L'esprit d'escalier

Bloody squirrels, comin' over here, takin' our jobs...

2009-03-02T21:54:00.001Z

Returning to the shop today following a few days spent elsewhere, I went first into the Customer Services department and was immediately confronted by a member of staff wearing a squirrel mask.

What a relief to know that everything continues as normal.

A Bit of Fry and Laurie, or one of its descendants, featured a sketch in which Stephen Fry plays a waiter to Hugh Laurie's TV executive dining at a classy restaurant. When the exec requests a coffee spoon, Fry returns with a sackful of plastic coffee stirrers and empties them over the table, explaining, "I know they're all crap, but at least you've got the choice."

On the Ideal World channel this evening there is a programme entitled 'Simply Yoghurt'.

Sunnyside up

2009-02-27T20:37:00.000Z

The uproar which met Sceptre's announcement that Glen David Gold's Sunnyside would be a Waterstone's exclusive for three months, an imbroglio in which I am gratified to have played a small part, has concluded in notification today from Hachette CEO Tim Hely-Hutchinson that the deal is off. What's more this news came out on Radio 4's Today this morning, which I think reflects how important, practically and symbolically, this issue really is for the trade.

This is wonderful, a testament to indie power. Having finished the book since I first posted about it, my attitude could only harden, as it really stunningly good and I don't want Waterstone's being able to use it as part of any deluded claim that they are the guardians of literature in the UK.

So, my fellow indie booksellers, the ball is in our court: let's keep our eye on it. Let's make this book ours. It deserves the support of real booksellers. I can't think of an instance, in my time as a bookseller at least, where such a long hiatus between books has concluded in a novel of such wit, beauty and ingenuity.

A colleague of mine said recently that she regretted having read Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance because she would never again experience the wonder of first reading it. Sunnyside will, for many of its readers, will be a book like that. And we want them to remember that it was that knowledgeable bookseller at their local who told them they just had to read it.

Mind you, I'm not sure about that cover....

First impressions

2009-02-15T19:10:00.001Z

I've just read, at the suggestion of a fan at Faber, The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, an author about whom I know nothing. I wouldn't say I was smitten but I was certainly quietly impressed by an author who can make a simple, and in many ways overfamiliar, story into something fresh. It's a variation on the great American road trip and its concomitant personal enlightenment, but it eschews the wearisome pretensions which started with Kerouac and have had their exponents in every generation since.

Two children - well, young teenagers - are taken to find their drop-out father by their aunt, when their disturbed mother is taken into hospital; initially, I had visions of yet another attempt to ape A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But Toews' attention to detail and dry wit allow the interplay between Thebes, Logan and their aunt to give a plausible portrait of the entire family dynamic and how it has come to where the book begins and then travels. Few writers do children or teenagers well, crediting them with more adult psychologies than seems plausible, but the slight precocity of both children is given backstory and context. It reminded me of The Outcast in that respect.

Even if I can't quite bring myself to recommend this book wholeheartedly, Toews is a thoughtful writer, who resists the temptation to smear her ego all over the text. She's written an anti-Beat novel, I suppose.

German literature, meanwhile, is embracing 'the new impressionism'. Supposedly, How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić (he's actually Bosnian, but now lives and writes in Germany) is in the vanguard, but I felt he fell into every trap which Toews was able to step over with so little fuss. It's a mish-mash of snapshots and episodes, the cumulative effect of which is to convey the brutal intrusion of sectarian conflict and its corruption of human decency, but I really felt it needed a bit more narrative backbone. Thumbnail sketches result in little more than the imprint of character.

Stanišić is endlessly inventive and the novel has innumerable great set-pieces, but the trickery starts to wear thin long before the end. I'm all for style over content when the writer has imagination and originality to pull it off - and, in this case, it may be that some of the dazzle is dulled by translation - but the hype with which this book was heralded ultimately does it a disservice. He's one to watch too, but no more.

Sunnyside down

2009-02-15T17:07:00.001Z

I've just started reading Glen David Gold's, Sunnyside, a book not so much long-awaited as very much unexpected. I'm only forty-odd pages in, so I'll forbear to comment for now, other than remark that it would seem that Gold's time since Carter Beats the Devil appears to have been very well spent: rich prose, delightful vocabulary and the purposeful research of little details which can make a book come alive.

But my beginning the book coincided, coincidentally, with the receipt of a letter from Sceptre , outlining their disturbing plans for the book. The UK hardback edition is to be a Waterstone's exclusive in July, with the rest of the trade allowed a trade paperback edition in October.

I can guess at the commercial rationale for this. Sceptre are an imprint of the Hachette group, which remains in dispute with Amazon about discount; this has forced Amazon to source to stock from wholesalers or to leave sales to sellers on Marketplace, so, principally, it's two fingers up to Amazon, telling them that their support for what I assume will turn out to be Sceptre's biggest title of the year is not required.

The executive director of one UK publisher recently me me that their German counterparts had received a letter from amazon.de telling them to choose between giving them 2% more discount or extended credit terms. They literally had to tick a box to choose their 'preference'. It was heartening to hear that they simply had told them to get lost, as had many other publishers.

So, up yours, Amazon, indeed; and wouldn't it be great to see another publisher stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them, instead of seeing HarperCollins jump in with a rather gauche letter from CEO Victoria Barnsley on their homepage plugging their new releases (and, gloriously, misspelling the name of one of her own authors)?

But promising signed trade paperbacks to the independents to make up for three months without the genuinely desirable hardback (trade paperbacks: all of the unwieldiness with none of the quality) is poor compensation and will continue to drive people away from independents, who have enough trouble trying to compete with chain discounts without being deemed unfit to help launch a major new novel.

Maybe, if its was something from one of Hachette's more commercial imprints, something which would sell a bigger proportion in WHSmith or supermarkets, then it would be less of an attack on the integrity of independents' stock ranges. But this is grim news for the book trade and a precedent to be deterred.

In the short term, it may have some benefits for Hachette, and Waterstone's are doubtless thrilled with their coup. Amazon won't be stopped from flogging the US edition (which is due two months earlier) instead, but the rest of the UK trade will be probably be intimidated into withdrawing any copies they source from the US.

Three possible responses suggest themselves. First, the rest of the trade boycotts the book entirely, trade and mass-market paperbacks included: glorious but impractical. Second, we all order in the US hardback and make sure we have it for those two months before the UK release: Sceptre wouldn't be able to send threatening letters to all of us (and I'm not sure if their territorial copyright applies before the UK release). Third, we all go and buy copies from Waterstones and and resell them at a slightly higher price: a bit wet, frankly.

All of these unfortunately mean giving the whole affair the sort of press which will probably boost sales. I suspect that may be part of Sceptre's grand plan. So, fourth, we all give in, go home and let Waterstone's impose their pitiful vision of range bookselling on the general public.

I don't care how good Sunnyside turns out to be. If these bleak possibilities are what we are left with, I'd rather the book was never published.

My first lock-in

2009-01-14T20:30:00.001Z

I was fortunate enough to be invited along to an after-hours tour of the Saatchi Gallery, courtesy of Jonathan Cape, set up to promote the series of books they publish to coincide with each major show. The current exhibition is New Chinese Art and even the more expert booksellers amongst the party found it quite eye-opening to have our tour conducted by the Gallery's Senior Curator, who took us from room to room, picking out one piece from each for a commentary.

The restrictions on political expression in China offer pitfalls for an artist with a remotely radical agenda, so I was surprised to learn about the subversive ideas symbolically secreted in so many artworks. Political mandarins, so steeped are they in dogma, tend not to be well versed in contemporary art, I was told, and so these subtle interpretations are beyond them.

This got me thinking about the language of artistic criticism in China. Words give up their meanings rather more easily, so I came to the conclusion that there must be some sort of artistic argot or metalanguage with which these ideas are discussed. Chinese languages, being pictogrammatically based, are full of loosely defined words which are given more precise meaning through their context. No wonder east and west sometimes struggle to reconcile their cultural differences; the basis of communication is structured in fundamentally different ways.

Fascinating though our little tour was, halfway round it occurred to me to wander off on my own for a bit. To stand alone, in silence, in the open space of such a gallery, contemplating exhibits without distraction, is a profound thing to do. When I returned to the fold, I mentioned this to our guide, who confessed that she rather likes being able to do just this herself.

Maybe it has something to do with being a booklover, in my case at least. Reading is a solitary activity and, while discussing books with others who have also read them is an important part of the experience, that initial time alone is essential in letting their ideas and images coalesce.

I suspect one of the reasons that I don't 'get' graphic novels, aside from my usual glib comment that it seems like a lot of effort for very few words, is that I want my mental image of the world in which I am immersing myself to form spontaneously, without prompts and clues.

One new book which confronts this dichotomy of the verbal and the visual is a debut novel due in May, The Selected Works of T S Spivet by Reif Larsen. It is illustrated throughout with the purported diagrams and designs of 12 year-old boy, whose maps mark him out as quite the prodigy. Though he lives on a working farm in Montana, his mother is an entomologist, from whom T S (Tecumseh Sparrow, for reasons which I suggest you read the book to discover) apparently inherits his instincts for meticulous cataloguing.

Recognition of a series of his works leads to his being awarded a prestigious title by the Smithsonian, who are unaware of his youth, but he accepts the accolade and elects to travel alone hobo-style on trains to receive his due.

Most of his maps represent scientific observations, but usually of the things which might preoccupy a boy of his age and it is this juvenile dalliance in an adult world which seems to have encouraged the book's publisher, Harvill Secker, to compare it to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Such comparisons always make me wary. Every time a catalogue suggests a book might be the next Kite Runner or Captain Corelli or Secret History, I, and I suspect many other booksellers, begin to suspect that the book in question lacks the imagination or quality to stand alone. Comparisons with other works can be useful, but far too often they are made with reference to books which have freakishly outsold all expectations. The circumstances of such a success are almost always too obscurely unique that to claim to be able to repeat them is always preposterous.

All of which is a protracted way of saying that comparing Larsen with Haddon is pointless; and in this case, its entirely erroneous. This is an adult novel in ways that Haddon's simply isn't, endearing though they both might be.

This bubbles with ideas, gives its characters complex depths beneath their raw emotions and makes the the minutiae of T S's adventure into as engrossingly a part of his grand journey. Harvill Secker know they have a special book on their hands and it will be interesting to see whether they can convey its originality in their marketing of it at the same time as making it a very commercial prospect.

Living in the past

2008-12-15T21:54:00.001Z

Until Never Let Me Go in 2005, I had never read anything by Kazuo Ishiguro and, finding that book unremarkable, might have tried nothing further if it were not for a friend of discerning taste whose favourite author he is. I've since accumulated a selection of his backlist, but had still only read his very first published novel, A Pale View of Hills, which is a model of understatement, perfectly depicting the Japanese dichotomy of public stoicism and inner turmoil. (Andrew Miller's One Morning Like A Bird manages the same.)

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (due in May) is a collection which plants itself between themed collections of short stories and more interwoven multiple narratives within one novel. Like balloons caught on the wind, soaring until they drift from sight, each of these stories leaves an emotive impression but is lost from view before we can make any firm assessment of its destiny. The opening tale of a Venetian cafe guitarist hired by a once famous crooner to help him serenade his wife beneath their hotel balcony is full of romance laid bare: its nerves, its uncertainties, its despair. A man drifting through his life visits friends from university unaware how they have moved on, resulting in bittersweet farce.

Ishiguro's particular gift is to give us an intimacy with his characters, using the the first person to depict that alternation between impulse and deliberation common to us all. When observing other characters, this results in a selectivity which neither forces us to see them as the protagonist does nor which leaves them too amorphously defined. Like a painting beneath whitewash slowly revealed through time, they are revealed indiscriminately, so that it takes time both to make out details and reckon their importance.

Given the constant conjuration of music's fragile power, it was fitting that there was a song which kept coming fragmentally to mind as I read. On My Life Is a Succession of People Saying Goodbye, which was a B-side to something from You Are the Quarry, Morrissey sings plaintively "Once my life stretched before me, but it now stretches behind" to the accompaniment of the tumbling trills of a harp, a song of regret whose despair lies not in loss but in the acknowledgment that a life's opportunities have been spurned.

Anne Michaels is also a writer with a gift for evocation and The Winter Vault, her wilfully curious story of a marriage thrown off kilter by tragedy, is steeped intensely time and place. The first half sees an engineer responsible for the transfer of the temples of Abu Simbel to higher ground when the Nasser valley was flooded by the creation of the Aswan Dam. (Remember that from geography lessons?) Humbly observing the massive displacement of communities in the name of progress, he and his wife suffer their own loss and return to Canada, where they decide to recuperate apart.

In perhaps more contrasting tones than Ishiguro, Michaels pits the innocence of hope against the naked brutality of fate, as the couple try to find new purpose in their lives. It's an intense read, requiring slow deliberation, so rich in metaphor and poetry. This does lead, perhaps inevitably in such a thoroughly scripted account, to the occasional stumble: a slightly po-faced note, perhaps, or a tangent roughly pulled back into line.

When this does happen, it's a little like opening up a sleek and elegant machine, all gleaming metal and sinuous curves, to discover the greasy nest of pistons and gears within, all whirring and thrusting frantically. Or possibly seeing a duck from beneath, although ducks are hardly the most graceful of birds airside... the banality of that simile's always bothered me.

But Michaels is clearly a born writer, alive to the charge of language, who undoubtedly scratches away in a garret in the light of a guttering candle until dawn finds her fallen asleep across her manuscript. It would be terribly disillusioning if not, anyway.

Switching inelegantly from the ethereal to the mundane, the book trade has an interest in Liverpool One, a new 'shopping and restaurant complex'. I wonder if it's as ghastly as Westfield over in Shepherd's Bush, to which I made a recent visit under the misguided apprehension that it wasn't just filled with the same outlets which dominate every provincial clone high street; I very quickly ended up with the sort of headache induced only by shopping centres and staring fixedly at a computer monitor for eight hours without blinking, the sort that feel like one's brain is being lightly sandpapered.

But for the people of Liverpool, good fortune does not stop with the provision of vital new branches of Top Shop and Clinton Cards, which are apparently their reward for being selected as 2008's European City of Culture. There's a two-floor Waterstone's as well, where a revolutionary - and I use the term at its most witheringly contemptuous - new initiative is being trialled: "personal shoppers".

Half a dozen staff are to be kitted out in green shirts - perhaps they're to be the bookselling equivalent of goalkeepers, the last line of defence against customer indecision - and made available exclusively for the benefit of customers between the hours of noon and three. And four and six; apparently, they all have to go for lunch at the same time.

I wouldn't want to misrepresent this professional upgrade, an evolutionary development more remarkable than the first movement of animals from water to land, so I shall briefly defer to the shop's manager, Ian Critchley:

"All people have to do is tell us a little about who they need to get a present for, and the personal shopper will select the perfect gift. Given we have over 60,000 books, as well as everything else we sell, we think this will be the perfect service for those who are spoilt for choice and pushed for time."

Aside from the fact that discounting on a scale which a psychologist would describe as self-harm means that certain titles are all but thrown in your face as you enter a Waterstone's, in case you should enter with your own arrogant ideas about what might make for a good read, the chain apparently thinks that being able to recommend books is some sort of secret shamanic talent, instead of the basic ability to be gauged when hiring booksellers. How little they would seem to think of their staff. How undermined those not in green must feel.

