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It’s been a big week for Scott Pilgrim fans. First the official film poster artwork is revealed, and now, (arguably even bigger news) the cover and the title of the final Scott Pilgrim book have been posted up on ONI press‘ site.
I cannot tell you how excited I am about this.
Or, The Most Epic and Awesome Social Media Fail in the History of the World, Ever.
If you haven’t heard about Rentokil’s fantastically sensationalist PR story about cockroaches on public transport, then you can read my overview here or Ben Goldacre’s overview here. This article is about how badly they dealt with the negative PR storm in its wake.
So you write a press release about a new bug killing technology you’ve developed, send it out to a few journos and then follow it up with some specific figures about the number of cockroaches on train carriages. You present the figures as being real, actual figures about the number of actual cockroaches you found on an actual train (they were not) and this is printed as fact. Then a relatively well known debunker of bad science tweets you asking to see the figures from your study. Knowing full well that your figures are a massive over-estimation reached by the most absurd model and not actually ‘real’ figures at all, you ignore him.
I admit my heart sank when asked to write a blog.
I’ve never written one—and don’t read them. I’m a closet blog-o-phobe. The faddish term sums it up for me: “blob” combined with the word for dead wood, rhyming with “hog”. It promises to bore, buttonhole, and take up copious space on my crowded mental sofa.
I can’t help it. The massed global community of avid, dedicated, garrulous bloggers makes me want to be silent.
Still more cause to celebrate today, as Wolf Hall enters another prize longlist.
The Orange Prize for Fiction 2010 longlist
An interesting discussion broke out on The Millions site last fortnight about the differences between UK and US covers. In a piece entitled Judging Books by their Covers. Millions editor C. Max Magee compared various jacket looks published here with those from across the pond, including those for our own Wolf Hall.
The Problem with Bad Statistics
You have to feel a little bit sorry for Rentokil. The tenacity with which Ben Goldacre (quite rightly) went after them was really something to behold (and I urge you read the whole #tagged exchange here).
If you’ve never heard of Ben Goldacre, then allow me to explain. He is the author of the blog and Guardian column ‘Bad Science’ and the book of the same name published by us, here at 4th Estate. He is a medical doctor who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dodgy government reports, evil pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks.
Vitamin pill magnate Matthias Rath sued both Ben and the Guardian after Ben raised serious concerns over Mr. Rath’s practice of taking out adverts denouncing Aids drugs in South Africa, while at the same time promoting his own pills. Mr. Rath eventually dropped his case.
On March 11 the winners of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award were announced in New York City.
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall took the fiction award, to add to her throughly deserved Booker prize win and Costa nomination, and another Fourth Estate author, Joyce Carol Oates, received the lifetime achievement award at the ceremony.
To celebrate Hilary’s amazing achievement we have reduced the Wolf Hall app by 50 % for this week only. Don’t miss out on your chance to download the full text of Wolf Hall, including the whole book, family trees and a video interview with Professor David Starkey, for the special price of £3.49.
Continuing our reading notes series, here is some additional material that we hope you’ll find useful to support your reading…
Additional author material:
On writing The Elephant Keeper
This is part two. Go to Part One.
Let me now address the issue of technique. Whatever you may have been told, there is only one safe way, which is this: to hook your legs over her back, exert strong pressure in every limb. What if she objects? you ask. My answer is: What if she does? Trust me, once you’re in, you’re in. If you are correctly positioned, it is well nigh impossible to her to throw you off.
A short story by Chris Nicholson
****
I know, I understand: it’s always tricky. Everything’s tricky. The timing of the approach, the manner of the approach; you never know how it’s going to pan out. You have to be careful, really careful.
At this very moment, for instance, over there, by the window. That’s the one. You can’t see her that clearly in the shadows, but she’s there all right. I’ve been watching for days and days, weighing up my options, sifting the possibilities. I admit, I’ve become a bit obsessed, a touch infatuated. Should I go for it or not? Might be a big mistake: she’s big, much bigger than me. Stronger than me. They always are.
Elephants are wonderful creatures to write about. It’s partly their strange, improbable appearance – those flapping ears, the piggy eyes, the ropey little tail, that twirling, muscular trunk – and partly their vast, mysterious, complex intelligence. They have paradoxical qualities: they’re big and heavy, but can move lightly and delicately; they’re very strong, but also very gentle and tender. They exhibit something like the same range and depth of emotions as humans: rage, greed, jealousy, hatred, impatience, curiosity, love. Some elephants have exuberant, extrovert personalities; some are shy and reflective. In other ways, they are unlike humans: the differences are perhaps as interesting as the similarities.
ELEPHANTS have had a strange history in Britain. For many centuries, that is, there were no elephants in the country, and yet they lived in the popular imagination as fabulous, powerful animals. They were like dragons and basiliks, half-real, half-fictional. Few people could be sure that they definitely existed, let alone be confident of knowing what it might be like to meet a real elephant. In the absence of hard facts imagination takes wing, and falsehoods about elephants abounded. In the medieval period and later it was widely believed that elephants lived for two or three hundred years, that they were frightened of mice, that they worshipped the moon, that they could write Greek.
Christopher Nicholson
‘I asked the sailor what an Elephant looked like; he replied that it was like nothing on earth.’
In the middle of the 18th century, a ship docks at Bristol with an extraordinary cargo: two young elephants. Bought by a wealthy landowner, they are taken to his estate in the English countryside. A stable boy, Tom Page, is given the task of caring for them.
Via @GalleyCat
It seems like Isabel Allende is not the only one doing good deeds today. Our friends Enhanced Editions, who helped us out with the amazing Wolf Hall app have also produced these iPhone versions of 2010’s Quick Reads books, published on World Book Day.
As part of this year’s Quick Reads and World Book Day initiatives, Enhanced Editions has partnered with a number of leading publishers to bring brilliantly written books by bestselling authors and celebrities to the iPhone.
It’s always nice to have an author on the list who is not only a great writer but also a caring person.
On Friday Fourth Estate author Isabel Allende announced that she has pledged $500,000 to “Chile ayuda a Chile,” a telethon that will be broadcast from Teatro Teletón in Santiago, Chile from March 5 to 6, 2010 to raise funds for the construction of emergency housing for those displaced by the devastating earthquake of February 27, 2010.
This is the first of the top secret iPhone projects I’ve been working on for the last few months – the result of a close collaboration between Fourth Estate and the awesome Enhanced Editions (founded by longtime 5th Estate friend and contributor, Peter Collingridge). Finally all the hard work has come to fruition, and we can announce…
WOLF HALL by Hilary Mantel, out now in paperback, and on your iPhone. Choose your weapon!
Recently I had the good fortune of bumping into the brilliant Susan Fletcher, author of Eve Green, and Corrag which we published in hardback yesterday. Susan was kind of enough to let me ask her a few questions on the process of writing Corrag, the importance of landscape in her fiction, the theme of witchcraft, and what she thinks about the digital future of publishing.
With a hardback as successful as Wolf Hall was, there was a lot of pressure on our designers to come up with an awesome paperback jacket. Of course, we never doubted them, and after not much time at all they came up with not one great cover look, but two!
To celebrate the paperback release of Wolf Hall today, March 4th, 5th Estate is holding a prize draw for one copy of this amazing special edition, worth £150. The special edition is leather bound with cloth boards and a cloth slipcase, is signed by the author, and is from a limited print run of 100, commissioned to celebrate Hilary’s historic Booker win.
For the next month only you might have the good fortune of hailing a taxi, and finding it looks like this. If you happen to spot the Wolf Hall taxi driving around, send in your snaps to fifthestate@harpercollins.co.uk and we’ll post up the best ones.
Susan Fletcher, winner of the Whitbread Prize for her best-selling Eve Green, and author of the upcoming Corrag, due to be published on the 4th of this month, will be giving a talk at the awesome Topping and Company in Bath (coincidentally one of my favourite bookshops.)
A darkly comic novel about the bizarre realities of life in Israel today.
Why is everyone so paranoid in this country? Can’t dark guys get on buses with suit bags any more? Eitan Enoch – ‘Croc’ to his friends – is taking his usual bus to work in Tel Aviv one morning when a fellow passenger starts to worry about the dark-skinned man with the suit-bag sitting up at the front.
This evening at the RSA Harvard Professor Nicholas Christakis will be giving a keynote speech on the Amazing Power of Social Networks.
This is the amazingly atmospheric new novel from Susan Fletcher, author of the bestselling Eve Green and Oystercatchers.
They were coming home especially. Can you believe it? Usually I am the one who is in charge of all family gatherings. No one else seems to have their diary to hand. But this time the visit was organized by all my offspring. And what was more they were buying us a television set. Yes, yes, I know, we’ve no telly. It was an oversight about, it seemed, to be rectified. Families are funny things. This current and impending visit was in honour of my appearance on the Amanda Ross TV Book Club. The family thought of it as a rally-around-mother session.
Experiments in New Media
I think these videos show two very exciting glimpses into potential futures for publishing.
The first shows how with a dedicated team you can create digital content that’s cool and functional enough that people might actually be prepared to pay for it.
How best for book publishers to learn from this? Should they like WIRED put together dedicated teams to come up with a template for tablet-fication of textual works? I assume quite a few are already starting work on this – but the task will never be as simple for them as it will be for magazine publishers, where one template will serve for all future editions.
What’s great about the Wired video, for me at least, is the sensitivity to narrative form at the heart of the new invention.
The Tablet WIRED
And if a team were to come up with a template for rich media products that might have once been called books, will it look something like this?
To celebrate the release of CONNECTED – the book – we are offering you the chance to win a pair of top price tickets at the Old Vic. All you have to do is answer the following question and become a fan of the Connected Facebook Profile ‘Be Connect’. For full terms and conditions, click here.
This month Azar Nafisi’s new memoir Things I’ve Been Silent About is published in the UK by Random House. In the following interview with Sarah O’Reilly she talks about her first – the best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.
The Secret of ‘Durable Pigments’
Azar Nafisi talks to Sarah O’Reilly
Your book has sold over a million copies worldwide, has been translated into 32 languages and spent an amazing 117 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Did you anticipate such success?
It is very difficult to determine why a book becomes popular. I certainly did not expect mine to be so. But I can draw some conclusions from my interaction with readers, and their responses to the book. I think its success is mainly due to two factors, the first being readers’ love of books. On one level Reading Lolita in Tehran is a celebration of both the act of reading as well as writing: I wanted to show how the two acts are connected. The enduring value of books is as much due to writers as it is to readers from different times, places and perspectives, who are constantly reinterpreting books and giving them new life. I would like to believe that is one reason for my book’s popularity. Linked to this idea is the fact that many readers, when learning about literature classes in Tehran through my book, discovered a new way of relating to a people who they felt they had very little in common with. This shared passion for literature provided a mutual space, connecting a young girl who had never left the Islamic Republic to, say, a woman in the United States or Italy who had never visited Iran. This common passion became a means of communication and empathy between seemingly different cultures and peoples.
A second reason for the unexpected popularity of Reading Lolita in Tehran is, I believe, the fact that it provided an alternative view of Iran to the dominant political one. The main characters in the book were not the political elite but ‘ordinary’ people who, through their creative resistance to repression, demonstrated that while their leaders can be very banal and predictable, they, on the other hand, are not so ordinary after all.
In general, the book hasn’t fared particularly well in our multimedia age. Why, in your opinion, should we read? Why is it important?
No experience can be simply replaced by another. New means of communication should complement and not eliminate the unique means we already have at our disposal; they should help broaden our horizons and sharpen our senses rather than diminish them. Reading a book has an important physical component to it that is both tactile and visual and cannot be recreated through the virtual reality of the Internet (for example) which minimizes the actuality and intimacy required by the act of reading books. Like the separate imaginative worlds they contain, books gain a character and specificity of their own through the ways each reader treats them. Because of this physicality they become an organic part of our actual world, both public and private. For me, a world without books is a world that is mutilated and orphaned beyond hope.
To celebrate the release of the second book in the Cornelius Quaint series – which follows the adventures of the eponymous master conjurer – the book’s publisher, The Friday Project, has kindly made the first in the series available free for a limited time in digital form online, and on Kindle.
About The Equivoque Principle: Dr Marvello’s Travelling Circus brings a touch of magic and wonder each tine it comes to town. But when master conjuror Cornelius Quaint and his troupe take to the streets of Victorian London, little do they know of the danger that lies ahead.
Today is Valentine’s Day, and putting my cynicism of commercial holidays temporarily aside, I thought it would be appropriate to post something about it.
I went through the 5th Estate archive in search of inspiration…
Social networks are intricate things of beauty. They are so elaborate and so complex—and so ubiquitous, in fact— that one has to wonder what purpose they serve. Why are we embedded in them? How do they form? How do they work? How do they affect us?
I (Nicholas) have been animated by these questions for the better part of the past ten years. I began by being interested in the simplest social network of all: a pair of people, a dyad. Initially, the dyads I studied were husbands and wives. As a physician caring for terminally ill patients and their families, I noticed the serious toll that a loved one’s death had on a spouse. And I became interested in how illness in one person might cause illness in another. For it seemed to me that if people are interconnected, their health must also be interconnected. If a wife falls ill or dies, her husband’s risk of death assuredly rises. Eventually, I began to realize that there were all kinds of dyads I might study, such as pairs of siblings or pairs of friends or pairs of neighbors who are connected ( not separated) by a backyard fence.
Based on exciting discoveries in mathematics, genetics, psychology and sociology, ‘Connected’ by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler is an innovative and fascinating exploration of how social networks operate. Think it’s all about who you know? It is. But not the way you think. Turns out your colleague’s husband’s sister can make you fat, even if you don’t know her. And a happy friend is more relevant to your happiness than a bigger income. Our connections — our friends, their friends, and even their friends’ friends — have an astonishing power to influence everything from what we eat to who we sleep with.
Watch more: Connected video – The Laughter Epidemic
Read more: Authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler on the Amazing Power of Social Networks
Buy the book http://tiny.cc/4iZ3z
Based on exciting discoveries in mathematics, genetics, psychology and sociology, ‘Connected’ is an innovative and fascinating exploration of how social networks operate. In this brilliantly original and effortlessly engaging exploration of how much we truly influence one another, pre-eminent social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler explain why obesity is contagious, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, with revelatory implications for everything from our notion of the individual to ideas about health care policy, ‘Connected’ will change the way you think about every aspect of your life, and how you live it.
http://www.connectedthebook.com
Watch more: Connected video – Why Fat is Catching
Read more: Authors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler on the Amazing Power of Social Networks
Juliet Gardiner’s The Thirties is February’s Independent Book of the Month, available at a special discounted price from most independent bookshops.
About The Thirties:
Acclaimed author of ‘Wartime’, Juliet Gardiner, brings to life the long-neglected decade of the twentieth century – the 1930s.
J.B. Priestley famously described the ‘three Englands’ he saw in the 1930s: Old England, nineteenth-century industrial England and the new, post-war England. Thirties Britain was a land of contrasts, at once a nation rendered hopeless by the global Depression, unemployment and international tensions, yet also a place of complacent suburban home-owners with a Baby Austin in every garage.
From the BBC website:
Today Woman’s Hour goes back to the 1930s. It was the decade that began with Amy Johnson’s epic flight to Australia and ended with Vivienne Leigh winning the Oscar for Best Actress for Gone with the Wind. It was also the decade of the Great Depression, the abdication and appeasement, as the country drifted towards the Second World War. But how did all this impact on the lives of ordinary British women? How far were they ruled by domesticity?
Click here to listen today’s episode of Radio 4’s Women’s Hour, featuring Juliet Gardiner discussing her new book, The Thirties.
Read more
There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
And the equation will come out at last.
Louis MacNeice, ‘Autumn Journal’ (1939)
The thirties is a statement as well as a decade. And it is one that is frequently heard today, because while those years are gradually slipping from our grasp, what they have come to represent is ever more present: confusion, financial crises, rising unemployment, scepticism about politicians, questions about the proper reach of Britain’s role in the world. Famously, to W.H. Auden, sitting on a bar stool in ‘one of the dives on Fifty-Second Street’ in New York in September 1939, the thirties were a ‘low, dishonest decade’. Looking back later, others followed him, labelling it ‘the devil’s decade’, ‘a dark tunnel’, ‘the locust years’, a ‘morbid age’, a time tainted by the dolorous spectres of intractable unemployment, the Means Test and appeasement, that ended inexorably in the most terrible war the world has ever known. But others claimed that this was a partial picture.
The Daily Telegraph called the Thirties “hugely impressive…she gives us a vast panorama, taking in everybody from debutantes to the destitute, painting a thoroughly entertaining and convincing picture of a nation deeply divided by class and region…for the depth of its research, the quality of the writing and the sheer richness and vibrancy of the material, this is a quite outstanding work of social history. From architecture to the abdication, from zeppelins to zoos, it is comfortably the definitive account of a decade that has been much maligned”
Unconventional model Isobella Jade talks about the process of writing her memoir, Almost 5′ 4″, especially for her readers in the UK, and reads an extract from the book.
Click here to purchase a copy of Almost 5′ 4″.
Click here to read Isobella’s article: 5 modeling jobs where height doesn’t matter.
© Isobella Jade
Soon after No Logo was released a decade ago, it had an immediate and resounding impact. Klein was inundated with calls from corporations seeking to revamp their tired brands and get the upper hand on their detractors; at the same time a whole new generation of activists was suddenly brought into action. Now, ten years later, Fourth Estate has published an anniversary edition; but what made the book into such an iconic and seminal signpost in the anti-globalisation debate?
It’s true, I am one of the tiniest working models out there, but still I have worked with great brands and magazines. When I was told I was too short to model, I put what I did have to use, and here are 5 modeling jobs where height isn’t a big thing.
Hand Modeling, believe it or not you can have a life and be a hand model, and you can make hundreds or thousands a day doing it. Forget the gloves; just take care of your assets well. Hand modeling is perfect for shorter girl who have small hands that are dainty and thin fingers and nice nail color and nail beds. Size of the nail varies, and hand models are not measured by one standard rule. Hand models are all ethnicities and their hands do not all look alike. Many products and brands from cosmetics, to dish soap use hand models. I have hand modeled for Macy’s, Bon Appétit, Women’s World Magazine and many others. How to start: Get photos of your hands, with nail polish, and without, holding products and at ease. There are modeling agencies that specialize in parts modeling; these are the agencies to target your photos and modeling comp cards to.
Favorite on the job skincare item for hands: LUSH’s Lemony Flutter cuticle cream.
Now all the hype has died down and the dust has settled, the main question that everyone’s asking is ‘What is the iPad for?’
The ever funny and insightful Charlie Brooker phrased it well in his article this morning, iPad therefore iWant:
Apple excels at taking existing concepts – computers, MP3 players, conceit – and carefully streamlining them into glistening ergonomic chunks of concentrated aspiration. It took the laptop and the coffee table book and created the MacBook. Now it’s taken the MacBook and the iPhone and distilled them into a single device that answers a rhetorical question you weren’t really asking.
Over at MacVideo.tv less rhethorical questions were being asked. In an article entitled Apple iPad: Who’s going to buy it, What’s it for? the blogger terms the tablet ‘The third device you never knew you wanted’.
I have a vague recollection of my first sketchbook. I think it consisted of a collection of blank paper torn from my mother’s diary. I remember the pages came from the back of the book, so the month must have been December. The torn edges curled slightly, there were small, discoloured holes where the stitching had been, and the paper itself was thin and transparent. I wrote my name on each page as large as I could. Ownership began here. I was about four years old and got a severe telling off, but it was worth it. Later I heard my mother tell a visitor that I loved to rip paper. I was, she stated, a nightmare. My love affair with torn paper continues to this day although it was some time before I understood that destruction is part of creativity. During the years when I used to paint full time I kept dozens of sketchbooks. I had made friends with another, more established artist who had the most wonderful books filled with effortless drawings and strong, confident watercolours. At first I tried to copy her but somehow text always strayed onto my pages, giving them a feel that was, thankfully, entirely my own.
So there you have it. After months of speculation, the bandying about of countless names and an almost endless stream of media hype, the iPad has arrived. Boasting a 9.7 inch screen, it has all the simplicity of the iPhone with a whole lot more functionality: a cross between a laptop and smartphone, it runs all the apps available on the iPhone and will surely be yet another fillip for developers’ coffers.
The basic device will cost $499 (just over £300) in the US and should be available across the world by July. But what will this new mystical device mean for publishing?
I know people have been various levels of ‘whelmed’ by Apple’s announcement. But I for one am extremely whelmed, and think this could be a really significant step for the publishing industry. Why?
iBooks video courtesy of CNET.com
1. iBooks. We heard the figures yesterday: 125 million registered iTunes accounts. This is versus an estimated 1.49 Kindle Users with an estimated 3m by the end of 2010 (true figures unknown as Amazon have chosen not to release them.)
iBooks just makes sense. It follows Law of the Internet #1 – go to where people already are. Don’t build minisites and spend $marketing money to drag them there.
Now I know Kindle users versus iTunes users is not an exact parallel, as I’m sure there are gazillions of people who have Amazon accounts, but in my mind and the minds of many people my age iTunes has become almost synonymous with digital content downloads. Amazon is where I would go to get cheap, physical books, but not traditionally to download mp3s, tv episodes or movies.
Just for another example, before we get onto CBB. Celebrity autobiographies, as you know, are the biggest sellers every year at christmas. Could Google Insight be used to predict which biogs would do best?
Here are the sales figures (as of last week) courtesy of The Sunday Times Bestseller List, for a selection of the top-selling celebrity bios.
It’s Not What You Think by Chris Evans
Last week 4 Weeks on list 14
Sales to date 167,025
My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle
Last week 3 Weeks on list 15
Sales to date 220,015
JLS: Our Story So Far by JLS
Last week 1 Weeks on list 11
Sales to date 132,490
Driven to Distraction by Jeremy Clarkson
Last week 2 Weeks on list 15
Sales to date 244,925
Ooh! What a Lovely Pair by Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly
Last week 5 Weeks on list 16
Sales to date 317,350
The actual stats (skewed slightly by the varying dates of release) puts Ant and Dec out front, followed by Jeremy Clarkson and then Frankie Boyle. Does search interest paint the same picture?
I’ll admit it. I’m a little bit addicted to Google Analytics. But particularly to Google Insight. If you haven’t played around with it yet, have a go. It’s free and available to everyone.
Let me tell you why it’s great. Google Insight measures what people are searching for. So in a way, it’s a really organic guage of people’s interest level in a certain subject.
In my opinion, it’s more reliable than consumer insight surveys since it’s not a measure of what people will admit they are interested in (to themselves, or to a researcher), but of what they are actually interested in. In other words, it counteracts the oldest of consumer research problems – of cognitive dissonance.
The one drawback of Google Insight that comes to mind is that it’s not subtle. It doesn’t, for example, differentiate between people who are interested in the “iSlate” in a vaguely curious way from those who are interested in a ready-to-buy type way. Unless, I suppose you run a search on “buy iSlate” or “iSlate cost”.
Given this morning’s apparently game-changing announcement that Amazon plan to open the Kindle up to third-party apps, I thought I’d take a look to see how the “iSlate” and the “Kindle” stack up in terms of search engine interest.
Last week 4th Estate editor Mark wrote about the first of his ‘Books of the Noughties’ – Miracles of Life by JG Ballard. This week he talks about 4th Estate’s most recent success, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.
Publishers, for obvious reasons, always say their books are astonishingly good, but, just sometimes, they genuinely are. I read Wolf Hall in manuscript in the autumn of 2008, and knew this was one. I hadn’t really known what to expect when I started it, but it was clear within a few pages that this was something not just out of the ordinary but unlike anything else being written today.
Anyone interested in the ongoing debate about ebooks and how (or whether) to enhance them may be interested in this site:
What are books?
We feel passionately drawn to them. We fall in love with them. But a book is usually nothing more than text on paper. Sometimes there are pictures, perhaps even a few maps. The constraints of book technology rule out anything more.
Until now.
The lovely Scott Pack alerted me to this neat book-based puzzle competition on the Bookseller website today.
The creator Horace Bent asks:
In celebration of the end of a wonderful decade in books, what better way to toast some of the bestsellers than to delete both their titles and their authors from existence?
The competition is open till the 31st January and involves decipering the clues in the image above. Click here to find out how to enter and read the original Bookseller post. Scott reckons he’s got the answers already. He would.
This week 4th estate editor Mark Richards pays tribute to the amazing JG Ballard, who sadly passed away last year, and talks about Miracles of Life, his Book of the Noughties.
One of the great pleasures of being in publishing is working with authors you have long admired, and previously known only as a reader and fan. In my first year at Fourth Estate I worked on J.G. Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life. A concise but capacious work, fascinating about both the Shanghai of his childhood and the Britain of his adult years whether or not you are interested in Ballard the man, Miracles of Life was the last provocation of a provocateur – a gentle, human and very moving book from a writer best known for his searing and prophetic visions of our increasingly technologised future.
It was, sadly, his final book, and he died after a long illness in April last year. I feel deeply lucky to have met him and worked with him.
Read more about J.G. Ballard:
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers is the incredibly exciting new book from Thomas Mullen, author of the excellent The Last Town on Earth, named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today.
In the amazingly evocative narrative, we follow the Depression-era adventures of Jason and Whit Fireson—bank robbers known as the Firefly Brothers by the press, the authorities, and an adoring public that worships their acts as heroic counterpunches thrown at a broken system.
To get a flavour of the book take a look at this video – currently featuring the US jacket and pub dates. Our version looks like this and is published in April, but don’t worry if you cant wait that long…
…We know you’ll love the book as much as we did which is why we’re giving away proof copies. Click here to find out how to get your hands on one, hot off the press or the slab, whichever you prefer.
This week’s Digital Diary sees Sam comparing two new tech products from two of the industry’s biggest players, and musing over what they might mean for publishing.
