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Mercier And Camier And Faber And Me

Faber have begun to publish their series of the complete works of Beckett in newly edited editions and in a "unified design".  And they look good. Rhys Tranter, who runs the wonderful A Piece Of Monologue site has kindly tipped me off that on the back of the new edition of Mercier And Camier is a quote from me. This is a lovely thing. It makes me feel quite pleased with myself. No no, Sam, please, don’t thank me, I’m happy to help.

I’d like to think that Faber have used me in an attempt to appeal to a younger, hipper audience. It’s more likely that I’m the only writer who’s ever bothered to write anything about Mercier And Camier and they had no choice. The quote is from an article I wrote for The Guardian ages ago, and you can read it in full here .

Mercier And Camier front

Mercier And Camier back

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The Peculiar Habit And The Ringtone Concerto, Part 19

It’s been raining now for eleven days. Small Ellen went yesterday to see her uncle, who lives near the west gate. She endured the admonishments he likes to deliver, and returned to us with seven silver coins and a porcelain bowl. We got nearly forty silver coins for the bowl from Hagger. Small Ellen demanded a meal at Stintow, and who were we to argue. She had two deserts. Last night we slept in the hotel by the curved church. The beds were soft and cool and the water we washed with was clean.

Today Flum killed a policeman. It was a mistake. We are running now and have no disguise. All the city’s signals are flashing and we are at the mercy of the wide walls and the narrow gates. Small Ellen has a cough. I fear the worst.

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Under the volcano

In London since last Thursday the sky has been unbroken blue. I’ve been going out to watch the sun set. At night I have seen the stars. The noise is of traffic and people. For once, there is no airplane noise. The city is a little calmer, a little more lovely. On Saturday while I was walking, I took photographs of the sky. I saw others doing the same, shyly, in the way that people get the cameras out when it’s snowing. It’s a nice feeling.

London without airplanes

If we’re lucky - I mean if mankind is lucky - then we are living during the time when the planet is at its dirtiest, noisiest, most polluted. In a few generations time people will either be living in a cleaner better place, or they’ll be clambering over each other for higher ground, cooler latitudes, clean water, food. It’s a little annoying - to think that you are living either in the worst of times, or the end of times.

Eyjafjallajoekull has done us a favour. It’s a neat, relatively painless but still dramatic reminder that we live on a planet. You know. A big blob of rock and water floating in space. You might live in a nice house, in a sophisticated city, in a rich western country, with a pension and broadband and a credit card. But you’re hurtling through the universe, sustained by a delicate mixture of gases, protected by a paper thin atmosphere, in a narrow band of temperature between a hot death and a cold death, on a planet that is changing, moody, impermanent, given to outbursts of violence and driven by complicated systems of self regulation that don’t include our well being in their calculations. We’re all of us hanging by a thread. Or several threads, I suppose. The thread of unlimited cheap air travel, available at the drop of a hat, seems a bit frayed. It probably won’t snap, not yet, and over the next few days they’ll tie a knot in it and we’ll all be back on Ryan Air, complaining about the fact that they take us all the way across Europe in an afternoon, for the price of a new shirt, but don’t quite take us to the door of our hotel and want us to pay them for a sandwich.

We don’t know we’re born.

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The Long Filming

A French film production of my first novel The Long Falling starts principle photography in Northern France and Belgium this week. It’s directed by Martin Provost , who made Séraphine , which starred Yolande Moreau - who also takes the main role in the new film. The two of them have, as I understand it, been the driving force behind getting this project - a difficult sell, I’d have thought - off the ground. The novel has been adapted to a French/Belgian setting, and names and other things (including the title) will change considerably. I don’t know anything about the adaptation. I didn’t want to, and didn’t ask. But these are talented film makers, and I’m very glad it’s them, and I wish them well.