Sticks and stones

2008-11-17T13:35:00.000Z

I had not been aware that Collins, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their first English dictionary, have been conducting a poll to find out which word it is that the British public would most like to see added. But the consultation period has now ended and the people have spoken, or at least uttered some sort of noise which might, in a kindly light, be viewed as the rudiments of language.

These sort of polls do tend to reveal worrying trends in our taste and judgement - Oasis as best band ever, The Lord of the Rings as best book, Boris Johnson for Major of London, anyone to win Big Brother rather than being shot immediately upon exiting the house - but on this occasion we have exceeded all expectations and come up with a 'winner' which frankly brings into question our long-held status as smartest species on the planet. Forget dolphins and bonobos: I think we're down to the level of earwigs or possibly some of the more intellectual varieties of moss.

For our winner is - and lacking the technological nous to embed some of drum roll into the text, I present without ceremony - 'meh'.

Meh. Meh? Meh! (No, it would seem punctuation doesn't make it any more palatable.) For the love of Jesus Christ and his tiny singing elves... could we not have come up with a word which isn't amongst the principal vocabulary of most farmyard animals?

Of all the glorious archaisms and neologisms which we might have chosen, we pick a word which the French, with their staunchly protectionist Académie française, don't even feel the need to coin. They just shrug, in that glorious Gallic fashion which brooks no debate, whether it be in relation to concerns about nuclear testing or the lack of a vegetarian option.

I'm not going to offer my own suggestions. Aside from the futility of it, I'm sure there are quite enough examples on this blog of wilful obscurantism in matters grandiloquent, of words lurking undisturbed in our linguistic backwaters. Instead, I shall be writing to the Secretary of State for Culture, or whatever nebulous department into which concern for our aesthetic well-being has been subsumed, recommending that the English language be confiscated from the British public until they have demonstrated themselves responsible enough to use it without tearing the entire fabric of our historic cultural milieu into tiny monosyllabic pieces.

All correspondence on this matter will therefore now be conducted solely in Latin, Aramaic or some sort of system involving flags.

A series of psychotic reviews

2008-10-27T20:51:00.000Z

Even though I feel The White Tiger is a little slight as a Booker winner - and it does employ many of the same tricks as The Reluctant Fundamentalist on last year's shortlist - I don't think it undermines what I think this year's Prize has eloquently illustrated: 2008 has been a great year for fiction, with the lack of big names hogging the limelight allowing some new talent to impress itself upon the general public's goldfish consciousness.

But the proof copies of new titles are mounting up in piles which have already begun to teeter hazardously, so I thought I'd better start finding out how 2009 is likely to compare. I was tempted by Tim Gautreaux's The Missing, but getting that out would have been too much like a game of Jenga, so I began with Viking's big hope for the forthcoming year, Mr Toppit by Charles Elton.

Even the proofs reflect their grand ambitions: they have dust jackets, die-cut to reveal a detail of another design on the book itself. (Finished copies will be the same, except in hardback format.) There is a purpose to this exorbitance, however, because it is a book about a book, or rather a series of books.

So, the premise: Arthur Hayman was a writer of children's books, the five volumes of the Hayseed Chronicles, which are to become incredibly popular when championed by the American hospital radio presenter who tended him as he lay dying after a road accident. Their main character, Luke, is named after the writer's son, who is later to struggle to come to terms with the public's insistence on identifying him with his literary equivalent. The eponymous Mr Toppit is the baddie of the series, a malevolent omnipresence, who makes a first appearance in the enigmatic last line of the last book; he functions like a diametric opposite to Narnia's Aslan. Luke's discomfort echoes that of A A Milne's son, Christopher, and the furore surrounding the Hayseed Chronicles is modelled on Pottermania.

I don't really like to lay into books too often, especially first efforts, but it has two flaws: the characters and the plot.

As the book vacillates between various points in Luke's growing up, you would expect both he and the other central characters to display some sort of development in their personalities, but they are invariably one-dimensional. Luke himself is perpetually surly, never progressing beyond the functional uncommunicativeness of adolescence. His sister, Rachel, is dippy, easily led and impressed by glamour. Their mother, Martha, is numb and obstinate. Lila, the books' original illustrator, is insensitive and autistically monomaniacal. And Laurie, the American radio presenter, is clumsy in word and deed, caught up in the moment's tide.

It is Laurie, too, who is the weak link in terms of the plot. When the family return to their country home to prepare for Arthur's funeral, this stranger to them all comes along. It's utterly implausible. There's a muddy reference to the family's not objecting, but it seems such socially aggressive behaviour that meek Laurie can't be imagined imposing herself unchallenged. In the subsequent days, Martha dismisses intrusions on the family's grief with a distinct brusqueness on several occasions, but she never objects to Laurie.

Laurie's later progression from hospital radio volunteer to nationally-broadcast chat show host is glossed over in much the same way. It's too remarkable, and frankly unlikely, a development not to require some sort of explanation. And this is symptomatic of the plot throughout: Laurie, Luke and, more intermittently Rachel all turn up and do their narrative duty in isolation from any psychological context.

The plot's one heart-stopping revelation passes almost as an aside, as if all the participants are so wearily accustomed to their lots that it is meaningless. Maybe that's what was intended, but it does rather indicate that the plot itself is fairly directionless, a weak illustration of existential resignation. A poor book from which I feel it is my duty as a bookseller to usher you away.

Still, I don't think I need fear for I might have trampled the delicate flower of some blossoming talent: the author's a literary agent and therefore has the hide of a rhinoceros in leather trousers. My theory is that a great concept has got Penguin so excited that they're blind to the fact that its execution falls very short of its potential. It really is a bad book, so bad it ought to be sent to bed without any supper.

Tearing one book to pieces has given me a vandal's adrenaline surge. So shall we trash another one? I'll probably regret it in the morning, but let's not let ourselves be inhibited in the moment.

The book is Michelle Richmond's No One You Know, due next June as part of Ebury's first big fiction year. It's her first to be published in the UK, but in the US, it's been her mystifyingly well-received fourth, I believe.

It's a thriller, in which Ellie confides all her sorrows to her tutor, Andrew Thorpe, following the murder of her sister, Lila, only to find that he has been accumulating material for a book on the murder case. In it, he reveals his main suspect for the crime, Peter McConnell. When he is acquitted, Ellie is bereft. She has been betrayed by a man she thought was her rock, she has lost her only, very dear sibling, her parents' marriage has crumbled and she doesn't even have the hollow satisfaction of justice. For some time she monitors McConnell, observing him from the far side of the restaurant where he always eats, but eventually he disappears.

Many years later, as a coffee buyer travelling to Nicaragua, she stumbles across him. He had been with Lila on the night she disappeared. The two of them had been working for some time on a solution to a famous mathematical conundrum, Goldbach's Conjecture - and McConnell, it later transpires, succeeded in doing so, although that implausible outcome seems to be permitted to allow McConnell to pay tribute to Lila - and were having an affair. This additional disgrace costs McConnell his family and flees to seclusion in the realm of mathematical theory. He protests his innocence and Ellie is persuaded that the guilty party is still to be identified. She finds Thorpe again and investigates some of the minor players whom Thorpe passed over in his version of Lila's life and death.

The overall story works well enough, even if the narrative is rather too simple to satisfy as a whodunit of any species. But there are some plot points which don't ring true, some inconsequential, some fundamental. An example of the former occurs on Ellie's first buying trip: although she has a couple of years' experience as a coffee taster, it is supposedly a remarkable revelation to her that it takes 2000 coffee cherries to produce a pound of coffee. And, more reprehensibly, an example of the latter would Ellie's complete failure to comment on, or even notice, Thorpe's constant note-taking when she talks to him about her sister's murder. I started jotting these incongruities down, because at the time I thought I might be missing something, but I stopped after seventy or so pages when it became clear that the book was fundamentally flawed, or at least carelessly edited.

When the final twist came, I presumed that it was a red herring, as there were still over fifty pages to read, but instead it just wound down over almost a sixth of the book. It made me think of Bartledan, the emotionless planet in Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless, where all novels finish after exactly 100,000 words, even if that occurs mid-sentence.

I think I should go a little way to undoing the damage that I have wrought by highlighting a decent book. As a bookseller, I can hardly send people away without recommending something. So Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward, published by Faber in April, is bloody marvellous. Reading in the blurb that he'd written it in the form of one continuous paragraph - it's nearly 300 pages - nearly put me off, but the book both justifies the effect and makes the most of it.

Its characters live in a run-down council block, all living lives of drugs, violence and false hope. Some of the cruder opening scenes were uncomfortably like much of Irvine Welsh's Filth - a book as dire as Trainspotting is sublime - but it's a book full of nuance and wit, allowing its characters' true natures to chivvy the plot along with just enough impetus to reach a cathartically moving conclusion.

By the way, it's his second book, he's twenty-three and the film rights to his first have just been bought by Hollywood. And he's nice, utterly lovely in fact. Tch!

On the subject of new talent, I've found it disappointing that so much new radio comedy over the last couple of years has been so turgid and clunking, the first Laura Solon series and most episodes of Ed Reardon's Week aside, that my ears were fair twitching with pleasure on hearing Radio 7's 15-minute sketch show on Sundays, A Series of Psychotic Episodes.

It's a little raw in its both writing and presentation, but the humour is so sharply original that it seems apparent already that its writer, Miriam Elia, is going to be a star (or at least constantly passed over by commissioning editors in favour of supposedly 'edgy' attention-seeking dross). Episodes are available for the time being on the BBC website and it's worth a listen for, amongst my favourites, the sketch 'Postmodern Pat and his Abstract Cat' and this wonderful line:

Were you born in the eighties? Then you may be entitled to compensation.

ηὕρηκα

2008-10-20T22:47:00.001+01:00

Harry Potter En Die Towenaar Se Steen

2008-10-07T22:43:00.000+01:00

I've been exploring Borders' website, to see what their relaunch has to offer. One new feature is their Spookily Accurate Book Suggestor.

They have the same problem as Amazon, at least with fiction, in that most of their suggestions are books by the same author, particularly when straying even slightly from the mainstream. Hunger by Knut Hamsen, for instance, produced a list of his other books, with a couple of plays by Ibsen for good measure.

The oddest result came when I entered Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, paperback edition. It responded with five suggestions: Chamber of Secrets in hardback, Philosopher's Stone on CD, Half-Blood Prince on cassette, one of the series - perhaps the first, but I couldn't say with any certainty - in Afrikaans and, finally, most surreally, The Story of Jazz by Franck Bergerot and Arnaud Merlin.

I think I'll go back to the endearingly ill-conceived storycode.co.uk. It may suggest The Poisonwood Bible every single time, but at least it's a good suggestion.

I've just read a debut coming-of-age novel by Peter Murphy, John the Revelator. I'm wary of such books, as so many of them are thinly disguised autobiographies, the sort of novels which one would hope a good writer might get out of his system and then place in a drawer, there to lie undisturbed until death and a publisher's scraping around for enlightening juvenalia. But Murphy is Faber's 'distinctive new voice' for spring and will be present at a new authors' party in a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd see if the book did indeed "brilliantly evoke all the frustrations and pent-up energy of parochial adolescence", as the blurb claims.

I duly ticked off the usual list: a lack of parental understanding, a charismatically rebellious friend, a knowing adult who appears genie-like when required to dispense advice, drunken adventures gone awry and unsolicited fantasy sex with a beautiful older woman. The trouble is that, beyond this, one is left only with some strange dreams involving a particularly sinister crow. The writing's good, I'll concede, really remarkably assured in fact, with some nice phrasing and switches of pace, but that's not quite enough: he's not John Banville.

I’ve also been reading Belching out the Devil by Mark Thomas, which exposes the world's most recognised brand - Coca-Cola if you hadn't guessed - as a company keen enough on profits to wash their hands of all manner of corporate impropriety, starting with turning a blind eye to guerrilla assassination of Union members in Colombia and not really getting any less horrific in any later chapter.

Now, I'm not naive enough to imagine that the moral footprint of my comfortable western lifestyle doesn't have its cloven aspect, but I feel that I'm learning about the realities of capitalism and making my choices accordingly. And what I don't do is stand in the way of justice or fairness. Coca-Cola do, to make more money. They want their brand to stand for American values and so we perceive that it does. But we don't look closely enough at how they interpret those values. They don't stand for opportunity and freedom, but for exploitation and control, and modern capitalism doesn't really distinguish.

Nestlé's new Munch Bunch advert sees them up to their usual dissembling too. A portion of their yoghurt, the ad garishly proclaims, provides a child's entire daily calcium requirement. But it says in tiny print at the bottom of the screen that 'one portion' is two pots. And on the website, I can't find the disclaimer at all.

Now, I know that's fairly minor sin in the annals of corporate deceit, but it does exemplify the willingness of big business to use legislation introduced to curb their excesses to claim that they are entirely compliant with society's wishes not be misled. Technically, they might be right, but morally, a term which is of course unquantifiable, it's perhaps worse than just lying in the first place.

It's just the same with their infamous baby milk misdemeanours, the principal reason why I boycott Nestlé. Once the problem was exposed, they assured the world that their sales reps would be retrained and that African mothers would not be told that formula was better than breast milk. When an undercover reporter revealed that it was still happening, they were able to claim that rogue agents were disobeying head office instructions. The number of agents involved suggests this is implausible, but on paper, they're off the hook....

Some months ago I spoke with a journalist who played a part in exposing Gap factories in the far East as using child labour. Gap immediately terminated business with the offending supplier. Did they know about it before the newspaper splash, I asked. I was told that of course they did and that if there were others they probably knew but wouldn't do anything about it until the next scandal, at which point they could again throw up their hands in horror and prove themselves to be the responsible international investors they hope we all believe them to be. And the worst thing is, I wasn't shocked.

How is it that we have allowed the technicalities of our legal corpus to define what is right and wrong? It is at the behest of big business and companies such as Nestlé and Gap now hold more political power than any government. (Speaking of which, how can any MP defend with a straight face a system with enough loopholes to allow Margaret Beckett to spend £2000 on the garden of her heavily subsidised second home, to pick just one of many - admittedly disturbingly Richard 'hell-in-a-handcart' Littlejohnesque - examples? Do they not understand that we don't care whether or not the rules allow it; what we object to is that she's blatantly taking the piss.)

It's probably unwise to lay into Nestlé or Gap on this blog. They strike me as the litigious type - multinational corporations seem to have much the same attitude to quelling dissent as mediaeval monarchs – and they can probably afford better lawyers than I.

Oh sod it, who cares? Let's go for broke. MacDonalds serve BSE-infected spinal cords in baps and Catherine Zeta Jones keeps her youthful looks by drinking the blood of enslaved orphans.

Meanwhile, Marks & Spencer appear to have hit upon the idea of using the insufferable Piers Morgan, in full-on smug mode, as the voice of their latest advertising campaign: "It's my opinion, and therefore a fact...". The boycott starts here.