With Christmas Day seeing Amazon sell more e-books than their printed counterparts for the first time ever – perhaps in part due to it being the present most teens were unwrapping that very morning – 2010 looks set to be a year of digital experimentation and creativity: one which will see a clash of the technological titans, as well as a raft of brilliant and not-so-brilliant ideas in the publishing industry.
Wasting no time in setting out their stall, Google launched their new smartphone this Tuesday, the fancifully named ‘Nexus One.’ A direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone – rather than a subtle attempt to undermine the latter’s dominance with the Android operating system as they have attempted thus far – the Nexus will have a 5 megapixel screen to the iPhone’s 3. Despite outdoing the iPhone in terms of functionality, the Nexus owes much to Apple’s simple design: besides four small buttons along the bottom strip, the phone is black with a large screen.
Due to unprecedented demand (!) we’ve decided to reveal the names of the remaining ANONthology authors in this post.
It means that anyone looking for the answers will easily locate them here.
Who wrote what
Continuing our Books of the Noughties series, I asked our head of marketing for an anecdote from when Bad Science was published.
Ben Hurd said this about it:
Dr Ben Goldacre has built up a very strong community around his Bad Science website and Guardian columns and in 2008 published a rather brilliant book that extends his crusade against the ridiculous and often nasty inaccuracies that prevail in the world of science. Bad Science is a superb book – it is funny, revelatory and hugely important.
The Christmas of 2009 was like nothing ever before seen in the industry. On Christmas day, ebook sales from Amazon.com outsold physical books. Perhaps this, combined with the fact that we are at the start of the first week in a new decade, is behind the waves of bloggers and commentators taking a moment to peek into their crystal ball to try to predict what publishing will look like in the future.
The final christmas wishlist is from Janice Lee, author of The Piano Teacher. Ambitious, exotic, and a classic book club read, The Piano Teacher is a combination of Tenko meets The Remains of the Day. Sometimes the end of a love affair is only the beginning…
To purchase a copy of the book, or to read ‘The Creative Gift’ – an article about The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee, click here.
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore,
Personal Days by Ed Park,
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
We hope you’ve enjoyed this feature, and if any of the recommendations inspired your christmas purchasing, we’d love to hear from you!
Click here to read other author’s wishlists.
We will be taking a short break over Christmas while we celebrate the holidays. Why not add our RSS feed to your iGoogle homepage and be reminded when new content is up. Alternatively, follow FifthEstate on Twitter.
The final of today’s Christmas Wishlists and the penultimate in the series is from Ariane Sherine, editor of The Friday Project’s There’s Probably No God: The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas: 42 atheist celebrities, comedians, scientists and writers give their funny and serious tips for enjoying the Christmas season.
Showing absolutely no nepotism whatsoever, three of the books on Ariane’s list are written by co-contributors to the Atheist’s Guide. (I wouldn’t let that put you off though – they are on my wishlist too.)
Charlie Brooker – The Hell of it All
The second of our Friday Project authors to offer up their Christmas wishlist today is the excellent Caroline Smailes. Caroline is the author of Black Boxes, which was published by The Friday Project earlier this year. Affecting and engrossing, this is a gripping novel of family breakdown – Julie Myerson meets Ian McEwan. Get yourself a copy here, or click here to read about a brilliant little widget created to publicize it.
You can also read Caroline’s great blog here .
Top of my Christmas wish list: Jeanette Winterson’s new book The Battle of the Sun. I’ve read everything she’s written, so I guess this is an obvious choice.
We asked our authors for books they’d like to give – or get – this Christmas. Continuing the series, today we are featuring the gifting choices/ wishes of not one, not two, but three of our very special authors.
Paula Byrne
Paula Byrne was born in Birkenhead and has a PhD from the University of Liverpool. Her second book, Perdita, was a Richard and Judy bookclub pick. Her most recent book, Mad World, was published last year to critical acclaim.
On my Christmas list are the following books:
- The new biography of the Queen Mother by William Shawcross (especially after hearing all the hullaballoo on Woman’s Hour)
- Selina Hasting’s The Secret Life of Somerset Maugham
- Behind Closed Doors: at Home in Georgian England by Amanda Vickery
- The Twilight saga because my niece has told me to read it (and so did India Knight in last week’s Sunday Times and I always do what India recommends)
We asked some of our brilliant authors for books they’d like to give- or get – for Christmas. This time it’s the turn of Michael Burleigh, brilliant author of Moral Combat: A History of World War II, due to be published by HarperPress in 2010. Pre-order your copy here.
Last Christmas friends gave us Caroline Clifton-Mogg’s Secret Gardens of London (Thames and Hudson). I’ve leafed through it several times this year, in the hope that it might help transform our very small back yard.
We asked some of our brilliant authors for books they’d like to give- or get – for Christmas. The next installment of our Christmas wishlist series is from Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan.
I’d give Jeremy Mynott’s beautifully compendious Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience (Princeton University Press) to my friend Dennis Minsky, naturalist extraordinaire on Cape Cod, because I’d like him to stop correcting my Anglo-centric spelling of bird names.
Two years ago, while researching new work, I visited my old home in London. I had not been back there since my parents died but I wanted to write about a woman who searches for her lost past.
The house in which we had lived since leaving Sri Lanka is in Brixton. Always a little shabby it now seemed woefully rundown. In the boarded-up back garden a jasmine creeper my father once nurtured was still thrusting itself up, and a hydrangea bush, planted by him stood forlornly, its flower heads merely a frost-blackened memorial to happier times. The house looked closed and dark, its windows covered in grime, for life had fled and was replaced by neglect. I peered in at the room where my mother had died. There was nothing in it, not a bed, not a carpet, nothing. Unable to bear the sight, I fled, pursued by memories.
Next month, New Books magazine, the magazine dedicated to book clubs and reading groups, is paying special attention to four of our very talented authors, debuting in Spring.
Read more about brilliant debut authors from Press Books!
Reading Lace: When Dreams Become Reality
Read the first chapter
Louise Tucker talks to Rebecca Connell
If you haven’t read the book yet – please note, this interview contains spoilers.
There are three strong characters in the novel. Who interested you most and why?
I saw all three characters as quite distinct from each other and Nicholas was the character who came to me first. In general I tend to prefer writing men, rather than women; I find it easier. I wanted to get the sense that this was someone who was quite morally ambiguous, so that the reader’s response to him would shift back and forth. I thought of him as the most complex.
As far as Lydia was concerned, I wanted her to be quite an unlikeable character, someone who, on the surface, was everything that someone would want, without much underneath. I almost felt I didn’t know her. And similarly, in a way, I saw Louise as someone that the reader wouldn’t know that well, someone who had an air of mystery about her but who had a lot going on under the surface, so the opposite of her mother.
And where did the idea for the book come from?
This story was originally published anonymously as one of the stories in Fourth Estate 25th anniversary publication, the ANONthology.
The Hypnotist’s Wife
Through the wall, she can hear him again; a low, relentlessly soothing monotone, the words inaudible. She sits sewing, concentrating on the quick flashes of the needle through bright cloth. At the edge of her field of vision, the television flickers mutely. She has grown used to her entertainment, such as it is, being noiseless. He likes to maintain the illusion of a sound-proofed sanctum, into which the chaos of the external world cannot penetrate. The slightest disruption – a ringing telephone, a muffled cough, the faint rattle of a teaspoon against a saucer – could endanger this delusion, and the onus is on her not to shatter it.
After a short break to visit the HC Warehouse in Glasgow, Sam Hancock is back again this week, looking at the latest developments in digital publishing.
With the runaway success of Lonely Planet’s digitized guides firmly in their sights - the LP’s language guides, despite offering only 600 words and not a great deal of interactivity, have repeatedly reached the top 20 paid travel apps ranking – Time Out have begun launching their range of city travel guides as apps.
The first app – initially only covering New York – has married mapping from Google with Time Out’s own extensive content, offering a constantly-updated guide to the city. The app manages to be both highly simplistic and very effective: using the iPhone’s GPS in combination with the myriad reviews and listings Time Out have to offer on a city’s cultural landscape.
Interestingly, the Time Outers have offered up their app for free – attempting to draw out a strong dividing line between themselves and Lonely Planet. For more discerning customers – read those with a thicker wallet – the app offers a ‘Critics Choice’ filter, whilst those looking to get more for their dollar can make use of the ‘Free and Cheap’ criterion. Other added features are the ability to send recommendations to friends and the fact that the app works even when you’re not connected.
Whilst the graphics aren’t great and Time Out are hardly going to blow the world away with their functionality, they have crossed one big hurdle: combining mapping data with creative content and have thus outdone LP on this front – time will tell who’ll be more successful.
Recently, we caught up with author Johanna Moran, whose debut novel, The Wives of Henry Oades, is to be published next February by Harper Press.
The Wives of Henry Oades is an incredibly compelling and unusual story about the different manifestations of love and family which should appeal to anyone who enjoyed A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian or Mister Pip.
Click here to read the full synopsis.
Q and A with Johanna
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a former Pan Am flight attendant living on the west coast of Florida with my lovely husband of thirty years, John.
What books have had a lasting impact on you?
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a brilliant portrayal of human struggle, has stayed with me, as have Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House. I would add to the list in no particular order: John Updike’s Rabbit series, W;t by Margaret Edson, Paula by Isabel Allende, Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, and Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking. Of more recent reads, months later, I am still thinking about Olive Kitteridge.
Anyone watching the X factor on Saturday would have caught this during the advert break – a pretty funny iPhone parody advertising The Sun newspaper.
To celebrate our achievement of having so many titles on the books of the decade lists, we’ve decided to dedicate some blog space to them. We started on Tuesday with a post about The Corrections. Today we’re celebrating Stuart, a Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters.
Here’s what John Bond, MD of Press Books had to say about publishing it:
“I remember Nicholas Pearson calling me when I was at an airport. Can’t remember where I was off to, but I was running Sales and Marketing at the time. I’d read the proposal and we were trying to think of books that bore comparison to Alexander Masters’ extraordinary portrait of Stuart Shorter so it would help in pitching it internally and externally. And we couldn’t think of any. Which in that moment seemed genuinely exciting rather than a problem. A uniquely amazing book. “
Stuart, a Life Backwards is the story of a remarkable friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator (’a middle class scum ponce, if you want to be honest about it, Alexander) and a chaotic, knife-wielding beggar whom he gets to know during a campaign to release two charity workers from prison. Interwoven into this is Stuart’s confession: the story of his life, told backwards.
Get your hands on a copy of the book here, or track down the excellent BBC drama, featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alexander, and Tom Hardy as Stuart.
To celebrate our achievement of having so many titles on the books of the decade lists, we’ve decided to dedicate some blog space to them. First up is The Corrections, a book that is pretty much universally loved both in and out of the office.
I asked around for some opinions on what makes it such a definitive book, and for some memories on how we came to publish it, and got these responses from Damon Greeney, an International Sales Director at HarperCollins, and Nick Pearson, who published it.
This story was originally published anonymously as one of the stories in Fourth Estate 25th anniversary publication, the ANONthology.
Lara could normally spot the new children a mile off because they tended to cling either to their parents or to some token articles of clothing – swimming trunks, typically, but one new arrival had memorably retained long socks and sandals. But he approached them directly, as unencumbered by textiles or relatives as any regular in their little gang. Lara had not noticed until then that that summer they were all black or brown-haired; they tended to become so muddy and stuck with leaves and twigs that such physical niceties could be hard to distinguish. He strode confidently into their midst in the forest clearing and they instinctively formed a respectful circle about him.
Is this the future of magazine publishing? And if so, what does it mean for books?
Meanwhile, PC World, in their article ‘The Apple Tablet is Dead’ speculates :
the Apple tablet is a mirage created by legions of fanboys and tech dreamers. The closer you get to that mirage, the more you realize it’s not going to be there when you arrive. But then, off in the distance, an even brighter and more beautiful tablet is envisioned for a day that will never come. It’s a nice dream, but it’s just not going to happen.
Whatever the truth of the matter, it makes sense – to me at least – not to get too hung up on iphone applications for books, when a bigger, better, friendlier reading (and multimedia) experience could be just around the corner. Price will be the deciding factor – if the Apple Tablet is going to retail at the sub £500 price point, it could be a game changer. After all, this is only about the same that most people pay for their iphones on contract over a year. Sports Illustrated and Conde Nast with their rumoured tablet version of Wired are ahead of the game with this one.
In a year that’s seen a Booker Prize, a spoof-Hollywood memoir and a detailed probe into the lives of London’s richest Russian émigrés, Press have offered a discerning readership choices across a smorgasboard of texts – and seems to have struck a note with the high priests of the Guardian Review. In a survey of a cross-section of recommendations from authors and famous people alike, Press books came up again and again.
Julian Barnes – acclaimed author of Flaubert’s Parrot – singles out Laura Cumming’s A Face to the World (HarperPress) for praise, noting that it, ‘is a rare item: an art book where the text is so enthralling that the picture, however necessary, almost seem like an interruption.
Duncan Hamilton, author of ‘Provided You Don’t Kiss Me’, the brilliant and inciteful book on the great Brian Clough, has just won the William Hill sports’ writing award for the second time.
Kevin Mitchell, writing on the Guardian website, said this:
Hamilton won the gong two years ago with his book on Brian Clough, Provided You Don’t Kiss Me. Now he’s done it again. I can hear the gnashing of teeth around the best bars in town and beyond…
The mood was that Hamilton was a good force moving among us, a writer who looks at sport from a different angle. In an industry that sometimes values instant headlines above considered analysis, books such as this are a reminder that there is, indeed, another point of view.
We thought to celebrate we’d post up this excellent Q and A between Jack Fogg and Duncan Hamilton. We hope you enjoy it.
Part of what I found so rewarding about the book is the way you came at the subject, foregoing the conventional chronological structure of biography and instead delivering a series of thematically linked vignettes. Was there anything in particular that made you favour this unconventional approach?
Brian was such a complicated person that I wanted each chapter to be about a different piece of him. I thought themes were important and would enable me to place what he did in a context alongside his ideas and attitudes. I also hoped it would plant him more solidly in his era – socially as well as in a footballing sense. It meant that I could shove the landscape, and the time-frame, around like shifting scenery on a stage or cut from one place to another. It let me tell Brian’s story as I witnessed it, and do it in specific scenes too. Graham Greene placed novels into two categories.
William Walker’s First Year of Marriage - a Horror Story, by the ever so funny Matt Rudd, was published by Harper Press earlier this year.
For anyone who has ever dreamed of finding true love only to discover that happy endings are just the beginning comes this brilliantly comic novel about marriage, ex-girlfriends, ‘performance anxiety’, and what it takes to make happily ever last beyond the honeymoon.
Matt has kindly decided to make the first chapter available online to anyone who would like to read it. So why not add some chuckles to your Thursday afternoon with this fresh, funny, subversive read.
Why not add an Exotic Flavour to your Canapés this Thanksgiving
courtesy of The Exotic Meat Cookbook….
© Jeanette Edgar and Rachel Godwin
Here’s a few simple canape ideas that will have your party guests gasping with delight and surprise this Festive Season.
Following on from Sam’s Digital Diary post yesterday, I thought I’d share this.
The concept, dreamed up by Mobile Art Labs, Japan, is the perfect solution to the problem of the Iphone being too small for tiny child hands. But the real gem here is how technology is used to add value to books, and keep kids interested in them, rather than setting itself up in opposition to them.
As the website explains,
The keyword of Phone Book is “Analog on the Digital Technology”; it combines digital value of iPhone and analogue advantage of books.
It’s true, there are some things the book is better suited for. In our technological excitement, it seems that we sometimes forget that the book is perfect in many ways. If it were a riddle, it would seem nigh impossible to fit so much information in such a small space. That was before microchips, though.
The second of our independent Books of the Month for November is THE EXOTIC MEAT COOKBOOK: From Antelope to Zebra.
Written by Jeanette Edgar and Rachel Godwin, the women behind the award-winning Alternative Meats company, this book is the perfect antidote to your bland festive Turkeys.
In a month which has seen a huge profileration of apps aimed at children – presumably a result of many parents recognising the calming qualities of their handy multi-media smartphone – one app has taken off spectacularly: Duck Duck Moose’s ‘Wheels on the Bus’.
So much so, in fact, that its developer – the Duck Duck Moose Partnership – has released another two apps to sit alongside their runaway seller, an Old Macdonald app and Itsy Bitsy Spider version – the developer’s latest offering.
The following is an extract written by Richard Dawkins, taken from The Atheists’ Guide to Christmas. Richard is one of Britain’s best-known academics. He came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution. He is also arguably one of Britain’s most outspoken atheists.
I was hoofing it down Regent Street, admiring the Christmas decorations, when I saw the bus. One of those bendy buses that mayors keep threatening with the old heave-ho. As it drove by, I looked up and got the message square in the monocle. You could have knocked me down with the proverbial. Another of the blighters nearly did knock me down as I set a course for the Dregs Club, where it was my purpose to inhale a festive snifter, and I saw the same thing on the side. There are some pretty deep thinkers to be found at the Dregs, as my regular readers know, but none of them could make a dent on the vexed question of the buses when I bowled it their way. Not even Swotty Postlethwaite, the club’s tame intellectual. So I decided to put my trust in a higher power.
‘Jarvis,’ I sang out, as I latchkeyed self into the old headquarters, shedding hat and stick on my way through the hall to consult the oracle. ‘I say, Jarvis, what about these buses?’
‘Sir?’
‘You know, Jarvis, the buses, the “What is this that roareth thus?” brigade, the bendy buses, the conveyances with the kink amidships. What’s going on, Jarvis? What price the bendy bus campaign?’
‘Well, sir, I understand that, while flexibility is often considered a virtue, these particular omnibuses have not given uniform satisfaction. Mayor Johnson …’
‘Never mind Mayor Johnson, Jarvis. Consign Boris to the back burner and bend the bean to the buses. I’m not referring to their bendiness per se, if that is the right expression.’
Here at FifthEstate we don’t go in for self promotion too often, but we couldn’t help but notice that out of the 100 books the Telegraph proclaimed as the defining books of the Noughties (I considered an alternative title of this post ‘Noughties but Nice’ but couldn’t bring myself to inflict that on you) Press Books, the imprint from within which this blog is run, has a total of ten titles on the list. These are:
(92) Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
(89) Appetite by Nigel Slater
(86) Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters
(84) Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss
(70) Bad Science by Ben Goldacre
Yesterday the second Atheist advertising campaign kicked off with a bang, with brand new Atheist adverts and a staggering 900 comments on Ariane’s piece in the Guardian.
This is what the new adverts look like, only they will now be found on billboards instead of buses: 
These adverts take a subtly distinct angle from the previous campaign – rather than blanketly writing off the idea of religious belief, a tactic hardly likely to work on the most faithful, they instead question the legitimacy of bringing up children under any one particular doctrine or dogma, arguing that this denies them the chance to form their own identity.
In a fortnight that witnessed another outpouring of apps, app related paraphenalia, and plenty more products masquerading as apps, one set sticks out amongst the rest for its simplistic brilliance: the Wallace and Gromit Digital Comics series produced by Titan Publishing.
The set comprises one free app and four paid offerings (’The W Files’; ‘Parts and Labour’; ‘Big in Japan’; and ‘Where there’s Muck there’s Brass,’ respectively), all launched to celebrate the 20th birthday of the plasticine pair.
This month we are featuring not one but two special books as Independent Books of the Month, both of which are published by our innovative imprint The Friday Project- which specialises in finding book projects that started out life in some way on the web.
The first book is The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas.
The Atheist’s Guide does pretty much what it says on the tin, with 42 contributions from well known writers, tv personalities and social commentators such as Richard Dawkins, Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown and AC Grayling on what Christmas means to those without faith.
This story was originally published anonymously as one of the stories in Fourth Estate 25th anniversary publication, the ANONthology.
The Political Obligations of the Lover
If you live under a repressive regime, you may have the duty to die for love. Go to the capital, stand in the central square, distribute pamphlets urging a general strike and compose a revolutionary song with the refrain: “I am loyal to nothing but love!” The imperial guardsmen will then shoot you dead. Be assured that it is better to die young and ecstatic than to suffer impotence, irrelevance and bureaucracy—the humiliations of old men who conform to oppression.
If you live under a regime that is not repressive but is merely corrupt, the guardsmen may not kill you. You may have to hold public orgies in order to be shot. I have never attended a public orgy, but I certainly would organize one if I lived under the graft and negligence of a puritanical petty tyrant. Make certain that if you are not shot dead but merely jailed for life, then your friends are prepared to break you out. Tell them: “It is only fair that you help me escape, given that I invited you to my public orgy.”
What you’re looking at:
‘Over 3,000 apps – and growing – are downloaded every minute from the App Store. This is a live feed showing the activity of 20,000 popular apps currently in iTunes. Every time a customer downloads an app, its icon lights up (5-min. delay). [from the placard]‘
… or ‘how to write badly well.’
I spent four years of my life studying creative writing at university, but I would probably have been better off banking the loan and reading this blog. On it, blogger Joel Stickley offers some very funny examples of all too familiar writing faux pas. My favourite:
Starting this week, Sam Hancock will be joining us to in the form of a weekly column, DigitalDiary – frontline reportage from the cutting edge of digital technology. Each week he will explore one new, big digital idea in the realm of publishing. First up: The Zehnseiten App
With The Bookseller talking about an ‘explosion in the number of apps’ available for the iPhone, and Apple’s device starting to be taken seriously as a challenger to Amazon’s Kindle, a small German start-up has set the running with the cross-publisher project ‘Zehnseiten.’
Between now and Christmas, we’ve asked some of our brilliant authors to provide lists of books they’d like as christmas gifts – either to give or receive. To kick of this series we have esteemed military historian Richard Holmes, with a special selection of Remembrance Day themed books.
We also asked Richard to provide a little background on why he chose the books he did.
This story was originally published anonymously as one of the stories in Fourth Estate 25th anniversary publication, the ANONthology.
Do
The leaves are the color of dried carrots. They sail in the wind, settle on the seats of the swing sets, on top of the plastic play tunnel, on the dull soil of the playground. Steven watches as the children jump into piles of them, gleeful shrieks echoing round the graffiti-strewn buildings nearby. Steven does not clean the bench at the corner of the playground and the leaves on it make the crunching sound of crumpling paper as he sits. His eyes are fixed on the little girl with two round ponytails standing on either side of her head.
The air has a coppery tinge, as though the whirling leaves have stained it, and the little girl’s brown face, her dark eyes, gleam red-gold as he watches.
To celebrate the paperback publication of her new collection of stories, The Thing Around Your Neck, Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks to FifthEstate about what inspires her to write, the fateful coincidence of her childhood house and the books that changed the whole direction of her fiction.
It has also just been announced that Chimamanda is on the shortlist for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; winner to be announced Monday 30th November. Congrats Chimamanda!
Mitchell and Webb brainstorming ‘funny ideas’ for their new book (out now.)
NME reported yesterday that Marcus Mumford of indie-folk rock band Mumford and Sons has set up his own book club. The first book they will be reading is ‘All the Pretty Horses’ by Cormac McCarthy.
Marcus is following in the footsteps of not only Richard and Judy and Oprah, but more recent attempts like the Wossy Bookclub (Jonathan Ross) and Gwyneth Paltrow.
These experiments were initially watched carefully by the book industry as it tried to work out what, if anything, would fill the void left by the R&J Book club demise.
Writer and illustrator Dallas Clayton created this for children: An Awesome Book – an almost day-glo coloured, charmingly sketchy story about the importance of dreaming, and dreaming big.
Unable to find a publisher, he decided to press and promote the book himself.
On Monday John Sutherland in the Guardian wrote about changing tastes in literature:
Eighty years ago the Manchester Guardian (as this paper then was) ran a poll to discover from its readers’ votes the “novelists who may be read in 2029″. Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky: John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), HG Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455) and JM Barrie (286).
What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes – alongside Max Beerbohm, it’s pleasing to note).
The literary saloon blog makes the point that polls are populist, suggesting that it is not the taste of the masses that makes books endure but the opinions of a small, literary elite – the academics and the critics. Is this the way things should be? Would it be so bad if, in 100 years time, the Richard and Judy Book Club had merged with the immortal canon?
October 2009 sees the publication of Phyllida Law’s wildly inventive Notes to my Mother-in-Law. The book explores Phyllida’s relationship with her husband’s mother through a series of notes she began leaving for the elderly woman after her hearing started to deteoriate. The notes became a kind found poetry.
Found poets, such as Phyllida, who take words or phrases from one arena of life and reframe them as poetry or literature, have a sort of alchemistic power to transform the daily and banal simply by changing the context. These notes – which began as a practicality – are more than the sum of their parts: when viewed together they reveal powerful truths about the complexity of human conversation. By keeping Annie, her mother-in-law, in the loop about the day to day goings on, Phyllida is able to give voice to the now silenced hustle and bustle of family life.
The copyright of all the pictures in this piece is retained by the illustrator Phyllida Law © 2009
Annie. Otherwise known as ‘Gran.’ Phyllida’s mother-in-law. She is forced to move in after her daughter, whom she had lived with previously, absconds to Cornwall with ‘a beautiful young man.’ Has been getting increasingly ‘Mutt and Jeff’ of late.
Phyllida. Annie’s daughter-in-law. The author of the notes to Annie that explain what’s going on, and the author (and illustrator) of the book.
If you haven’t had a chance yet to read our Anonthology, the magazine we published to celebrate 4th Estate’s 25th anniversary in May, you’ve only got one week left until the anonymity is lifted and the writers’ names are revealed. We’ve decided to extend the competition deadline until next Friday, so if you’d like to have a go at guessing who wrote what, to potentially win some classic, limited edition books, get on over to Anonthology, asap.
Alternatively, if you’d just like to read the magazine, click on the graphic to read it in fullscreen.