Moreau and Provost

I’ve lost count of the number of times books of mine have been optioned over the years. The first time it happened I took a deep breath, thought about the money, and tried to keep a close eye on what they were up to. But I soon realised that film options are a weird sort of futures trading and have little to do with the actual business (never mind the art) of making actual films. It has become quite a welcome, modest, source of income for me. Film makers get in touch, offer money to have exclusive rights to try and develop a script and raise more money to film it, I say yes, they pay me, and then they can’t get it together and after a year is up, maybe even two, they disappear. Suits me.

It suits me because I don’t really want anyone to film my books. They are books. Novels, mostly. Complete unto themselves. They are not blueprints for art in another medium. Why can’t film makers just make films? Do they not have ideas of their own? It puzzles me. Making art might be thought of as a sort of elaborate, public cleansing ritual. It’s odd and unsettling to have some guy come along and climb into your dirty bathwater.

And I can’t be the only reader who gets pissed off when Hollywood comes stamping all over a novel that means something to me. When I love a book, I dread - and I really do mean dread - that some bastard will film it. And worse, that the film will be a commercial success. That characters and scenes and ideas that are alive inside me in complex non visual ways involving language and tone and a carefully, skilfully evoked atmosphere, will turn up as squashed, horrible, crushed reductions all over the television or the radio or the sides of buses.

Most recently for example, The Road . I have no idea if it’s a good film or not. I really don’t care. The point is that that man and his son have lived in my head since I read the book, and my emotional attachment to them, and to it, is so deep and genuinely meaningful to me, that the bits of clips that I glimpsed before I could hit the remote, the bits of useless special effects that suddenly appeared on the TV during ad breaks before I realised what it was, the face of Vigo Mortensen being anguished on posters, have - despite my vigilance - somewhat spoiled the life of the book in my memory. Where it lives as a world, a feeling, built on the language of Cormac McCarthy and the material of my own imagination and experience, and where it should be allowed to live on - without being subjected to a jarring translation into mundane specifics.

Next year, god help us, we get the Tintin films. You have no idea how depressed this makes me. Really. When I was about eight, my Dad bought me a copy of The Black Island in Dublin city centre. I read it in the car on the way home and it changed my life. Seriously. During my teens I learned more from Hergé about how to write than I did from any other writer. (For a superb account of just how good the Tintin books really are, I can thoroughly recommend Tom McCarthy’s Tintin And The Secret Of Literature .) And I lived in those books. Part of me still lives in them. To this day, when I take to my bed, it’s The Calculus Affair, Tintin In Tibet, The Seven Crystal Balls , that I take with me. Most of all it’s The Castafiore Emerald - one of the very few almost perfect books - that sustains my imaginative life. I have smuggled bits of Hergé into every novel I’ve written. Sometimes people notice, and it thrills me.

My point though, is simply that the boy detective and his friends are fully alive in my imagination. They live and breathe and speak there, and the colours of their world and the tones of their voices, though not fixed, move within an orbit created by the skill of Hergé as a writer and an artist, and by my own experience of reading about them, and my childhood and my youth and my life, and that inner world is precious to me, completely precious and valued and loved; and next year, with a deluge of advertising, breakfast cereals, action figures and nauseating celebrity interviews, that bastard Stephen Spielberg is going to fuck it all up, and no matter how much I try to isolate myself and ignore the whole horrible thing, my beautiful inner world is going to be violated by Jamie fucking Billy Elliot Bell and Andy fucking Gollum Serkis, and Nick fucking Frost and Simon fucking Pegg. And even if these people (all of whom I, annoyingly, quite like) create something marvellous, it won’t be my marvellous - the one me and Hergé created - and I’d really rather that the whole project was hit by a shooting star, an Inca curse, something, anything, that shut it down now and forever.

I’m not sure there’s anyone quite as emotionally invested in The Long Falling as I am in the Tintin books. But I know there are people to whom it means a great deal. I hope you won’t mind the film too much. If you think you will, I hope you can avoid it. I’m sure that won’t hit the takings too much.