Champagne socialisers

2008-09-10T23:24:00.000+01:00

Finagling my way into the Booker Prize shortlist party this week, held at the V&A, I was disappointed at quite how corporate an affair it was. Unlike last year, where authors, editors and booksellers engaged in earnest discussion of the fortunate six, the hall was largely filled with guests of Man Booker plc and I heard rather more talk of the credit crunch than literature.

Still, everyone seemed to obey the little signs on all the statues requesting that we not leave our drinks on them and I saw no canapés ground into things which probably probably require a little more care than just the cool wash and a cupful of fabric conditioner.

The evening was one which now affords little opportunity for name-dropping, although I did chat briefly with Ben Okri, who proved himself to be an astute commentator on the British publishing industry. His last novel, Starbook, was one of the earliest fiction titles on Random House's Ebury imprint, which had hitherto focussed on fairly undemanding lifestyle non-fiction. He said that his reason for entrusting his book to them was that he felt that established literary imprints don't know how to promote their books to a general public indifferent to good writing. Perhaps this is why Pan Macmillan are apparently looking for someone relatively young to run Picador.

I reckon, however, it is retailers who are principally to blame, particularly Waterstones. They cram the front of their shops with 3-for-2s, all promoted at the publishers' expense, and claim this demonstrates their commitment to range bookselling. I imagine they'd be happiest if this was all they sold: it would certainly eliminate the expense of maintaining backlist and employing experienced booksellers.

Other than Ben Okri, the only writer I spotted was one of last year's shortlisted authors, Indra Sinha, prowling unmolested about the place like a depressed big cat. Animal's People fared poorly compared to the rest of the shortlist; sales don't even seem to have afforded him a new pair of sandals, as I'm sure his gnarly toes were poking out of the same pair last year.

All in all, the evening was poor reflection of the enthusiasm of the trade for this year's delightfully unpredictable shortlist. Michael Portillo spoke with more sincere passion than I ever remember him doing in the Commons and it was a disheartening to see with what little interest his speech was attended compared to the endless champagne.

Waiting for the bus home, when I'm wasn't keeping a wary eye on the mammoth rats charging about the undergrowth in the front garden of the house next to my stop, afforded me a nice opportunity for some inter-chapter people-watching. As someone with distinctly limited sartorial instincts, I do sometimes find myself marvelling at the extraordinary apparel of others. I'm not yet enough of an ageing curmudgeon to scoff at what those twenty years younger than me choose to wear and indeed I do find myself reflecting that I've probably missed my chance now to dress with the flamboyance and individuality which is probably an indulgence open largely to the young.

Others, however, would seem not to concur. String vest and bovver boots with tattoos seeping across the forearms are a regular enough outfit, but to see them on a man of pensionable age is distinctly incongruous. I've never been a fan of camouflage patterning, of either the khaki variety or the monochrome urban palette, both because of its connotations and its sheer ugliness, but the latest variation is just comical: trousers with the familiar splotches, but in pinks and purples. Summer fruits camouflage would describe it best, I think. The black shellsuit with metallic silver paisley motif, especially when matched with loafers - never trust a man in loafers - and one of those peculiarly sculpted moustacheless beards which frame the face deserved an award, or at least a grant from an appropriate fund.

But the royal blue satin hooded gown I saw this week was so baffling a choice only the prompt arrival of the bus prevented me from engaging the man sporting it in conversation. I assume he was either a former boxer too broke to update his wardrobe or an official from the sort of organisation presided over by David Icke.

My own crimes against fashion have been musical this week. A little timewarp concentrated on my corner of north London has resulted in repeated airings of my collection of Lynyrd Skynyrd LPs, picked up from the Camden Record Exchange at a time when their stock consisted almost entirely of discarded copies of No Jacket Required.

I blame this brief nostalgic outburst on Susie Boyt, whose account of her obsession with Judy Garland proved surprisingly engaging, especially to someone like me who tends to view musicals as little better than a gross offence against public order. My Judy Garland Life is a perfect example of how any subject can be made fascinating by an elegant writer with a passion. My defences were down, therefore, and I can only be thankful that this wavering of my critical faculties didn't escalate into a desire to listen to Whitesnake again.

Cuckold comfort

2008-08-26T13:49:00.000+01:00

So, I've finally read a novel by Howard Jacobson, the English Philip Roth, the dog's beytsim of Jewish fiction this side of New York. For some time now, his every new book has been announced by Jonathan Cape with hushed and vaguely messianic awe, along with a zealous conviction that this would be the year that he would be garlanded with critical approval and guaranteed a seat at every awards dinner.

He has, of course, been passed over by the Booker judges again this year, but I'm wary of the judgement of a panel headed by a man whose most recent media foray was a documentary which explored in hideous detail what might be the most painless way to execute someone without ever pausing to wonder if the utter barbarism of it all might just indicate it to be a futile search.

I was impressed and deeply so, but one is clearly meant to be. It is books such as this that make me wary of reviewing for the heavyweight supplements of Sunday's press.

Its conceit is that every man secretly desires that his wife take a lover and the machinations of its plot are those of Felix Quinn meddling surreptitiously in the affairs of his wife in order that she end up in the arms of the predatory voluptuary Marius.

I'm not really sure I'm able to identify to any useful extent with Felix's desire to be the cuckolded husband. I can't say I've much experience of situations analogous, but I think I know enough to say that my sexual predilections do not encompass the joy of jealousy at the thought of my partner with another. So my reaction to the scenario is necessarily dispassionate: I don't know the rules of the game.

Indeed, I think that's my feeling about the book as a whole. It drips with erudition and literary context, bandying about references to Dostoevsky and Dickens in such a knowing fashion, a fashion my paltry knowledge of the classics fails to illuminate, that I dimly suspect the whole affair might be some sort of pastiche, some sort of phantasmagorical test by Jacobson, to see who is worthy of his engagement. If so, I rather think I've failed. I admire the book and its author but no more than that.

Felix's grandfather is said to have been in Zurich at the same time as an Irish writer, who entreats him to sleep with his wife, for the mutual gratification of all concerned, an offer he seemingly accepts out of politeness before fleeing the city.

Whether that meant Joyce had to try again with someone else, or simply had to make it up, is one of those literary mysteries that no amount of reading and rereading Ulysses will solve.

Now that's wit. It's totally beyond me even to conceive of emulating him in this department, unfortunately, but better green eyes than green ink, I suppose.

It was actually quite a shock to find myself so stumped for a response after having engaged so completely with the previous book I'd read, Inside the Whale by Jennie Rooney. It's one of those debut novels which makes one impatiently excited at the prospect of having found a future star. It's narrated in alternate chapters by Stevie and Michael, whose night together before Michael is shipped out to fight in Africa results in a baby.

Traumatised by the horrors of war in general and by his accidental killing of a friend specifically, Michael stays away so long that Stevie gives him up for dead and finds another man to father her child. When he does return, they meet briefly, not knowing that each has warily observed the other in advance, but their lives have grown apart.

Michael's story is narrated from a hospice bed and in his last days he tells a nurse his story. She realises only belatedly that the woman he has mooned over is her mother. It's note perfect, full of fresh and uncontrived language and delicately shaded with historical context. Direct social commentary is not really attempted, but I feel that would have weighed the book down. It is self-contained in reflection of the isolation of its narrators, who know that the tragedy of their regret must be borne alone, not bequeathed.

Nicely enough, Jennie came into the shop to sign copies just a day or two after I read it, but I rather suspect the sight of my suddenly rising up from behind a stock trolley, whose lower reaches I happened to be sorting through when she arrived, and bounding over to her with puppy-dog enthusiasm to laud her for uncanny literary sensibilities was a little too startling to make the encounter one she'd wish to repeat.

I have a new role at the shop which takes me off the shopfloor several days a week. Unfortunately, I have been wedged into a corner of the accounts department, which means that I am subjected to a constant diet of Shite FM, or Virgin Radio as it proclaims itself to be with forceful frequency, a station so middle of the road I suspect it may be run by lollipop ladies. The Police, Queen, Oasis... oh Christ, so much Oasis. And you'd think 'Ashes to ashes' and 'Let's dance' were all Bowie had ever recorded.

And does anyone need to hear the the latest Coldplay single - I don't know what it's called and I'm determined to remain ignorant - twice an hour? This morning, when the chords of doom rang out, I went off to do a bit of shopfloor research to avoid listening to it for a third time: I came back fifteen minutes later and they were playing it again! If I wanted to hear Chris Martin bleating on incessantly, I'd be Gwyneth Paltrow and, frankly, there's very little evidence supporting that possibility.

Congestion on the road less travelled

2008-08-07T13:20:00.000+01:00

Apparently, in the recent film version of Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker is seen reading a book called Love Letters of Great Men. This has provoked thousands of enquiries in bookshops, us included. The book, however, does not actually exist as anything more than a prop.

Or at least it didn't. Macmillan have announced that they will be rushing into print a book with that very title.

I suppose it could be argued that now hundreds of people will be delving into belles-lettres who wouldn't otherwise and that one shouldn't dismiss this as an opportunist piece of marketing designed to extract money from people who wouldn't recognise a well-turned romantic entreaty even if borne on the paws of a bear from Clintons with a heart on its tummy.

But I think cynicism is the correct response here. I'm reminded of when, a few years ago, Geri Halliwell was photographed reading Further Along the Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck. Within days sales of the book had multiplied tenfold; sales of The Road Less Travelled, which would make reading the book Halliwell was snapped with make sense - in as much as that sort of woolly gibberish makes any sense at all - remained unaffected. So I think to describe people as sheep in such circumstances would be insulting to the ovine race.

Perhaps the publishing industry should employ the idols of the Heat magazine demographic to be seen in public reading books. It would be interesting to see how far one could push it. Ulysses? The Divine Comedy? The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine?

Of course it's wonderful that Richard and Judy can get thousands of people reading The Outcast or Cloud Atlas and that Oprah can push Anna Karenina to the top of the charts. But publishers have remarked, in the UK at least, that it doesn't help sales of many authors' other books very much. The fabled Richard & Judy 'bounce' is, if not a myth, a remarkable feat of marketing. Dorothy Koomson, Simon Kernick and 'Sam Bourne' (Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland's pseudonym for his sub-Da Vinci Code thrillers) have been almost as successful with subsequent books, but they are very much the exception.

Mind you, this difficulty of branding authors exists at the literary end of the scale too. Almost every Booker winner is disappointed to discover that their backlist doesn't really shift any more copies and indeed one got his publisher to rejacket his backlist three times, convinced that was the key. It wasn't, of course. But I suppose most readers even of a Booker Prize winner are more casual readers, who don't really seek out new authors, and they're just as likely to be led by what's hot as as any other sector of the market.

I remember just after I'd started out as a bookseller, a book entitled 'Flying Fishing by J R Hartley' was produced on the back of the rather endearing if a little overmilked TV ad for Yellow Pages in which a genial gentleman of advancing years was seen to phone around second-hand bookshops in search of that very book, of which it transpired he was the author. So inevitably it wasn't long before one gurning little twerp of a teenager came into the shop and, to show how his mate how terribly, terribly funny and clever he was, asked for Flying Fishing by J R Hartley. I reached over to a nearby display and presented him with a copy and will forever take great pleasure in his look of confusion and disappointment as he turned and skulked out of the shop, leaving his friend standing there, blinking mutely.

Another point to the booksellers there, I think. I'm sure we must be well ahead by now.

The importance of earnest Byng

2008-08-05T11:54:00.001+01:00

The death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn last Sunday provoked immense interest, both in the press and in terms of sales of his books, which was heartening. I'm not sure I can think of a more worthy recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I remember in the last days of the Major administration a poll of MPs was conducted to find the favourite book of the House of Commons. The surprising runaway winner was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a result which hinted at some desperate attempt by the Conservative Party Whips Office to depict its moribund representation as possessed of both moral integrity and intellectual sophistication. I wonder what a similar poll today would identify, with the Labour Party as unpopular now as the Tories were then? Probably The Kite Runner. I'm sure that would tick the right boxes: empathetic, multicultural, popular with people who have no taste of their own.

Solzhenitsyn's passing reminded me of one of the more questionable novels to have achieved Booker recognition, The Industry of Souls by Martin Booth, which made the shortlist in 1998. It owes a great deal to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, portraying life in a Siberian labour camp through the twenty-year ordeal of a suspected British spy. It's rather sparing on the unrelenting misery of it all and the sex scene, where some of the internees temporarily escape their guardians and run into some female prisoners in caves, is about as plausible as a description of a swingers' party in Ann Widdecombe's autobiography.

Aside from that, it's not a bad book, just an unnecessary one, doing moderately well what Solzhenitsyn had already done with rather more style and authenticity. Solzhenitsyn-lite, if you will, Sebastian Faulks goes to the gulag.

Snowy wastes are also the setting for this year's unlikely Booker candidate, Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith. The press as usual had little more to say on the announcement of the longlist than installing Salman Rushdie as de jure favourite, what with his being the only one the average news reporter seems to have heard of, despite the fact the Prize's most notorious previous winner, John Berger is also on the longlist. Odds are usually first given by Graham Sharpe of William Hill, who always cheerfully admits that he has almost nothing on which to base his initial figures. I suspect this year the bookies have been prowling blogs, as Netherland is now shortest priced and it's the book which probably received the most pre-longlist Booker tips.

So we in the trade are grateful to Jamie Byng at Canongate who, in typically rambunctious style, let rip on the Booker website with a tirade, dismissing Child 44 as "a fairly well-written and well-paced thriller that is no more than that".

I'd like to defend Child 44. Not as a Booker choice, because Byng is right that it shouldn't be on there. But it's a fantastic thriller, with the brilliant premise of trying to track down a serial killer in Stalin's Russia, where - officially - there is no crime. It has characters to believe in and care about, monstrous villains and a spectacular descriptive backdrop. But by whichever criteria one might define literary fiction, Child 44 is isn't. The writing is purposeful but never poetic, effective but never ethereal.

But Byng's beef was that it had been chosen over The Spare Room by Helen Garner, which he says is "is a modern classic that will continue to be read and enjoyed and appreciated long after all of us are dead".

Considering the fact that most shortlisted titles from the 70s, a significant number from the 80s and a surprising number from the 90s are out of print, I think that's a ludicrously optimistic assessment of the life of a novel. But a few other posters on the website concurred, if not in quite so fulsome terms, so I thought I'd give it a try.

And I'm certainly glad I did, as it's a truly memorable piece of writing. I do wonder, however, if it was omitted on the grounds of length. At 175 pages, it's scarcely longer than On Chesil Beach, the book on last year's shortlist which some felt should be excluded on the grounds of its being a novel, rather than a full length work of fiction. The Spare Room too might reasonably be described as a novella: the story is simple, linear and brief and and its first person narrative obviously limits its perspectives.

But much of its power resides in its simplicity. It is account of friendship, told from the point of view of Helen whose friend Nicola has come to stay with her while she undergoes a radical new vitamin C treatment in a desperate attempt to fight off the cancer which only Helen has conceded is terminal.

Bravely, the book focusses on how difficult it is, both physically and psychologically, to provide care for a terminal cancer victim. Their long-standing friendship obliges Helen to devote herself to her friend, draining her utterly, but the pain that Nicola endures makes it difficult for her to object. Only when another friend challenges the doctor who has hoodwinked Nicola is Helen finally able to confront Nicola with the truth: that she cannot cope and that Nicola must accept what is happening to her.