Also, this week only, the first five people who leave a comment with their email address below will get a printed copy of the Anonthology in the post.
Don’t forget to come back here over the next few weeks, when we will be posting up each of the stories – with the author’s names attached!
Continuing with our reading notes series, Fifth Estate is very pleased to feature the exciting new release from Phyllida Law. ‘Notes to My Mother-In-Law’, the book that Stephen Fry described as ’something quite splendid, new and unforgettable’, is brought to you by Fourth Estate and is the Independent Bookseller’s October Book of the Month.
To hear Phyllida talk about the book, listen again to her speaking on woman’s hour, courtesy of the BBC.
Congratulations to Hilary Mantel, whose fantastic novel Wolf Hall was awarded the Booker Prize last night! Upon winning the award, she remarked that if bagging the Booker Prize was like being in a train crash “at this moment I am happily flying through the air”.
You can check out an interview, videos and writing by Hilary here
The first book published by Fourth Estate to ever win the Booker Prize, Wolf Hall had been a hot favourite of bookies since the longlist was announced. Apparently William Hill had never seen a betting pattern like it, and Scotsmen.com quoted one spokesperson who said it was “almost like an unspoken psychic rumour” that Mantel would take the prize.
Recently, we were lucky enough to ask Lynne Truss a few questions about herself and her writing. Lynne’s latest book, Get Her Off the Pitch!, is a hilarious chronicle of her strange journey through the world of sports journalism. Author of the worldwide bestsellers Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Talk to the Hand, she is one of Britain’s best-loved comic writers.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m five foot nine. I’ve weighed the same for about five years, but every day I read the scales and say the same thing: “Oh, surely not.” I spend all my time writing and emailing. If I can’t get an internet connection, I panic. I text all day, or at least until all my texting friends drop from fatigue. I am in love with communication. The most tragic moment in literature for me is when that confessional note goes under that carpet in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I’ve just acquired a dog for the first time in my life, and he is bliss on little furry legs. His arrival has been an enormous surprise to my two aloof cats. They keep shooting glances at me that say, “How could you do this to us?” And I shrug and say, “Actually, you brought this on yourselves.”
I love the short story. I’ve heard all the tired arguments against it – that you can’t lose yourself in a book of stories the way you can in a novel, that reading stories back to back brings on a kind of indigestion of the imagination, that the very brevity of the form encourages a shallowness in the writing. Piffle, all of it.
Yes of course there are some terrible short stories around, but there are a hell of a lot more terrible novels in print, so as an argument against the form it’s specious. There’s a sad misconception that stories are what one writes as a preparation for a novel; as though writing a novel were both harder and more mature. Agreed, sustaining a narrative arc, and maintaining a reader’s interest, over three hundred pages instead of just thirteen, is a challenge but I would argue that writing thirteen pages in which the reader becomes fully involved in the narrative world you offer them and is left feeling they have had a complete narrative meal and not just an appetiser is a far tougher one. There are an awful lot of narrative appetisers around, and I count myself among their occasional authorial cooks; sometimes the material you pick for a story simply isn’t short story material…
We recently had the chance to ask Patrick Gale a few questions about himself and his writing. Patrick is the author of, among other titles, The Whole Day Through and Notes from an Exhibition. His fantastic new collection of short stories, Gentleman’s Relish, is due out today from Fourth Estate.
Tell us a little bit about yourself
I’m the last novelist in England, or the first, if you’re sailing from across the Atlantic. I’m typing this at my desk, looking over our garden and barely resisting the temptation to get out there and start deadheading.
What books have had a lasting impact on you?
Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy and Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea for showing me what was possible. Armistead Maupin’s Tales from the City and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library for showing me anything is permitted in fiction if you do it with style and charm. Saki and Chekhov’s short stories for showing how much can be achieved in a tiny space.
Why do you write?
Compulsion. Also I think it feeds my profound curiosity about people’s lives. If I didn’t write I think I’d have to be a priest or a psychotherapist, probably the latter as it pays better and involves less silliness.
As an author, what are you most proud (or embarrassed) of writing?
I’m pretty proud of writing Rough Music. Although it was Notes From an Exhibition that won me a much bigger audience I think the earlier novel was a technical breakthrough for me. And it suddenly seemed to grant me permission to stop smiling, as a writer, and go into the dark places.
What is your biggest failure?
Not counting my earliest novels, which were crazily under written because I was so impatient, I’d say my Little Bits of Baby and The Cat Sanctuary. They’re not failures, exactly, and they each have a loyal following, but I had a pretty lazy editor at the time who was content with far less than I know I was capable of. I respond well to pushing and he didn’t push me nearly enough. They’re both stories that deal with very dark themes within a comic framework and if I wrote them now I know I’d go far deeper into those dark areas. In particular I’d listen more closely to what the female characters were trying to tell me rather than imprisoning them in my (very male) plotting. I think a female editor would have stood up for the female characters as my male editor didn’t.
When you were a kid, what did you think were you going to be when you grew up?
When I was really really small I had secret dreams of being a ballet dancer. Then I settled on music – I’d like to have been a cellist. I still play the cello but it’s a constant source of guilt that I didn’t threw it over for acting once I was a student.
If you could travel anywhere in time, for one day, where would you go and why?
I’d go to Clapham Station on the day Oscar Wilde was made to change trains there on his way to Reading Prison so I could push through the crowd of spitters and hecklers to slip him a letter reassuing him that his words would live on and his love be legalised and celebrated.
Do you like reading e-books?
I don’t know. I’ve never tried. But I love new technology so it’s probably only a matter of time. However I’m also deeply in love with books as things, with peculiar smells and creases and stains. I can’t imagine snatching an e reader from a burning house the way I can a book.
Who are the five people, living or dead, you’d invite to a party?
Francis Poulenc, Colette, Byron, George Cukor and Ann Tyler. But god alone knows what I’d feed them.
What are you working on at the moment?
A new novel is bubbling up nicely. It’s dark and fairly rambling at the moment, about the West Cornwall family of a very good priest who’s a very poor father.
This Thursday will see the publication of What on Earth is Going On?, a popular current affairs book by Tom Baird and Arthur House. The book takes the form of an alphabetical glossary dealing with 63 of the most important topics of our times – from Climate Change to Credit Crunch, Darfur to Devolution – in clear and concise entries designed to entertain as well as educate. This is the first book for both of its authors, and like many of the best ideas, it arose out of a half-serious conversation in a pub.
To commemorate the close of the first decade of the 00’s, last week The Millions blog ran an ongoing feature counting down the best books of the millennium (so far). Judged by a distinguished panel of writers, critics, and editors, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections emerged in the top spot as the best new title of the last decade. As a follow up to the series, the blog posted a great piece listing the top 20 books chosen by the panel of experts, versus the top 20 books chosen by their readers. Despite the expected overlaps, it was fascinating to see the clashing tastes of both groups. One book that made it onto the reader’s list that didn’t figure into the expert’s was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s much loved novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.
So what do you think…is Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections the best book of the Millenium?
A warm scone is an object of extraordinary comfort, but even more so when it has potato in it. The farl, a slim scone of flour, butter and mashed potato, is rarely seen nowadays and somehow all the more of a treat when it is. I have taken the idea and run with it, mashing steamed pumpkin into the hand-worked crumbs of flour and butter to make a bread that glows orange when you break it. Soft, warm and floury, this is more than welcome for a Sunday breakfast in winter or a tea round the kitchen table. Cooked initially in a frying pan and then finished in the oven, I love this with grilled Orkney bacon and slices of Cheddar sharp enough to make my lips smart – a fine contrast for the sweet, floury ‘scone’ and its squishy centre.
enough for 4
peeled and seeded pumpkin – 300g
plain flour – 140g
bicarbonate of soda – half a teaspoon
salt – half a teaspoon
butter – 70g
an egg, beaten
warm milk – 90ml
thyme leaves – 2 teaspoons
a little oil or butter
Cut the pumpkin into large chunks and steam until tender enough to mash. Set the oven to 200°C/Gas 6.
Mix the flour, bicarbonate of soda and salt in a large bowl. Cut the butter into small chunks and rub it in with your fingertips. You could do this in a food processor, but it hardly seems worth the washing up.
If you happen to be staying in Sydney and married to someone who wants to visit her uncle who lives ‘just outside of Sydney’, be prepared to drive for somewhere between twenty-eight hours and six-and-a-half weeks before you get there.
Also, if you have a mother-in-law who once went to Australia and your wife has an urge to spend three thousand dollars on a mobile-phone-call to ask for directions rather than one dollar for a few minutes in an internet cafe on Roadmap.au.com, and your mother-in-law says, oh, it takes about an hour to get to Uncle Kenny’s from Sydney, wrestle the phone off your wife and ask your mother-in-law if A) she travelled to Uncle Kenny’s in a Ford Corolla with a top speed of fifty-six kilometres an hour or B) on a very fast train.Also, if your wife has insisted you spend a further fortune hiring Sat-Nav, and you’re about to drive from Sydney to a small place called Picton, check at least two things before you set off:
1: The little radial next to Avoid All Massively Expensive Toll-roads is checked.
2: The little radial next to Avoid All Major Highways and only direct me along un-surfaced B roads roamed by serial-killers and dingoes is unchecked.
For reasons that should now be obvious, things between Alison and I were a bit frosty by the time we got out of Sydney and got to grips with the Sat-Nav. Thank the Lord, then, for Australian radio. And, most importantly, the adverts.
In case you’ve never experienced the pleasure of an Australian radio advert, they all seem to be about how to maintain a longer and sturdier erection (for him), and how to achieve a deeper and sultrier orgasm (for her (or, perhaps, for him and for her; they were a bit vague on that one)). Thanks to the fact we were too busy listening to the radio to shout at each other, we were still just about on speaking terms by the time we sorted out the Sat-Nav, bounced back onto the tarmac, and began to make steady if unspectacular progress towards Picton, and Alison’s Uncle Kenny.
This was our first experience of driving in Australia, and, Sat-Nav aside, it was slightly surreal: Just like us, the Australians drive on the left, yet, obviously totally unlike us, they measure their speed in kilometres, which meant it constantly felt as if we were going too slow and yet looked as if we were going too fast (as Alison screamed at me each time she glanced at the speedo).
Another strange thing is that when they lose a lane – three lanes down to two, two lanes down to one, etc. – it’s the inside lane that disappears, which totally threw us every time it happened, and also seemed to give all the little old ladies we were forced to undertake an extra excuse to drive in the middle lane of the motorway even though the inside lane was totally free (nice to know little old ladies are the same the world over, though).
Road-signs are very un-English as well: YOU’VE GONE THE WRONG WAY, GO BACK, seemed essentially Australian to us, as did the anti-speeding bill-board that featured an attractive blonde holding up her little finger with the strap line, NO ONE THINKS YOU’RE BIG WHEN YOU’RE SPEEDING underneath her image.
There is one serious difference, though, but I can’t quite remember what it was. One of our guides told us later on in the trip, but we’d all been drinking, so it’s gone a bit hazy and vague – something about Australians only needing to insure themselves for third party damage to vehicles; i.e., not for any damage they do to you if they ever drive into you. It was either that or they don’t actually need to take a driving test before letting themselves loose on the roads. Or maybe it was both. I’m sorry. I can’t remember. And Virgin Internet is going too slow for me to Google it and find out at the moment. Whatever it was, though, once we’d been told, we always insured ourselves to the max and only ever went driving at night.*
When our Sat-Nav finally delivered us to our destination, Picton looked like a really nice town. At the risk of upsetting Pictish people the world over, I’m not sure it’s worth going out of your way to see it unless you’ve got a particular reason for going there – it’s a bit short on opera houses, Great Barrier Reefs, huge orange rock formations, etc., (I did do a Google search to try and find an interesting fact to give you on Picton, but all I could find was an entry that said Picton is a rural town in New South Wales, Australia: It has a railway station) – but it was really good to visit somewhere that doesn’t exist solely for tourists to wander around taking pictures: You know, a place where ‘real Australian people’ live.
Being honest, it was a bit like being back in Hedge End.
Not that Alison’s Uncle Kenny is Australian. He’s from Cardiff, originally, and he and his wife, Lorraine, and their two sons, Wayne and Shane (named long before they decided to emigrate, believe it or not) set out for Australia on the £10 assisted fares programme back in the early seventies, which was the last time Alison saw them. Thirty-five years on, Kenny’s a widower now, sadly, but still living in the same house Alison can remember getting phone-calls from each Christmas day as a child.
This was the first time I’d ever met him, but we soon discovered we shared a dislike of not knowing whether a bar served pint-glasses, schooners, midis or pots, and, I think, mutually warmed to each other once we worked out I wasn’t after his home-brew and he wasn’t after the lager I’d picked on from a bottle-shop on the way out.
Before the proper drinking could start, though, we decided to pop out to visit one of Kenny’s sons, who lives in a village just outside of Picton. Twelve days later, we arrived.
Wayne, like most working-class Australians who don’t live in cities, lives in a house with a back-garden twice the size of Hampshire. As soon as we got there he and Alison did the, ‘you were this big last time I saw you’ thing that all people who can’t remember the last time they saw each other do, then he and his wife and daughter did the thing all Australians love to do when they’re introduced to English people who haven’t been in their country for more than a week – tell us about all the things in Australia that can kill you. Alison’s Uncle Kenny, the woman who gave us our hire-car, and the receptionist at the hostel we’d stayed in, had already run through this list with us several times, but Wayne and his wife and daughter took it to a whole new different level, all three chipping in with examples at the same time: Sharks. Spiders. Snakes. Dingoes. Crocks. Stingers. Floods. People in the Outback. People in the cities. Swine-flu (virtually unheard of at that time (we thought they were making it up)). Rabid kangaroos. Wild Boar. Bar Bores. Getting your foot stuck in the cattle-grid over the male-toilets and slowly dying of thirst (think of the alternative – you’d rather die, wouldn’t you?). Drought. Forest fires. Little old ladies driving in the middle-lanes of motorways and refusing to let you over when your lane disappears without warning. Poison frogs. Killer toads. Rip-tides. Backpackers. Tour guides. Being temporarily blinded by the flash-gun on a Chinese person’s digital camera and stepping in front of a train because you can’t see where you’re going, various combinations of all of the above, all in different orders, not to mention quicksand, lightning, taking a wrong turn on a walk in the Blue Mountains, depression, diphtheria, scorpions, and the bloke playing a didgeridoo near Sydney Harbour (he won’t kill you, but after two hours of listening to him, you’ll want to do yourself in).
Seriously, if the English discovered Australia today, Social Services would have to burn the whole place to the ground before they could pass it fit for human inhabitation.
And that’s without the danger posed by possums.
I’ve got to admit, I thought a possum was a catch-phrase invented by Dame Edna Everage, but apparently, they really do exist. They look like oversized domestic cats, or, to English people who’ve been drinking, Koala Bears; i.e., very adorable and cuddly and extremely pettable. Despite this cute and harmless appearance, though, possums have a little known defence mechanism – if a possum is spooked or feels threatened it lollops for the nearest tree and climbs it. The sight of a possum in a tree then attracts people towards the tree, where, invariably, they stand around pointing up at the possum going, look, it’s a possum, in a tree, who’d have thought it? This attracts even more people towards the tree. Which is when the possum invokes its little-known defence mechanism and sends jets of foul smelling urine down upon all those beneath it.
And, apparently, the reek of possum pee is almost impossible to get out of your clothes.
Which, when you’re backpacking, and only have one change of clothes to last you three months, is a bit of a disaster.
So be warned: If you ever see a possum in a tree, or if you ever hear someone shouting, Look, it’s a possum, in a tree, who’d have thought it? Don’t go running over. It’s only going to end in tears.
As we would discover later on in our journey.
*Alison thinks the thing with the driving is that there’s no obligation for Australians to take out any motor insurance at all. The very nice German who sorted out our hire-car for us in Cairns told us this, laughing, as we pulled off the forecourt. We have no idea if this information is true but I would like to retract the statement about us both being drunk at the time we were told.
Daniel Clay is the author of Broken – an utterly original, totally compelling debut novel, written in a fresh and distinctively British voice. Called ‘bold, prescient, engaging, and oddly touching’ by the Guardian, Broken was published to critical acclaim. The Harper Perennial paperback edition appeared earlier this year.
Last week Hilary Mantel’s brilliant novel, Wolf Hall, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Set amidst the rich incidents of 1520’s England, Wolf Hall explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics, peeling back history to show us Tudor England and its most intriguing figures in a strikingly original light.
Hilary recently participated in the Daunts Debates, where she discussed her personal fascination with the historical period of Wolf Hall, and touched on the process of bringing characters like Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More and Henry VIII to life.
Check out parts two and three…
On September 3rd, Gary Kemp’s brilliant memoir, I Know This Much: from Soho to Spandau was published by Fourth Estate. One of the most well-written autobiographies to appear in years, I Know This Much is packed full of vivid anecdotes and great stories. In the following clip, Gary reads a wonderful passage describing Spandau’s arrival at Band Aid:
Gary recently recorded a great Q&A, posted here as a podcast:
The kormas of India, serene, rich, silken, have much in them that works with the sweetness of the parsnip – cream, yoghurt, nuts, sweet spices. The ughal emperors who originally feasted on such mildy spiced and lavishly finished recipes may not have approved of my introduction of common roots but the idea works well enough. Despite instructions the length of a short story, I can have this recipe on the table within an hour. For those who like their Indian food on the temperate side.
enough for 4 with rice or Indian breads
onions – 2 medium
ginger – a fat, thumb-sized piece
garlic – 3 cloves
a mixture of parsnip, swede, carrots, Jerusalem artichokes – 1.5kg in total
cashews – 100g
green cardamom pods – 6
cumin seeds – 2 teaspoons
coriander seeds – 3 teaspoons
vegetable or sunflower oil, or butter – 2 tablespoons
ground turmeric – 2 teaspoons
chilli powder – half a teaspoon
a cinnamon stick
green chillies – 2 smallish ones, depending on their heat, thinly sliced
single or double cream – 150ml
thick natural yoghurt – 150g
fresh coriander, chopped
Peel the onions, cut them into large pieces, then blitz in a food processor till roughly minced – you don’t want a sloppy purée. Peel and roughly grate the ginger on the coarse side of a grater. Peel and finely slice the garlic cloves. Peel and coarsely chop the vegetables. Roughly chop half of the cashews.
Now deal with the spices: open the cardamom pods with your nails and scrape out the seeds, then crush them to a gritty powder. Grind the cumin and coriander seeds to a fine powder.
Put the oil or butter into a deep, heavy-bottomed pan and stir in the onions, letting them soften but not colour. Stir in the grated ginger and sliced garlic, continue cooking over a gentle heat for a couple of minutes, then introduce the spices – cardamom, cumin, coriander, turmeric, chilli powder and the cinnamon stick. Continue cooking, stirring for a couple of minutes, until the fragrance of the spices begins to rise, then add the chopped root vegetables and the chopped nuts. Season with the thinly sliced chillies, salt and black pepper.
Stir in 750ml water, partially cover with a lid and leave to simmer gently for forty-five to fifty minutes, till the roots are tender to the point of a knife. Toast the reserved whole cashews.
Carefully introduce the cream and yoghurt to the pan, allowing them to heat through but not boil. Should the mixture boil, it will curdle, and though the flavour will be fine the grainy texture will be offputting. Check the seasoning, adding more salt or pepper if necessary. Scatter over the toasted cashews and some chopped coriander.
And more on Parsnips…
Nigel Slater’s latest cookbook, Tender, Volume One: A cook and his vegetable patch, is published by Fourth Estate on the 17th of Semptember. With over 400 new recipes, Tender chronicles the things we eat – from the vegetable patch to the kitchen table.
Hello FifthEstaters!
I’m John Elliott, popular culture editor at Fourth Estate and the editor of Gary Kemp’s terrific new memoir I Know This Much.
Working with Gary has been a lot of fun, and he’s been in and out of the office for the last few months – checking out the covers we’ve designed, asking for tweaks to the text and even discussing what colour the casing of the book should be (”sand or chino-coloured”?).
Our first task was finalising the text – which wasn’t difficult, as Gary’s a seriously good writer (no need for a ghost here).
The book tells the story of the band of course, but it’s also a great deal more than that.
The opening chapters give a wonderfully warm picture of growing up in working class Islington in the Sixties and Seventies, and offer a brilliant portrait of his mum Eileen, dad Frank and brother Martin.
It was an era when the memory of the Second World War loomed large – kids like Gary played on bombsites – but Londoners were also beginning to loosen up, as the British music scene started to really take off.
Gary’s writing about the need for an urban working class kid to look good is up there with Nick Hornby, as is his description of the various music-tribes he pledged allegiance to in the school yard of Dame Alice Owen’s (Bowie Boys v Prog Rockers, Rod Stewart fans v fake West Coasters).
Barbara Ellen in the Observer has already written of the book as “fascinating social history” – and one of my favourite sections is Gary’s account of the scene at the Blitz club, from which a whole generation of marvellously free spirits sprung.
When Spandau Ballet are up and running, Gary’s tales of life in a very hip – and eventually very big – band are funnier than any I’ve found in books by other music stars, and a lot less repetitive too.
One of the best bits of the book is about playing Live Aid, and Gary’s writing about the minute levels of social distinction between pop stars – after being ignored by his hero David Bowie – is brilliant, and another bit I love his meeting, in Broadmoor, with the terrifying Ronnie Kray.
The book is wonderful read and we’ve just published it – complete with a pic taken by Terry O’Neill on the cover, in which Gary is looking slightly menacing, as he was filming The Krays at the time.
Inside the pictures of Gary’s family are properly atmospheric, even slightly haunting, and the ones of the band reveal the zenith of New Romantic style.
So with the book back from the printers and looking very handsome indeed, it was time for Gary, me and the team here at Fourth Estate to head out for a few drinks to celebrate publication.
Michelle (our publicity director) had secured a room at Soho’s Groucho Club, and John Bond – the boss – was picking up the tab.
As the guests were arriving – including, could you believe it, Led Zeppelin’s awesome guitarist Jimmy Page, and, no less, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd – I was to be found not, sadly, drinking but scribbling a speech in a quiet corner.
Speech over – a great relief – it was party time, and the evening was a cracker.
Jimmy Page turned out to be both a very mellow and charming character, but sadly, he told the Fourth Estate team he wasn’t on for doing his autobiography – what a book that would be!
Meanwhile, Martin Kemp – Gary’s brother – arrived, along with Rory Bremner, Sadie Frost, Alain De Botton, Chas Smash of Madness, Kelly Hoppen, and a gang of the original style-setters from the Blitz, who were all looking superb (hats off to Chris Sullivan, who was rivalling Gary – the last of the snappy dressers – for best suit of the evening).
Gary was having a raucous time with his old mucker John Keeble – Spandau Ballet’s drummer – and was doing a good job of both thanking everyone involved with the book, and ordering more champagne – excellent man!
I hope you enjoy reading Gary’s book as much as he and everyone at Fourth Estate has enjoyed working on it!
In the US, Barack Obama’s first day of school speech has pushed all kinds of buttons. On the extreme right, he was attacked with mindless zeal, while his centrist supporters were somewhat defensive.
And this was before he gave the speech.
Lee Siegel in The Daily Beast has one of the most insightful responses to the president’s schoolroom speech. An unpredictable essayist with his own take on modern life, he recently published Against the Machine, a quirky polemic about the plight of the blogger and the excesses of online commenting – amongst other things.
Who better to analyse the president’s slick yet wholesome message?
And now I know why the entire “controversy” has been making me snicker. While liberals and conservatives were trading cliches about the president’s anodyne advice, my inner 12-year-old just wanted to cut school.
Because Obama’s speech to the kiddies is “borrowed from” William Bennett’s infamous The Book of Virtues, a “treasury of great moral stories” for social conservatives. Siegel was outraged, but I’m impressed when my president does stuff like this.
Siegel writes:
Imagine Obama warning the bankers and the businessmen that they could only be bailed out if they fulfilled their responsibilities. But he didn’t hesitate to tell that to the kids.
Okay, fine, but can we also get real? The grown-ups have always behaved one way around kids and another way around bankers (i.e. other grown-ups.) Most parents talk to their kids not quite the same way they talk to a loan officer, broker, attorney, used car salesman… any adult they have to do business with.
Sometimes this is the reason parents drink. (John Cheever’s short story The Sorrows of Gin comes to mind.) Making the switch can be stressful, but it’s part of the parental role – and parents who can’t play it are incompetent.
The good middle class parent (personified by Obama) tells the children about responsible living and tries to discourage greed, sloth and lying. All competent parents know that their own generation is guilty of these things, but the idea is a sound one: if you believe these aren’t ‘the done thing,’ you will keep your most dangerous impulses under control. (It’s how we learn to avoid red meat or pizza most days while having the occasional flesh/carbohydrate feast.)
Parents (personified by Obama) are supposed to hold children to a higher moral and behavioural standard than they hold other people. (Higher standards can be annoying, but they harm nobody.)
I know all this because I was once a child (and so was Lee Siegel) but I was also … a BABYSITTER. (Was Lee Siegel ever??) As a barely nubile babysitter, I was like middle management – and the parents I worked for were the board of directors. We babysitters were the foremen on the factory floor of childhood.
As a babysitter, your theoretical role is to uphold official values – but if you’re under a certain age (as I was) you are still a kid, so you want to critique and thumb your nose at these values. (If your charges fall asleep early enough, all this is moot. You can do whatever.)
Basically, Obama’s well-behaved speech was about one obvious (to babysitters) fact of life.
Childhood is a time for obeying the rules other people – most notably bankers, and even a few babysitters – don’t have to follow.
While this is deeply unfair, I don’t think it’s William Bennett’s fault. Parents of almost every political persuasion uphold this system and Obama, have you noticed, is a member of the parent class.
However, his advice about Facebook makes me wonder if he’s a closet babysitter.
