellers losing their jobs, and this is due in part to Amazon’s aggressively low pricing on prominent titles. Therefore, despite their limited role in respect of these changes in the retail landscape, Hachette Livre are determined not to provide Amazon with further ammunition with which it could damage booksellers who offer a personal service, browsing facilities and other valuable benefits to the reading public.

Amazon’s reputation to date has been built on range, service and honest recommendations to customers. Their current actions represent reduced range and service together with distorted recommendations – effectively creating a breach of trust between Amazon and its customers, particularly its “Prime” customers who have paid to have free delivery on a comprehensive range of books."

Hachette Livre is a large umbrella organisation, which encompasses the following publishers:

Little, Brown Book Group (includes Abacus, Virago, Sphere, Piatkus, Orbit, Atom)
Orion Publishing Group (Orion, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Gollancz)
Headline Publishing Group
Hodder & Stoughton (includes Sceptre)
Hachette Children's Books (includes Franklin Watts, Orchard, Hodder, Wayland)
Hodder Education Group
John Murray
Octopus Publishing Group (includes Bounty, Cassel, Conran Octopus, Hamly, Gaia, Mitchell Beazley, Miller, Philips)
They also have subsidiaries in India, Aus, NZ...

This isn't the first time Amazon has used this tactic. Earlier this year Amazon.com removed Buy buttons from selected books of publishers who refused to switch their Print-on-demand publishing to Amazon's newly bought POD company (see Bookseller story here (http://tinyurl.com/3efuy5)). They really are bullies.

Amazon and the supermarkets have consistently been putting the squeeze on publishers in this way, making it harder and harder for independent publishers to operate, not to mention small bookshops (who don't have the same muscle and can't compete). The ultimate losers are the authors, who get a smaller and smaller slice of the pie. I got 70p per book with a cover price of £10.00. When books are sold at a discount, the author gets significantly less than that (percentages vary according to contract, but they're typically less than 10% of cover price).

Things you can do to help:

Contact Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/4skfzf)
Copy this post, or write your own, on your blog / website / via email
Boycott Amazon (alternative book sources: localbookshops.co.uk, abebooks.co.uk, bookdepository.co.uk, Waterstones.com, Play.com, actual physical bookshops, or where possible buy through authors' and publishers' own websites).
Write to newspapers
Contact the competition commission (email: info@cc.gsi.gov.uk This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Review: Inglorious by Joanna Kavenna

Seems to me that the awarding of the Orange New Writers Prize to Inglorious by Joanna Kavenna is a gloriously heartening sign that timid conservatism does not always rule in the contemporary literary world.

This book, which was sent to me by Faber and which I had only just finished reading when it won last week, is a delicious anti-novel, breaking many of the rules which writers are so often taught to stick to and sidestepping many of the (same old) conventions publishers seem to believe the reading public requires in its books.

For a start there's no story or action in the conventional sense: and that's the point, the wonderful, clever and to me totally gripping point. Rosa Lane, 'thirty-five and several months', is a successful journalist in a settled relationship, but once she begins grieving the death of her mother this life comes to seem to her no longer a structured story but a state of stasis - 'She had spent the previous ten years in a holding position'; 'Instead of seeing herself as the centre of her own small world, with the city as a backdrop to her life, she began to see everything as a fractured mess.' Rosa quits her job and immediately her life begins to unravel as, comically and painfully, she becomes further mired in stasis, increasingly unable to act, enraging her friends who want her to do something, merely walking around the city and observing everything with an alien's vivid eye, thinking herself into greater and greater intellectual contortions steeped in literary references, and making hilarious To Do lists which she never carries out and which sum up her existential muddle:

Things to do, Monday

Get a job.
Wash your clothes
Go to the bank and beg them for an extension....
Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities...
Clean the toilet.

Rosa's alienation creates an ironic commentary on contemporary society and her flights of fantasy makes for splendid social satire: 'We can do you an appointment for Thursday,' the bank clerk tells Rosa, and as she clips off to arrange it Rosa riffs silently:

We can do you an eviction on Tuesday, she thought. We can do you a spell in a reform centre for the fiscally incompetent on Wednesday.