Curiously, Peter Carey's jacket quote that this is 'a perfect novel' and the earnestness of Jamie Byng's defence made me analyse the prose with far greater scrutiny than I might otherwise have done. It reminded me a little of Plainsong by Kent Haruf, another book which doesn't waste a word and which relies on the unadorned authenticity of its account to draw the reader in.

The Spare Room isn't quite so effective: its very occasional purple flowering jars, but that is in part because of the great care with which it has been put together. One sequence ends with the phrase "...she pedalled away in a westerly direction": the last four words add nothing to the meaning, but its particularly significant position means that one cannot help but analysing it and thereby finding is flawed.

There were perhaps no more than a handful of these instances and I'm sure that were I to pay to such attention to something more sprawlingly conceived I should find The Spare Room to be far more consistent. I've just read Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek, a diverting enough thriller with an interesting variation on the 'I woke up and it was all a dream' trope; it's translated from the original German and a couple of times, the word 'corpse' is used where 'body' would be more idiomatic. It caused me to pause, but on the whole the undemanding style meant that its slightly stilted and repetitive phraseology did its job.

The Spare Room achieves what it sets out to do almost unerringly, managing to confront its theme with a directness which is remarkable given the potential sensitivity of the topic. But I'm not sure it does anything much more than that. The book and its characters don't live on in my thoughts.

It should have made the longlist. But, then again, I feel just as strongly that The Outcast, In God's Country and One Morning Like A Bird should have made it. All of which proves nothing except that commentators dismissing 2008 as a bad year for fiction have either been reading the wrong books or are obsessed with established writers.

So Helen Garner has some way to go before achieving immortality, despite the vehemence of Byng's protestations. John Ruskin wrote, "All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time". The achievements of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn show quite how far even someone as talented as Helen Garner has to go in order to make that leap.

Suffering from premature evaluation?

2008-07-28T19:13:00.000+01:00

Waterstone's decision this week to start taking advance orders on the Sony e-reader has provoked the predictable disgorging of articles on how this new device will be received and what this means for the future of the printed book.

The starting point of all these pieces is essentially whether or not this is the book trade's 'iPod moment'. Aside from being the sort of lazy, whelk-brained journalism in the sort of style which explains Government budget announcements in terms of how they would affect soap characters, it simply isn't.

I did get to have little play with one last year and I'm not really sure why anyone would want one. It's an ugly, bulky piece of kit and it lacks the basic features which make books such a joy, such as being able to flick back and forth with great ease until the reference you were looking for flashes past.

I doubt even many early adopters, if I'm going to go down the road of using such clumsy jargon, are going to go for it. It's hardly revolutionary. It's stand-alone device, not even Mac compatible, which displays text in a format more familiar to devotees of the printed page.

The nearest it has to the high-tech world's Holy Grail of a 'killer app' is the ability, apparently popular with elderly Kindle users in the States, to enlarge the size of the font, providing an instant large print facility. This is certainly a wonderful benefit, but hardly a USP.

This is the flaw in the giddy enthusiasm of many commentators. We simply don't know who will use them and, more importantly, how. I keep reading accounts of how much easier it is to take an e-reader on holiday than half a dozen books. Aside from their undoubted weakness in the presence of sand, sea and sun lotion, is this really all anyone can come up with? A whole new market is not going to open up because of a small saving on Ryanair luggage charges.

I'm not Luddite enough to dismiss the possibility, even likelihood, that such devices will find a significant following. But I suspect it'll take up to a decade. I think foldable, rollable sheets impregnated with ink which can be made to form letters and images under the direction of an electric current will be key. But in terms of functions, I really couldn't say.

Anyway, it's Booker longlist day tomorrow and it's going to be an excitingly open contest again this race. I imagine all the newspaper coverage will focus on Salman Rushdie: clear favourite if he's included, clueless wittering about the lack of household names if he's not. It's the way it always is. I got asked by a reporter why F Scott Fitzgerald had never won the Booker a couple of weeks ago....

Still, at least there's no McEwan to monopolise what little space they'll give it. I might see if I can get my description of Sadie Jones' fantastic debut as the book Ian McEwan would write if he tried properly the whole way through and could write female characters quoted anywhere.

I'm not going to try to predict what'll be on there, as I'd simply be rounding up all the other opinions I've gleaned to make up the dozen or so were promised. There are too many potential candidates I've not read. But it would make me very happy, and slightly less splenetically inclined towards this year's Chair, the Right 'Orrible Michael Xavier Portillo, to see some of the following in contention:

The Outcast - Sadie Jones
The Language of Others - Clare Morrall
One Morning Like A Bird - Andrew Miller
Netherland - Joseph O'Neill
In God's Country - Ross Raisin
Breath - Tim Winton

I won't be drawn further. Oh, go on then: Andrew Miller to win.

Going by my usual record, however, in matters Booker, I have likely condemned all of them to omission. Sorry about that.

On the reading front, there's been Hannah Tinti's The Good Thief, the supposedly uplifting tale of a one-handed boy called Ren, who is rescued from an nineteenth-century orphanage to help out in various scams and thefts. I think it's supposed to be quirkily endearing, but I'm afraid I found Ren such a drip that I soon lost any interest in the fate of the stumpy little twerp and his motley band of cartoon hangers-on, the marginally most ludicrous of whom was the dwarf living up the deaf woman's chimney.

Currently, it's Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil, which might well be worth adding to that list of Booker candidates. His last, Maps for Lost Lovers, was a sensationally beautiful novel eleven years in the writing, which sets an honour killing in a Muslim community in the north of England.

His new one brings together characters of sharply contrasting backgrounds and beliefs and puts them at the front line of the 'war on terror' in Afghanistan, a nation which was scarcely given time to recover for being s staging ground for the Cold War. Again his lyrical prose contrasts sharply with the senseless brutality which has been carried out in the name of ideology, whether Soviet, Taliban or American.

I've had a Channel 4 documentary about the sandwich industry on while I've been finishing this off. Not surprisingly, there an awful lot of poor quality food being sold in a deeply deceptive way. No mention though of the thing which bugs me most: the signs on the tills in Pret A Manger which say "We're legally required to add VAT to food to eat in. Nightmare!"

I quite mind being patronised by a sandwich shop.

And now for someone completely different

2008-07-05T14:14:00.000+01:00

I need to get something off my chest: America, bless it, is really pissing me off.

The cultural imperialism, the tendency to wear shorts, the appalling lack of decent cheese: all of these I can cope with. But I cannot, and will not, abide their describing second-hand books as 'used'.

What the hell is a 'used' book? "Here, have my copy. Sorry, I've read most of it, but if you give it a shake, there's still a bit left."

A 'used' book is surely a dubiously stained and dog-eared paperback, shedding yellowed pages like some sort of paginary alopecia, just an unexpected puddle away from papier-mâché. 'Used' has connotations of the car lot, and its rapidly depreciating jalopies sold by sweaty-palmed men with too much hair gel.

A second-hand book is a fragile treasure made precious by its venerability and scarcity. Once it has been read, it is not drained of value. It is passed on, with a story of its own already attached. It is an heirloom, a time capsule, a lost world to be rediscovered.

So, let's have no more talk of 'used' books. And 'pre-experienced' is right out.

Star customer of the day was the tall, austere gentleman enquiring about a couple of theology titles. I graciously bestow this accolade on the grounds that he was the Comic Messiah, Our Lord John Cleese. I cannot possibly reveal exactly what he asked for, for so to do would be a heinous breach of bookseller-Python confidentiality, but unfortunately both books were out of print, which rather curtailed our conversation. I was tempted to ask whether the religious curiosity was in aid of a sequel but resisted, which is probably just as well. He is very austere and very, very tall.

It later occurred to me - l'esprit d'escalier indeed - that if he had asked for some fiction recommendations along the same lines, I might quite reasonably have led him to Quarantine by Jim Crace and told him it was about this bloke called Jesus and his forty days in the desert, only he's not the messiah, he's a very naughty boy. This too though I imagine would have led to the kind of disapproval of which only the very tall and austere are capable.

This means that so far in the shop I have been of little service to John Cleese, embarrassed Michael Palin, collided with Eric Idle and failed to engage in any way with Terry Jones other than to glimpse him between the stacks. So, when can we expect you, Mr Gilliam?

Never meet your heroes: you'll only disappoint them.

No mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller

2008-06-29T14:27:00.000+01:00

Recent reviewing opportunities have given me a bit of a crash course in thrillers, a genre of which I've hitherto been rather dismissive. The vicarious thrill of shoot-outs and car chases and desperate races against time is not really what I look for. It has surprised me, though, to discover quite how much the standard varies, even between authors who are notionally aimed at the same sort of readership.

The Hunt for Atlantis, the debut novel from film critic Andy McDermott, was one which I found immensely entertaining. The author's background as a writer on film is very apparent: he has an eye for visual detail and his characters are never left on the sidelines in deference to the main thrust of the plot.

He also provides a strong female character, archaeologist Nina Wilde, something which was completely beyond Joseph Finder, whose Power Play happened to be the book I read next. His women are all icy blondes, apparently steeled by past betrayals against the possibility of romance but with the weakness for the whichever of the gun-wielding, stubble-chinned macho men turns out to be the manly yet tender hero. The plot is entirely linear - team-building executives in a remote mountain lodge are taken hostage - and there's plenty of grimacing as crippling injuries are shrugged off with manly fortitude as mere scratches.

I also happened upon Alex Chance's The Final Days, another of the innumerable conspiracy thrillers with which the market has been flooded since The Da Vinci Code charmed even the doughtiest of resistance fighters against literary banality. The plot is jolly exciting, of course, twisting and turning its way through perils and subterfuges of bewildering variety. I'm sure the film rights were snapped up long ago and no doubt in a summer or so cinemas will be screening yet another blockbusting festival of special effects with a cast market-researched to appeal to the appropriate demographic. But the writing is atrocious and passes the Dan Brown test with flying colours: any sentence selected at random will be something so clumsily expressed it sets your teeth on edge.

But then I read John Hart's Down River - presently due the Richard & Judy treatment - and found myself utterly engrossed. Efficiently written, it was only after I scoffed for the third time at how transparent was the guilt of a character that it struck me what a cunning little dance I was being lead on. I also read The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian: set in the present day, it makes inspired use of the story of The Great Gatsby in whipping the rug from right under the reader's feet with estimable adroitness.

And then I came to John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man, one of the few highlights of a decidedly meagre autumn schedule for fiction this year. I knew of course he writes espionage thrillers and had read one before, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which had impressed me without making me feel inclined to read another.

But for reasons which, if specified, would involve name-dropping on a wearisome scale, I have just read this latest one. Its three main characters - a Chechen refugee, his idealistic lawyer and the banker who holds his father's questionably acquired assets in a secret account - are toyed with by competing intelligence services and each is motivated by threats and temptations expertly formulated to appeal to their respective instincts.

The setting is post-9/11 Hamburg, a city struggling to come to terms with the likelihood that Mohammed Atta and his Al-Qaeda cell plotted their atrocities living there. Consternation results from appearance of the refugee, Issa, and while he and his two wary allies try to reconcile their desires with their fears, the security services plot to ensure an acceptable conclusion to the affair.

The existence of the camp at Guantanamo Bay and the little we know of 'extraordinary rendition' has shown us that the faintest possibility of any terrorist connection provokes an uncompromising response from America and Britain. Public concerns are dismissed by the invocation of the war on terror even as the freedoms supposedly at stake are whittled away. Have we become so complacent and cosy in our introspective lifestyles and so inured to the distant fall-out that we are simply deaf to the suffering caused in our names?

Or it is that the words of politicians, those who have greatest influence of the priorities and principles of our society, are now so self-servingly empty that the public conscience has no voice? If so, then it is of vital importance that we have people of le Carré's stature and integrity to ensure that the issue of what it is right to sacrifice to preserve civilisation as we understand it cannot be scrubbed from the agenda.

Don't let's run with the dogs tonight

2008-06-17T22:18:00.000+01:00

As George Bush continues his embarrassing farewell tour of those countries prepared to let him in - perhaps a "global itinerary of apology", as Boris Johnson put it when his most recent gaffe had been to cast anthropophagic aspersions against the people of Papua New Guinea, might have been appropriate - I've found myself reading a couple of novels which examine the West's guilty conscience at exploiting the rest of the world in any number of hideously obdurate ways.

The first is Lost Boys by James Miller, a July debut about terrorism and child abduction, those nightmarish shibboleths with which the more reactionary elements of the media chose to browbeat us into submission to their grasping and paranoid agenda.

The novel opens quite unassumingly and I was at first wary of the descriptions of stuccoed West London terraces which are the touchstone of countless novels of middle class suburban ennui. But this, I came to realise, was very much the point, as it's also obvious from the outset that twelve year-old Timothy Dashwood will vanish. And indeed he does, despite his mother's hysterical mollycoddling and the the precautions taken by his school when other boys start to vanish without trace.

The middle third of the book is essentially one long passage bridging the transition from the family's initial shock at Timothy's vanishing to his father's attempts to track him down. It consists simply of his father's listening and reacting to tapes of interviews and musings by the unorthodox private detective looking into the case. There is an apparent discontinuity suggested by the father's having these tapes, but inevitably this little mystery turns out to be fulcrate to the plot.

This bravura is the catalyst for an essential transmutation: what might have been an adolescent raging against the legacy of Western callousness becomes an eloquently deconstructionist analysis. Britain is already alarmed by home-grown terrorism within Muslim communities, but we are yet to consider that possibility that our foreign policy decisions - in trade and in conflict - will sire an entire generation which rejects contemporary values as untenably exploitative. The bubble of comfort inside which the West has attempted to seal itself is under will be under threat from just as much from within as without.

This cosy bubble, a forcefield against intrusion from the mundane horror of reality, is very much the motif of The Other Hand by Chris Cleave, out in August. On holiday in Nigeria in attempt to revitalise a marriage undermined by an affair, Sarah and Andrew venture out of the hotel compound only to be confronted by the full horror of a nation divided by greed and fear once the West realises there is oil to be had.

They encounter Little Bee, who turns up at the door of their cosy suburban home two years later, an asylum seeker with no paperwork. Andrew has just committed suicide, leaving Sarah with her four year-old boy, whose steadfast insistence that he is Batman, with a mission to fight baddies, is a source of both endearing humour and sobering pathos.

The West's shucking of accountability is personified by Lawrence, a Home Office press officer, whose affair with Sarah provoked the holiday which resulted in Sarah's and Little Bee's being yoked together. He is reluctant even to acknowledge unintended consequences, let alone admit any responsibility. He simply cannot understand how Sarah's feeling of duty towards Little Bee can survive in the face of the threat she poses to her way of life.

The book is much more than a critique of Western imperialism. Just as in his first book, Incendiary, Cleave shows a rare talent for developing culturally convincing characters and making interactions of differing perspectives entirely plausible. Despite the horror at its heart, The Other Hand is very funny, sometimes life-affirming, story. Little Bee is a perceptive commentator, whose occasional naivety is simply due to quite how alien Western life is to her. The absurdities and parochial concerns of middle-class existence are not lost on her. Casual racism is smartly lampooned and she establishes that those with the least to give are, perhaps through empathy, often the most generous.