Victor Lodato speaks to Jonathan Ruppin of Foyles
It can be very difficult to use teenage characters as narrators, to make them both plausible but also sufficiently articulate to convey the ideas of a novel. Did you find it difficult to create Mathilda’s voice?
Strangely, I didn’t find it difficult at all. Mathilda’s voice arrived in my head one morning, with great force and clarity. I knew immediately that this was the voice of a child and though the first words seemed a bit ominous (‘I want to be awful. I want to do awful things’), I knew that the words had no evil in them, but rather issued forth from a character of incredible willfulness and energy, someone refusing to be contained. I really can’t begin any piece of writing without this deep connection to a voice. If I have to struggle to get the voice right, I simply accept that this is not my story to tell, this is not a character to whom I can do justice. With Mathilda I felt, from the start, that I knew her in my body, in my breath. The music of her voice was natural to me, and I spoke every word out loud, for years, as I was writing the book. Truly, I felt more like a secretary than a writer. Where such voices come from is one of the mysteries of the writing process and one that I tend not to question.
Why did you choose to name the novel after Mathilda herself, even though the events of the book are driven by Helene’s life and death?
As I see it, this is clearly Mathilda’s book. Yes, Helene is a vital part of the story, but it is Mathilda’s quest to understand her sister that truly gives the novel its centre, its heart. Mathilda is asking the questions, Mathilda is the one trapped on the island of grief, as she calls it. And really the book is about much more than the mystery of Helene’s death. This tragedy sets the stage for Mathilda to act out her deep confusion, her anger, her sexuality. And though she does find some answers about her sister, the real reward is that she finds herself.
The world in which Mathilda and her sister are growing up is inevitably partly a creation of post-9/11 America, but you also describe a second major terrorist attack at a later date. Why did you decide to move the political landscape on from an entirely contemporary setting?
It was sort of an intuitive choice. But I guess, in some ways, by pushing the novel five minutes into the future, it allowed me to put myself (and ultimately the reader) in the same position as Mathilda – the position of an innocent in an unsteady world, not knowing what might happen next. This seemed to increase the danger and excitement of the story. The novel unfolds in a very ‘present-tense’ sort of way, with Mathilda recording events as they happen. During the writing process I was breathing with Mathilda, breath for breath, and rarely ahead of her. In wanting the reader to have this same experience, it was useful to include certain events in the larger world that would be as new to the reader as they are to Mathilda.
Mathilda’s social life reflects the intensity of friendships between teenage girls and the way that such bonds can be quite calculated. Did you find this tricky, as a man, to depict?
Again, not really. I grew up surrounded by women – I lived in a house with my mother and both grandmothers and I spent my summers at the home of my female cousins. Being a very quiet and shy child, I often put myself in corners, saying little but watching everything. In my plays my main characters are usually women. I tend to write from outside myself, sometimes from way outside myself. I have a play with all black characters (I am white). It just seems to be fertile territory for me. And it doesn’t seem so strange to me, to write from the perspective of a woman, or from a person of another race. Don’t we all have a bit of the other inside us? To recognize this, to accept this is, I think, a very civilizing thing.
Mathilda is often very manipulative; is this more of a hangover from childhood or the emergence of an adult trait?
Your question brings to mind the epigraph I included in the book, a quote from the writer G.K. Chesterton: ‘For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy’. Yes, Mathilda is manipulative, but she feels great wrongs have been perpetrated and she is willing to do whatever is necessary to bring the culprits, as she perceives them, to justice. She often lies, not least of all to herself. Over the course of the novel she begins to see her own faults more clearly and, in doing so, she becomes more forgiving of others. She moves from a merciless campaign for justice to her first fitful attempts at offering mercy. This movement, which is essentially one toward adulthood, brings her to a more grounded place, a place where her wiles and manipulations are less necessary.
Are there novels and novelists you would cite as an inspiration for writing Mathilda Savitch?
I have sometimes, playfully, imagined my book as a strange combination of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: two books, two voices, that I love – and books that, when I was young, made me want to write a novel. I’m generally inspired by a gripping voice, one with great authority, capable of taking me inside the heart and mind of another person (the ultimate virtual reality). Other first person novels that I adore: William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow; Kazuo Ishiguru’s The Remains of the Day; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping; Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy; Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Anne Enright’s The Gathering; Willa Cather’s My Antonia; Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal; Dennis Cooper’s Guide; W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.
Did writing something that you knew didn’t have to be realised as a stage production give you more freedom to tell the story just as you wanted?
One of the things that delighted me, in writing the novel, was the freedom to let the story unfold over a greater length of time. In a play, the magic circle drawn around the characters is usually, by necessity, much tighter. When crafting a play, I invariably find that I write more scenes than I can actually use. In a play too much extra material, too many diversions, can be fatal, especially if these things impede the sense of inevitability, the sense that we are witnessing characters caught in the wheels of fate. And while a novel’s power can be reduced by excess baggage as well (and, in writing mine, I do think I applied my playwright’s habit of precision), the form is, without a doubt, a roomier affair – one that allows the characters to have a few more detours of thought and situation. And, having fallen so deeply in love with Mathilda, I thoroughly enjoyed being able to give her a more generous life.
Will this be a one-off foray into novel writing or are you planning to write more fiction?
I loved writing this novel. It was incredibly challenging and I had to use all these new parts of my brain. I’ve already started a second book. And if your next question is: can you tell us something about it? My answer would be: no. I like to keep secrets. And the truth is, I really couldn’t tell you very much about it. Similar to how Mathilda Savitch began, all I have at this point is a voice, and a vague intuition as to where the story is going. As Arthur Miller once said (I’ll paraphrase): there’s a play in your blood and you write until you find it. Play, novel, poem, it doesn’t matter what I’m working on, at the beginning the writing is always a simple, and terrifying, act of faith.
The voice of Mathilda Savitch arrived one morning with a kind of crazy force. I remember staring out the bedroom window, not quite awake, when I began to speak, in an urgent whisper, the first words of the novel. As a playwright I’m used to hearing voices, but Mathilda’s was particularly insistent and wildly seductive. Though her first words seemed a bit ominous (‘I want to be awful. I want to do awful things’), I knew immediately that this was the voice of a child, that the words had no evil in them but rather issued forth from a character of great willfulness and energy, someone refusing to be contained. I spent the next several years recording everything I heard this child say. Truly, I felt more like a secretary than a writer.
I know it must sound odd, even a bit precious, to speak of Mathilda as separate from myself, as some sort of stray radio frequency buzzing in my ear. Perhaps the perception of this ‘other’ is nothing more than a trick my brain plays on itself. Nonetheless, I seem unable to get very far as a writer unless some part of me is convinced that my characters have lives and wills separate from my own. Of course, over time I began to see that Mathilda and I had a lot in common. When I started the novel, it was almost exactly one year since 9/11. Terrorism hovers in the background of Mathilda’s world as well and, I suppose, by borrowing this child’s voice, I was able to address my own fear and confusion and anger in a very open and innocent way. It was liberating to write in the voice of a child, from the perspective of someone who is still learning the world and interpreting its complexities for the first time. Interestingly, for me the novel began one year after 9/11, whereas for Mathilda the story begins one year after the death of her beloved older sister. Her parents have become frozen by sadness and fail to provide the girl with any map or guidance on how to grieve. Mathilda must find her own way across this dark landscape.
This all sounds terribly depressing but, in fact, what I recall most vividly about the writing process is the way Mathilda made me laugh. It seems that when I’m dealing with some darkness in subject matter, my mind and body instinctively hunt out the humour. I don’t think I would have been able to spend six years working on this novel without the release of laughter.
Also, at the heart of the book is a mystery that Mathilda is attempting to solve, a mystery about her sister’s death. For a long time I remained in the dark, hunting for clues. I was rarely ahead of Mathilda. We edged toward the truth together. It was this detective work, coupled with the exuberance of the voice, that kept me writing.
Today on Fifth Estate we post the final instalment of our three-part series on the future of publishing. So far, much of what we’ve heard suggests that by 2025 the world will increasingly look like a disturbing cross breed between a Philip K. Dick novel (minus the mind-bending hallucinogens), and Back to the Future 2 (minus the hoverboards and flying DeLoreans).
In parts one and two of the series, our contributors presented speculations on the radical shifts publishers and the entire publishing process will undergo in coming years – covering everything from the emergence of new genres to the form next generation reading devices will take. In our concluding piece we continue to look at ways the industry may transform in the coming years.
Scott Pack, Publisher of The Friday Project
The lovely, and increasingly bearded, Jeremy LoCurto, asked me to write a piece about what publishing will be like in the year 2025. In the spirit of our digital future I asked people on Twitter for their views in 140 characters or less.
Here is what they said:
@rblandford In the future, books will be read to us by a robot butler, who will then waltz with us in the living room before bedtime.
@adrianslatcher books will be smaller, faster (to market), not necessarily just books (see new nick cave), but still, distinctly books
@booksellercrow What will publishing be like in 2025? – Fucked. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
@nikperring I suspect a very small amount of paper will be used, if any. Is that too obvious?
@davidmbarnett Dominated by novels and autobiogs by the children of today’s celebrities, probably.
@dantjenkins Jordan will be on the Nat curriculum will be printed in student editions by Penguin, Coles Notes will also be available
@KRLitmag I see iPods with AudioBooks, more Kindle, Sony Readers, etc, an upsurge in eBooks and web publishing for 2025.
@nikperring generally, I mean; not suggesting books will be particularly small.
@orbific 2025: novels will seem archaic, like opera. People will see them as solitary and anti-social. Stories will be networked.
@matthewhill There will be no publishing, only Daniel Brown.
@dantjenkins people will reminisce about paper cuts
@jonmhowells publishing 2025. Same old moans, but more jetpacks.
@quackwriter 2025: Books will be beamed direct to people’s brains. Publishers will have to pay for the best brain space.
@KieraG23 publishing 2025: profit share or collapse.
@LaceyTiger In a reversal of fortunes, authors will receive multi-million pound advances and demand jewel encrusted lecturns for . . .
@JosaYoung originality will disappear and and only identical books colour coded for ease of genre spotting will be published
@KRLitmag Printed press still popular in 2025, but more of a “scene” – older gens holding onto past, kids trying to be sophisticated.
@LaceyTiger . . . readings, while struggling would-be movie stars will be forced to produce own films and tout their wares on the net!
@meandmybigmouth There will be a LoveFilm for books. Only one major chain will survive and they will purely stock mass market. All else sold by indies.
@brettlock In 2025 we will be in the middle of WWIII. It won’t be going well.
@magicnose forgive my zero tweets on publishing in 2025. truth is i’m pretty ignorant about all publishing so thought best i kept out
So there you have it, a snapshot of the future generated by the favoured social networking tool of the moment. A fine case of lazy journalism by me, or ‘crowdsourcing’ as @john_self so kindly put it.
Peter Collingridge, Apt Studio
I think the best, or perhaps most credible, futures are those that somehow reflect our present.
For me, this is shown by the enduring appeal of Bladerunner’s grimy, broken, recognisable city – credibility earned by the fact that it’s not a shiny, perfect, city of the future but a wholly familiar one, albeit with plug-ins .
Similarly, when I try and imagine publishing 15 years from now, I’m likely only to see the things that currently preoccupy me professionally about publishing. Those preoccupations are two quite big, but also quite simple, things:
- How enjoyment of literature can be enhanced through relationships with other media; and
- How to bring great writing to a much broader audience.
Looking at that second preoccupation first.
I think that by 2025, the problem of supply will have been “solved”.
We’ll be able to get any writing, from any era, in any language or format we like, immediately, and probably for free. At a time when many are prophecising the apocalyptic end of publishing I think it is both astonishing and comforting that, in 2009, the biggest and most powerful technology companies in our lives (Apple, Amazon, Sony, Microsoft, Google) are competing – arguably for the first time – on the same playing field, and it’s to “win” in books.
Whether “winning” means scanning the information in books (Google, Microsoft), or controlling the playback or distribution of the information in the book (Amazon, Google, Sony, Apple – allegedly ) the attention of these giant companies on a relatively small industry suggests that books may just be around for a little longer than some would suggest. Exaggerated rumours of publishing’s death etc. However, doubtless is the fact that this attention will force the business to change shape dramatically – and very quickly.
So what might this “solved” supply world look like? Well, clearly there will still be some died-in-the-wool, hard-copy book fetishists, but we’ll leave them and their print on demand, customised hardback books to one side, the perverts.
Whilst we *might* still have reading devices / physical or screen-based hardware, and getting content onto them will be trivially simple, I like to think that we are more likely to have moved not just to an invisible “cloud” based storage system, but to an invisible consumption system.
Perhaps the heads-up display, or earpiece model is too much to imagine, but I can see that text-to-speech will long have evolved beyond an argument over whether it’s a legal entitlement or a rights violation to the point where most of our interactions will be voice-based, with computers and over the air. And my money is on a Google-shaped company owning all of this, not publishers.
As Amazon demonstrated with its Stephenie Meyer coup of 2011, there are a lot of savings to be made by telescoping the publishing supply chain and cutting out all of the middle men. (The same move also swiftly settled their score with Hachette ) Removing those middle men – the publishers, printers, distributors and, later on, agents – left only author, retailer and consumer. And consumers lapped up the price savings in whatever format (Kindle, Lightning Source, Audible) and in enough numbers to easily justify such economies.
However whilst Amazon blazed the trail, Google of course swept in and did the same – but made it all available for free.
So, in 2025 there will be an ever-growing sea of writing available, and the rights holders of course will move to where the market is and whoever controls that market. Authors will be able to publish direct to Google and Amazon and reach millions, unmediated. As a result, supply won’t be the problem – it will be the creation of demand, my first preoccupation. And this is where I think publishers will need to move to, quickly.
Given the sea of information available – and the uncritical attitude of Google and Amazon to serving up that sea to whatever minority or majority wants it – people will need to carve a curated journey through the sea. Publishers need to get over their fear of going direct to consumers, and embrace disintermediation themselves.
Those publishers left standing – probably the smaller, more boutique outfits not acquired or bankrupted by Googlezon - will offer all sorts of models and products: one-off, subscription, on-demand, tailor-made. The shape these “products” will take will be various, and if my hunch
is right the content will long have moved from just words, to an experience where words, music, film, supporting material, and the idea of the networked book all combine on your terms.
Personally – I’d love it if only parts of this came true. Mainly the Enhanced Editions bits, obviously. And I appreciate that, from the current perspective of publishing, the above is far from rosy. But I also think that the history we are living through right now is a defining one for publishing.
Again, speaking personally, I think that publishers in 2009 have some very hard choices to make – to go wholeheartedly direct to consumer, to embrace collaboration with each other, to fail enthusiastically, to move beyond being editors to become producers and curators, to innovate, to invest in R&D, to attract new and fresh skills and ideas, to move quickly and learn even faster, and above all to execute really, really well.
But I believe, and I hope, that books will remain at the centre of our culture well beyond 2025. Who makes sure that happens – beyond the authors at the centre of it all – is what is up for grabs.
Sam Shone, Marketing Manager
In 2025 publishing will look almost exactly as it does today. People will still buy hardbacks mainly in the autumn and paperbacks mainly in the summer. Katie Price will, tragically, still manage top the charts with her 19th biography Confessions of a Silicon Grandmother. Publishers will be trying to guess what the next technology to revolutionise the industry will be (e-readers, Tablets, iPhones and their descendants will have become so mainstream and readily available that the novelty will have worn off and everyone will have realised that it is, in fact, easier and nicer to buy a book).
The thing about all this technology is that it’s new and it’s fun – it’s the novelty of it that is fuelling the debate. Don’t get me wrong, it is changing the industry but what it’s changing isn’t how people consume their books but how we introduce people to them. It’s a marketeer’s dream; everyone has one device onto which we can send multi-format information to engage them with our books: videos of the author, audio and even text (how novel!). What excites me about publishing 2025 is the development of even more platforms we can use to tell people about our authors and finding new ways to reach more people quickly and effectively. It will be incredibly targeted and with very little of the wastage we see in print and outdoor advertising because we will know exactly who we are advertising to, and to what frequency.
Publishing and the coming changes due to digitisation are often compared to recent and radical changes in the music industry, but let’s take a step back and look at those changes. What exactly is radical? Have you changed the way you listen to music? When you download your album from itunes do you get it bundled with artist interviews, music videos, behind the scenes footage or live tour tickets? No, you buy the music and you listen to it. You probably saw all that other stuff on TV or through a podcast and that’s why you’re buying the album. The product hasn’t changed because you still listen through speakers at home and through earphones on the move. The major change has been that music is now instantly accessible through the same product you use to consume it. There it is, that’s the radical change: ‘instant access’. I just can’t see someone wanting or needing that kind of instant access to a book because books are not designed for the same kind of instant gratification; you have to commit a fair bit of time to them in order to get anything from the experience.
It’s fair to say that the current e-reader platforms have not revolutionised the industry. I would personally love an e-reader as I wouldn’t have to print off any more manuscripts (which, lets face it, are not easy to read when stood up on a busy train), but general readers don’t have that problem – reading a book as soon as it comes in, regardless of whether it’s a word doc, PDF, handwritten or on stone tablet, isn’t their job. They don’t need an e-reader because it doesn’t solve a problem they have with the current format, nor does it provide any function that enhances their reading experience. We’ll all use them in the industry and a small section of consumers will too, but they won’t become the main format – promise.
The Tablet is likely to be the platform that brings about the biggest changes in the industry. It will be an iPod (and I assume at some point iPhone), e-reader, internet provider, portable TV and lemon zester all in one cool, stylish, Apple iTastic touch screen box. It gives the consumer something they ‘need’ – one device for everything (and an amazing marketing campaign that will convince you that you are not cool unless you own one). But will this change the way people read? I still don’t think so, but as I said before it will change the way which we introduce people to our books. These devices are about instant and short-lived gratification: a song, the news, a music video, a viral video, TV programmes on demand. Books are not about instant gratification and so the Tablet will not be giving you anything you don’t have or anything you need. Newspapers, on the other hand, are screwed. Sorry.
Did you enjoy this series? If you have any ideas for topics you’d like us to explore, or want to contribute to our next blog series contact fifthestate@harpercollins.co.uk
Why Churchill again? Hasn’t every detail of his career, especially in World War II, been flogged to death ? I thought not when I started on Finest Years, and now I am sure of it.
Yes, Churchill’s documents and papers have been exhaustively explored by historians- there are no great secrets to be found. But there remained a host of issues about which I believed there were new and important things to say. Here are a few of them:
My admiration for Churchill never flags. It has been a joy to paint his portrait in all its splendour in this book. But I believe many readers will gain perspectives on his leadership, and on the Second World War, from Finest Years which will surprise them as much as they surprised me when I came upon them. I shall be bitterly disappointed if anybody puts down the book claiming that they knew it all before. I did not- which is why it has been such a fascinating experience to research and write this epic tale.
We recently had the chance to ask Ed Macy, author of Apache and Hellfire, some questions about himself and his writing. His latest book, Hellfire tells the story of how Ed came to be the first person to fire the fearesome Hellfire missile in combat. Published by HarperPress, Hellfire is released on September 3rd.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I was an average boy, in an average place, doing average things. Then I fell in with the wrong crowd. I spent a short while as a bad lad, in a bad place, doing bad things. I quickly grew up and after a few failed relationships and 23 years serving in the Army I settled down. I now spend my spare time doing good things, all over the country (world recently) for those less fortunate. My time is spent mainly on children, and more recently, on those left behind after WW2 that have been forgotten by our government.
What books have had a lasting impact on you?
I’m a firm believer of Karma in this life. I believe my actions today will have a profound effect on what happens in the future. Those actions do not only affect me but often others and Mitch Albom’s the five people you meet in heaven is as close to what I believe as I have ever read.
I never thought I would find an aviation book that could encompass every facet of aviation to aspire to. Hugh L Mills Jr wrote about being a Little Bird pilot in Vietnam and in my eyes Low Level Hell is the epitome of what I hoped to achieve in my career. It’s not gung-ho, has no political slant and does not exaggerate though sensationalisation. It changed the way I saw my roll as a pilot and as a commander and became the bible on aviation to me. Honesty, integrity and always do you your best for every soldier no matter who they are, even if the risk is death.
As a boy I had reading difficulties. I did not get on with my English teacher and knowing I struggled to pronounce words she forced me to stand in front of the whole class and read an extract from J.R.R Tolkien’s, The Hobbit. To the raucous laughter of the rest of the class, she mocked my poor attempt. I walked out, never to attend another English lesson again leaving school without any English qualifications. As an adult I spent an inordinate amount of time learning what I had missed at school and thoroughly enjoyed reading the Hobbit to my children at home.
Why do you write?
My family were fed up and bored listening to my war stories and wouldn’t entertain anything that began with, “When I was in…” So I wrote them down.
As an author, what are you most proud (or embarrassed) of writing?
I’m not embarrassed by anything I’ve written and given my lack of formal education I couldn’t have been more proud when Apache was published.
What is your biggest failure?
Apache sold enough books in its first week to have been a number one bestseller for an entire month. I chose the week Sir Cliff Richard published his and had to settle for second. Cliff is an institution in our family and failure to be Number One turned out to be hilarious.
When you were a kid, what did you think were you going to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a professional BMX’r but my dad made my bike from broken bikes at the scrappy and it never cut the mustard.
If you could travel anywhere in time, for one day, where would you go and why?
I would travel to my own time party. I would dine and drink with leaders before taking a call outside!
Do you like reading e-books?
I’ve never had the chance yet but I’m hoping Father Christmas is reading this.
What are you working on at the moment?
I have just returned from a jungle expedition in Malaysia where I led a team looking for the bodies of a lost WW2 RAF bomber. Working on behalf of the relatives we found and exhumed the remains of the 8 man crew because the British government refused to. I am now writing up my report in which to have the men DNA tested so the relatives can give them a proper burial after 64 years.
Who are the five people, living or dead, you’d invite to a party?
To my Time Party I would invite Adolf Hitler 89, Robert Mugabe, Saloth Sar (Pol Pot), Osama bin Laden and the guy who stole my HanWag mountain boots from my back garden. I’d sit them down and take my call outside. “Ugly Five One this is Ed Macy. Your target is…”
It’s a well known fact among back-packers that people who’ve never been back-packing don’t understand what hard work back-packing is, and how hard it is getting everything organised. Unlike politicians, who sit around doing nothing all day because they’re useless and lazy, back-packers sit around doing nothing all day because they’re depressed and exhausted. Putting it all into context, you try booking the equivalent of a fortnight’s foreign holiday once a week without feeling stressed or depressed or wanting a divorce from your wife (who’s sitting right there beside you, disagreeing with every single suggestion you make, even though you’re only agreeing with what she said three minutes earlier). It’s not possible. Which is why back-packers have a higher suicide rate than accountants. At least accountants set out in the morning knowing it’s not going to be fun.
Our plan for Australia was a week in Sydney – including two nights staying with Alison’s uncle just outside – then a week driving up the Pacific Highway to Brisbane in a camper van, a couple of weeks in and around Brisbane followed by a flight to Cairns, then, three weeks later, a flight back to Brisbane for a connecting flight to Fiji.
The flights were all booked before we left the UK, but nothing else was, so we wasted our first afternoon in Sydney trying to hire a car and a camper-van. All the adverts we’d seen said car-hire prices could be as little as twenty dollars a day, so we’d budgeted accordingly. In reality, you have to book a car for at least a decade to get rates like that, and we only needed a car for two nights. Given the short length of the rental period, most places quoted us two hundred dollars a day. We ended up at No Birds Car Hire (honestly) and paid two hundred for a Corolla over three days. Then we went looking for a camper-van and started to realise it was going to cost us over a thousand dollars to do what we wanted to do, rather than the six hundred we’d budgeted. Then I had a nervous breakdown. Then we went for a drink.
I think we were in the Kings Cross area, which, at first glance, looks like a normal high street, but isn’t: One of the great things about Sydney is how varied it all is, and how easy everything is to find – in London, in some areas, it feels as if you can walk for miles without finding a decent bar, and, at midnight or one in the morning, you know there’s a good time to be had somewhere, it’s just impossible to find where it is. I don’t know if it’s because Sydney’s smaller, more modern, designed by people who weren’t born in 1712, or just whether we happened to be in the right district, but all the streets were packed with bars, hostels, sex-shops, restaurants, and dodgy looking Scandinavians intent on having a good time. It was as if the whole of London had morphed into Soho, and instead of struggling to find somewhere to start getting drunk in, we had problems choosing which bar to go into first.
Another great thing about Australia is the men’s urinals. Rather than the flooded quagmire of inch deep urine and cigarette butts that pass for floor-tiles in English, American, Canadian, and European bars, the Australians have a sort of cattle-grid system going on, so no matter how wet the pensioners and the drunk people get their own feet, the residue just goes straight through to the trough underneath. I think Australians have put more thought into this than the rest of the world because they all wear thongs on nights out (flip-flops to the rest of humanity) and have a terror of wet toes. Whatever, those cattle-grids are a definite improvement, which was a good job, really, because we spent our first night in Sydney staggering from one bar to another in an attempt to get drunk enough to forget about our budget. Then, once we were drunk enough to forget about our budget, we staggered back to our hostel for another row and some sleep.