The truth is that I needed the money. And I am sufficiently removed from the book that it doesn’t tug at me at all. To be honest, I can’t remember much of it. If I watch it (and I suppose I will at some point) I probably won’t be able to spot many of the changes. And I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am sort of intrigued at the idea of a bunch of people running around the Belgian countryside acting out scenes I imagined all those years ago. And I love Grace, and I hope they realise that …

Actually, it seems that it does tug at me. Because I remember things now that I had forgotten. Maybe I won’t watch it. I don’t know. I really don’t.

If I was rich, I wouldn’t allow anyone to make films of my books. But I’m not. Sorry about that.

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Count Me Out

This morning, two letters. One is from the Pope to the people of Ireland. You can read about that vacuity elsewhere. The other is from me to the Diocese of Westminster, formally declaring my defection from the Catholic Church. The timing is entirely coincidental, but I like it.

It’s a very long time since I was anything other than a relaxed, contented atheist. I avoid religious ceremonies of all kinds as much as I can, and have tried to be ecumenical in my anti-religious thinking. But, I’m Irish. I was baptised into the Catholic Church. I was educated at a Jesuit school from the age of 8 to the age of 18. I received communion and was confirmed into the Catholic Church. I went to a Catholic University. It’s hardly surprising if most of my atheism is, so to speak, Catholic atheism.

While I haven’t claimed the Catholic Church as mine since I was a teenager, the Catholic Church continues to claim me. And you, if you received a Catholic baptism. The superb and straightforward website www.CountMeOut.ie explains how the Church continues to count us, the baptised but long gone, amongst its congregation. And it helpfully provides the resources for putting an end to this by formally ‘defecting’ from the Church. Though focussed on people in Ireland, it will be useful to Catholics anywhere who don’t want to be counted as Catholic any more. In my own case for example I printed off a PDF they supply, and addressed it to the diocesan office where I am resident along with a cover letter I wrote myself. In due course, I expect, some poor, miserable priest whose job it is to deal with the hell-bound, will write to me with a confirmation that I am no longer a Catholic.

I probably would never have bothered doing this if it wasn’t for my unfocussed feeling of disgust and anger over the recent child abuse scandals. Defection is a small but practical stand against what would otherwise be a detached, distant horror. And I can’t really think of a better word for the widespread rape and sexual abuse of children by priests of the Catholic Church, which has been, over generations, systematically covered up by the hierarchy of the church, up to and including the current Pope, Joseph Ratzinger. (For a decent summary of just how entangled Ratzinger is in this, have a read of Christopher Hitchens. ) This cover up involved moving rapists and abusers around rather than reporting them to the civil authorities. As a result it led to the creation of more and more victims, and more and more suffering. This litany of facts, which reads at first like the berserk plot of a particularly distasteful Dan Brown novel, is now so well established and documented that I frankly, honestly, cannot understand how little has been done about it. I cannot understand why many bishops in Ireland remain in their jobs. I cannot understand why they, and others, including Sean Brady, have not been arrested on suspicion of, at the very least, not reporting a crime. I am baffled as to why an international police investigation has not been launched. I genuinely don’t understand it. The Catholic Church hierarchy is morally vacuous. As Johann Hari has pointed out , if it it were any other sort of organisation, it would not be tolerated. It would have been shut down.

If you received a Catholic baptism and are now an atheist, or a person of no religious beliefs, or a ‘lapsed Catholic’, I hope you’ll think about defecting via www.CountMeOut.ie . If you remain a Catholic, please, at the next mass you attend, when you recite the Nicene Creed, consider the line We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church and consider the implications of your personal solemn endorsement, given what the Church has been involved with in your lifetime. If you still wish to stand up and proclaim your faith in it, then shame on you.

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Lanark

Lanark


“Have you a library?”
“We have two: one for film and one for music. I am in charge of the latter.”
“What about books?”
“Books?”