And she recognises the West's bubble of comfort and denial as a mechanism for self-protection because she has seen such horror and endured such pain that it is only a degree of self-denial at her situation that allows her to carry on.

The book is so effervescently entertaining that the raw accounts of what happened that day on the beach in Nigeria could seem dissonant. But, because they are so graphic and upsetting, I shall never forget them and must conclude that, on a metatextual level, they remind me that the comforts of my life have consequences and I have it within me to bring some influence to bear on what they might be.

The poetry of the paperclip

2008-06-12T19:51:00.000+01:00

At the earnest suggestion of a rep, who's been handing out proof copies with evangelical zeal, I've just read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. The book is being published in September by Gallic, who were set up last year by a couple of former Random House staffers with the sanguine aim of introducing the instinctively parochial British public to some of the best of contemporary French literature.

And it is indubitably French. The principal standpoint is that of Renée, or more usually to the other characters Madame Michel, the concierge at an apartment block which our other narrator, a twelve year-old of intimidating precocity called Paloma, would describe as irredeemably bourgeois.

At the outset, Renée lurks in her loge, the television tuned interminably to some populist channel, in an effort to convince the affluent flat owners that her proletarian life is predictably mindless, while she curls up undisturbed in an armchair reading Tolstoy and Kant. Meanwhile, Paloma also tries to secrete herself away, carefully recording her 'Profound Thoughts' and making entries in her 'Journal of of the Movement of the World', all informed by a misanthropy of Cartesian design.

The two circle each other warily, until one of the flats changes hands, bought by Monsieur Ozu, a cosmopolitan man of impeccable aesthetic sensibilities. When Ozu and the concierge first meet, she expects the usual supercilious indifference exhibited by those whom she serves but finds herself floundering when the usual conversational platitudes seem inappropriately inadequate. Instead, she mutters the first part of the dichotomous maxim which begins Anna Karenina and is startled to hear its counterpart in response from Ozu, the twinkling in whose eyes confirms she has betrayed her nature.

Paloma's disgust at the values of her family, and at empty life she feels has been mapped out for her, convinces her that she must kill herself, and do so by immolating herself in the apartment block which represents all that she loathes. But she also recognises a kindred spirit in Ozu and, as the three bond, Renée and Paloma believe they have found friendship for the first time.

The only secondary character with any apparent humanity is an acquaintance of Renée, a cleaning lady called Manuela. Her bustling practicality is complimented by a carpe diem joie de vivre and it is only belatedly that Renée's understands that Manuela is smart as well. Renée has imprisoned her intellect to punish herself of being borne of such inadequate breeding that she is unworthy of it, yet Manuela has accepted that the satiation of her intellect must be occasional, but no less a joy for that.

Paloma is perhaps rather less credible a character. The self-discipline and, particularly, the sophistication of her thoughts don't ring true. The fixed glare with which she commonly disdains her family always seems more indicative of adolescent contrariness than of due condescension.

There is a moment when a fallen rosebud is a epiphany for her:

"Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death."

Even her acknowledgment that the thought was originally Pierre de Ronsard's doesn't make her seem much more than a representation of Renée's lost potential. A handful of instances of more childish tastes aren't enough to create a plausible twelve year-old, no matter how austere.

The plot of the book is very much subservient to and an illustration of its philosophical dialogue. Questions of pace and plausibility are of limited relevance, which most British readers - and I acknowledge my own shortcoming here - would consider wilfully unconventional. We are most comfortable with storyline and protagonistic empathy; they are books whose contents we can observe. A challenge to the very cultural context of our perceptions cannot be engaged with passively, so a book such as this may seem forbidding in its demands upon us.

It would simply be false to infer that narrative fiction is inferior. A great book may defined just as much by a great story as well as by its concept or its language. But plot may be negligible and nugatory, as it is in that disappointingly generally uncherished Booker winner, The Sea, yet its glorious prose, so reminiscent of Nabokov, is resonantly sublime.

L'Élègance du Hérisson has sold over 800,000 copies in France alone in 2007 and found favour in several other European markets, but I suspect its impact will be slight over here. Like our relative indifference towards the short story, our tastes may too often be restricted by our perceptual insularity and our cultural inhibition.

Hérisson, incidentally, has a delightfully poetic second meaning of 'chimney brush'. It doesn't quite supersede my favourite French word, which is trombone: as well as indicating the same instrument in English, it also means 'paperclip', adding an elegant whimsy to the French stationery cupboard. Like our current literary tastes, the English approach seems uninspired and utilitarian by comparison.

Meanwhile, in the shop, I field my first ever enquiry as to whether we sell "funny little hats".

Hype sensitivity

2008-06-01T18:34:00.001+01:00

It was with surprise and delight that I stumbled across a half-page news international item in last week's Observer, revealing the hullabaloo which suddenly attends Joseph O'Neill's new novel, Netherland. The New Yorker has declared it a masterpiece and comparisons with F Scott Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow and all sorts of other American literary icons are being cast with abandon.

Now while some of these encomia are inevitably a little far-fetched, for once the hype has some substance. It is a post-9/11 novel, a literary sub-species covering the entire spectrum of metaphorical effectiveness, from Dave Eggers' depiction of wounded American pride and embitterment in You Shall Know Our Velocity to Ian McEwan's preciously imperious Saturday, a book with which I lost patience following the eighteen-page description of a game of squash between two middle-aged doctors, a passage which Proust would have found self-indulgently long-winded.

In Netherland, the role of metaphor is borne by Chuck Ramkissoon, a one-time friend and informal business associate of the narrator. He is the heart and soul of a cricketing community of ex-pats, a would-be Kerry Packer with dreams of an international cricket empire. But he is the immigrant chasing the American dream at a time when the Statue of Liberty has turned its gaze inward.

Essentially, this is the post-colonial novel transferred to a nation of immigrants, where the notion of national identity is little more than a cultural construct. The world has struggled to understand how a country whose image is largely channelled through Hollywood could choose - twice! - George W Bush as its President, but the dichotomy of America's liberal coastal cities and its fundamentalist heartland is filtered out. The country is too diverse in origins and beliefs to function as a unified whole, but the trauma of 9/11 demands a unified response. There is no single quintessential American identity, stereotype though such a definition would have to be.

The novel has a lot more to say than that, of course - there's a plot and everything - and I'm quite sure that I'm imposing my own interpretation on it, but that's a necessary part of any work of art. A novel, a painting, a play: all of these are only potential works of art until witnessed by someone other than the artist and then they become beacons for appreciation and analysis. Anyway, I exhort you to seek out Netherland for yourself.

At a lunch to celebrate its publication, Gill Coleridge, Joe's agent, explained how a desultory offer from Faber, the publisher of his first two novels, led her to offer it to Fourth Estate. Trying to sell foreign rights had been a frustrating experience, with countless European houses expressing doubt that a cricket-themed novel would find much of a readership on the continent. Once The New Yorker had passed judgment, however, the offers came flooding in.

I belatedly discovered that Coleridge is also Richard Ford's agent in the UK, which was a missed opportunity, especially as O'Neill's outsider's analysis of a nation's psyche makes a fascinating reading alongside the Frank Bascombe's gradual surrender to the realities of the American dream.

Anyway, we'll see what the Booker judges make of it. Since each new set of judges probably wants, understandably, to make its mark on Booker history with a distinctive and independent-minded choice of winner, it may be that they will want to avoid feeling corralled into choosing it. (Verb, gerund, gerundive, gerundive, participle? Urgh. Sorry.) I fervently hope though that will recognise that setting aside the hype for any book can still leave a book of considerable inherent merits.

The only books I've read so far this year which I think are worthy Booker competition are The Outcast by Sadie Jones, which I'm fervently hoping will receive its due at this week's Orange Prize ceremony, and In God's Country by Ross Raisin, a book which Joseph O'Neill's editor, Clare Reihill, was deeply disappointed to lose to Viking in auction. More to follow at a later time on those two, I think.

Customers in the shop over the last week or so seem to have been on their best behaviour on the whole, so my subconscious has thoughtfully taken it upon itself to trouble me with oneiric enquiries of its own invention. I dreamed a few nights ago that I was patiently explaining to a customer that "it's A to Z, alphabetical by author", to which my interlocutor responded, "But what about the other letters?"

I suspect it's some sort of premonition.

And when did you last read your father?

2008-05-22T12:03:00.000+01:00

Last night I was invited to dinner with Xinran. I might also have taken up the offer to attend drinks to mark the launch of Juan Gabriel Vasquez's new book. Or I could have just watched the football.

But no, I was duty manager on the late shift. Another evening of refund fraudsters, computer glitches and discourse with customers with the wit and social graces of autistic camels.

I wonder if there are people out there with cherished dreams of working in shops? Possibly not beyond the age of seven, until which time playing shop is considered educational, rather than indicating stunted ambition.

Mind you, I did have a young lad come into the shop not so long ago asking about jobs. He said that he was looking for the sort of position which would allow him to sit behind the desk and read most of the day. No wonder we get treated with such disdain by customers if that's what they think we do in bookshops. Although, if we didn't have to spend quite so long tidying up after people for whom the effort of returning a book to the shelf seems a ludicrous imposition, we'd probably get through a few chapters.

I've found myself thinking along these lines as I'm reading The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, of which Heinemann were kind enough to send the most extravagantly packaged proof I've seen since HarperCollins did ones for William Dalrymple with incense sticks. They're hardbacks in boxes and they're numbered, after a fashion, with the names of each the 167 characters in the book. Mine's called Freddie after a character I have yet to encounter. I wonder if the allocation is anything other than random.

I'm particularly interested because I went to school with Nick. He was in the year above and we socialised occasionally. He was distinctly fey at the time, given to the wearing of fedoras and trench coats. Now I'm working in a bookshop, earning some pocket money on the side with some journalism, while he's sold his first novel for the usual 'significant' six-figure sum. Rather than an insignificant six-figure sum, I suppose.

He's also the son of John le Carré, which I should imagine is scarcely an impediment to finding oneself a publisher. But it would unfair to bear a grudge for that reason, not least because he will be dismissed as someone whose father's reputation and influence must have won him his publishng contract by every reviewer yet to write their own bestseller.

It would be pointless even to compare the two as writers, not least because Nick is on his first book while his father is nearly two dozen down the line. And because there's been forty years of fiction published since The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was written. But the book deserves to be judged on its own merits, no matter that there might be easy comparisons to make. To describe a book as an ersatz version of another or a hybrid of two is of value only in a marketing context, not in making a critical evaluation.

A hundred and fifty pages in, I'm enjoying myself, I think principally because the author so very clearly is. It's yarn of a story, whose direction I can't begin to predict. We have a main character - with no name that I've spotted yet - who is a student of radical thinking and some gorgeous pastiche of the martial arts, surrounded by impassioned scene-stealers. It's only frustrating because our 'hero' is a little too passive, too clinically perceptive, too much of a pivot for the book, rather than an engine.

In a way, it's a pop culture White Teeth. Like Zadie Smith, he's thrown so many ideas at it that not all of them can stick, but what remains is a novel of such bravado and brio that to fail to enjoy it would be the act of a spoilsport. (It's hundred pages shorter than his first draft too, apparently.) What remains is a glorious patchwork quilt with so many little scraps of narrative that needed a home like this, a novel which celebrates the wonder of storytelling and the sheer joy of harnessing the power of language.

Writing by numbers

2008-05-17T18:27:00.002+01:00

I've been reading a proof copy of a wonderful debut novel, Addition by Toni Jordan, which Sceptre have produced to promote their mass-market paperback after doing poorly with the trade paperback, possibly owing in part to a fairly atrocious cover.

Our narrator is Grace, who has a variant of OCD which compels her to count everything in her life and restricts her to those things which she can easily monitor. She is not portrayed as weak, as any sort of victim or as being in any sort of denial. She resists categorisation, marginalisation and any sort of mollycoddling. She is forthright, independent and possessed of a irresistibly sharp wit.

But that doesn't mean she's not vulnerable. She just knows her weaknesses and doesn't need a knight in shining armour to save her from herself. She's a well drawn, rounded character, someone I felt I was getting to know, not just a figure to observe travelling through a particular story. She feels as if she should have life beyond the page.

Her own personal version of numerology means that the fact that her full name, Grace Lisa Vandenburg, has the same number of letters as Seamus Joseph O'Reilly - 19 - means he's definitely got boyfriend potential. So it was with some excitement I noticed that mine does too! Only then did I realise that I seem to have fallen in love with a fictional character. Still, at least she's from someone else's imagination rather than my own, which is encouraging.

Sobering statistic of the week - with the possible exception of the revelation by the Zoological Society of London that humanity has killed off between a quarter and a third of the world's animal life since 1970 - is the survey of Italians which found that 68% of them want all Roma Gypsies deported from the country.

Last month's national elections resulted in the return to power of the odious Silvio Berlusconi, heading a right-wing coalition voted in largely owing to their hardline proposals with regard to immigration. Italian police have been charged with protection the Roma from victimisation, but so far this seems to have little impact on the abuse and violence.

We can't be complacent in the UK. London now has Boris Johnson as its Mayor - even though voting for Boris was as about as sensible as voting for a bowl of fruit - which no doubt has at least something to do with Tory attitudes to immigration. The real concern is the fact that the Mayoral Assembly now has a BNP member, since 5% of voters were taken in by their paranoid xenophobia, although I am gratified to learn that, thus far, the ghastly Richard Barnbrook is being ignored by his fellow Assembly members.

He was the BNP member who offered his support to Prima Ballerina Simone Clarke when she attacked for using her Arts Council-funded prominence to speak in support of the BNP. At the time she was dating a dancer of Cuban-Chinese descent, which Barnbrook said he didn't have problem with, but added that he thought it best that the pair didn't have children.

The following statement made to the BBC during his campaign should leave you in no doubt about his commitment to tolerance:

"You can be gay behind closed doors, you can be heterosexual behind closed doors, but you don't bring it onto the streets, demanding more rights for it."

This worrying incompassion, which seems set only to increase alarmingly given the sentiments offered in response by readers of the Daily Mail on their website and on the BBC website's Have Your Say page, will no doubt become even more prevalent as the world's resources become stretched. This week Barcelona, with their reservoirs filled to only 18% of their capacity, became the first European city to import water. I wonder how long it will be before we have tales of immigrants scrounging water.

I've been reading an anthology of Peter Ustinov's weekly columns for the defunct European newspaper written in 1990-91 and his calm wisdom is something which seems no longer to have a place in political debate.

He speaks with the compassion one would expect of such an active ambassador for UNICEF and does not shy from uncomfortable truths. In a piece revealing the widespread victimisation of the Maori community in New Zealand, he notes:

"Prejudice is an indefinable weed which is at its most insidious in the greenest of lawns."

With the West's lawns starting to brown, I fear that our feeble attempts to protect the world's poor and weak will be replaced by the frantic raising of drawbridges.