What this book is portraying of course is an emotional breakdown (shock-horror: a 'dark' subject!) but it is done with such lightness of touch and such linguistic relish that there is nothing gloomy about it - quite the contrary. And Rosa is an anti-hero: you want to wring her neck at times, but that's the point - she's involving; I at any rate was utterly hooked on knowing whether or not she would ever kick-start her life again. In any case, it is Rosa's vivid and witty imaginings which power the book and render it buoyant and dynamic . There is a story, of course, on the emotional and imaginative level, which is the real level for fiction, after all.

So, great that Faber published it in the first place, and the fact that it won should dispel the nervousness implied by its packaging (an American paperback edition was blatantly 'chick-litty', and I'm not sure that the 'ironic populist' English edition [above] works for any market).

The Error of Age Banding

Three cheers for Philip Pullman, Anne Fine and Adele Geras for their beautifully articulated objection to publishers' plans to 'age band' books for children, which you can find at their dedicated website - where you can add your name to a list of objectors. I replicate their main points here:

• Each child is unique, and so is each book. Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless.
• Children easily feel stigmatized, and many will put aside books they might love because of the fear of being called babyish. Other children will feel dismayed that books of their ‘correct’ age-group are too challenging, and will be put off reading even more firmly than before.
• Age-banding seeks to help adults choose books for children, and we're all in favour of that; but it does so by giving them the wrong information. It’s also likely to encourage over-prescriptive or anxious adults to limit a child's reading in ways that are unnecessary and even damaging.
• Everything about a book is already rich with clues about the sort of reader it hopes to find – jacket design, typography, cover copy, prose style, illustrations. These are genuine connections with potential readers, because they appeal to individual preference. An age-guidance figure is a false one, because it implies that all children of that age are the same.
• Children are now taught to look closely at book covers for all the information they convey. The hope that they will not notice the age-guidance figure, or think it unimportant, is unfounded.
• Writers take great care not to limit their readership unnecessarily. To tell a story as well and inclusively as possible, and then find someone at the door turning readers away, is contrary to everything we value about books, and reading, and literature itself.

The Short Review Issue 8

Issue 8 of The Short Review is now up, and includes a pretty nice review by Melissa Lee-Houghton of the Bitch's own short-story collection Balancing on the Edge of the World .

A Bookseller Tells it Like it Is

Belatedly I commend to you this devastating post at The Age of Uncertainty. Its author, Steerforth, who has been a beacon of sense and sensitivity in a world of bookselling madness has now given up his position as a Waterstone's branch manager and lays out his sobering reasons why.

Winehouse and Raleigh

How curious, some of the reactions to the fact that Amy Winehouse lyrics appeared on the prac crit section of this year's Cambridge English Tripos. What a pity that the Cambridge university spokesman fuelled the complaints of The Campaign for Real Education that this was 'dumbing down' by commenting that 'Cambridge dons live in the modern world' (which has been represented by some journalists as meaning that they'll do anything to look up-to-date), instead of sticking to the examiners' excellent justification: 'The idea is to assess students' abilities at dealing with unseen writings from across the field of English literature' - ie, as Mary Beard indicates, to assess their ability to think for themselves (which is the real education, don't you know, all you Campaigner folks!).

As it happens, both Professors John Sutherland and Michael Dobson show that the Winehouse lyrics stand up well to the comparison with Raleigh which the question required:

Look at this stanza and ask yourself: is it from a 15th-century poet, or a 21st-century chanteuse?

Tho' I battled blind,
Love is a fate resigned
Memories mar my mind,
Love is a fate resigned.

In a blindfold test (another favourite prac-crit technique) a lot of readers, I believe, would think it's of Elizabeth I, not Elizabeth II vintage. It's Winehouse, of course. Top marks to whoever set the paper. (Sutherland)

Both lyrics, in their different idioms, are in fact highly conventional, and each lapses blurrily at times into the poetical cliches of its own day (Winehouse's phrase 'the final frame' in this context perhaps risks confusing the vocabulary of the pop video with that of snooker); but both are clearly the work of writers with an assured grasp of those conventions, and acutely aware of the needs music imposes on, and finds within, language. (Dobson)

In any case, I'd have thought that the ability to discriminate for themselves between good and bad literature is a skill we would rather like those grads most likely to end up running our publishing houses to have.

Though, considering some of the trends in publishing, and the fact that

A student who sat the paper said: 'It was really bizarre. I sat there looking at the paper in shock. I wouldn't consider a controversial pop singer a literary figure'

you wonder if this exam was a case of shutting the stable door too late.