I read it first I think when I was in my late teens. It is coupled in my memory with Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers , and I’m not entirely sure why. I suspect I must have read them at the same time, or one after the other, or perhaps Burgess’s endorsement of Alasdair Gray got me to Lanark (“Gray is the best Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott”). Anyway. Earthly Powers has some explicit gay sex scenes, and Lanark confused me. So one of them was regularly consulted and the other was read once, fast, and I wasn’t sure that it had fully settled in me.

Lanark was too disturbed to feel the tears on his face. He said,
“You don’t know me. I’m not called Thaw. I’ve been none of these things. I’m something commonplace that keeps getting hurt.”

And although reading it now is much like reading it for the first time, there are scenes and lines that are suddenly, acutely, familiar; and I have had the occasional nagging sense that ideas in it have found their way into my own work. Though I may be mistaking being human for being a writer. It’s a book full of recognition. I’m like that . Or, I know someone who does that . Or - this is the way it works .

Duncan shut his mouth. After a few minutes Mr. Thaw said on a note of pleading,
“Tell me the matter, Duncan.”
“I had a wish to be an artist. Was that not mad of me? I had this work of art I wanted to make, don’t ask me what it was, I don’t know; something epic, mibby, with the variety of facts and the clarity of fancies and all of it seen in pictures with a queer morbid intense colour of their own, mibby a gigantic mural or illustrated book or even a film. I didn’t know what it would have been, but I knew how to get ready to make it. I had to read poetry and hear music and study philosophy and write and draw and paint. I had to learn how things and people felt and were made and behaved and how the human body worked, and its appearance and proportions in different situations. In fact, I had to eat the bloody moon!”

A quick summary … is difficult. There are four Books, and they are presented to us in the order 3, 1, 2, 4. Books 1 and 2 form a structurally straightforward, realist account of the short life of Duncan Thaw from boyhood to early adulthood in and around Glasgow. He wants to be an artist. He is doomed. Books 3 and 4 bracket this conventional narrative with the peculiar adventures of Lanark, a version of Thaw in a version of Glasgow called Unthank - and other places - that is fantastical and absurd and which echoes what we know with the grotesque distortion of what we suspect. Lanark wants sunlight and love. He is doomed.

Lanark ran to his bed, grabbed the radio and flicked the switch; he said, “Get Dr. Munro! Get me Dr. Munro!”
A small clear voice said, “Who is speaking, please?”
“I’m called Lanark.”
“Dr. Lanark?”
“No! No! I’m a patient, but a man is dying!”
“Dying naturally?”
“Yes, dying, dying!”
He heard the voice say. “Will Dr. Munro report quickly to Dr. Lanark, a man is dying naturally; I repeat, a man is dying naturally.”

It’s often funny. Earnest young men usually are. And it’s an easy, relaxed read, despite its length and the peculiarity of the structure. Things happen. People talk. It fairly gallops along. It’s full of bits you’ll want to mark and come back to. It’s quotable. And it has Gray’s own beautiful bookplates to ruin your eyesight on.

Lanark Lanark Lanark Lanark


Like a lot of readers, I am moved more by the story of Duncan Thaw than I am by the rest of it. I find it impossible to read of the death of Mrs Thaw without weeping. And I love Mr Thaw. I love his good sense and his dignity, and his patience with his son. I love his love. Thaw himself is a pain in the arse of course, but my god, he’ll break your heart. And he is, more than Lanark, the emotional centre of the book. He’s where the reader stands. This reader anyway. Despite the fact that his life is narrated to Lanark, and that Lanark is the container, it is Thaw that makes sense to me. The book insists that what we understand about Thaw is bracketed by what we don’t understand about Lanark. It is from the sunless confusion of Unthank, up to the familiar streets of Glasgow, and then back down again, that the book and the reader moves.