Saturday. Our first full day. We kissed goodbye to our pensions and stumped up something like twelve-hundred dollars for a Britz camper-van we would pick up the following Saturday, and then, as I was still working on the first draft of Swap at that stage, I spent a few hours head-butting my laptop in the Starbucks by the harbour while Alison went window-shopping (and still bought three tops and a kettle (a kettle, I said. When we’re backpacking? Why?)). Then we hit the Opera House bar for the evening. While we were there, Alison doubled our mortgage on phone calls to her mum and sister telling them we were safe and gloating about the fact we were in a bar outside Sydney Opera House and they weren’t. They gloated back that their houses weren’t about to be repossessed, and ours was. I thought about texting my sister but I’d just discovered Coopers Light Ale and decided to devote the evening to that. Another great thing about Australia; when they sell ‘super-chilled’ lager, they have the temperature digitally displayed on the pump so you can see that it really is cold. In the UK, most times, even if the super-chilled lager is slightly cooler than room-temperature, they put it in the microwave before they give it to you. One thing they haven’t worked out down there, though, is glass sizes. It varies from bar to bar, so ordering a beer can be traumatic. A pot, for instance, is smaller than a half-pint (I ordered one by mistake and cried when the barman gave it to me); a midi is just bigger than a half-pint but still nowhere near big enough, and, occasionally, they also serve pint glasses as well. In the end, I stopped asking what measures they did and just started asking for their biggest, coldest glass of draught lager. If that turned out to be a pot, I ordered another half-dozen to keep me from thinking about how much money we were spending. And a half pint of white wine to keep Alison moderately agreeable as well.
Sunday morning was one of the highlights of our first stay in Sydney for me. Crunching hangover, had to be out of the hostel by ten, had to pick up the hire-car, had to get out to Ali’s uncle’s place in the suburbs by two in the afternoon (why does she tie us down to these things?), so we woke up early and decided to go for a run. I don’t think I’ll ever go for a jog again without thinking about what it was like to jog through the botanical gardens to Sydney Harbour; In England, when I go for a jog, I always feel as if the everyday folk are looking at me as if I’m a bit of a freak; does anyone else get the feeling passers-by think you’re a thief or a flasher when you’re out for a run? In Sydney, on a nice sunny bright Sunday morning, if you’re not jogging, you’re in the minority. We tried to finish up with a Rocky style sprint up the opera house steps, but age and alcohol consumption got the better of us. We did the first eight steps, collapsed for a quiet sob, then got a taxi back to our hostel. What with the four hour hike to the bathroom, we were getting a bit short on time.
And that was it. Our first few nights in Sydney were over. We got packed up and strapped our worldly possessions to our backs, which, for Alison, wasn’t as easy as it sounds. What with the hair-straighteners, the hair-dryers, the portable air-conditioning unit, the six pairs of high-heels, the ten pairs of flat-heels, the sandals, the espadrilles, the black boots, the tan boots, the trainers, the flip-flops, the wellingtons (in green with smiley sheep faces on them), the fluffy bunny slippers with the big ears, the three sets of carefully co-ordinated bikinis and military uniforms to go with each set of footwear, the cattle-prod to keep me away in the dead of the night, her rucksack was rather heavy, and she needed assistance to get it on: After she had re-packed it for the sixty-seventh time and announced she couldn’t understand why it was so heavy, I and five hostel staff levered it up onto the bed. She then sat down in front of it and got her arms through the straps. I and the five hostel staff then lifted her up to her feet. And then the complaining started. And continued. And got louder. So, a word of advice about back-packing. If you’re married, don’t. Or, if you really feel that you have to, go in different directions. We were definitely talking about divorce by the time we got to No Birds Car Hire and picked up our Corolla. And things were about to get worse. We were leaving Sydney. We were heading for Picton. We were going to stay with a real Australian family. And guess what? They could speak Welsh.
Earlier this summer Francis Wheen read a brilliant excerpt from his upcoming book, Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age of Paranoia, at Fourth Estate’s 25th Anniversary celebration at the Roundhouse in Camden. In the video below, he narrates a ludicrous scene from the longest obscenity trial in British history, where for three weeks the court focused its attention on the anatomy of Rupert Bear…
Strange Days Indeed, tells the story of the 1970’s, a decade of collective nervous breakdown, financial meltdown, and political turmoil - a time not unlike our own. With his acute sense of the absurd Francis Wheen slices through the melange of mistrust and conspiratorial fever to recount an era of power cuts, military coups, economic anarchy and the arrival of Uri Geller. Strange Days Indeed publishes on September 3rd.
It was almost ten years ago that I first heard the tale of the great Nez Perce exodus of 1877. Even though I’d never been to the north-west United States, I was so gripped by the drama, the heroism and the injustice of these events that I resolved immediately to retrace the exodus one day, and learn all that I could about this Native American tribe and their enemies. Finally, in the summer of 2006, I got the chance to start my journey — I flew to Seattle, rented a battered old minivan, and set out for eastern Oregon, and ‘Nez Perce Country’.
The tribal homelands of the Nez Perce are set in stunning, rugged Western-alpine scenery, where the foaming Snake and Salmon Rivers collide. The tribe had held these lands for up to 13,000 years when the first European settlers arrived, promising the Nez Perce Christian salvation and profitable trade. Instead, when gold was discovered in the local hills, a swarm of squatters poured onto the land, fencing off stolen territory and clashing violently with the Nez Perce. The settlers, convinced that their conquest of the West was divinely-ordained destiny, pressured the tribe to sell their most treasured jewel, the pristine Wallowa valley, but the young Chief Joseph had made a death-bed promise to his father never to relinquish the land in which his ancestors lay buried — “My son, never forget my dying words. This country holds your father’s body. Never sell the bones of your father and mother.”
Finally, in the summer of 1877, after one humiliation too many, a band of young Nez Perce warriors snapped and went on the rampage, killing fifteen settlers. The United States Army rushed to fatally punish the tribe, who fled into the mountains — the great Nez Perce exodus had begun.
What happened next defies belief. Over the next four months over 700 men, women and children travelled around 1,700 miles over the most inhospitable terrain in the West, pursued by four armies. It’s an astonishing tale of human resilience and hope, and it was a tremendous privilege to be able to travel in the footsteps of the tribe.
But as I made the journey, the evidence mounted of a remarkable historical turnaround. For the descendants of those first settlers, the white ranchers and farmer and loggers living in the north-West today, have learned the lesson that young Joseph’s father was so desperate to impart, of loving and protecting your homeland — but they have learnt too late. The ravaged forests, dammed rivers, open coal mines and polluted waters that now define the old Nez Perce homelands made it all too clear — that the settlers sold their fathers’ bones, and now they are paying the price. And that’s what makes the tale of the Nez Perce so compelling to me, that not only does it teach us a lesson about the strength of the human spirit, but also about how man should occupy the earth.
Brian Schofield is currently the assistant travel editor, culture and news review writer at the Sunday Times. His first book, Selling Your Father’s Bones, is part history and part travelogue through the wilderness of the stunning landscape of the continental United States. It was published in paperback by HarperPress this July.
I Know This Much is the upcoming autobiography from Gary Kemp, guitarist of Spandau Ballet. In his wonderfully written memoir, Gary not only tells the story of the band, but also evokes the atmosphere of a colourfull and provocative time period: the 1980s. Check out this great film of Gary discussing his book and reading selected passages:
I Know This Much: from Soho to Spandau will be released on September 3rd. It is published by Fourth Estate.
Nearly three months after its launch, the Anonthology continues to be a resounding success. An anonymous collection of short stories from some of our biggest authors, the Anonthology is a literary experiment challenging fundamental assumptions about authorship. Since launch, we’ve had nearly 8,000 online reads — partly due to a great plug on the Guardian blog!
This October we’ll be revealing the authors of each piece on Fifth Estate. So, if you haven’t put your guesses in yet, it’s not too late. Go to www.anonthology.com to read these pieces and enter the competition. There are still five very special Fourth Estate books up for grabs.
To date, 5,500 physical copies have made their way into the hands of book lovers through numerous channels, including: Plectrum, Untitled Books at Port Eliot festival, Hay festival, iheartfreebooks, Foyles’ Bookshop as part of the 25th Anniversary exhibition, and the Roundhouse, Camden. In addition, we have great partnerships with Stack Magazines, and Nemonymous coming up.
And if you haven’t downloaded a copy to keep, what are you waiting for? You can now read the Anonthology on your Iphone so you can enjoy short anonymous fiction on the train, the plane, wherever! Anonymity has no boundaries.
Now, as I mentioned, one of our upcoming partnerships is with Nemonymous — a magazine that has been conducting similar experiments of its own for some time now. A Sci Fi magazine, Nemonymous is compiled of stories contributed and commissioned anonymously by author and editor D F Lewis. Seeing as we are both interested in experimenting with anonymity in fiction, we saw several opportunities for working together. The lovely editor of Nemonymous has agreed to distribute copies for us and has also written a real-time review of Anonthology – our first – which you can read here
We’ve also asked him to say a few words about his own project, Nemonymous….
NEMONYMOUS
by DF Lewis
Above is the cover of the first edition of ‘Nemonymous’ from 2001, arguably the world’s first ever publication deliberately presented as an anonymous self-contained collection of multi-authored fiction stories. There has been, of sorts, an edition each year since then — all variations on that anonymous theme, essentially with the same ethos of Nemonymity, mixing genre with literary with absurdist with intangibility…
Therefore, I was delighted to see the arrival of ‘ANONthology’ from Harper Collins, a story-by-story review of which I have recently posted here.
In the early days, it was very much seen as a movement. Many of its pioneer authors showed their appreciation by writing about the experience of having their work published by Nemonymous, some of which were shown at Captain Nemo’s Ark.
When told that I had been invited to write a brief article here, some more recent authors in the publication offered their input and below are just a Nemonymous threesome:
“One thing I have liked with Nemonymous is that even though maintaining the same initial premise, the form and structure and apparatus around this has kept changing. No issue is a clone of a prior one, whether it be in how you have changed the submission process, the name information, the theme…” — Anonymous
“It’s good for the craft, the writing; but not necessarily good for sales….new ways of viral promotion need to be researched/developed that fit in with the Nemonymous credo….” — Anonymous
“Well, if I was in your position I think I would write about the thrill of receiving anonymous stories when you put out the call for them, preceding a new Nemo edition. I imagine it to be a little like sea fishing, you’ve baited your hook and await the first nibble/bite etc. Are you going to hook something small yet gaily coloured and vivacious or could it be something much larger, darker and with rows of huge teeth that will threaten to devour its captor? It’s the excitement of the unknown, is the story by a roughhewn undiscovered writer that shows promise and with your help can flourish into a well-cut gem, or could the next anonymous entrant be a world-famous best-selling novelist who felt the urge to do something different?” – Anonymous
I am too close to Nemonymous to be able to express my essential feeling about it, but I think the above come close and better expressed than if I sat for hours honing my thoughts!
Perhaps a few dry points of history, however, from me:
Each of the first five annual issues (2001-2005 inclusive) of Nemonymous was what I called a ‘megazanthus’: i.e. a cross between a magazine (or, rather, a literary journal) and a book anthology. The authors of the stories were not named at all in the actual issue in which they appeared but in the subsequent one. The latest three issues (2007-2009 inclusive) have been large book-shaped anthologies. Each has its authors’ names randomised on the back cover and a year later assigned to the correct story in the subsequent issue. In recent years, a guess-the-author competition has been offered to readers.
The first three issues contained stories that were contracted for publication before I knew the authors’ identities myself! The later issues gave a choice to submitting authors whether or not to email it anonymously.
Nemonymous was originally inspired by my study (since the nineteen-sixties) of ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ literary theory and by an original experiment in the neutralising of author name-prejudice. Furthermore, the effect of reading a multi-authored group of anonymous stories has been said by many to lend itself to a ground-breaking ‘gestalt’ effect.
But it’s all far more exciting than that! Just look at all the reviews. :)
In part one of our series on the future of publishing we received a rich variety of predictions for the year 2025. In one contributor’s vision of the possible future, it was foreseen that Croydon would undergo a flowering — a renaissance in arts and culture. Another predicted the advent of electronic paper that would feel, act and look like a book — only hyperlinked and uploadable. One contributor maintained that physical books would continue to dominate the industry.
This week on Fifth Estate our series on the landscape of publishing in 2025 continues. For several years now, publishing commentators have been predicting revolutionary change in the industry. Here at Fifth Estate, we thought it would be fun to explore different views of how this might play out. This is the second in a three part series.
Rahim Hirji, Director of Corporate Development
There will be no books in 2025 – well, not in the form that we know them today. With time scarce and technology advancing at a speed faster than a pandemic outbreak, we will see a merging of content across all media. Books will become productions and publishers will become producers, not just of fiction and non fiction, but of stories, ideas and visions. All content, not just books, will be digital with every single book in the world instantaneously available, anywhere, anytime. There will be no physical book and I will not need a bookshelf. I’ll be able to read whatever I want on whichever device I want, be that on my phone, tablet, laptop or TV. I’ll never need to worry about where my book is, because it’ll be stored in a virtual Googazon cloud, that will not only store the last page that I read, but will also serve me up the next piece of media content that I need and want to read or watch, be that the news, the latest Gladwell theory of wow, or episode of season 24 of 24. Everything will be available in all languages immediately, in human simulated audio and in word form. Rights will extend globally, as international boundaries become more blurred. And publishers – publishers will work together, invest together and join forces with other media producers. Stranger things have happened. Who knows what publishing in 2025 will be like? What we do know is that technology knows no boundaries and the future has not yet been written.
Ben North, Creative Director
There will be at least six new genres that we either don’t think will work or haven’t considered yet. This is because the future isn’t predicted, it’s made by interested and interesting people having ideas and doing things. Sadly, in 2025 most publishers will spend far too much time trying to predict what will happen in 2030 or 2035. E-readers will be dead, and we will be reading on … whatever device works best to read on. (The central question with this sort of technology is nearly always: does A) work better than B) for my current needs? If the answer is ‘yes’, then A), be it a book, a convergent digital device or a spaniel with a chalkboard hung from its collar, is the thing you need.)
Even so, I’ll make some guesses. Almost none of them will be right. Which I guess will still make them more useful than most futurology.
See you there …
Hannah MacDonald, Publisher, Collins
Summer holidays in 2025: My daughter sulks by a swimming pool reading interactive horror stories on her phone. She subscribes to over twenty small, edgy online publishers who keep her supplied with the slightly sexy, scary morality tales that are to her taste. She watches a lot of movies on her phone, the screen is the same size as the packets of cigarettes she hides in her drawers. But she still reads because she likes the way she can be involved in the stories — change the events and endings according to her mood.
I don’t spoil it by telling her that most of her suppliers aren’t as independent as they seem. The ones with the sillier titles (Kinetic Kink, creatOR) are owned by publishing corporates who monitor content and activity in the silence of near paperless offices.
I meanwhile sulk in the shade reading a new paperback called Teenagers: How I Coped by the-ex minister for social mobility, Jordan. I am one of a sizeable minority who still prefer paper.
Jeremy LoCurto, Graduate Trainee
In ETA Hoffmann’s short story, “The Choosing of the Bride”, a goldmaker produces a magical object: a blank book that becomes whatever you most want to read. Most readers would love a magic book like this. And in a sense, now you can have one — in the last couple of years, this alchemy has sort of been brought to reality with the advent of e-readers. So many people are now asking: is the future of publishing written in e-ink?
I don’t think so. E-readers aren’t good enough today, and won’t be around in 2025. Hoffmann wrote his short story almost 200 years ago, and the modern e-reader still creaks with the cobwebs of a two-hundred year old vision dreamed up by a gothic writer. In 2025 e-readers will have been long since swallowed up into convergent media devices, like the forthcoming Apple Tablet, and publishers will step up efforts to produce ‘enhanced’ content to ensnare the user in the galaxy of the digital book (and make them pay more for it). By then, users will micro-purchase slivers of extra material to build a more in depth reading experience. A new layer of personnel will be added to the publishing process to create digital media productions. They’ll be more akin to producers than editors, and work to build book galaxies for a short list of select mass market titles.
I imagine (read: I hope) that by 2025 there will be a generation of devices that project atmospheres consisting of image and sound. By then books remain narrative driven text, but are orbited by material beamed out of the screen. So when I read A Moveable Feast, satellite maps tracing Hemingway’s Paris hover around me, and archived historical snapshots of the location of the Café des Amateurs float around the walls like framed clouds. Soundtracks of Parisian music from the 20’s are beamed into my headphones. If I want, I can activate a 360 panorama view of Hemingway’s study at Finca Vigia or turn the walls of my room into a video of Cuban fishing and Kudu hunts.
In 2025 available technology might finally be more in step with our imaginations. But even then, I predict that at least 70% of publishing will still be physical books. The technology behind the book is proven: they are portable, cheap, easy to use, and durable — and engage our imaginations like no other medium.
‘All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels’ - Leonard Cohen
‘The news is sad but it’s in a song so it’s not so bad’ – from The Favourite Game
In his short story ‘Career Move’, Martin Amis created a kind of alternative version of our universe — one that wasn’t so much parallel per se as just enjoyably wonky. Here poets are fêted as superstars. Forever jetting off for meetings in Hollywood, versifiers have the arduous task of dealing with adoration, good lunches and vast sales figures. Screenwriters in the ‘Career Move’ realm, meanwhile, toil in abject obscurity. Their efforts are published to little acclaim in small and largely unread magazines.
Swap pop stars for screenwriters, and we have a tale that, in a way, is curiously apposite to the career of Leonard Cohen. The Favourite Game, though widely reviewed, sold only a thousand or so copies when it was first published in 1963. And part of what persuaded Cohen to throw his lot in with music three years later, which he has admitted in hindsight seems ‘mad’ and ‘a very foolish strategy’, was an attempt to address an ‘economic crisis’. Poetry and fiction, his vocations until then, were simply not bringing in enough money for Cohen to survive on. From this position, it is fascinating, if facile and, of course, ultimately futile, to wonder what would have happened had this novel been a bestseller. A world without that voice, those songs surely is almost as unimaginable to many of us as, perhaps sadly, a planet where poets always fly first class. Equally, almost everyone coming to this novel today is armed with an idea of Cohen as a singer-songwriter. The book’s original readers knew Cohen, if at all, as a poet.
In the absence of a bout of amnesia or some sort of weird mind-wiping device, we can’t, obviously, unlearn what we know about Cohen. Or think we know, at least. Naturally this novel should, as it really deserves, be read as a freestanding, brilliant and inventive work of fiction in its own right. It is, however, also unavoidably a key and irremovable piece in the continuum of Cohen’s art. One that contains certain themes — the allure of the sacred and the profane, and the pain of love and loss, in particular — that admirers of his songs can immediately recognize. Its genre too — fictionalized autobiography — after all, also forms the basis of his musical output. In fact, the distinctions between Cohen the songsmith and Cohen the wordsmith all but dissolve the closer one looks.
Cohen was born and raised in Montreal’s affluent Westmount district. Cohen drew a fictionalized portrait of his formative years in his debut novel. His father, Nathan, died prematurely when Cohen was just nine years old. The young Cohen paid tribute to his father by burying in the garden a note to the dead man, slipped inside an old bow tie. He has said that composing this message, a few lines of verse, was his ‘first experience … with that kind of heightened language that [he] later recognized as poetry’.
The Cohens were observant Jews involved in the garment business. Leonard’s maternal grandfather was the rabbi Solomon Klein. Klein had compiled a thesaurus of Talmudical interpretations and played an important role in Cohen’s education, taking him to the library and instilling in him a love of the traditions and language of the faith. (During the 1990s when Cohen entered a Buddhist retreat and was finally confirmed as a monk, he stated that he wasn’t ‘looking for a new religion’ but was ‘quite happy with the old one, with Judaism’.)
This did not, however, preclude the young Cohen from accompanying his Irish nanny on her visits to the Catholic churches that are such a feature of Montreal’s architecture. These, too, would leave an indelible mark on Cohen’s creative imagination. While certainly chronicling an encounter with a friend who served him Constant Comment tea in her riverside loft, the song ‘Suzanne’, for example, actually offers an elliptical portrait of Montreal. The fusion of religious and nautical imagery in the lyrics was directly inspired by Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, the sailors’ church in the city harbour. ‘I have to keep coming back to Montreal,’ Cohen once observed, ‘to renew my neurotic affiliations.’
By the time Cohen entered McGill University in 1951, he had discovered the poetry of Federico García Lorca and was playing the guitar. He would go on to name his daughter after the Spanish poet and set his own translation of Lorca’s poem ‘Pequeño vals vienés’ to music with ‘Take this Waltz’.
At McGill, he formed a country and western band called The Buckskin Boys who played at college dances and functions. Living during this period ‘beside jukeboxes’, Cohen was also writing verse in earnest, encouraged by his tutors, the Montreal poets Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. (They were men who Cohen credited with ‘acting in many ways’ as his absent father.)
Cohen’s first publication came in 1954, when ‘A Halloween Poem to Delight My Younger Friends’ appeared in CIV/n, a shortlived literary quarterly founded by Layton, Dudek and Aileen Collins. His debut collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in the McGill Poetry Series in 1956, the year Cohen left Montreal for New York and a postgraduate course at Columbia University.
Cohen’s stint at Columbia was relatively brief, but there he met fellow student Anne Sherman. An intelligent and liberal-minded brunette, Sherman would serve as a longstanding muse and provide the basis for the character Shell in The Favourite Game. His spell in New York coincided with the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Greenwich Village, Manhattan’s bohemian enclave, was then in its Beat movement heyday. At the Village Vanguard, Cohen caught Jack Kerouac, whose epoch-defining novel On the Road remained unpublished at that point, reciting verse backed by a bebop jazz combo.
As Cohen has often stated since, music and writing were two activities that he himself had ‘never really separated’. His writing, he has maintained, ‘grew out [of an] interest in folk music and the lyrics of folk music’. And similarly, he has said: ‘I always felt there was an invisible guitar behind the prose writing that I’ve done and even the verse that I’ve done.’ Even in this early poetic period the guitar, or at least music, was not entirely invisible. Back in Montreal, Cohen often gave recitals accompanied by musicians at a jazz club in Dunn’s Steak House, an eatery famed for its ‘black radish with onions and chicken fat’.
While Cohen had already established his own poetic voice before exposure to the Beats, he shared many of their preoccupations and sensibilities. Although more generally associated with the 1960s, it was in the previous decade that antiestablishment ideas about sexual liberty, spiritual fulfilment, Eastern religions and the consciousness-improving possibilities of drugs took on a greater urgency for artists, intellectuals and writers. It was Beat writers such as Kerouac and Ginsberg, along, arguably, with J. D. Salinger, who helped to popularize Zen Buddhism in the West. And like Kerouac, whose parents were of French- Canadian extraction, Cohen took amphetamines to enhance his concentration and used hashish and opium in the intellectually questing spirit of Baudelaire or De Quincey. (Though they would also be used, along with wine, to stave off the depression that dogged Cohen for nearly half a century. More recently he has said of drugs: ‘The recreational, the obsessional and the pharmaceutical — I’ve tried them all. I would be enthusiastically promoting any one of them if they worked.’)
Cohen is, in many ways, much more a product of the 1950s — the era when Henry Miller’s Sexus and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man were denounced as pornography — than of the countercultural maelstrom that came later. A few months older than Elvis Presley, he experienced the arrival of rock ’n’ roll not as a teenager, like, say, fellow Hank Williams fan Bob Dylan, but as a published poet in his twenties.
With a summer back in Montreal under his belt, writing and working as a counsellor at a youth camp where his duties included leading folk-singing sessions and teaching the kids to devise haiku, Cohen had his next collection, The Spice-Box of Earth, accepted by the prestigious Toronto house of McClelland & Stewart. An arts scholarship from the Canadian Council gave him the funds to travel, and so, in December 1959, Cohen headed to London with the aim of working on a novel. ‘I started to write novels because I couldn’t read other people’s,’ he claimed in 1970.
Though the book, an early draft of The Favourite Game, progressed well enough, Cohen found London drab and damp. The weather forced him to purchase what would be immortalized as the ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ from Burberry in Piccadilly. Another London shopping trip saw him acquire the green Olivetti typewriter that his poems, novels and lyrics were typed on for over twenty years — and which can be spied on the back cover of his Songs from a Room LP.
Wandering in the City, after a dental appointment in the East End, Cohen chanced upon a branch of the Bank of Greece. Entering it, he was greeted by a teller, who, in stark contrast to the rest of the financial district’s pasty-faced inhabitants, looked tanned and healthy. Learning that the man had just returned from Greece, Cohen booked himself a one-way ticket to Athens. From there he made his way to Hydra, an idyllic island that, while lacking electricity and telephones, boasted a lively community of expat artists and writers. (In due course, Cohen, who in September 1960 bought a house on Hydra, turned the eventual arrival of overhead cables on the island into ‘Bird on a Wire’.)
Among those who Cohen befriended there were the Norwegian novelist Axel Jansen and his girlfriend, Marianne Ihlen, a former model, and their son, Axel. When Jansen left, Cohen and Ihlen struck up a relationship that endured for a decade and whose dissolution was meditated upon in song.
Dividing his time between Hydra and Canada, where The Spice-Box of Earth had been published to enormous acclaim in 1961, Cohen’s literary star was on the rise. Although it went through several rounds of revisions before it was published, The Favourite Game was awarded the $4,000 Prix Littéraire du Québec in 1964.
The poetry collections Flowers for Hitler (1964) and Parasites of Heaven (1966) that followed would, however, prove more controversial as did his next — and to date last — novel, Beautiful Losers (1966).
Eschewing the largely autobiographical bent of his debut, Cohen had vowed to write a ‘liturgy … [a] big confessional oration, very crazy, but using all the techniques of the modern novel … pornography … suspense, humor and conventional plotting’.
The final novel would be preoccupied with sublime grace and redemption and its recurring motifs were those of submission, saintliness and suicide. Central to its freewheeling narrative was the historical figure of Catherine Tekakwitha, the Mohawk who became the first Native Canadian saint. Cohen later maintained: ‘She spoke to me … she embodied in her own life, in her own choices, many of the complex things that face us always.’
Cohen wrote most of the book sitting on the terrace of his house on Hydra, a portable Dansette record player with a copy of Ray Charles’s The Genius Sings the Blues LP on almost constant rotation, normally by his side. Consuming a heady dose of amphetamines, Cohen often tapped away for twelve hours at a time. Perhaps not surprisingly given this regimen, when he finished a draft of the novel in 1965, he ‘flipped out completely’ and, hallucinating for about a week, was hospitalized on the island.