We're only here for the beard

2008-05-07T21:49:00.000+01:00

This week I was privileged enough, courtesy of Atlantic Books, to meet that doyen of alt.history and postcyberpunk and paradigm of pognophilia*, Neal Stephenson, in anticipation of the September publication of his new book, Anathem. The venue was a dim, slightly stuffy underground bar near Holborn, serving a range of tapas, including a sweaty cheeseboard featuring a cheese so odd I'm not unconvinced I may not have been confusing it with the bread.

(* I am aware that this is a gratuitous piece of sesquipedalianism, but anyone who wishes to accuse me of bombast and magniloquence at the slightest provocation would be right on the money.)

His editor remains the maverick's maverick Ravi Mirchandani, with whom I did work experience when he was at William Heinemann about nine years ago, when I still entertained furtive dreams of editing a Booker winner or two as an editor at Picador. I saw little of him while employed as an ersatz editorial assistant, since he tended to leave for lunch a little after eleven, leaving a trail of unreturned messages in his wake, and return about three days later.

He did, however, give me a proof copy of The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III, which remains one of my favourite novels. I also did a little work on Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, published at the end of my three weeks there; I seem to remember typing out long passages from the manuscript, although to what end I really couldn't say.

The author gave the obligatory sales pitch, an unenviable task even in front of a small audience naturally inclined toward him. Of course, being an author in today's market is almost as much about image and media skills as it is about being able to write; on publication, the usual cavalcade is de rigueur for all but the most established and stubborn writers. I'm told that the Richard & Judy team do bear in mind how an author will come across on the studio sofa when making their selections for the Book Club.

Anyway, after the usual toasts, I took the chance to speak with him. This is one of the perks of the book industry, compared to other media. I doubt I should get the chance to speak, at least without a PR's close supervision, to many stars if I worked in film or music. He seemed a little diffident, but, looking back, I do wonder if assailing him with questions about postapocalyptic dystopias in contemporary British literature - Jim Crace's The Pesthouse, Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army, Nick Harkaway's The Gone Away-World - was a little unfair on him. I'm not as familiar with his work as I like to be when meeting an author, so perhaps I was trying too hard to assert my own credentials, for fear of looking ignorant.

Later, when I was saying my goodbyes to the Atlantic staff, he was deep in conversation with a couple of the Waterstone's buying team. I'm not very good interposing in conversations and tend to hand around awkwardly on the periphery for a few minutes until finally plunging in, usually at an utterly unwelcome juncture, so I decided to leave. As I started up the stairs, he came bounding after me, to thank me for coming.

This is a symptom of something I don't really like about the industry. When meeting head office buyers and the gentlemen of the press, an author is presumably given clear instructions to be as amenable and patient, since the impression given will probably end up having some bearing on the enthusiasm with which the book will be promoted. It's not so much the fact that one feels more inclined to support those one finds likeable, but the fact that the whole thing is a symptomatic of the author's being part of the package, part of the product.

We forget sometimes that a book is a commitment of considerable intensity on the part of the author - I know this is a generalisation and a romanticisation of the life of a writer - and that they are the one essential component, the spindle on which the whole wheel turns. Not even Mark Booth at Century - the man who publishes Katie Price and then recently had the gall to announce 'the death of the novel' - has yet devised a way to take that human element from the process, although I wouldn't be surprised if he spends his time these days coding algorithms to generate novels spontaneously.

The author is not a nuisance - certain persistent offenders demanding ongoing front-of-house presence against all sensible retail practice notwithstanding - but a cultural definer, standard bearer and baton passer. My nerves at meeting a senior member of the marketing team at a publisher whose lists I like owes themselves to the wish that I might make a good impression for professional reasons; nerves at meeting a favourite author are more profound and personal because I am responding in whatever small way I can to someone who has shaped my thoughts and has made me contemplate life afresh.

So, when Anathem is published this autumn, I hope the launch will be a celebration of the man, his ideas and his artistic vision.

Bookselling: the early years

2008-05-05T13:46:00.000+01:00

Going off on one of those irresistible Internet tangents which it is impossible to ignore when a deadline looms, I encountered an fascinating and unrepealed piece of legislation, The Copyright Act (1709). It states that a customer, should he consider the price charged by a bookshop for any particular title to be too high, is entitled to write to the Archbishop of Canterbury and request that he rule on whether or not the price is indeed excessive. Should he deem it to be so, he can fix a lower price and the bookshop shall be fined £5 for every copy henceforth sold at the higher price.

I await my first customer to take advantage of this. I see, however, that www.archbishopofcanterbury.com remains unregistered: perhaps I should set up a bargain bookselling site and claim that prices are set by a higher power.

My star customer of the first Saturday I've worked since Christmas was the gentleman who came in with the details of a book on obtaining one's pilot's licence. He provided all manner of useful bibliographic data to aid in tracking down the correct book, including the fact that it was apparently published in 1900.

It made me think of Wings Over Dagenham, the wonderful Goon Show where Neddy gets carried away building a mangle and accidentally invents the aeroplane - Moriarty laments the passing of the horse-drawn zeppelin - and is immediately contacted by the Air Ministry.

Prose on the underground

2008-05-05T13:42:00.000+01:00

(Originally posted on 8th October 2007)

I travel to work by Underground. My point of origin is sufficiently suburban that I get a good half an hour’s reading in to ease me into the day and I find a cosy mental cocoon is the best way to endure commuting.

Short stories seem to be the obvious choice for a short journey, suitably brief and self-contained. But they’re never the right length, of course. It’s, say, two and half stories or just the two and then a twiddling of the thumbs for the last few stops. Besides, short stories aren’t really my thing: oblique, smug little things, far too many of them.

The great writers, the ones whose every sentence cries out to be given its own module on the National Curriculum, are too rich to be digested when queasy from abrupt braking and other people’s sweat. And I can’t, for example, be swept away on an elegiac tide by John Banville in twice-daily fragments over a fortnight. Conversely, something with a bit of pace has its flair rather dampened by the need to nip up an escalator every other chapter.

Non-fiction has to be chosen carefully. It’s no use having one’s elucidation on the matter of quantum physics bisected by eight hours of emails and meetings. My fragile thread of understanding would perish in the meantime. Biographies don’t really suit brief episodes, unless one is prepared to draw up a crib sheet to recall a labyrinth of unfamiliar – as appropriate – aunties or astronauts or Albanian ambassadors.

Of course, there’s also the risk of being sat adjacent to someone with a particularly intrusive personal stereo. I’ve never quite summoned up the cojones to start singing along, but I also find it difficult to concentrate on a book when being buzzed by the treble end of Snow Patrol.

A friend of mine says she uses one herself to blot out whatever anyone else might be listening to, but I can’t see that working for me. I’m as precious about what I listen to as what I read, so I don’t want to employ my music as some sort of noise-cancelling device. My favourite albums would be reduced to the consistency of muzak.

So all I can do is undertake the aural equivalent of holding my breath. Besides, as Gandhi so nearly put it, an iPod for iPod and the whole world goes deaf.

The most recent significant impact on the reading habits of Londoners has been proliferation of free newspapers, flocks of which billow around the carriages with Hitchcockian menace only to settle beguilingly onto the laps of weary commuters with their come hither headlines and double-page spreads of photos sourced from Heat magazine’s dustbins. Before them, most people reading on trains read books. Admittedly though, we had got to the stage where everyone who wasn’t reading Dan Brown was poring over Sudoku puzzles like a student in the Union bar hoping to appear irresistibly intellectual.

I think free newspapers are a great idea. If everyone gets to vote, I’d like think that we should all have at least a basic awareness of the issues of the day. But alarm bells rang when one of them announced its arrival with the claim that it would feature all that one might find in a conventional newspaper but wouldn’t feature too much news as it was felt that young people tend to find that a bit hard going.

Frankly, I wouldn’t wrap my chips in them. Any publication which derives the majority of its correspondence from text messages is unlikely to encourage particularly trenchant debate on any topic.

It’s a great pity that this is what has replaced book reading for a huge number of commuters. Whatever my own dilemmas about suitable book choices for the tube, the capacity in books to show us what critic Samuel Hayakawa called “as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish” is their principle wonder. I never go anywhere without a book – who knows when I’ll be stuck in a queue? – and so I’m more sanguine than most when faced with a monopoly on trains to Edgware at the expense of anything remotely imminent to High Barnet. It’s not the destination that matters, you see, it’s the journey.

On stalking and other social interactions

2008-05-05T13:39:00.000+01:00

(Originally posted on 5th October 2007)

I've been poring lasciviously over a feature in the latest issue of Record Collector magazine on the 60 "most interesting" David Bowie rarities (I have two!), which reminded me of a rather endearing authorial encounter a few weeks ago.

We'd been promised a visit from Sebastian Horsley, the artist best known for having himself crucified and, in true Libertine spirit, spending tens of thousands of pounds on prostitutes; he recently published an autobiography, Dandy in the Underworld.

I'd first seen him at Sceptre's party back in February, when he'd swept in wearing a floor-length mink coat, teetering on outrageous stack-heeled boots and dripping in make-up, accompanied by his amanuensis, Rachel, resplendent in very little at all.

My participation in the evening's glamour was restricted to sharing an ashtray with Tracey Emin and reluctantly dancing with colleagues so drunk that the next day they had no memory of, in one case, her own dancing, let alone (mercifully) mine, and in the other, of how he had come by the bruised knuckles (enthusiastically punching a pillar, I was able to reveal).

We had a couple of dozen copies for him sign: a few minutes' work with another few for pleasantries was all I expected. Twenty-five minutes after his arrival, he'd managed six, owing to his racounteuring (sorry, I know verbing weirds language) like an amoral and quite filthy Peter Ustinov and an insistence on adding a message, different in each case, to his signature.

Struggling a little for aphorisms, he decided that one book should be inscribed with his home address and the next with his telephone number. He regularly finds death threats on his answerphone, he explained, but he feels that people who give advance warning of murderous intentions rarely carry them out. Indeed, he likes to phone them back, which I should imagine would deter all but the most psychopathic of stalkers.

By this time, his publicist was slumped in the seat next to him, clearly resigned to the fact that fulfilling their next appointment on time had been a plan born of unjustified optimism.

Now, David Bowie's extraordinary 1995 album, 1.Outside, came about in part because of Bowie's ongoing interest with those who inflict violence upon themselves in the name of art. Wondering if Sebastian Horsley's self-crucifixion might just have ushered him into Bowie's circle and hoping that maybe this was the man to help me fulfill my quest to meet him, I probed as subtlely as I could about a link.

"Why do you ask?" said Sebastian. "Is he a friend of yours?"

Will Self describes Horsley as "simultaneously enthralling, charming and fantastically annoying". I couldn't have put it more perspicaciously myself.

Zuckerman's dying swansong

2008-05-05T13:37:00.000+01:00

(Originally posted on 15th September 2007)

Given my almost lycanthropic relationship with sunshine, last week's release from summer's clammy embrace has been quite blissful. Thursday morning saw me quite joyous as I beheld the mist hanging over the railway cutting and I struck out with crisp strides to the tube station.

Befitting such an autumnal turn, I decided to read Exit Ghost, Philip Roth's forthcoming final chronicle of Nathan Zuckerman. I'd given a quote to The Bookseller, admittedly somewhat mischievously, that it was "the Deathly Hallows of serious literature" and anticipated a masterpiece comparable to Updike or Bellow.

I read it with burgeoning disbelief. It's the worst book I've read all year.

The pivotal relationship of the book is that between Zuckerman and Jamie, the wife of the couple with whom Zuckerman has arranged to swap houses. He remembers her from some lecture he gave when she was a student, although her recollections of the encounter are not noted. He too had the privilege of meeting a literary idol when young, the now forgotten E I Lonoff, whose biography Jamie's sometime lover - and is he still? - is intent on writing.

Zuckerman's attitude to the biographer Kliman is aloof, condescending and obnoxious to the point that his valid concerns about the motives for reintroducing Lonoff to the canon are undermined. Kliman and Zuckerman are diametric: young and old, extroverted and introverted, full of vim and full of bile. Kliman represents how tawdry the relationship between the artist and his audience has become.

Now I'm all for a bit of misanthropy from time to time, especially if it's done with the sort of élan which demarcates its author as occupying the sort of high ground which validates it. Roth, as a great twentieth century writer, has that, but Zuckerman does not. I think Roth has here allowed Zuckerman to become a mouthpiece for his views on the sanctity of literature. I'm sure there are students of Philip Roth who might say that I've completely misjudged where Roth ends and Zuckerman begins. But both Zuckerman and Roth, who are similarly reclusive, evidently feel that the man and the writer are entities to be considered separately and, in that fundamental kinship, Roth, to my mind at least, undermines that very idea.

I'm not going any further down that route. It'll only end in tears and discussion of Wagner. Every reader reads his own book, and I'll gladly leave it at that.

The oddest thing about Exit Ghost, though, is the passages where Zuckerman, each time he has spoken with Jamie, writes these imagined conversations between the two of them in the form of a playscript. I'm not sure if these passages are also meant to indicate some of extrapolated subtext to their conversations. It's more than likely I've missed the point altogether, but to make proper sense of it all, I'd have to read it again, and I'm not sure I've done anything to deserve that.

I must confess at this point that this is only the second Roth I've ever read and the first was a much earlier work I read about fifteen years ago. I really ought to try American Pastoral or The Human Stain or indeed just about anything else he's written, going by his exalted reputation.

I do seem to have a knack for homing in on the dodgy ones when I make a foray into the backlist of big name authors I've hitherto managed to avoid. William Boyd? I read Armadillo. Absolute rubbish. Matthew Kneale? Small Crimes In An Age Of Abundance. One first-class short story and eleven wearisome ones. Margaret Atwood? Oryx and Crake. Bloody tedious and certainly amongst the odder choices by a Booker panel to make the shortlist; it's a weak dystopian short story dragged out to novel length, like one of those dreadful 80s 12-inch extended remixes.

I'm quite sure in all three cases that their reputations do not rely on the books I happened to try and that I'd be as smitten as anyone else by Any Human Heart or English Passengers or The Handmaid's Tale. They're on to the 'to read' pile, the only downside of that being that if it were just the one pile, it'd be a hazard to aircraft, so I can't guarantee a second chance to any of them before the Tories get back into power.

Or, by way of a more recognisable time scale for any Americans who've stumbled across this, before the Rapture.

Incidentally*, I was reading in Have A Nice Doomsday, Nicholas Guyatt's despatches from America's Bible Belt, that there are hundreds of thousands of Christians who are so convinced that Jesus will whisk them up to heaven at a moment's notice that they won't take jobs like piloting aircraft or driving buses because they don't want to condemn their passengers to the rather messy fate that awaits people when the person in charge of their vehicle they're in suddenly vanishes in a puff of sanctimony.

Well, that's the evangelical for you: a couple of disciples short of a Last Supper but considerate with it.

I've been listening to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy by Elton John while writing this. I'll steadfastly defend Elton John up to a point, but that point is 1976. Floreat 1972-76 and there's not been a song worth growing ears for since. But his early stuff is extraordinarily beautiful, even if the remastered versions out now still don't hide the fact that the drumming sounds like a frankfurter on an upturned bucket.

*Oh, all right, I confess: it was just a very contrived link. Still, Eddie Izzard would be proud of me.