I wanted madness to blot out the memories with the strong tones and colours of a delusion, however monstrous. I had a romantic notion that madness was an exit from unbearable existence. But madness is like cancer or bronchitis, not everyone is capable of it, and when most of us say, “I can’t bear this,” we are proving we can.

But I can’t really get along with Unthank, the Institute, Provan, the Council - all the elaborate architecture that exists in Books 3 and 4, and which seems ultimately, to me, to do not much more than elucidate by deprivation what we get from books 1 and 2. As with all delineated fantasy a fair bit of time is spent on exposition. Time spent explaining a metaphor is time spent weakening it. The best bits of 3 and 4 are the formless, drifting intuitions and impressionistic resignations of Lanark. When he simply falls into a sad acceptance that he doesn’t know what the hell is going on, and that it isn’t fair. Which is when he is mostly Thaw. Sometimes you get the feeling that his (Thaw’s, Lanark’s and Gray’s) fear of women might derail things completely, or that the voluble self-conscious nervousness about everything will swamp us. The trouble taken to get him into politics towards the end, and have him attend the Council assembly in Provan, feels to me less like a nod to Kafka and more like a kind of epileptic fit to him. It does create a powerful pathos, finally, but it seems like an over amplified insistence on universality, on extrapolating the cruelties of Thaw’s small world into a larger one.

“Attention, please note! Attention, please note! The expansion committee announces that after the hundred and eighteenth all twittering is to be treated as a sign of hopelessness.”

I have a dim memory of feeling that Books 3 and 4 were over my head the first time I read them. Now though I get the sense that Unthank is half vision of the messy innards of the capitalist mistake, and half a topography of Gray’s own lack of confidence. Because there’s too much of it, for me. And it’s too clever - its contrivances laid bare and pointed at are contrivances nevertheless. There is too much elaboration and emphasis. By the time Gray himself appears, as Nastler, the king, to tell Lanark how it’s all going to end, and to parade his “Index of Plagiarisms” (they are no such thing), I’d had about enough.

Which is probably why Gray brings it all to a halt not long after. It’s too fine a book, and he is too skilled a story teller, to ever actually lose the reader. And in any case, he anticipates and undermines this sort of criticism, sometimes by directly making it himself, from inside the text, more often through his wonderful sense of pace and timing and tone. Lanark is persistently engaging. For a book that is 560 pages long, written over the best part of 30 years, that is some achievement.

And make no mistake. I’m the man who climbs a mountain and is moved to tears by the view but complains then about the ache in his knees. Lanark is one of the great books. There is nothing comparable really. Idiosyncratic and berserk, it swells in my nit-picking consciousness with a generosity of spirit and an ache of love and sadness that did, it seems, after all, settle in me all those years ago, hidden, like a piece of advice, waiting for me to be old and broken down enough to hear it.

And it’s what Thaw, and Lanark, and Gray are really interested in and long for - kindness, fairness, and love - that Lanark delivers. Gray’s socialism and his furious compassion for people animate this book. It’s full to bursting, but with a very calm centre, and if there are stutters and hesitations and missteps, Gray is well aware of them, and they are honest and involving. And Lanark trips through this clutter of obstacles and doubts and diversions, and emerges as a bright, sunlit memorial to the ideas of art and decency and generosity and love. And when all that fails - as it inevitably does -  we are left at least with the hope of “annihilating sweetness.”

I fear that the men of a healthier age will think my story a gafuffle of grotesquely frivolous parasites, like the creatures of Mrs. Radcliffe, Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Perhaps my model world is too compressed and lacks the quiet moments of unconsidered ease which are the sustaining part of the most troubled world. Perhaps I began the work when I was too young. In those days I thought light existed to show things, that space was simply a gap between me and the bodies I feared or desired; now it seems that bodies are the stations from which we travel into space and light itself. Perhaps an illusionist’s main job is to exhaust his restless audience by a show of marvellously convincing squabbles until they see the simple things we really depend upon: the movement of shadow round a globe turning in space, the corruption of a life on its way to death and the spurt of love by which it throws a new life clear. Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies. What do you think?