A gust of wind later carried Cohen’s only copy of the manuscript into the Aegean Sea — fortunately his New York publisher had a carbon copy.
The novel, like its predecessor, went through several further drafts but when it was completed Cohen regarded it as the best thing he’d ever done. ‘It’s a technical masterpiece. It was written with blood,’ he said, not long after its publication and scarcely exaggerating. The novel, however, initially polarized opinions (see ‘Nothing But Raves’ ) and sold modestly. By now, Cohen was growing tired of his peripatetic, centcounting existence. Left with little in the bank, he contemplated a career in broadcasting before hatching the slightly unorthodox plan of solving his financial woes by moving to Nashville and becoming a country singer.
Heading initially to New York, Cohen wound up staying in the city for most of the next two years — and a good part of that lodging in the notorious Chelsea Hotel. Located at 222 West 23rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and counting Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Patti Smith and Sid Vicious as boarders at one point or another, the Chelsea in the late 1960s was the residential epicentre of New York’s artistic demi-monde. Cohen was the right man in the right place at the right time. While his attempts to woo Nico, the Velvet Underground’s icily Teutonic chanteuse, didn’t go quite so well, Cohen befriended the then-popular folk singer Judy Collins who recorded a version of ‘Suzanne’ for her album In My Life in 1966. And on 30 April 1967, Collins was performing at an anti-Vietnam concert in New York’s Town Hall. Collins had persuaded Cohen to appear. Shaking with fear, Cohen mounted the stage. His voice virtually a whisper, and his guitar audibly out of tune, he got halfway through the first verse of ‘Suzanne’ before stopping. Making his apologies, he fled. From the wings, however, he could hear the audience urging him to return. Collins gently ushered Cohen back into the limelight. Finishing ‘Suzanne’, he was met with rapturous applause. A pop star had just been born.
Leonard Cohen’s two novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, were reissued by Blue Door this July. The extraordinary and inimitable singer-songwriter’s classic novels are among his most critically acclaimed literary work, echoing the dark poetry and wry humour of his timeless songs of loss, love, sex and religion.
Daniel Clay, author of the critically acclaimed novel Broken, returned to the UK recently from extensive travels through Australia. Over the next couple of months Fifth Estate will be publishing his travelogue in several parts as The Australia Diaries. Keep tuned in as we follow Daniel’s account of his trek across Australia: from Sydney, to Morton Island, Fraser Island, Cairns, and Cape Tribulation, along with many other exotic destinations down under.
Australia’s great, isn’t it? Even without ever having been there, my wife and I have always known it should be where Europe is: Same language. Better climate. Better surf. How many fewer wars would there have been if Germany and France had been on the other side of the world, and Australia had been just on the other side of the channel? Definitely at least fifty-two.
In March of this year, being middle-aged and dispirited, we decided to spend the equivalent of an acrimonious divorce on a round-the-world trip. We didn’t have much of a clue where to head, we just knew it had to include Australia: My wife’s got an uncle who lives in Picton, just outside Sydney, who she’s not seen since she was three, and I’ve got relatives out there too (I have no idea where; I just know a few headed that way in the seventies on £10 assisted fares, never to be heard of again).
So, finally, at six a.m. on a cool Friday morning, via Singapore, a small Indonesian island called Langkawi, another small island called Hong Kong, and with a fifty/fifty chance our rucksacks were in the hold of the plane we were travelling on, we found ourselves looking out of the window and seeing the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House for the very first time: Sydney, the little old Chinese lady sitting next to me whispered. Sydney, I mumbled back. And that, me being English, was the only thing I could think to say to her during the entire eighty-six hour flight.
The first thing we realised when we touched down was that Oz isn’t quite the laid-back paradise Australians would have you believe. Even by British standards, airport security was ridiculous, and we spent two hours in a queue while customs officials interrogated the little old Chinese lady who’d been sitting quietly next to me, then waved us drunken Europeans through with a grin and a friendly G’day. The second thing that struck us was how organised things were. Rather than the cavalry charge that passes for a taxi-rank in most airports, there was an Alton Towers style barrier system going on, with a Fijian looking bloke wearing an all white suit, naval cap, white gloves — and, I think, a machine gun — waving people into various taxis. Once inside the cab, though, normal service was resumed: We have no idea if the driver was Australian or not, because all he did was grunt at us. He was definitely a fully paid up member of the union of taxi-drivers, though, because he didn’t know how to find where we were staying and got more and more annoyed with us because we didn’t know either. Some things are the same the world over. Sort of reassuring to know.
Not only was this our first time Down Under, it was our first time in hostels. Having stayed in quite a few now, we’d class this first one — Harbour City Backpackers, in the brilliantly named district of Woolloomooloo — as being in the upper end of the hostel-market. Because we hadn’t, our first impressions were that it was a dive: Waiting in line with ten or so other creased and crumpled sweaty people with their worldly possessions strapped to their backs was a bit of a come-down after three weeks in four-star hotels: When we were told our room wouldn’t be ready for another few days we stashed out stuff in the TV room with the obligatory teenage girl asleep on the floor in the corner and hit the city. We hadn’t slept for something like thirty hours by this time and were dangerously close to divorcing as we argued over which way we should head, but all that was forgotten once we stumbled upon the harbour: With the bridge and the opera house and a couple of liners in the port, blue sky, sparkling water, the obligatory Irish bloke dressed as an Aboriginee playing a didgeridoo, it has to be one of the coolest places on earth. We sat outside one of the many quayside restaurants and tried to take it all in: I tried to take it all in with a nice cold lager but, as it was only eight in the morning, Alison gave me that look and ordered me a latte instead.
Knowing we only had six weeks to do the entire east coast of Australia, we got sightseeing straight away. First things first, a harbour cruise. We joined a few hundred Chinese people with scary looking cameras on a catamaran and set off for a two hour cruise. It’s amazing how huge the harbour is, and how, once you’re away from the bridge and the opera house, it feels much more like a coast-line than a natural bay. It’s also amazing how loud the whirr of a few hundred digital cameras can be, and how high Chinese people can jump while doing a V for victory sign with both their hands. Every time either of us looked mildly awake we would be besieged by twenty-five thousand of them wanting us to take their pictures. Again. We had photo-fatigue by the time we got off and headed back to the hostel for a proper row and some sleep.
Our bags were still there, as was the sleeping girl, and our room was ready: After living together for almost twenty years, we’d decided to spare the dorm-dwellers our love-making rituals and splashed out on a private room. If you’re unlucky enough to be married and are thinking of doing the same, I wouldn’t bother. Hostels are only cheap if you’re in a dorm, and, as we discovered later, we could have had an apartment for the week we were in Sydney for much the same we paid out in hostels: At between sixty and ninety dollars for the two of us to have a room with a shared bathroom for one night, the hostel life isn’t always as cheap as it sounds. It’s always an experience, though, and quite often more entertaining than staying in a hotel: The hostel we were in was in an old brick colonial style building that really reminded me of my old primary school. Built in 1990, it’s one of the oldest buildings in Sydney. It felt a bit spit and sawdust but was really close to the botanical gardens and the harbour. Our bathroom was just a bit further away, about four hours down the corridor. I set off on the adventure of having a shower and grabbed the first empty cubicle I found.
The first thing I noticed was that someone had glued a razor-blade to the floor-tiles beneath the shower-head. I was so busy looking at that I didn’t realise someone had also stolen the shower-head. I turned the water on and nearly got decapitated by a high-powered jet of water angled at right where my head would have been if I hadn’t been staring at the razor-blade and wondering, Who put that there? Why? The next cubicle along was alright though, and my first shower Down Under ultimately turned out okay, although I did wonder what headlines it might have generated if I had been decapitated: Debut author loses head and cuts feet in kinky hostel sex game. Great career move, says agent. Wife devastated at early return home.
I set off on the four hour trek back to our room and discovered Alison still hadn’t stopped moaning about the lack of air-conditioning, en-suite, mini-bar, plug-sockets for the three types of hair-straighteners she had in her back-pack, and all the other major disappointments in her life that had somehow been caused by marrying me. I put head-phones on while we got ready to go out for the rest of our first day in Sydney and reflected on how strange life was, really: We were further away from England than we’d ever been, and it was just like being at home.
Daniel Clay is the author of Broken – an utterly original, totally compelling debut novel, written in a fresh and distinctively British voice. Called ‘bold, prescient, engaging, and oddly touching’ by the Guardian, Broken was published to critical acclaim. The Harper Perennial paperback edition appeared earlier this year.
The Whole Day Through is the first novel of mine set in Winchester, but anyone who knows my work and knows Winchester will have recognised a thinly veiled version of King Alfred’s ancient capital in my previous novels, Facing the Tank, Tree Surgery for Beginners and Friendly Fire. Although I now live in deepest Cornwall, I’m a Hampshire Hog, born on the Isle of Wight and raised in Winchester. I left for university in 1980 but still think of Winchester as my home town. A short train ride from London Waterloo, Winchester makes for an excellent day out and the following route from the station will let you take in many of the locations drawn on in The Whole Day Through while enjoying the historic beauties of the city.
Emerging from the station, turn right, following the footpath along the top of the railway embankment and right again over the dizzyingly high railway bridge. Turn left at the other side and cross the road. You’re now at the foot of Oram’s Arbour, the site of an ancient encampment and where Ben takes the phone call from Chloë and, later, dawdles to watch children playing rounders. His and Bobby’s house is down in Fulflood, across the Arbour to your right. Cross the grass on the diagonal path — you’ll find a splendid view of the city spread out below you as you climb. Face away from the view and continue to the left at the top of the Arbour. Number 5 Clifton Road, the first of the two houses with very steep gables, was our first house in Winchester, where we lived when I was a choirboy. Walk past the front of the house and down Clifton Road to the junction with Romsey Road. Up the hill to your right lies the hospital where Ben works — worth a detour if you’re a fan of the polychrome buildings of Butterworth — and the prison where Hardy’s Tess was hanged. If these don’t tempt you, cross the road and continue along the pedestrianised delights of St James Terrace, where our lovers each walk in the book’s final chapters. Across the railway cutting to your left is what was the Royal Green Jackets’ barracks.
At the end of St James Terrace turn left down the hill and almost immediately on your right you’ll see the corner house that was the model for Professor Jellicoe’s naturist hideaway in the novel. As you can see I took tremendous liberties with the truth, but I hope you can see why the original house has always intrigued me. Carry on down St James Lane. You’re now entering the area of the city dominated by my old school, Winchester College. You can see the magnificent bell tower rising out of the oldest part of the College straight ahead of you, but the school has grown so since its original foundation that many of the houses in this part of town are now part of it.
Cross Southgate Street, then continue directly down the hill by Canon Street. At the end of the street turn left then immediately right and continue along College Street, pausing, naturally, to browse in P. & G. Wells the Bookseller. A little way past Wells you’ll find a pink house on your right where Jane Austen breathed her last. Her grave in the nearby cathedral mentions her Christian virtues and ‘the extraordinary endowment of her mind’ but avoids that tainted word novelist…
A minute’s more walking brings you to the College’s gatehouse and it’s well worth taking one of the guided tours here. If you have an hour to spare, you can now visit the watermeadows and St Cross by carrying on along College Street, following the old red-brick wall that encloses the warden’s garden. Where the wall turns sharply to the right you’ll have a view to your left of elegant Wolvesey Palace, home of the bishop, and the vast ruins — now enclosing choir school playing fields — of the medieval palace it replaced. A part of the ruins is usually open to the public. Continue along the warden’s wall, turning right and right again, to where the pavement brings you alongside the College’s 1960s concert hall. The way into the College from this side is barred to you but you take a footpath to your left, alongside the river.
Winchester is a watery city and once had a network of brooks and streams usefully cutting across it. Most of these have long since been channelled underground, leaving only street names to show where they run, but on this side of the city all the way out to the hospital at St Cross, water rules and you’ll walk through scenery typical of Hampshire’s south — water meadows rich in trout, herons and other wildlife. The footpath leads you alongside some of the College’s playing fields.
The path crosses Garnier Road by the old pumping station and winds on, past moist gardens and allotments, to another stretch of water meadows beyond a kissing gate. Beyond you now lies St Cross Hospital. Well worth a visit for the partly Norman church (where Ben and Bobby attend Shirley’s memorial service) and the lovely complex of old buildings surrounding it. You can spot the permanent residents by the red or black robes they’re supposed to wear at all times. Traditionally any visitor can claim the Traveller’s Dole — a chunk of bread and a glass of beer served free at the gate — but last time I checked this had been replaced by less frugal, non-charitable refreshments served in the outer courtyard.
At the end of your visit, walk almost straight ahead out of the outer gate, around a white fire barrier and on to Back Street. This will lead you past some delightful old houses, including a half-timbered one on a right-hand corner said to be one of the oldest in the city, past St Faith’s Primary School (where I imagined Ben and Bobby’s mother worked) and out on to Kingsgate Road. This seamlessly becomes Kingsgate Street, which you follow for its entire length. As the road progresses you’ll see the cathedral’s nave looming up ahead like a stone battleship. If you feel in need of sustenance, lunch can be found at the Queen’s Head, which has a pleasant garden, or the extremely atmospheric and much older Wykeham Arms.
From the Wykeham Arms pass directly beneath the old gateway ahead of you. This houses St Swithun’s, one of the city’s tiniest but most atmospheric churches, reached by a steep flight of stairs. Turning right then brings you through the fifteenth-century Prior’s Gate into the cathedral close and up against some of the oldest domestic buildings in it, including the Prior’s Lodge. Just around the corner to the right lies Pilgrims’ School, which educates the choristers for the cathedral and the quiristers for the College. To the left of the school’s front door stands the Pilgrims’ Hall, all that remains of the old medieval priory’s guesthouse, well worth a peek if it’s unlocked, for one of the earliest examples of a hammer-beam roof in the country.
Following the road on through the close will bring you past the handsome deanery, much improved for one of Charles II’s visits. Beyond that, keeping to the right, you will come to the Gothic arches that are all that remain of the eleventh-century chapter house. If it’s a sunny day, slip through here to visit Dean Garnier’s garden, which grants magnificent views of the cathedral exterior, as does the well-concealed path you can pick up by passing through the broad tunnel known as the Slype just beyond it.
Please don’t follow Professor Jellicoe’s disgraceful example by trying to slip in through the secure door in the Slype’s middle — the code I give in the book is NOT the right one! Rather, retrace your steps and walk under the long line of flying buttresses along the cathedral nave and enter through the west end. This may be the tourists’ entrance but it also confronts you with one of the most dramatic interior views the country can offer.
Leaving the cathedral by the way you came in, follow the lime avenue out of the close to The Square. Here you’ll find one of the city’s well-kept architectural secrets, the sister church to St Swithun’s — St Lawrence-in-the-Square. Once a chapel royal for Norman kings, it’s now principally a fifteenth-century building, crammed with earlier details, which charms for the Narnian fashion in which it seems to open out from a cupboard-like entrance between adjoining shops.
To return to the station, turn right as you come out of St Lawrence’s, pause to admire the pinnacled splendour of the fifteenthcentury Butter Cross, then head up the high street, past Elizabeth Frink’s fetching horse and rider, as far as the Westgate, then cross the road beyond County Hall and its bronze hog and follow Station Road. The curious who still have the energy can visit the little Westgate Museum, then turn left to visit the splendid Great Hall and the long-since disproved Arthurian Round Table…
PS: In the time that has elapsed between writing this piece and its appearance on Fifth Estate, the author has since discovered that Jane Austen’s house, which was painted pink throughout his childhood and teenage years, has suddenly turned yellow.
The Whole Day Through is the Book at Bedtime all this week on Radio 4, read by Samantha Bond and Nathanial Parker. Tune in tonight, August 10th, at 10.45pm or you can listen again from tomorrow on BBC i-Player.
2025. Skynet has taken over. Machines and androids rule the world. When not orchestrating genocide against the last remaining specimens of the human race, they read only on Kindles equipped with hologram colour screens. The permanent cloud of nuclear dust from the last world war has made most animals extinct and turned surviving specimens into luxury items sought after by the rich - excluding the possibility of luxury leatherbound editions of Tolkien reissues.
Barring apocalyptic nuclear war and a renaissance in robotics, this horrifying vision, (which draws heavily on the plotlines of Terminator and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), is hopefully not what lies ahead for publishing. But what does the future look like?
This week on Fifth Estate, we’ve asked some of the top talent at HarperCollins to outline their vision of what might be in store for publishing by 2025. For several years now, publishing commentators have been predicting revolutionary change in the industry. Here at Fifth Estate, we thought it would be fun to explore different views of how this might play out. This is the first in a three part series.
John Bond, MD Press Books
My heavily tattooed, surgically-enhanced daughter is as old as the century. After years of wearing those metal discs in ever-increasing diameters as earrings ( the ones that always used to be the preserve of elders within Amazon tribes ), she can finally use her earlobes as skipping ropes. At 25, she has already been married and divorced twice, the second time to an itinerant antiquarian bookseller who has bequeathed her his charity shop in fashionable Croydon. The shop sells second-hand paperbacks that range in price from 1p to 10p each which have all been reset to have larger type for the ageing browsers. She also sells unique editions of certain authors, one off printings and packages of short novels and poetry customisable on the premises. These and other items in the shop – paintings, maps, photographs – sell fom £10.00 to £100.00 and are frequently supported by live events and an academy where membership brings you direct access to the tutoring skills of the most successful artists and writers who have collectively made Croydon the Rive Gauche of the day.
Although she sometimes likes to smell and feel the old books, she has not bought or read a physical book for ten years. Everything she absorbs on her smart phone is non-fiction, constantly updatable and enhanced with perfectly realised video, audio, news, games and with the ability to be simultaneously translated into her second language, Mandarin. Her mother works in the loft editing on a by now ancient touch screen wireless tablet the 14th novel from Marian Keyes. Her father,in the early stages of dementia, can sometimes be seen wandering around the same shop, trying to persuade people that he used to hold down a job that involved reading paper manuscripts by showing them the elastic bands he still has on his left wrist, and asking their help in assembling a flat-pack dumpbin.
I have no idea what will have unfolded by 2025. Someone writing recently about the death of newspapers said that experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. And they’ll be plenty of experiments before 2025. But even if the method of delivering words has changed by then, all I know is that it is impossible to imagine a world without writers.
Simon Johnson, Director of Business Development
The things we as publishers aspire to are the same, helping in the creation, discovery and promotion of great stories, brilliant writing and trusted information. BUT in 2025 we will do it so much better…and here’s why:
Clare Smith, Publishing Director
By 2025 I believe we will have electronic paper (hurray!) that will feel, look and act like a book. So instead of many books, you will own your one ‘hyper’ book. The Kindles and EReaders of today will look to us like the mobile phones of the 80s do now — clunky, stiff and not particularly user-friendly. For readers of fiction, you will be able to download a novel to flick through, read bits of and then buy — so the high street bookshop will be right there in your office and your home. You will be able to create your own library — and get your own customised hard copy from a local print-on-demand machine which will let you choose finishes (ok, that’s REAL wish fulfilment for an editor, no-one to say no to embossing and foil). For non-fiction readers, it is even better: they will be able to click on hyper-text links to film, author interview, soundbites and pictures.
Katy Whitehead, Graduate Trainee
What the publishing industry looks like in 2025 will depend on how it faces the challenges posed to it in 2010 — and whether it gets caught up in Kindle dread and Sony e-hysteria. People won’t stop reading physical books unless publishers stop producing them — or divert so much resource into e-books that the physical counterpart get neglected and ends up shoddily made and distributed. An oft-quoted argument in publishing is that a generation who grows up comfortable with screens will prefer to consume all their entertainment in this way — but there is a fair deal of hard evidence to counter this. Studies suggest that frequent use of screens shorten our attention span and that we retain less info from screens than print.
So what I see in 2025 for publishing is a split — whilst the majority of reference books will have made the leap to various electronic forms because of the convenience this affords, narrative books shall retain their physical form. This is for two main reasons:
I will give one caveat to this prediction and that is the green issue: if the need for trees becomes so pressing that it’s considered morally unethical to print books on paper, or if virtual reality becomes so realistic that the sensory experience of reading books can be exactly replicated by technology, then the era of print might be over. But in that scenario, with us all slowly suffocating from CO2 poisoning, and living under the steely glare of a Cyborg Thatcher, how to read will probably be the least of our worries.
Over the next couple of weeks we will be posting Parts 2, and 3 in this series – so keep tuned in!
The Atlantic recently ran a feature called ‘Border Crossings’, with contributions from four distinguished fiction writers. The authors — Margaret Atwood, Joseph O’Neill, Monica Ali and Anne Michaels — took the following question as their starting point: “in our age of globalization, when immigration and the Internet and multinational conglomerates have made cultural transmission across borders easier than ever, does the idea of a national literature still have meaning?”
With a title like “Border Crossings” and a premise like that (“cultural transmissions”!), I was having vivid flashbacks to university classrooms packed with hungover aspiring post-modernists, translation-theorists, and deconstructionists who viewed Derrida with the same reverence I imagine pious Mormons reserve for Joseph Smith. The essays spawned from the Atlantic’s prompt each took a very different approach to answering the question and made for some interesting reading. So, as a former member literature student I thought it might be fun to unpack long dormant literary tools and investigate this question myself.
Atwood’s essay made the true, but trivial, observation that books and authors do not cleanly fit into stable taxonomic categories — like, for instance, “nationalities”. Instead, works of literature “now slide into and out of the old categories” because, in the global era there has also been an explosion in the amount of ways a work can be classified. Nationality is just one more metric for characterising a work of literature. In the global world authors and books increasingly carry competing layers that lead to innumerable ways of classifying them. Or in terms of whether there is or is not such a thing as a national literature anymore, “the boundaries are stretchy”. So there is, but there isn’t — depending on what metrics you choose to apply to the work. While I think no one would disagree with the basic point that works can be classified and explained in more than one way, this didn’t strike me as a perspective unique to the global age.
Monica Ali’s piece took the position that perhaps our trouble in designating something a national literature comes from a much bigger issue — a more general instability of national identities in modern times. In the end, however, Ali believes that the literature which emerges from nations — even nations undergoing identity crises — is unique, and characteristic of the time and place. “We have” she says, referring to the UK, “a national literature now; that it is created by a multitude of diverse voices, many originally from other countries, that it presents a plurality of ideas and themes and perspectives, in no way detracts from its role.”
My favourite of these essays was by Joseph O’Neill who wrote on “The Relevance of Cosmopolitanism”. According to O’Neill, in Cosmopolitanism, individuals are increasingly finding themselves belonging to a global community with shared values, rather than to traditional national identities. One factor is the shift in the distribution of economic and political power, from national structures to more diffuse and decentralized global positions (all very Foucaldian sounding). As a consequence, the Cosmopolitan individual has more of a stake in globally adopted values; ethically and politically, “a person…can belong only in a global community” with one’s “obligations to others arising irrespective of the nationality”. From such a position, the role of nationally formed perspectives in literature is greatly diminished, replaced instead by an ethical and political vantage point that is boundary-less.
While I thought O’Neill’s perspective on cosmopolitanism was great, it seems to me that we are still a long way from this being fully realised. Secure in the bubble of global cities - like London, New York, and Los Angeles – cosmopolitan perspectives certainly reign, especially as the massive metropolises are undoubtedly becoming more and more homogenous. However, as one of my colleagues pointed out – go to any secondary city in the UK and you’ll see a totally different picture. Personally, after living in a few different countries its been my experience that nations continue to have strong and distinct identities from which their artistic culture is formed. It may be that identities of all kinds are perhaps easier seen in retrospect, and that right now we just can’t yet see the prevailing culture for what it is. In this sense, maybe national literature is like a bad relationship — you never knew you were in one until a long time afterwards.
What do you think, does national literature still exist?
You can check out the full articles here.
This week, Fourth Estate publishes the paperback edition of This Little Britain, in which Harry Bingham argues for Britain’s leading role in making the modern world a richer, freer, more peaceful, and more democratic place. Taking a particular interest in the many exceptional things that Britain did first, or best, or most, or were the only ones ever to do, This Little Britain focuses on oddities that have spread across the world. Today’s extract focuses on language and literature.
On Language and Literature
SHAW’S POTATO
The playwright and would-be spelling reformer George Bernard Shaw famously pointed out that, using only common English spellings, we could write the word fish as ghoti:
F: gh as in rough
I: o as in women
SH: ti as in nation
Shaw couldn’t have been trying very hard, if this was the best he could come up with. If he’d turned his attention to the other half of Britain’s national dish, he could perfectly well have come up with ghoughbteighpteau for potato:
P: gh as in hiccough
O: ough as in though
T: bt as in debt
A: eigh as in neighbour
T: pt as in pterodactyl
O: eau as in bureau
Other languages have their eccentric spellings, of course, but English is in a league of its own. French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian all spell more or less as they sound. English just isn’t like that. If you heard individual words from this paragraph and were asked to write them out, how would you know to choose more rather than moor or maw? Know rather than no? Would rather than wood? Write rather than right or rite? Or rather than oar, ore or awe? Their rather than they’re or there? You rather than ewe? Course rather than coarse? But rather than butt? In rather than inn? For rather than four, fore or even (for those acquainted with the archaic term for Scottish gypsies) faw? The answer is that, of course, you couldn’t. But nothing happens without a reason, and the strange spellings of English have their reasons too, lurking deep in the heart of Shaw’s potato.