The second self-help book you've ever bought

2008-05-05T13:34:00.000+01:00

(Originally posted on 28th August 2007)

I've been suffering from Booker overload. Writing a leaflet on the longlist and concocting ready-made quotes for the newspapers for shortlist day has prompted me to attempt to make some headway on the disparate heaps of non-fiction I've been stockpiling.

I've finally made a start on Waterlog by Roger Deakin, a proof copy of which has been slowly yellowing on my shelves for eight years. Synopsis: environmentalist and documentary maker living in a Suffolk cottage with a moat - please bear with me - conceives of swimming anywhere and everywhere in Britain where there's room for the breaststroke.

Deakin's profound knowledge of and love for nature makes him a fantastic guide to Britain's inevitably vanishing wilder locations. Essentially, it's a millennial restaging of William Cobbett's Victorian paean to a lost age, Rural Rides, minus the incipient racism.

I've always felt a claustrophobic discomfort in the water, but I do envy Deakin's ability to feel part of the shifting waterscapes of coasts and rivers, ancient and immovable yet restlessly kinetic. It's hard not to feel a twinge of loss when he tracks down a Fenland sinkhole in which for many years Baptists anointed their flock but is warned off further investigation by dire warnings from the Department of the Environment of leptospirosis and all manner of delinquent bacteria.

At a time when sparrows and hedgehogs have recently been designated endangered, it seems ever more urgent that we try to understand how human moulding of the landscape fundamentally skews ecosystems. Deakin laments that the banks of chalk streams are bought up by wealthy trout anglers when in France all land within twenty metres of a riverbank is public property. He stands vigil over a river diverted past a factory via a concrete channel.

But he's no misanthrope. The book is written literally from a frog's eye view but informed by a mind steeped in folklore and nature. As he drifts through the duckweed, exchanging curious glances with the newts, he is comforted by the amniotic quality of the water and it is a pleasure to imagine accompanying him on these eccentric field trips, listening to him point out the linnets and the blackcaps in grandfatherly tones.

Deakin died only last year - a great loss - but fortunately not before completing a second book, Wildwood, a comparable elegy to woodland and all manner of arboreal magnificence. My mother instilled in me a fascination with nature from a young age and I still remember racing through all her Gerald Durrells and leafing for hours through the twenty-part encyclopedia of animal life we kept on shelves in the hall. It is the wide-eyed wonder of passionate people like Deakin which is ever more vital at a time when schoolchildren are taken to city farms to encounter such exotic fauna as the cow and the pig, creatures which they are then horrified to learn are present in their packed lunches.

Anyway, I've inveigled both of Deakin's books to Front of House in the shop, Wildwood enjoying an Indian summer in New Titles and Waterlog crowbarred into the 'Other' section of Popular Biography alongside other unclassifiables such as Nietzsche's Ecce Homo and Pimp by Iceberg Slim.

There's been another upsurge in people asking for The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. For anyone fortunate enough to have had this pitiful excuse for an ISBN as yet pass them by, it's another of these manuals of positive thinking dressed up in pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo and shot through with moronic references to 'energy' and 'centredness'.

"Our job as humans is to hold on to the thoughts of what we want, make it absolutely clear in our minds what we want, and from that we start to invoke one of the greatest laws in the Universe, and that's the law of attraction. You become what you think about most, but you also attract what you think about most."

Thus writes John Assaraf, yet another Californian peddling a blend of basic common sense and scientific travesty. The whole book goes on like this, repeating the idea that visualising what you want to the exclusion of all negative thoughts will inevitably make those dreams come true. Want a flash car? Visualise it long enough and, so long as an image of some decrepit jalopy doesn't interpose, it's yours. Honestly, it's like cosmic ordering for dummies. Richard Dawkins may be an arrogant tosspot - and, boy, wasn't he just when I had what I had expected to be the privilege of meeting him last year - but frankly he sits on the fence too much for my taste. I'm not sure a full-on assault of pinpoint ratiocination is sufficient deterrent to these charlatans.

This week's Private Eye sends Dawkins up quite deliciously, having him harangue a woman for making a birthday wish:

"But how could blowing out candles on a cake have any influence over a future event? Isn't that just the most crude, primitive, infantile, unscientific superstition?"

Anyway, all this codswallop gives me another idea for a Christmas novelty title. It'll be called The Second Self-Help Book You've Ever Bought and every page will be blank, save one with the words 'You Mug' in an uncompromisingly bold typeface.

I should state at this point that I claim copyright on the concept and text, before Michael O'Mara Books add it to their illustrious roster of humour titles. (I came across the highlight of their September list today: Nosepicking For Pleasure.)

I really shouldn't write these posts while a police helicopter circles endlessly overhead like some sort of enormous luminescing mosquito. It has left me with an imbalance of the humours. I'm going to listen to Arcade Fire at mildly antisocial volume now and play 'air organ' on Intervention and My Body Is A Cage.

Afternoon of the living dead

2008-05-05T13:33:00.000+01:00

(Originally posted on 19th August 2007)

It's after lunch on a Saturday that shopwork really starts to grate. The ill-tempered and witless seem to move onto the high street en masse: another afternoon of the living dead. By about half three, most of us on the servile side of the counter become convinced that surely anything would be less soul-crushing: working in an abattoir for kittens perhaps.

And being Duty Manager for the day just makes it that little bit more... well, even Roget can't help me here, but it's bloody relentless, whatever it is.

Competing for the day's star customer accolade were the Russian woman who accused a member of staff of stealing the bag she'd actually left on a different floor, and the student who kept trying to get a refund to which he certainly wasn't entitled and who only gave in when he realised that it would me who'd be called upon to adjudicate at whichever desk he went to and that I was quite prepared to play the game of saying 'no' in as many different ways as possible without hesitation, deviation, repetition or just telling him to sod off.

This week's cavalcade of the clueless seems to have made me a soulmate in misanthropy of Michael Bywater, the recent paperback publication of whose Big Babies, Or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?, has been my Tube reading for the last few days.

Essentially, his argument is that we live in a culture whose sole aim is entertainment, passive and puerile, baby food for the brain. (He doesn't like marketing's fancy for alliteration so perhaps I'd better modify my rhetoric here.) From the vacuity of musicals and reality television to the patronising pictograms of warning signs which proliferate in every public space, we are discouraged at every turn from taking any responsibility about the way we live.

I came across a perfect example of such a sign at London Bridge station this week. A poster drawing attention to the hazards of unattended baggage juxtaposed a picture of a bench with a lone suitcase beside it with one identical but for the presence of a man sitting next to the bag: the first had a big red cross beside it, the second a tick.

Being a slightly fusty alumnus cambrigiensis, he does occasionally misfire when laying into certain pop-culture phenomena: his tirade against The Spice Girls, while of course nobly motivated, did rather need a copy editor to point out that he was taking a step too far outside his realm of expertise. And his assertion that "good sex shouldn't be fun" does rather fly in the face of the field research of millions.

I've been listening to Talk Talk's Laughing Stock while writing this, a speculative purchase of a band whom I had hitherto only encountered when marginally misshelved in the Talking Heads section of record shops. I can't remember now what provoked my investigating them, but they certainly have their passionate adherents on Amazon. (Mind you, so does everyone on Amazon, but Talk Talk's reviewers seemed mostly to have at least a familiarity with polysyllabism and the concept of punctuation).

I'm at a loss as to how to describe the album: woozy blues, classical mithering, a vaguely ambient jazziness at the abstract end of the Eno scale and the sort of wilful atonality which Scott Walker has spent the last couple of decades honing. Anyway, I'm enjoying being confounded by it.

I've not had any particularly memorable contributions to Photos of Dinosaurs in the last few days. But I did unearth one of my own that I'd forgotten about.

Where do you have books on music and rock stars from the sixties?
- Up in the music department on third floor.
Then why does it say 'Books and Music' over there?
- Because that's Borders over the road. It's a different shop.

That's what Saturday's like. All bloody day.

Chance is the name we put on our ignorance

2008-05-05T13:28:00.000+01:00

(Originally posted on 11th August 2007)

This post's epigrammatic title is quoted from The Painter of Battles, the forthcoming English translation of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Spanish bestseller. I finished it today in the early evening sunlight, reading for an hour or so with my legs slung across the arm of the chair, askew as if they were prosthetic limbs put aside (one's own physical comfort can be such a distraction when trying to become immersed), and the cat nestled beside me on a folder of gas bills.

It took me the majority of its 220-odd pages to develop much of an appreciation for it. Faulques lives hermit-like in a former lighthouse; he is working on a painting, wrapped around the interior of the building's dome like a Moebius strip, capturing every horror he saw through his viewfinder as a war photographer. One day a Croatian soldier, an image of whose nationalistic defiance won awards for Faulques and cemented his fame, appears and announces that he has spent the last ten years hunting him down. He intends, he declares, to kill him, his reason being that wide distribution of the image meant that his Serbian wife and child were brutally slaughtered.

The Croatian's desire for vengeance is brought about not through blind hatred but from a slow realisation of the complicity of the photographer in what he chooses to record and how - like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, I suppose - his presence might affect it.

The reason it took me time to warm to it was that my first point of reference was Schopenhauer's Telescope, a superbly Kafkaesque novel by Gerard Donovan which made the Booker longlist in 2003 (the year of Vernon God Little's absurd victory). The jacket blurb for this reads:

One afternoon - in a certain European village, in the middle of a civil war - one man digs while another watches over him. Gradually, they begin to talk.

Aside from being the most beguilingly phrased blurb I've ever read, I think the thematic similarity with The Painter of Battles is fairly obvious.

So, at first, this book suffered by comparison. The present-day narrative is constantly interrupted - or so I thought - by Faulques' reminiscences about Olvido, another photographer who teamed up with him and whose bloodied body constituted the last war photo he took. They became, of course, lovers and she is strikingly beautiful, piercingly intelligent and ineluctably drawn to Faulques, whose tactiturn machismo is softened by his intuitive artistic sensibility... and so on, just as middle-aged male novelists have acted out their fantasies so many times before.

But putting Olvido's stereotypical nature aside (and also the fact that I couldn't help thinking that her name sounds like a type of low-fat spread), the device gradually revealed its purpose. The Croatian has spent ten years in pursuit of Faulques, but he does not wish simply to assassinate him; indeed, he comes and goes from the lighthouse for several days. It is his intention that Faulques should come to understand why the chain of events which began with Faulques' taking of the photo must end with his death. As the two discuss the mural, and the paintings which seem to have inspired it, Faulques begins to understand that the painting is his own attempted expiation, his synthesis in paint what the Croatian's words also indicate.

Pérez-Reverte does flirt with the quantum implications of the book's philosophy. The Croatian refers to the 'butterfly effect', that illustration of chaos theory which demonstrates the manifold, seemingly unimaginable consequences of every action. But his lesson to Faulques is not that. It is, succintly, what I have headed this piece with, a notion which Faulques haltingly derives from the situation, the idea that no consequence is so unimaginable that we cannnot conceive of it and therefore that we cannot take responsibility for it.

On a distinctly lighter note... Photos of Dinosaurs goes international! I have my first overseas contribution, so I bring you, courtesy of my uneasy grasp of the French language, the following from a bookshop in Paris:

Do you have Stendahl's The Red and the Black?
- Yes.
Is it cheaper if I buy just The Red?

Life and death after Douglas Adams

2008-05-05T13:24:00.000+01:00

(Originally published on 3rd August 2007)

I went to my first book launch in a few weeks last Thursday, for a magical first novel called Gods Behaving Badly, in which the gods of ancient Greece are living in undignified squalor in a shabby terraced house in Islington. Some of the gods try to apply their deific skills top the modern world: Artemis is a professional dog walker and her brother Apollo a TV psychic. But their modern lives are mundane and largely impotent; it takes the appearance of the doughty Alice, their cleaner, to bring some excitement and purpose back to their eternal existences.

The author, Marie Phillips is, wonderfully, gloriously, a former bookseller; she proffered the opening chapters of her manuscript to a sales rep, Peter Fry, who took it straight to Dan Franklin, grand fromage at Jonathan Cape. He read it, immediately phoned her to ask for the rest and made her an offer the next day.

It's the first genuinely funny new novel I've read for longer than I can remember: it made me laugh out loud on the tube, which undoubtedly had me fixed in the withering yet oddly stoic glare of my carriage-mates. What makes it stand out is the dialogue, a trick which evades most authors, who either end up with characters sounding like they've spent their entire lives under the direction of Noel Coward or else spouting some sort of ersatz street-talk which has been researched by means of sitting on the top deck of a bus at the end of the school day.

Essentially, she has Douglas Adams' ear for comic dialogue. (I mentioned this to her at the launch and she delightedly pointed out that the appearance of one of the lead characters in a dressing gown was in homage to dearly departed Douglas.) The opening scene, where Artemis comforts a tree which had been an Australian accountant called Kate until she rashly declined a particularly blunt proposition from Apollo, is the spirit of the book in microcosm. When Artemis describes Kate's new appearance to her, she takes comfort in her foliage.

"Are you sure I haven't gone mad?"

"I'm sure," said Artemis. "You're a tree. A eucalytpus. Subgenus of mallee. Variegated leaves."

"Oh," said the tree.

"Sorry," said Artemis.

"But with variegated leaves?"

"Yes," said Artemis. "Green and yellow."

The tree seemed pleased. "Oh well, at least there's that to be grateful for," it said.

"That's the spirit," Artemis reassured it.

In an appearance on Radio4's Bookclub (or something similar) some years ago, Douglas Adams asserted that the biggest influence of his writing style had been A A Milne. It instantly made sense. He used the same, blunt verbless sentences, with rambling pomposities thrown in as the plot and characters demanded. He cast sentences so that the eye is drawn to the absurd. He even capitalised for emphasis. All in all, there's a certain flow to it, one that works well when spoken out loud but also has the internal poetic rhythm that is the gift of the most stylish of prose writers, the staccato combined with the mellifluous. And I think Marie Phillips has that too.

Athena's wisdom is now lost in the hubbub of accountants' jargon and marketing gibberish; Dionysus spends time concocting and field-testing his revoltingly potent home-brew; Hephaestus is the epitome of the amateur DIY enthusiast. The book is appreciative enough of the mythos from which its immortal cast comes to make it a knowingly satisfying book for the lay classicist. But it also updates the stories delightfully: who could fail to be tickled by the notion that the Angel tube station is the gateway to the Underworld? Certainly not me, having arrived for the launch via that station in heat in more conducive to cake baking and then travelled up those escalators so long that they look as if they've been filched from the set of A Matter of Life and Death, accompanied by the less than celestial strains of a busker murdering Baker Street on an oboe (although eight out of ten for effort there).

Anyway, Gods Behaving Badly is out now and will be a book I shall suggest at every vaguely appropriate opportunity to our customers. So when you get a copy for Christmas from that distant and eccentric relative who has heretofore alternated between getting you bilious and grossly oversized knitwear and gift sets of rather manky cosmetics from Superdrug then you may well have me to thank for the hours of entertainment and the excuse to absent yourself from the post-prandial charades and ceremonial watching of the Harry Potter film.