Gray

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The Horla

Guy De Maupassant

I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.

I read Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla while on a flight to Dublin the other day. (It’s very short).  I was reading the handsome volume from Melville House , part of their "Art of The Novella" series. It includes two versions of the story, from 1886 and 1887, and an earlier version entitled Letter From A Madman , of which the quote above forms the opening paragraph. I think I prefer this first take. It’s very direct, much shorter even than The Horla itself, and it ends with the line, "What should I do?" which had me looking out at the runway of Dublin Airport in a bit of a panic. Damned if I know what you should do, Guy.

The story is straightforward. A man feels that he is gradually becoming in some way haunted, or perhaps possessed, or in any case considerably fiddled with, by a presence, an invisible something-or-other, which drinks the water on his bedside table while he sleeps, and drinks the milk he leaves as a test (because he hates milk himself) and which causes him to suffer greatly and feel deep fear and unease and dread, unto the point of despair, and in the last version, violence. He thinks he’s going mad. Then he thinks that there is another possibility. That the creature, which he takes to calling Le Horla (he doesn’t know why) is a higher form of life that has arrived to take the place of mankind. He finds evidence for this in reports of a strange illness in a town in Brazil.

The translation is a lovely piece of work, by Charlotte Mandell. In an afterword, she points out that the neologism ‘horla’ combines hors , meaning outside, and , meaning there. "So le (note the masculine gender) Horla sounds like the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There."

De Maupassant’s descriptions of nocturnal activities in a locked room where he is ostensibly alone immediately put me in mind of Thomas Glavinic’s Night Work , about which I’ve written on this blog . Glavinic takes (I’m sure he must have read The Horla ) what is a slight but startling set of ideas about our perceptions and our sense of ourselves, and expands them into a terrifyingly empty world, which nevertheless seems to have someone else in it. These are stories about the self. But the self isn’t single.

Melville House tell us that The Horla "was published shortly before the author was institutionalised for insanity". It’s a bit of a stretch, that, I think, to be fair. He wrote Letter From a Madman a full seven years at least before he entered the asylum after a suicide attempt. But it’s clear that De Maupassant was thinking and writing about what ‘insanity’ feels like. It’s terrifying, clearly. And the terror comes in large part from what it also feels like - reasonable, and logical, and precise.

The Horla

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Jamie Stewart’s Packages

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I’ve had these packages from Jamie Stewart for months. Three of them were still in their envelopes. I’ve been scared to open them. A new one arrived yesterday. So today I opened all of them. Or, I took them out of their envelopes. I took some photos. In some of the photos I include a donkey that Kenneth gave me last week. He brought it back from Cyprus. I still haven’t opened any of the actual packages. They’re quite pretty as they are, and Jamie, or whoever puts them together, is good at knots.

That concludes this blog post.

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Authoring the future.

cogs

The stand off between Amazon and Macmillan over the last few days has been covered all over the place by people with a firmer grasp of the economic and legal ins and outs of what’s going on than I possess . But. This is not going to be the last such confrontation. For reasons that are all about technology and business - and have next to nothing to do with writing - the shiny spotlight of new gadgetry, and all the money that powers it, has turned its heat on the world of book publishing. Of all things.

(And I do mean books. I don’t mean newspapers and magazines, which are a separate business. And one in which the application of new technology makes more sense. While there are cross overs and tangled interests, the similarities tend to be red herrings.)

The books business has operated on a fairly predictable, if complicated, model for a long time now. There are subtleties and oddities, and I’m simplifying somewhat, but basically …

1.        The author writes a book.
2.        The author hands the book to an agent.
3.        The agent finds a publisher for the book.
4.        The publisher has the book edited, designed and printed.
5.        The publisher markets the book to retailers and readers.
6.        The retailers buy the book and present it to readers.
7.        The reader buys the book.
8.        The reader reads the book.