P as in hiccough
The first point to make is that language is human. It’s fallible. Or, not to beat about the bush, it’s full of cock-ups. One such error is hiccough. The word first pops up in Elizabethan English as hickop or hikup, an adaptation of the earlier hicket or hicock. Now it’s pretty clear from all these versions that the word was onomatopoeic, a fair attempt to catch the sounds of a hiccup in letters. But no sooner had the word decided to settle down than people started to assume that a hiccup was some sort of cough. And if a hiccup was a cough, then shouldn’t it be written that way: hiccough, not hiccup? The answer was no, it shouldn’t. Not then, and not now. The error grew nevertheless, until hiccough became at least as common as hiccup. The error is rejected by most dictionaries, but is still common enough that my computer spellcheck accepts both versions. Since people not dictionaries are the ultimate appeal court in these matters, then hiccough is certainly a real enough word, a mistake that’s passed the test of time.
O as in though
Most oddities of English have little to do with straightforward errors. A bigger problem is that English is a living language, and its strangest spellings are often left as residues, like tree rings marking out past phases of growth.
English spellings largely derive from a particular period in British history, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It’s possible to be as precise as this for the simple reason that for the three hundred years or so following the Norman Conquest English had mostly disappeared as a written language. When official documents needed to be written, they’d been written in French or Latin. Thus by the time that English began to reemerge from its long hiding, it was faced with the challenge of adopting a writing system almost, as it were, from scratch.
This could easily have been a recipe for disaster. People tended to spell as they pronounced, and regional accents of the time were very varied. There are more than five hundred spellings recorded for the word through. The word she had more than sixty, including:
If you were writing just for your own friends, or to conduct business locally, perhaps none of this might have mattered. But as soon as official records and legal proceedings began using English too, then this kind of variation began to matter a lot; a common approach was called for. Naturally enough, London, home to the court and the senior echelons of the national bureaucracy, became dominant in imposing its spellings, in particular through the most senior bureaucrats of them all, the Masters of Chancery. Over time, they began to stamp their authority on the chaos. Out went all those scheos and sheeas and zhes, to be replaced by she. Out went ich (and many others) to be replaced by I. Because the movers and shakers of London spoke an English drawn mostly from London and the Midlands, our spelling is based largely on those accents.
Those early bureaucrats did a good job. Fifteenth-century English spelling was increasingly systematic and rational — a typical European language. Alas, however, no sooner had the spellings been fixed than pronunciations shifted. The spelling of words like through, rough and right is a perfectly accurate guide to the way these words used to be spoken. But the language has moved on, leaving these old medieval relics behind.
T as in debt
The silent B in debt is another tree ring.
When the Masters of Chancery were working to fix the language, there was a debate between those who thought that all spellings should be phonetic, and those who wanted them to be based on sound etymology. The phonetic camp won out in most cases, but not in all. Debt has a silent B, simply because medieval scholars wanted to point out that the word has its origins in the Latin debere, to owe. So a silent B was added — and never mind the fact that the word actually came from the French dette, which never had a B anywhere near it.
This was a quirky way to justify introducing a totally needless letter, and it was based on a more than generous interpretation of etymology, but there was, at least, an etymological connection, however thin. Medieval scholars were, however, prone to finding connections to the Latin where none actually existed, so our language is littered with plenty of spellings that are unjustifiable on any level. Island doesn’t come from the Latin insula; it comes from an s-free Germanic root. (Compare modern German Eiland.) Anchor, rhyme, scythe, island, numb, ghost and many others derived their oddness from other errors fixed and perpetuated by Renaissance dictionaries.
A as in neighbour
All the problems so far mentioned fade into insignificance compared with the one identified by the A in Shaw’s potato.
Just as the Masters of Chancery were producing the first rational spelling system in English, something was going on to turn all their fine work on its head. This was the Great Vowel Shift, which did exactly what it said on the tin. Before the shift, English vowels had been much the same as their Continental neighbours. The word fine in English used to be pronounced with an ‘ee’ sound, like the Italian fino (‘fee-no’). If a fourteenth-century speaker of English had encountered a sentence like ‘I see my goat is lame — my cow too’, they’d have pronounced it approximately as: ‘Ee say mee gawt ays lahm — mee coo toe.’
This sounds odd to us, but only because we’re not used to it. At least English used its vowels in more or less the way you’d expect given its ancestry. Then, for no known reason, the vowels decided to get up from their fixed positions and wander round till they settled again in new places. The Chaucerian ‘ee’ sound became the modern ‘eye’ sound, the Chaucerian ‘ay’ became the modern ‘ee’, and so on.
The process was both strange and not strange at the same time. In some ways, nothing much could be more ordinary. Language changes. If you want a scone, do you ask for a scohne or a sconn? If you talk about dust, do you use the southern ‘uh’ sound, or the shortened Yorkshire ‘oo’ sound? If a Brummie moves to a new part of the country — Liverpool, say, or Glasgow or Cornwall — they may well start to modify their vowel sounds, almost without noticing it. The Great Vowel Shift was in a way no odder than that — and bear in mind that it took place over two centuries, or the space of five or six medieval lifetimes.
On the other hand, the process is also a little odd. Why did English change so much and its closest neighbours little or not at all? And what propelled the movement? There is no shortage of theories. Social upheavals following the Black Death is one possibility. Another is that as the French-speaking ruling class came to speak English, there was a vogue for a kind of patriotic hypercorrection of French vowel sounds. But no one knows for sure. It’s just one of those things.
The one certainty, however, is that English spellings were fixed before, during and after the shift. A word like polite (around before the shift) simply saw its pronunciation change, from something like pol-eet to the modern pol-ite. But an almost identical word — police — which entered the language after the shift reflects the Continental ‘ee’ sound of its origin. The result, of course, is that there’s no way to tell in advance how a word should be spelled, or how a spelling should be spoken. Fine for those who grow up with the language; murder for those who have to learn it.
T as in pterodactyl
The first recorded reference to a pterodactyl is in Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. In it, Lyell predicts, ‘The ptero-dactyle might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.’Whether pterodactyls could ever have been described as flitting is open to doubt, but what’s significant here is that new words have to be coined for new uses, and that one of the biggest creators of new words is science.
Scientists are only human. They want their coinages to have a bit of class — and what could be more classy than a bit of Latin or (still better) Greek? And since the ancient Greeks were fond of their initial Ps, our language is now adorned with pterodactyls and ptomaine and psychology and many others. The trouble with these introductions, of course, is that English tongues can’t really wrap themselves around such (to us) exotic constructions. So the pronunciation tends to be anglicized, while the spelling resolutely isn’t.
O as in bureau
The final great complicating factor for English is highlighted by the final letter of Shaw’s potato. Bureau is a French word. It has entered English with its pronunciation and spelling more or less intact, but because the French match up vowel sounds and letter combinations differently from us, their words only serve to baffle and complicate our spellings.
That’s not the only problem that can arise, however. Sometimes a new word entered the language — for example, nation, another French borrowing — and English tongues weren’t able to wrap themselves around the foreign sounds. So the French pronunciation, roughly na-see-o(n), becomes corrupted to the comfortable English nay-shun. Creations like this are hideously common. Do you want to guess how many ways there are to create the sh sound in English? You might play safe and say two or three. Or perhaps go wild and suggest five or six. The correct answer is in fact thirteen, as in shed, sure, issue, mansion, passion, ignition, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperone, schedule, pshaw and fuchsia.
Potato as in 
That’s now every letter of Shaw’s potato accounted for. Shaw himself so disliked the mess of spellings that he left money in his will for a prize to be awarded for the best new alphabet to take care of English spelling. The winner was a chap called Kingsley Read. As Read saw it, a big part of the problem with English spellings is that there are too few letters for the number of sounds they need to make. There are forty-eight distinct sounds in English, and only twenty-six letters to do their work. The letter A, for example, has at least four jobs to do: ay as in able, a as in at, ah as in alms and or as in all. If English is to be easy to spell, then there should be one sound to a letter, one letter to a sound. Read’s alphabet, the Shavian alphabet, is a rather beautiful creation. It looks like this:
(That’s the start of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in case you missed it.) Alas, however, no one ever used Read’s alphabet. No one ever used Quickscript, his later modification of it. No one has ever used Readspel, Read’s final attempt to get people on his side. And no one ever will.
In the end, weird spellings are only a problem if that’s how you choose to see them. Part of the beauty of English is that its history is visible for all to see. It’s a hybrid between Anglo-Saxon rootstock and Franco-Latinate blooms. It’s a magpie language, acquisitive and reckless. It’s a human language, strewn with errors and eccentricities. It’s a living language, with vowels and pronunciations that shift from age to age. That won’t ever change. The question really is, who’d want it to?
A WORLD OF SQUANTOS
In November 1620, the Pilgrim Fathers made landfall off Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. It wasn’t the best time of year to arrive. The New England winter was more ferocious than anything the predominantly East Anglian settlers were used to. Nor were the precedents exactly encouraging. The first British settlement in North America had disappeared without trace. The second (in Jamestown, Virginia) had survived, but only after terrible loss of life. The Pilgrim Fathers weren’t even well equipped. They were missing basic tools, and were astonishingly ignorant of both agriculture and fishing. Their prospects were lousy, and they knew it. In the words of the colony’s first governor,William Bradford:
And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men?
From that hideous wilderness stepped forth a miracle. In the words of William Bradford again:
Whilst we were busied hereabout,we were interrupted, for there presented himself a savage which caused an alarm. He very boldly came all alone and along the houses straight to the rendezvous, where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in … He saluted us in English and bade us ‘welcome’.
The ‘savage’ who emerged from the Massachusetts woods had picked up a few words of English from visiting sailors, but the miracle hadn’t yet taken place. The man who bade the settlers welcome took them to meet a second man, Tisquantum, abbreviated to Squanto. And Squanto spoke English; not just a few words, but fluently. Captured by British fishermen some fifteen years before, Squanto had been carried off to London, where he’d learned English and received training as a guide and interpreter, before managing to escape home again on a returning boat.
The unlikelihood of this sequence of events is simply astounding. What are the odds that a bunch of under-skilled and under-equipped Englishmen should pitch up and find perhaps the most fluent native American speaker of English anywhere on the continent? Squanto didn’t just offer a taste of home. He taught the settlers the things they needed to know. He showed them how to sow their corn seeds with little bits of chopped fish for fertilizer. He taught them how to fish and how to distinguish what was edible from what was not. It’s quite likely that Squanto saved the colony.
The story makes a point. Back then, English was a minor language, with limited projection beyond England’s own boundaries. Today, it is the world’s own language. Back then, it was the unlikelihood of finding a Squanto which made his appearance so miraculous. Today, a traveller could pitch up almost any- where — any country, any coast, any continent — and hope to find some words of English spoken, by at least some members of the local community. The miracle today is not the rarity of English, but its universality.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that English has become the world’s most commonly spoken language. It hasn’t. A billion Mandarin Chinese speakers dwarf the 350 million or so native English speakers. But that misses the point. To be a global language is to be the preferred means of communication between two parties from different language communities, and it’s here where English is exceptional. On top of the 350 million native speakers, there are perhaps another 400 million speakers in former colonies, plus a billion or so speakers — from Japanese tourists to Swedish businessman — who have simply adopted the language as the simplest means of international communication. This number is growing all the time, not least in China, which will soon have more English speakers than the combined total of all English-speaking countries. No other language remotely compares with the global significance of English. Its lead is increasing all the time.
It’s always tempting to romanticize the language’s dominance, to start muttering about Shakespeare and Chaucer, the flexible euphony of our tongue. But Shakespeare, Schmakespeare. The world speaks English because of British gunboats (and emigrants) in the nineteenth century and American hegemony in the twentieth. If those Mayflower settlers had happened to speak Ubykh, a Caucasian language with eighty-one consonants and only three vowels, or perhaps Rotokas, a Papua New Guinea language with just six consonants and five vowels, then the world would quite likely be speaking those fine languages today.
Meanwhile, English is spreading in other ways too. The Oxford English Dictionary currently lists about half a million words. Its American equivalent, Webster’s, comes up with a roughly similar figure of 450,000. The two dictionaries have, however, much less of an overlap than you might guess. The OED contains more archaic or regional British terms,Webster’s more Americanisms. Putting the two dictionaries together would probably produce an expanded word count of some 750,000 words. (I say probably: no one has ever bothered to work it out.) But even this total excludes huge swaths of English. It excludes terms from the various world Englishes (Singapore English, Jamaican English, Indian English, etc.). It excludes much slang and regional dialect. It excludes acronyms, even those that are usually used as words (CIA, NATO, the EU, and so on). It excludes most flora and fauna. If all these were added in, the word count would probably reach a million. If all scientific and technical terms were added, the count might be twice that. By comparison, French has an ‘official’ dictionarybased word count of less than 100,000 words, German around 190,000.
The sheer scale of its vocabulary is one of the key reasons why other languages are fighting a hopeless battle to keep English terminology out. It is all very well for the Académie Française to invent new French terms to replace Anglo-Saxon intruders, autofinancement for cashflow, for example. But what about those million or so technical and scientific terms — bluetooth protocol, polypropylene, iPod, troposphere? Is the Académie really going to invent new terms for those and all 999,997 others? In 2004, The Economist quoted research which suggested that two-thirds of all Internet content is in English. Scientific and technical journals are also disproportionately anglophone. English isn’t just pushing other languages back, it’s eating into them too.
What of the future? There are roughly two schools of thought. The first takes Latin as its example. The break-up of the Roman Empire led to the break-up of the language. Romanian, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese litter the linguistic map, the ruined remains of a once great empire. Romanian and Portuguese speakers may both be speaking linear descendants of the same language, but the languages have long since become mutually unintelligible.
Is this the fate of English? There’s plenty of evidence to suggest it. After all, it’s already slightly misleading to speak of one single language called ‘English’. We have at the very least Indian English, American English, British English, Nigerian English, Philippines English, Canadian English, Pakistani English, Australian English, and so on. (The order of terms in that list might not be a conventional one, but it’s perfectly logical: the terms are arranged in descending order, by size of the English language community.) But this list describes broad types only. Within every genus, there is an abundance of species. Not just Scouse English, but Caribbean Scouse, Pakistani Scouse, Irish Scouse, and so forth. If you sat in a Singaporean student café, among students speaking their version of English, you probably wouldn’t understand what was being said. Perhaps the English break-up is already happening. Perhaps the rot has already set in.
Or then again, perhaps not. The counter-argument is simple: call it the eBay paradigm. In a world of highly competitive markets, eBay is rare and extraordinary in having virtually no meaningful competition. How come? Simply because eBay was the first, and as such it started out with the most buyers and the most sellers. Buyers naturally flock to the system with the most products to choose from. Sellers naturally gravitate to the outlet with the largest number of buyers. Unless eBay does something horrendous to mess up, its position is and will remain unrivalled.What’s true of beanie toys and second-hand clothes is all the more true of a universal language. If you’re an ambitious student keen to acquire a second tongue, which one does it make most sense to master? Obviously the one that gives access to the largest possible number of fellow speakers. So the larger the number of English speakers, the greater the incentive for others to learn it. Dominance feeds dominance.
There perhaps lies the real point about that Singaporean café. If you were sitting there, sipping your bandung and picking at your fish-head curry, it’s likely that your fellow diners would notice your difficulty in making sense of their conversation. So they’d probably just shift the way they spoke. From the idiosyncrasies of Singaporean youth English to something like an international Standard English. That Standard English would still be noticeably local in flavour. It would certainly be American tinted. But you’d understand it. They’d understand you. That’s the point of a universal language. It makes one world of us all: a world of Squantos.
OF COWS AND BEEF
The word Welsh derives from an Anglo-Saxon root, Wealas, which means slave or foreigner. There, in a nutshell, is all you need to know about the politics of sixth-century Britain. The incoming Angles, Jutes and Saxons had turned the native British Celts into foreigners in their own land; not quite slaves perhaps, but humiliatingly subject all the same.
Anglo-Saxon rule didn’t extend merely to land and territory; it covered language too. Although a certain amount of intermarriage must have taken place between invaders and ‘slaves’, that intermarriage was reflected hardly at all in the spoken word. Virtually no Celtic words survived the onslaught, and those that did are telling. Modern English words such as tor, crag, combe, cairn, cromlech, dolmen and loch are all Celtic, and they all describe features of the landscape which simply hadn’t existed in the flatlands from which the invaders had come. The newcomers took the words they absolutely needed and ditched the rest. Only a few dozen Celtic words survive in English today.
While the Celts always referred to their invaders as Saxons, the newcomers themselves began to call themselves Anglii, their new country Anglia, and (in due course) their language Englisc. It’s that language which we speak today. Of the hundred most commonly used words in modern English, almost all are Old English in origin, including all but one of the top twenty-five. (In order: the, of, and, a, to, in, is, you, that, it, he, was, for, on, are, as, with, his, they, I, at, be, this, have, from. The Old Norse intruder in this list is they. The word the appears in this book some 5,850 times.) These twenty-five words make up about one third of all printed material in English. The top hundred words make up about a half. The first French-derived word doesn’t appear until number at seventy-six.
You can tell a lot about a society from the language it speaks. The language of the Anglii was domestic, rural, warlike, concrete. Words such as man, daughter, friend and son are Old English. So are dog, mouse, wood, swine, horse. So are plough, earth, shepherd, ox, sheep. So are love, lust, sing, night, day, sun. So are words such as so, are, words, such, as. The one linguistic invasion of real significance in those years was Christianity. As the pagan Anglo-Saxons began to convert to the new religion, new words (mostly Greek or Roman in origin) crept in to handle the new concepts: bishop, monk, nun, altar, angel, pope, apostle, psalm, school. The number of new words was small, less than 1 per cent of the existing vocabulary, but they extended the language by giving it ways of expressing new thoughts, new concepts.
With the language to do it, the Anglii began to produce a literature of their own, probably a great one. If people wanted to preserve their work, they wrote not in English but in Latin. As a consequence, most work that was written in English has been lost for ever. Fortunately, though, enough of the old literature has survived for us to get a feel of what was lost. Beowulf is the first great surviving work of literature written in English, a story of strange monsters and Dark Age realpolitik. Here, in Seamus Heaney’s translation, is the arrival of the monster Grendel at the feasting hall:
In off the moors, down through the mist-bands
God-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.
The bane of the race of men roamed forth,
hunting for a prey in the high hall.
Under the cloud-murk he moved towards it
until it shone above him, a sheer keep
of fortified gold. Nor was that the first time
he had scouted the grounds of Hrothgar’s dwelling —
although never in his life, before or since,
did he find harder fortune or hall-defenders.
This extract gives us the true feel of Anglo-Saxon: gritty, alliterative, forceful, direct. In Heaney’s words: ‘What I had always loved was a kind of four-squareness about the utterance … an understanding that assumes you share an awareness of the perilous nature of life and are yet capable of seeing it steadily and, when necessary, sternly. There is an undeluded quality about the Beowulf poet’s sense of the world.’
Warrior-like it may have been, but Anglo-Saxon almost died nevertheless — not just once, but twice. The first major threat came with the Viking invasions when, but for Alfred the Great, we might well have ended up speaking Norse, not English. The second near-death experience came with the Norman Conquest in 1066. Because the new king, William, had been hard up for cash, he’d paid for much of his help with pledges of English land. When victory came, those pledges were redeemed. All of a sudden, every position of power in England was filled by French speakers. The new noblemen spoke French. Bishops and abbots spoke French. The court spoke French. The king made a short-lived effort to learn English, then gave up and stuck to French. As an official language, English completely vanished. In its written form, its disappearance was almost total.
For centuries, a kind of linguistic apartheid reigned. English peasants continued to speak English. The court continued to speak French. But in between the top and bottom layers of society, mixing was inevitable, as Normans married English, as French babies were cared for by local women.At the level where the two societies met, the English language underwent the most rapid — and important — transformation of its life.
A torrent of new words poured in from the French, thousands of them, far more than had ever come from Norse or Celtic. The Normans brought a new kind of justice and administration to the land. Arrest, attorney, bail, bailiff, felony, fine, pardon, perjury and verdict all come from the French. They brought new concepts of chivalry: courtesy, damsel, honour, romance, tournament, chivalry. The arts, science, the domestic scene — all borrowed heavily from French words: music, paper, melody, grammar, calendar, ointment, pantry, lamp, curtain, chimney. And while the English worked the fields tending the oxen or cows, sheep, calves, deer and pigs (all English words), it was as often as not their French masters who got to eat the resulting beef, mutton, veal, venison and pork (all French ones).
On the whole, these new words didn’t replace the older English ones, they sat alongside them. That’s why the language now has so many alternatives: the fancy French model and the plainer English one. For example, the English ask sits beside the French question, interrogate, demand. The English king rubs shoulders with royal, regal, sovereign. We have English hands but do French manual work. For three hundred years such words poured over the Channel, leaving English immeasurably enriched, a different language.
It wasn’t just new words, it was new ways of writing too. Compare these two bits of verse, one French, one English.
Foy porter, honneur garder
Et pais querir, oubeir
Doubter, servir, et honnourer
Vous vueil jusques au morir
Dame sans per.
(I want to stay faithful, guard your honour / Seek peace, obey / Fear, serve and honour you / Until death / Peerless lady — Guillaume de Machaut.)
And the English one:
Summer is y-comen in,
Loude sing, cuckoo!
Groweth seed and bloweth mead
And spring’th the woode now —
Sing cuckoo!
Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Low’th after calfe cow.
Bullock starteth, bucke farteth.
Merry sing, cuckoo! (Anon)
The French verse is smooth, melodious, liquid. It is clever writing. Its themes are courtly love, honour and chivalry; its principal sound effect coming from that smoothly repeated soft rhyme. The English verse is the exact opposite. It’s earthy, lusty and crude. It talks about animals and farts. It’s a language at home in the fields, not the court. It uses rhyme, but does so not in a smooth and flowing way like the French, but in a way designed to make the most of the natural swing and rhythm of spoken English. That old Anglo-Saxon taste for alliteration is still there (calf / cow, bullock / buck). This is a language that enjoys its own sound effects; the one thing it won’t do is stay polite and well mannered.
The point isn’t that one form of writing is better than the other. The point is that English writers suddenly faced a huge expansion in their choice of how to write. They could be lusty, earthy, crude, jaunty. Or they could be Latinate, posh, abstract, clever. Or, like Chaucer and Shakespeare, they could mix and match, moving from the earthy to the sublime and back again. That expressive richness has been the language’s greatest resource, and it has been core to the achievements of its greatest writers.
That choice of how to write is still with us today. Britain’s two best-known poets of recent times have been Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin. Here is Ted Hughes, writing about a ewe having problems giving birth:
I caught her with a rope. Laid her, head uphill
And examined the lamb. A blood-ball swollen
Tight in its black felt, its mouth gap
Squashed crooked, tongue stuck out, black-purple,
Strangled by its mother. I felt inside,
Past the noose of mother-flesh, into the
slippery Muscled tunnel, fingering for a hoof …
This is Anglo-Saxon in modern clothes. Hughes is earthy, concrete, in-yer-face. He uses compound nouns, alliteration and thumping stresses. It’s verse that lives in the fields, and raises two fingers to the court.
Here, in contrast, is the way Philip Larkin writes about animals — in his case, retired racehorses.
Yet fifteen years ago, perhaps
Two dozen distances sufficed
To fable them: faint afternoons
Of Cups and Stakes and Handicaps,
Whereby their names were artificed
To inlay faded, classic Junes …
This is pure French. The language is Latinate, high-flown, smooth and elegant; a language comfortable with the Royal Enclosure, not the dung and straw of the stable yard.
In short, English became — and remained — a language in which you could swear like a German, or seduce like a Frenchman. You could make war using one vocabulary, and philosophize with another. No other European language has that suppleness, that blend of Germanic directness and Latinate elegance. If our literary tradition is as great as any in the world, then that greatness owes much to the language that gave it birth.
HALF-CHEWED LATIN
It began with the Black Death.
In Bristol, where it struck first in 1348, some 45 per cent of the population died. Across the country, the death toll was lower, but still vast. As the country fell dying, the only growth industry was that of burial, and since priests were constantly in contact with the sick and dying, the death rate among the clergy probably exceeded even that of the general population. In January 1349, the Bishop of Bath and Wells wrote, ‘Priests cannot be found for love nor money … to visit the sick and administer the last sacraments.’ Since those last sacraments would have been viewed as of vital importance in Catholic England, the problem was a serious one. Dreadful times bring drastic remedies. The bishop went on to say that, in the absence of a priest, it would be proper for the dying to confess their sins to a lay person or even (steady on!) ‘to a woman if no man is available’.
Perhaps it was this new DIY approach to dying which fostered new ways of thinking, or perhaps it was simply the collision between hard times and a complacent Church. At all events, the age produced its revolutionary, an Oxford scholar named John Wyclif. Wyclif began to compare the Church he saw around him with the words of scripture, and he found the Church wanting. He wrote, ‘Were there a hundred popes and all the friars turned to cardinals, their opinions on faith should not be accepted except in so far as they are founded on scripture itself.’
Logically, then, if scripture was so important, it should be available to everyone — and available in English, not Latin. In our own secular times, it’s hard to get overexcited by such a suggestion, but in a world where it was not altogether clear whether Church or state exerted more power,Wyclif ’s proposal was revolutionary, a clear threat to the status quo.
Wyclif didn’t just talk about what ought to be done, he made sure that it was done. A group of scholars, working in line with Wyclif ’s doctrines, began to translate the Bible. It was by no means the first time in European history that a vernacular translation had been produced, but it was the first time that a complete translation had been produced by serious scholars working in explicit defiance of Church doctrine. To offer a contemporary analogy, it was as if Wyclif and his fellows were seeking to introduce the freedoms of the Internet to a society that had long known only state-owned media. The English language was the battering ram. The result, one day, would be the Protestant Reformation itself.
Yet for all Wyclif ’s thundering denunciations of the Church, those first attempts at translation were oddly timorous. It was just as if, when it came to the point, the translators didn’t quite have the nerve to leave the original text behind. Here, for instance, is a chunk taken from the first psalm.