Speaking of Douglas Adams, in the news today was the sorrowful conclusion that the baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin, is now believed to be extinct. The connection with Adams is that the baiji was one of the animals he sought out with naturalist Mark Cawardine in their book on endangered species of the world, Last Chance To See, published in 1990. At the time of his visit, the Chinese government had set up an ambitious project to preserve the dolphins' habitat, but the demands of industry have been, it would seem inevitably in a rapidly expanding economy, impossible to ignore. Having advanced all the usual arguments in favour of promoting biodiversity, Adams concluded that there was one more reason to preserve curious evolutionary culs-de-sac such as the kakapo and the Komodo dragon: "the world would be a colder, darker, lonelier place without them". Today, of course, we know he's right.

To compound this note of loss and regret, I'll conclude with a rather sad little quote from the editor of The Dandy, Craig Graham, announcing a relaunch of the 70 year-old comic as Dandy Xtreme.

"Following extensive research, we discovered The Dandy readers were struggling to schedule a weekly comic into their hectic lives. They just didn't have enough time. They're too busy gaming, surfing the net or watching TV, movies and DVDs."

Hero worship

2008-05-05T13:22:00.000+01:00

(Originally posted on 25th July 2007)

I'd been saving up Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land for a time when I'd be able to give it the unswerving attention his books deserve, but this week concluded that such an opportunity was unlikely to manifest itself any time soon and so cracked the spine on the Piccadilly Line in defiance of the unbroken ranks of Potteroos.

I've heard nothing but reverent praise about his third novel featuring Frank Bascombe, and, 200 pages in, I concur wholeheartedly. The density of cultural references makes it necessarily slow going for someone unacquainted with suburbia in the grand American style, but such a close reading gives me the chance to savour every perfectly cast sentence, to delight in what Stephen Fry calls "the chewiness of language".

In a bar, Bascombe sees a silent TV image of George Dubya on the campaign trail in 2000: "Bush's grinning, smirking, depthless face is visible, talking soundlessly, arms held away from his sides as if he was hiding tennis balls in his armpits."

The wit is coruscating; the image is indelible. And there's even something about the passage as a whole which suggests that Ford wants us consider the possibility that the tennis balls, for some maleficent purpose, might actually be there.

When he came in to the shop to sign stock last autumn, I felt a sense of awe. He has a grand presence and a measured stride. His huge hand embraces yours, his voice has an authoritative rumble, what he says is succinct and definitive.

And for perhaps the only time in my life when meeting someone with an iconic status in my eyes, I wasn't reduced to sweaty gaucheness. We spoke about the great writers of post-war

America

and when he'd signed his books, I managed to say what I really meant: "It's always a pleasure to meet authors, but sometimes it's just an absolute honour."

Trite and grovelling, no doubt you think, but it was utterly sincere. So, David Gilmour, if, by some bizarre happenstance, you're reading this, I can only apologise. It was a thrill to meet you, but excruciating for you, I'm sure. Still, you should have told me you were duetting with David Bowie a week later. I'd have mortgaged the cat for a ticket.

The obligatory Harry Potter post

2008-05-05T13:14:00.000+01:00

(Originally published on 22nd July 2007)

So, Harry Potter. It's all over. The boy has become a man. Marvellous.

This isn't going to be a rant about Harry Potter. I'm not a fan - I have the read the first of them, as I felt it my duty as bookmonger, and was reminded of the pleasure I got from Roald Dahl as a child - but I'm happy enough for people, young and old, to enjoy them. In a way, I wish I were a fan, getting caught up in the all the anticipation, excitement and attendant persiflage.

But the Harry Potter phenomenon does concern me. And I think it's because it's become so much more than a way to show people what wonder can be found in the humblest of bookshops. Now anyone can, and apparently does, flog Harry Potter, even shops that don't normally stock books. Last Friday night certain clothes shops adjacent to bookshops dressed their staff up in all manner of thaumaturgical regalia to tap into the craze.

So I think what worries me is that people drawn to reading Harry Potter are going to expect this sort of glamour to attend the book trade generally. Hollywood tries to turn all its products into a relentless cavalcade of stars and CGI, all sound and fury signifying nothing, while the independent film industry continues its lonely decline, so it'll all be about making each release into an event. A film's success is determined in its first weekend's ticket sales.

The book industry is trying to ape that sort of business model, making authors, especially the media-savvy and photogenic, into stars, with the result that the general public's critical abilities are those which will suffice for 'watercooler' autopsies. But Harry Potter is a one-off. Anyone waiting for this kind of hullabaloo to show them what to read next isn't going to buying books again any time soon.

Back in January, when Stef Penney won the Costa Book of the Year (next year awarded alongside the Monster Munch Award for Contemporary Architecture), books made one of their occasional forays beyond the review supplements and into the news pages. But most journalists just wrote about Penney's agoraphobia and the supposed incongruity of this condition with her writing about the wilds of Canada, it not apparently occurring to any of them that having an imagination tends to be very much part of the job spec when it comes to writing fiction.

Reviews, sometimes even in the Sunday broadsheets, are often no more than a description of the plot. (I’d like to make an honourable mention here of Claire Allfree, who reviews for Metro, a publication not normally associated with intellect and insight; but both are abundant in the two and a half inches the newspaper is prepared to give her in lieu of more mobile phone ads and text messages from idiots.) It’s no wonder John Banville’s masterly Booker winner, The Sea, has sold so poorly in comparison with more prosaic winners, when nothing happens until 20 pages from the end, but after 80,000 words pieced together with such rare beauty. There are distressingly few of us who feel aggrieved that Jim Crace, England’s most stylish novelist, is not paraded through the streets of his home city of Birmingham in a streamer-festooned, open-top bus every time he publishes a new book.

Last week I was interviewed by a journalist from The Los Angeles Times about the then imminent Potter: she said she knew the films but not the books! They had no book readers up to the task? Books seem to have become a niche interest, a novelty, a hobby for the socially retiring. (The same day I also appeared on Al-Jazeera, in a piece on Alastair Campbell's diaries; my mother is now convinced I'm a prime terrorist target.)

There will always be word-of-mouth titles which skew the market - A Year in Provence, A Brief History of Time, Captain Corelli's Lousy Rotten Stinking Mandolin - and names, even at the literary end of the spectrum, who shift books no matter the quality of their latest (yes, I do mean you, Ian McEwan and Sebastian Faulks). And then of course there's The Da Vinci Code.

Now, anyone who's ever read a line of Nabokov or Conrad or Walcott will be able to tell from reading a single sentence from The Da Vinci Code that the publishers have made flesh the philosophical exercise involving an infinite number of monkeys and a similar number of typewriters (and no copy editors). The language in that book is so excruciatingly poor that the manuscript ought to have been so scored with blue pencil by its editor that one might have wondered if a young Picasso had been doodling on it. I'm sure the story is gripping, but one man's page-turner is this man's stomach-turner.

This total lack of analytical skills is why The Lord of the Rings gets voted the best book of all time, why students quote from Wikipedia in their essays, why the media's coverage of any political issue or scientific development is reported such starkly black and white terms that any debate is reduced to mindless sloganeering.

So, I hope all those waiting for Harry savoured every last word, but I hope that that you’ll pick up something that needs a bit of engagement some time soon. It doesn't matter that people read trash or watch trash or eat trash; it does matter when our minds, our palates, our expectations become so dulled that we don't want anything more, that we can’t even recognise something with real value, something worth treasuring.

I address that last adjuration to all those fans of G P Taylor, Jennifer Donnelly, Meg Rosoff, Philip Pullman and all the other children’s authors whom publishers are pushing on readers scared to pick up anything not first vetted by Richard & Judy. And that includes all of you out there who made The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time into a word-of-mouth bestseller and even voted it as a 'Vintage Future Classic'. Let's not be coy here: it may shed light on a previously relatively unreported condition, but it's a children's book. If you found the plot satisfying, then you have a reading age of nine and almost certainly read the book with a supply of Cheesestrings and Sunny D within easy reach.

Photos of dinosaurs

2008-05-05T13:12:00.000+01:00

(Originally published 18th July 2007)

Well, it's finally happened: the 'Photos of Dinosaurs' email is bouncing round cyberspace and should be lurking in all sorts of people's inboxes tomorrow morning.

Should there be anyone reading this who doesn't know me, Photos of Dinosaurs is my bid to become the Christmas bestseller of 2008. A bookshop is just about the only place where a customer can, and frequently does, come in and legitimately ask you about any topic whatsoever, aardvarks to zymurgy. And amongst all the sensible questions are a fair number of bizarre ones, which can come about from confusion, ignorance, wilful stupidity or too much exposure to reality television, and I've been hoarding such treasures for a while now.

The title of this putative bestseller - Photos of Dinosaurs - comes from one of my favourite enquiries: "you've only got books with pictures of dinosaurs; haven't you got any with photographs?". (I have an erstwhile colleague who's had the exact same too! And indeed just a couple of weeks ago someone I currently work with had the same question only about dragons!)

I reckon it might just take off. Buyers for bookshops would all identify with it and literary editors would have endless fun quoting from it. Douglas Adams and John Lloyd certainly recognised the latter possibility in The Meaning of Liff - their inspired little anthology of place names employed more usefully as words which should exist - which included:

Ripon (vb.)
(Of literary critics.) To include all the best jokes from the book in the review to make it look as if the critic thought of them.

I've registered the domain name photosofdinosaurs.com, as well as the obvious variations, and I've sent out an email to every bookish contact I have, encouraging them to send their own favourites to jonathan@photosofdinosaurs.com.

I've already had a few contributions from my shop, my favourite of which went as follows:

"Do you have books on London seasides?"
"Do you mean English seasides?"
"No, London coasts."
"London riversides?"
"No, London seasides."
"But London isn't on the coast."
"Don't worry about it mate, I'll go somewhere else where they know what they're talking about."

So, calling all booksellers....

Not a daily Mail reader

2008-05-05T13:10:00.001+01:00

(Originally posted on 13th July 2007)

Today I finished The Road Home by Rose Tremain and I do think it's possible that I've just read this year's Man Booker Prize winner. It's the story of Lev, an eastern European immigrant to Britain: his wife has died and he has come to Britain to try to make enough money to improve the life of his daughter, who now lives with his mother. I'd not read a Rose Tremain before, but until now she's been best known as an historical... no, I don't care what Fowleresque edict I'm contravening, a historical novelist, and I'm rarely tempted by those. But she has an elegant, unfussy style which works its magic quite discreetly.

I've no doubt that Lev's story is not typical of the immigrant experience in Britain. He has the benefit of good fortune a little too often and his suffering at the hands of British prejudice is infrequent and relatively benign. But I'm not sure that's a valid objection. Rose Tremain is telling Lev's story and it is asking a little too much to ask him to represent everyone with a similar backstory. If Lev and the supporting cast were nothing more than stereotypes, it would be an issue. But Lev, his family and friends at home and his new acquaintances are well-rounded, the sort of characters one has no difficulty imagining outside the confines of this narrative.

Reading it reminded me of Ripley Bogle by Robert McLiam Wilson, a novel I loved when I read it about ten years ago. Ripley Bogle is homeless, but quite the street poet, with dandyish artistic sensibilities. But he is such a vibrant, vital creation that one soon sees how irrelevant any accusation that the author has romanticised life on the streets would be. And I met a man not unlike him at Crisis one Christmas: Brian was as well-read, knowledgeable and erudite as any Islington dinner party guest.

Earlier in the week, when I was only a short way into The Road Home, The Daily Mail took advantage of the conviction of the 21st July would-be bombers to emblazon their front page with a characteristically nasty headline: 'Bombers on benefits: How four refugees taking sanctuary in Britain betrayed us'. No doubt further stories about the dangers of the amoral foreigner invasion will follow and it will become even harder for anyone with the slightest tint to their skin - creosote-hued celebs not included - to step outside without being subjected to stares of hatred and suspicion.

Whenever I come across these examples of The Daily Mail's revolting agenda, I always think about an interview in The Guardian a few years ago with the Jennifer Griffin, daughter of Nick Griffin, the abominable leader of the abominable British National Party. She'd decided that she wanted to set up a BNP equivalent of the Young Conservatives (or Conservative Future as they rebranded themselves at a time when it seemed like the Tories had none, before Tony Blair contrived his legacy of making them look electable again). Challenged to defend her views on 'white flight' and Britain's being 'full-up' - clearly just a parroting of those of her father, who presumably spouted racist propaganda at her in lieu of bedtime stories - she said, "'The Daily Mail seems sure that illegal immigration is causing terrible problems across the country." You can read the article at http://politics.guardian.co.uk/elections2004/story/0,,1217914,00.html - it's bloody scary.

Having spent most of this post damning the Mail mentality, I must confess to, erm, buying The Mail on Sunday today: I couldn't resist the giveaway of Prince's new album. I was very curious to see what the lascivious composer of Sexy MF, Dirty Mind, Gett Off, etc. might possibly have to say to middle England.

Not, it would seem, a lot. He rocks out competently, warbles along to some jazzy lounge stuff and generally provides an excellent soundtrack to a cheesy evening of clumsy seduction. Meh, which I believe is the expression of indifference de nos jours.

The Mail on Sunday lived up to expectations though: every page made me shudder.

Cheese, wine and John Keats

2008-05-05T13:07:00.000+01:00

(Originally posted on 7th July 2007)

I came across something rather splendid in our cookery department today: a self-published book called The Cheesemonger's Tale by Arthur Cunynghame. The author was once a Royal Warrant Holder as cheesemonger to the Queen and the Prince of Wales. I'm not sure what treachery one has to commit to lose such a warrant, but it doesn't seem to have dented the man's enthusiasm for his subjects, those of cheese, wine and the elegant marriage of the two.

It's the sort of book that the big publishers don't really do any more, a gorgeous gallimaufry with no more of central thread than the search for great cheese, a book that could only come from the mind of someone so immersed in the subject that the wider world is probably much of a mystery to him. Anyone who speaks of brie as 'temperamental' clearly communes with the stuff in a way a dabbling amateur like me can scarcely appreciate. Dull adjectives like 'steely' and 'floral' are reinvigorated here and he certainly has my mouth watering at the prospect of some proper Wensleydale, especially after foolishly buying a bland lump of the stuff from Sainsburys last week.

There are earnest little asides too, on the evils of supermarkets and a remarkably unlikely, given the author's undoubted Englishness, defence of EU policy of protected foodstuffs. And I particularly liked his definitive statement on the eating, or not, of rinds: if you like the taste, eat it.

Today's award for outstandingly ignorant pomposity goes to the customer who first was disgusted that we no longer stock a book he had bought from us in 1976 and, after a brief hiatus during which he ferreted fruitlessly for Keats in children's poetry before being directed to the adult section, declared himself baffled why we did not have that author's 'The rime of the ancient mariner'. I imagine that you will take rather less time to spot the fatal flaw in his reasoning that it took me to convince him of it.

He just shades the accolade from the ill-advisedly mustachioed gentleman who raged about Philip Pullman's being kept in teenage fiction when 'he clearly writes for adults'. Let not the fact that he been published only by Puffin and Scholastic, two of our finest children's publishers, deter you, sir.

I suspect there is going to be a prominent vein of literary snobbery running throughout this blog. Still, I'll brook no objections and all who take offence should go off and reread their 'adult cover' versions of Harry Potter.