Blisful the man, that went not awei in the counseil of unpitouse, and in the wei off sinful stod not; and in the chayer of pestilence sat not, But in the lawe of the Lord his wil; and in the lawe of hym he shal sweteli thenke dai and nygt.
Even putting aside the archaic spellings, this text reads more like half-chewed Latin than proper English. But it was a start. Its authors must have recognized the weakness of that early version, because no sooner had the first translation been finished than a new and better one was begun. Those translations were transcribed by hand, then disseminated by wandering Lollard preachers. (Lollard, from the Middle Dutch word meaning ‘a babbler of nonsense’, came to be applied pejoratively to all Wyclif ’s followers, who then came to embrace the term enthusiastically.)
In a land where books were rare and precious, where the language of salvation had always been incomprehensible to the vast bulk of the population, those Bibles must have been the most extraordinary experience: liberating, poetic, exciting, inspiring. Many parish priests, indeed, would have understood next to nothing of the Latin that they had so solemnly intoned in church. With Wyclif ’s new Bibles, weavers and housewives were suddenly being let into knowledge of God’s word itself, secrets that had previously been the property of only a tiny handful.
Inevitably, of course, the movement was suppressed.Wyclif ’s manuscripts were burned and the Lollards themselves arrested, often killed. But just as today the tide of technology tends to favour the Internet over those seeking to erect barriers against it, so too did the invention of the printing press shift things decisively in favour of revolution.Wyclif ’s translations had had to be copied, slowly and painfully, by hand. Those that came after him in England and (particularly) Germany could churn out copies by the thousand. Costs fell, print runs increased. By 1526, William Tyndale, heavily influenced by Martin Luther, printed three thousand copies of his English language New Testament, then sold each copy for as little as four shillings. The authorities could no more track down and burn each copy than they could order trees to hold their leaves in autumn. An English-speaking God had finally, decisively arrived.
As far as British exceptionalism is concerned the story ends there. An Englishman, John Wyclif, inaugurated a movement that would lead to the most important development in the Christian Church since the split between Catholic and Orthodox. That movement then shifted its centre of gravity eastwards to Germany, and England played no more than a secondary role in what followed. Yet to end the story at that point leaves off, at least from a literary point of view, its conclusion.
As we know, Henry VIII broke with Rome and, on his death, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, converted the English Church into a genuinely Protestant one, something it had not been during Henry’s reign. During the six-year reign of Edward VI, around sixty new versions of the Bible were released.More followed under Elizabeth, then James. Compared with the old days, this was liberation indeed, but a troubling one all the same. It was all very well to write the gospels in the language of ploughboys, but the translations couldn’t all be equally good. Which ones were right, which wrong? It was time to set up a committee.
The committee in question was a bureaucrats’ daydream. Fifty-four translators were appointed, split across six working groups, who toiled away for six years. The results were fed into yet another committee, a review committee, comprising scholars from Oxford, Cambridge and London. The review panel spent nine months in honing their texts. The result of their labours, the Authorised Version of the Bible (or the King James Bible), could have been a bureaucratic disaster, a hotchpotch of muddle and compromise. It was nothing of the sort. It has become, deservedly, one of the great monuments of English.
The secret of its success was a simple one. All the committees, but most especially the final review committee, paid close attention to what would sound good when read aloud. Furthermore, keeping to their mandate of making scriptures accessible, the translators stuck to a honed-down lexicon of just eight thousand words. (Shakespeare, by contrast, uses some twenty thousand.) The result was grand, spare, sonorous and easy to understand. Here, for example, are the famous words from John’s Gospel, given in some of the major versions of the Bible up to this point:
AN ANGLO-SAXON VERSION (995): ‘God lufode middan-eard swa, dat he seade his an-cennedan sunu, dat nan ne forweorde de on hine gely ac habbe dat ece lif.’
WYCLIF (1380): ‘For god loued so the world; that he gaf his oon bigetun sone, that eche man that bileueth in him perisch not: but haue euerlastynge liif.’
TYNDALE (1534): ‘For God so loveth the worlde, that he hath geven his only sonne, that none that beleve in him, shuld perisshe: but shuld have everlastinge lyfe.’
KING JAMES (1611): ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Sonne: that whosoever beleeveth in him, should not perish, but have everlasting life.’
Among these different versions, Wyclif ’s words, with their strange spellings and disconcerting rhythms, seem to us like ancient history. The Anglo-Saxon is ancient history. Tyndale’s version rings out almost as clear and modern as the King James version. But it is only in its final appearance that these lines find their feet; meaning, rhythm and weight coming together in perfect balance.
That Bible in that version is one of the great monuments of our, or any, literature. It, every bit as much as Shakespeare, has shaped the language we use today.Whether we are fruitful and multiply or are at our last gasp, whether we serve two masters or cast our pearls before swine, whether we live by bread alone or off the fat of the land that flows with milk and honey, then in this den of thieves (for by their fruit shall we know them) we are quoting the Bible. If we have ears to hear, if nation should rise against nation, if we pass by on the other side, if we kick against the pricks, if we are full of good works or a law unto ourselves, if we say, ‘Doctor, heal thyself,’ and if we take up our beds and walk (doubtless escorting the poor whom we have always with us), if we are present in spirit, if we suffer fools gladly, if we cry ‘Oh death, where is thy sting?’ then (be of good cheer) we are quoting the Bible. In short, where two or three are gathered together, we can but find that we live, move and have our being in the world that Wyclif, Tyndale and the King James translators created.
The influence of that Bible lies in far more than just a couple of hundred famous phrases. As I was writing this chapter, I happened to pick up a copy of my third novel, The Sons of Adam, where I came across the following sentence: ‘Tom would be happy if all the kings of the earth had been turned overnight into ordinary people: shoe-shine boys, oil-riggers, commercial travellers, bums.’ That phrase ‘the kings of the earth’ is straight from the Authorised Version (Revelation 6:15 if you care to check) and it isn’t standard English today. ‘All the kings in the world’ would be more normal, or perhaps even ‘Every king on the planet’. But I had wanted a grander phrase than that, something to point up a contrast with the ‘ordinary people’ that followed. I’ve probably never read the relevant bit of Revelation and I certainly didn’t consciously reach for the language of King James, yet because I was after something sonorous, grand and spare, my subconscious took me there anyway — just as thousands of other writers have been led, wittingly or unwittingly, to the exact same source. That’s influence. That’s greatness.
Alexander Dubçek led the Czechoslovak Communist Party during the heady days of the ‘Prague Spring’ in the late 1960s. For a few glorious months, a new version of Communism began to flourish: liberal, responsive, even democratic.
Then, in August 1968, the tanks moved in. Dubçek and others were arrested. From Prague Spring to Soviet Winter.
The story has two morals. The obvious one is that force wins. To paraphrase Clinton: ‘It’s the Tanks, Stupid’.
The not so obvious one is that history matters. When the Prague revolution was undone, Dubçek’s image was often silently removed from photographs. History was rewritten. What had happened was made to un-happen.
These things disturb us, but we tend to think of the airbrushing of the past as something that happens elsewhere. Soviet Russia, yes; today’s Britain, no.
Yet here in Britain, we’ve done something strange of our own. We talk about the sins of Empire and slavery a lot, and we’re right to do so. The slave trade was the British holocaust: a monstrous evil that endured for a century. It would be a shameful telling of history that tried to avoid or downplay this fact.
Yet in our zeal to confess our sins, we’ve headed much too far in the other direction. Take, for example, Simon Schama’s epic BBC-backed History of Britain. A wonderful work in many ways, yet one that somehow avoided mentioning the most important single point about Magna Carta: namely that it marked the practical origin of the rule of law, not just in Britain but anywhere in the world.
Likewise, you could easily read Schama and not realise that the extraordinary uniqueness of the English Parliament. Over the Channel, kings ruled. Over here, kings and people ruled together. Is that fact really not worth highlighting?
Or let’s think about the Scientific Revolution. Isaac Newton was, of course, its greatest luminary, but England — small, poor and remote as it was — had by far the largest community of serious scientists in the world. That’s kind of interesting, you’d think, yet Schama doesn’t care to give it so much as a sentence.
Nor does he mention that freedom of speech first arose here … nor that we pioneered criminal trials that were free of torture … nor that British public health led the way towards the radically improved life expectancies we now enjoy. And so on.
It’s almost as if Schama wanted to avoid talking about all the good stuff. He’s not alone. Most of our other historians follow suit.
This is crazy. If we care about democracy, we should care about the history of democracy — and of every other area where Britain led the way towards a world of freedom and prosperity. I wrote This Little Britain to remind us of all those massive facts that other historians choose to downplay or ignore. The facts that represent us at our glorious best, not at our awful worst.
The Soviets knew that history mattered, when they airbrushed Dubçek from existence, because they were embarrassed by what he represented. We’ve airbrushed our past, because we’re embarrassed too. We think that if we’ve done bad things, then it’s somehow bad taste to talk about the good things. That’s no way at all to honour the things that we should be most proud to honour. It’s time to put away the airbrush and speak the truth. I hope that This Little Britain does just that.
This Little Britain is published by Fourth Estate. The paperback is due out this Thursday, August 6th. Check out Fifth Estate tomorrow, when we’ll be running an extract on the history of English language and literature.
Earlier this summer, at Fourth Estate’s 25th Anniversary party, James Lever read an extract from his novel, Me Cheeta. Decked out in a full monkey suit as the whiskey swigging Cheeta, Lever dazzled the audience with a reading from the opening chapter of his book. Check it out:
Last week, Me Cheeta was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
I recently attended my first ever writers’ conference as a speaker instead of a delegate. I was doing a workshop on the Friday night and the Sunday morning plus a dozen or so one-to-one’s with unpublished writers who were looking for feedback on their work on the Saturday. In the build up to the conference I flicked through the programme to see what the other speakers were up to and spotted an hour long lecture on the Saturday with the optimistic title, A Winning Strategy For Escaping The Slush-pile. Given the fact I spent nearly twenty years trying to escape one slush-pile after another I sniggered and wondered what poor sod had drawn the short straw for that one. I glanced at the speaker’s name and winced when I saw it was me. Three things struck me immediately: I had to talk for an hour (I hate talking); I had to talk about slush-piles (I hate slush-piles); I had to be positive (I’m not).
Still, though, the programme was printed, and I’d already submitted my invoice, so I went and fetched all the beer from the fridge and started to plan what to say. I decided to run through what a slush-pile is, the most accepted format of sending a submission in to one, the best places to get the names and addresses of agents and editors who might be accepting unsolicited submissions, and give out the names of all the agents who hadn’t rejected me out of hand between two and five years ago, when I was busy making submissions myself.
As per usual, I was a total nervous wreck when it came to giving my talk and garbled incoherently at everyone in front of me. If you were there, I apologise, and here’s what I was trying to say:
A slush-pile is the place where a publishing house or literary agent stacks all the unsolicited submissions they’ve been sent until someone can find the time to look through them, and, more often than not, reject them.
Some people have different ideas on the best format for a slush-pile submission. I always went with the following. Although I got plenty of rejections, I never had any negative comments about presentation or not knowing what I was doing; just a few saying I couldn’t write…
A covering letter to the editor or agent you’re sending in to. This letter should be in an accepted business letter format with your name and address, the editor or agent’s name and address, date, title of your novel, a little bit about your novel and the market/genre you see it sitting in, plus a little bit about you.
A title page, including your name and address, your novel’s title, and the word-count.
The first three chapters of your novel, double-spaced, with only one side of the page printed on, and each page containing your name, the title of your novel, plus the relevant page number in a header or footer. (If the first three chapters of your novel are massively long, I wouldn’t send any more than the first twenty pages; Broken didn’t have any chapters, so I sent the first seventeen pages whenever I submitted it to slush-piles).
A synopsis of your novel. This should be no longer than two pages long. If you can keep it to one page, all the better. Most people hate writing them and not many people are sure what makes a good synopsis, and I’m not confident either. I always went for the ‘blurb’ style approach that set the scenario rather than a hard and fast list of characters and events. Just do what seems right for you and your book, but keep it brief. Also, keep in mind that many agents and editors won’t look at the synopsis until they’ve read your opening chapters, so if your opening is fantastic, your synopsis might not be such a critical thing, and if your opening is useless, they’ll probably never read your synopsis anyway, so it’s best not to worry too much.
A stamped addressed envelope for your submission’s eventual return.
All of the above should be loose-leaf (no staples, no paper-clips, no fancy binders). Also, though this is just my personal opinion, your font should be very plain throughout, with no fancy borders for title pages, no gimmicky twenty-point capital letters for the first word of the first page, no changes in font colour, etc. The thinking behind this is that you want an editor or agent to read the start of your novel and, hopefully, get in touch with you and ask to see the rest. That is the only point of making a slush-pile submission, so the plainer and slicker your presentation is, the less chance there is they’ll be fed up with you before they’ve even got to page 1 of what you’ve sent in. With this in mind, my covering letter was always very short and I always put my synopsis at the back of my opening chapter. All I wanted to do was move the agent to the opening pages of my novel as quickly as possible; I told them as little as I could about myself and what I thought of the quality of my writing (for anyone who’s interested, the covering letter and synopsis I used when submitting Broken to slush-piles are posted at the foot of this article here.
Once your slush-pile submission is ready, the best place to get relevant names and addresses of where to send it is from either The Writers’ And Artists’ Yearbook or The Writers’ Handbook. Both are published annually and have thorough listings of agents and publishing houses, whether or not they accept unsolicited manuscripts, and what sort of markets and genres they are/are not interested in: Unless someone’s entry specifically said they weren’t interested in the markets I was writing for, I would submit to them. The only exception I made to this was to avoid anyone who charged a reading fee; there are more than enough people out there willing to reject you for nothing, so don’t feel obliged to pay for the privilege of being told you can’t write. Also, these days, there are plenty of internet sites that give out information on who’s accepting unsolicited submissions, plus the vast majority of agents and publishers have their own websites, and these tend to have thorough submission guidelines on them, plus who to send submissions to. This site here actually rates different agents on their submission record and seems really up to date and thorough, so you might want to check it out: http://www.litmatch.net.
One thing I began to do was multiple submissions. Many agents and editors believe you shouldn’t send in more than one slush-pile submission at a time, and I think that would be fair if we were guaranteed an answer within seven to ten days, but, in many cases, it’s seven to ten months, and, occasionally, the reply just never comes. Rather than waste five years submitting one novel, I always tried to make sure I had at least three submissions out there at a time; as soon as one came back, I sent a new one off to the next agent on my list.
Also, don’t forget sites such as www.authonomy.com and www.youwriteon.com, both of which are sort of automated slush-piles where writers rate each others’ submissions and the top-rated novels go through to editors for review. Harper Collins have recently published their first author in this way (The Reaper, by Stephen Dunne) and youwriteon.com has an established record for helping writers get into print. As well as giving you that all important chance of making a breakthrough, both also give you access to feedback on your work, plus the chance to comment on the work of other writers going through the same process, which can only be a good thing; critically reading other peoples’ work is, for me, one of the best ways to improve yourself as a writer.
Other than that, I didn’t garble about too much else, except I really tried to ram home the fact that a rejection on a slush-pile shouldn’t be taken as a sign that your novel is rubbish or that you can’t write. I think I’ve said elsewhere on this site that making a slush-pile submission is like entering a lottery that rarely pays out, but, like a lottery, if you don’t buy a ticket, you’re never going to win, and the more tickets you buy, the more chance you have of winning. I think this is where most of us fall down when it comes to slush-pile submissions. We’re too sporadic and we give up too easily. There were times when I went months without submitting my fiction to slush-piles, and there were a few novels where I gave up submitting after five or so rejections. Broken picked up well over thirty standard rejections before Curtis Brown offered representation, but I’d made up my mind I wasn’t going to stop submitting it until there was no one left in the UK to submit it to; irrespective of how many rejections I got, whether the feedback was good, bad, indifferent, I was determined to give it the best chance it could possibly have of ending up in front of the right person. In terms of a winning strategy, I genuinely believe this is the only one there is: If you think it’s good enough, don’t give up until your options are exhausted.
The only other thing I tried to do in my talk was convince people that there are agents and editors out there looking through their slush-piles for undiscovered talent. I’ve met plenty of unpublished writers in the past who don’t believe it’s the case, but I’ve always been lucky in that respect — although I’ve picked up a huge amount of rejections over the years, I’ve also had a few agents and editors ask to see an entire manuscript following a slush-pile submission. With that in mind, the following agents either asked to see the whole of one of my novels or said they would be interested in seeing something else of mine if it was written more specifically for the markets they represented:
Jane Conway-Gordon, Dinah Wiener, Luigi Bonomi, Christine Green, Peter Buckman (at The Ampersand Agency), Judith Chilcote, Sheil Land Associates, and, of course, Curtis Brown.
Good luck if you decide to approach them. If not, fingers crossed you’ll have success with editors and agents more suitable to the markets you’re writing for.
Congratulations to James Lever, whose satirical novel, Me Cheeta: The Autobiography, has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize! The moving and hilarious novel follows the story of Cheeta the Chimp, simian star of the big screen, on a behind-the-scenes romp through the golden years of Hollywood. To celebrate, Fifth Estate is posting up the first chapter as an extract. Enjoy! 
Inimitable Rex!
On my last day in motion pictures I found myself at the top of a monkey-puzzle tree in England, helping to settle a wager between that marvellous light comedian and wit Rex Harrison and his wife, the actress Rachel Roberts, and thinking, This is gonna look great in the obituaries, isn’t it? Fell out of a fucking tree.
This was in ’66, during a day off from filming my supposed comeback picture, Fox’s disastrous megaflop Doctor Dolittle, with Dickie Attenborough and Rex. We were in the grounds of some stately home in the charming village of Castle Combe in County Wiltshire, some time after a heavy lunch.
Rex was convinced that the tree would puzzle me. Rachel thought I’d be able to work it out. Arriving at the terms of the bet had not been easy. How exactly was I to demonstrate my mastery of this cryptic plant?
‘You ought to let it start at the top, and then it’s got an incentive to climb down,’ said Lady Combe. Servants were ordered to fetch a ladder. She was delighted at the success of her party. ‘This is exciting. Is it always so much fun with you film folk?’
‘Now then, Cheeta,’ said Rachel, holding a pack of cigarettes very close to my face. ‘You see these Player’s? They’ll be waiting at the bottom for you. You understand? Yummy cigarettes. Don’t you dare let me down.’
‘Darling, I’ve just had rather a splendid idea,’ said Rex. ‘Why don’t we forget the money? If the monkey makes it you can sleep with Burton, if he’ll have you, and if it doesn’t, then I can divorce you but you have to promise not to kill yourself.’
‘Getting windy, Rex?’
‘Au contraire, my sweet. Let’s call it two thousand.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Lady Combe. ‘Is something the matter?’
‘Yes,’ said Rex. ‘Your cellar is atrocious.’
Rex and I had had a number of differences on set, but nothing you wouldn’t expect to see between a couple of stars pushing a script in different directions. Far from being the coward and sadist Rachel frequently described him as, Rex was, somewhere beneath the caustic exterior he had designed to conceal his vulnerabilities, a good man and a very special human being. Nonetheless I’d been upset to have every one of my off-the-cuff contributions vetoed. This interminable ‘Talk to the Animals’ song had already taken us a week. Perhaps I was a little rusty — I’d not worked in pictures for almost twenty years — but Rex had nixed every one of the backflips or handstands I’d been trying to liven it up with. So I was pretty keen to get this tree climbed. Plus I wanted the cigarettes — and, anyway, I wasn’t about to be outwitted by a tree.
The French call them ‘monkey’s despair’. From a distance, each limb had appeared invitingly fuzzy, furred like a pipe-cleaner, or Rex’s arteries, but as soon as I grasped it I discovered that the thing was made entirely out of horrible spiky triangular leaves, more like scales. Unfortunately, Rachel had already ordered the ladder to be removed and I could do nothing but cling to the crown of the tree, slapping my head with one hand and communicating via some screaming, which required little translation, that I was perfectly happy to let Rex have the money.
‘Don’t make such a fuss, Cheeta! It’s just getting adjusted,’ Rachel assured the little crowd, as I tried cautiously to inch down that torture-chamber of a tree for her. But it really was impossible. The French were right. The English name had led me to believe that the tree would be no more than some mildly diverting brainteaser, the chimpanzee equivalent of the Sunday crossword — but this was a ‘puzzle’ only in the sense that being violently assaulted by a plant is, yeah, a somewhat puzzling experience. Fucking typical English understatement.
‘I rather think,’ Rex commented, ‘you owe me two thousand pounds.’
‘Don’t go off half-cocked, darling, like you always do … It’s only been up there a minute.’
Jesus, was that all?
‘Don’t be absurd, you drunken bitch. It’s stuck.’
‘You’re not welching me out of this one, Rexy-boy,’ I heard Rachel say. ‘I never expected it to start climbing right away. You just hold your damn horses.’
‘Now, Rachel, please, it’s perfectly clear the poor animal’s in distress,’ I heard another voice interject. Oh, brilliant: Dickie. ‘The pair of you should be ashamed. Lady Combe, can we please please please get that ladder back up? This is quite frightful!’
‘You touch that ladder, Lady Whatsyourface,’ Rex said, ‘and I promise you, there’ll be tears before bedtime. Nobody touch that bloody ladder! My pathetic shell of a wife is making a point. Dickie, do piss off and stop blubbering.’
‘Thank you, darling,’ said Rachel.
‘You’re welcome, darling,’ said Rex.
They weren’t all that much fun to be around, Rex and Rachel, it does have to be said. I’d never liked the goddamn English anyway, with their razor-wire elocution, their total lack of humour and their godawful pedantic spelling. I clung on, cheeping in distress and swaying eighty feet above the ground. This had all begun a week ago, as we were embarking on Rex’s endless song, which I don’t think he believed in any longer. He regularly punctuated ‘Talk to the Animals’ with violent outbursts of animal-related abuse. He was failing to cope with the toupeemunching goat, the parrot that kept shouting ‘Cut,’ and the general incompetence of the inexperienced English animals, and he was beginning to take it out on me. ‘I don’t mind the bloody ducks and the sheep,’ he’d complained, after we’d abandoned shooting for the day again, ‘so much as this monkey trying to upstage me all the time.’
This was distressing to hear. I’d been lucky to get the job after two decades of stage work and it was important to keep my costar happy. I accepted Rachel’s half-offered cigarette and demonstrated one of my old standbys, the amusingly raffish side-ofmouth exhalation. But Rex was unappeased.
‘And now it’s pinching your fags,’ he said, ‘or did you do that deliberately? Is it that time of the afternoon already?’
‘What an absolutely irresistible charmer you are,my sweet,’ said Rachel. ‘I was just thinking how much it resembled you, though it’s still got all its own hair, hasn’t it? I expect it can still get it up, too.’
From this point onwards, Rachel began to refer to me as Little Rexy — ‘Ooh, look! Little Rexy’s smelling his own poo!’ — and would then make references to my superior intellect, charm, personal appearance, talent, virility and odour, which of course were the last things the universally despised, impotent, alcoholic, cruel, vain, brittle, snobbish and mephitic but still, under that carapace of protective acerbity, very gentle and insecure human being Rex needed to have rubbed in.
Meanwhile, he was oscillating between this rather threatening fantasy of buttonholing various exotic creatures on obscure subjects and straightforward abuse of animals. ‘If this unspeakable fucking shit of a goat touches my hairpiece again, I’ll rip its throat out,’ he’d say, in his inimitably crusty manner, and then he’d be off again, wearing his ‘gentle’ face, with his unlikely plan to set up a multi-species salon —
I’d expatiate on Plato with a platypus
On sex I would talk man to manta ray
I’d discuss dialectical materialism with a micro-organism
I’d enquire of an echidna if Picasso were passé …
and on and on. I mean, this song of Rex’s was endless —
Oh, how I yearn to yack with yaks in Yakkish
Or interrogate a fruitbat about Freud
I’d like to natter with some gnats in Gnattish
I’d harangue orang-utans about the Void …
Ostensibly a beautiful dream, it missed the point. Nothing needs to be said. There is no need for humanity to put its love for animals into words, no need for further explanation or apology.We understand each other perfectly. And, besides, Rex’s idea raised the nightmarish possibility of animals having to participate in the sort of ‘sophisticated’ discussions the unbelievable Chaplin used to host in Beverly Hills, with unfortunate fauna being hounded for their opinions on the latest Eugene O’Neill, etc. Jesus, that poor fruitbat, I thought. If Rex got on to Freud, he’d be there all night, hearing about how bizarre it was that so many of Rex’s girlfriends had killed themselves, or tried to: I saw Rex touring the remaining forests of the planet fretting to unwary wildebeest at the waterhole about, for instance, his failure to call an ambulance when his lover Carole Landis killed herself with Seconal because he wanted to keep the affair quiet. Then rounding on some warthogs and screaming that they were shits who didn’t have half the money or talent he did.
Belatedly I understood the full horror of the situation. It had been my co-star Rex who had made the suggestion that I accompany the other leads to Combe Hall. It was he who had floated the swattable second-serve of a notion to Rachel that ‘If the monkey’s so much cleverer than I am, then surely it should be able to climb that tree …’
Or was I being paranoid? Ask Carole Landis if I was being paranoid. Oh, what larks!
I heard Dickie snivelling eighty feet below (‘This is all very upsetting!’) and Rex cleverly setting up his mentally ill wife to take the blame (‘Satisfied darling? Shall we bring it down yet?’). I swayed above them all on the boneless branches that bit my hands and feet and looked out over the pretty fields of County Wiltshire. I watched the shadows of low, flat-bottomed clouds pass across the rain-spoiled wheat, like paranoid fantasies through Veronica Lake’s vodka-sodden mind, and saw them dissolve into a grey mass, becoming a black line at the horizon, reminding me of an unfortunate s