In an ideal world, steps 2 to 7 would not exist. In the world of new technologies - of Amazon, the iPad and iBooks, of the Google Book Agreement - steps 3 to 7 are in a mess, scrambled, being fought over, argued about, and written off and on again as everyone tries to find the right combination that will keep everyone employed.

Notice anything? It’s pretty much certain that ten years from now, those 5 steps from  3 to 7 will have been cut down to maybe 4 steps. Maybe even 2 or 3 steps. We are approaching the ideal world.

The only essential steps in this process are steps 1 and 8. If I want to pay my rent, step 7 is good too. And in order for step 7 to happen, some of the other steps are going to have to stay in place in one form or another. But the process is going to shrink. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Mostly the debate about what to shrink and how is being had between publishers and retailers. Agents are a canny lot and are keeping a watching brief. Readers are interested, and are vaguely hopeful that when the dust settles they might have some cool new ways of reading books, and that it might be a bit cheaper. Authors are worried. Authors are always worried of course. But in this instance, how worried should we be?

Publishers certainly need to worry, particularly the big ones. Traditional retailers don’t need anyone to tell them that they need to worry. But non traditional retailers, Amazon chief amongst them, need to worry too, and from their actions over the last week, I think they know it. Neither of these two giant cogs in the process want to give way. So inevitably the pressure is being forced outwards. Readers are feeling it (or, are being asked to feel it by Amazon’s pricing games), and authors are feeling it - mostly by being told that the days of big (or any) advances are over, and that royalties aren’t going to improve either, sorry about that, and that we should shut up and be grateful that anyone does us the honour of publishing us in the first place.

This is bullshit.

Retailers and publishers are non-essential. New technology means that I can, in theory, sell you my new book on this website at a price that suits both you and me, and cut out the middle men. But I want to be a writer, not a businessman, and you want the enjoyment of browsing your local bookshop and stumbling over my book there, all nicely presented. So, I employ a middle man. But why on earth would I need two middle men?

Authors have power.

It’s very difficult to convince any but the biggest name authors of this. Most of us feel that we have no power whatsoever. This is because we tend to forget, indeed we are encouraged to forget, that we are, to use the iLanguage, the ‘content providers’. And what is content? King. Without us, there are no books. No books, no business.

It’s difficult to do anything with that. It’s difficult to organise a bunch of isolated, solitary social misfits. But it’s not really necessary. Agents form a strong, though admittedly not comprehensive, bodyguard. They act of behalf of individual authors rather than some greater ideal, but they know what side their bread is buttered. The generality of agents’ work is done to the benefit of the generality of authors. They are, after all, a non-essential step as well, and they know it.

And within publishing there is a core of people who know full well that the business is about writing, and that what serves the writing will in the long term win out over what serves the process. These people are clinging to door frames maybe, but they’re there. And they’re right. And the wrong ones who have replaced their colleagues will not last.

I’d argue, and I don’t think it’s a controversial argument to make, that publishers and retailers have done a pretty good job of diminishing quality over the last, say, fifteen years. They’ve become involved in the chase for big money phenomenon books; they’ve invested in non-writing celebrities and have tried to contrive titles to appeal to perceived markets; they’ve sacrificed long term modest sales authors in favour of one off high sales ones - part of the misguided strategy of focussing on titles, not on writers; they’ve taken discounting to an absurd level - seeming to misunderstand the very nature of what it is they’re selling, believing books to be as amenable to regular bulk buying as ready meals. They have, and it’s a generalisation that doesn’t have to contend with very many exceptions, behaved bloody stupidly.

The current scramble for the future of books hopefully lends itself to a refocussing on books themselves. People want good ones. Formats and methods of delivery may change, but people will continue to want great books and great writing. Anyone who misses that point, be they author, agent, publisher or retailer, is going to lose out. Anyone who forgets that it’s about connecting the reader to the writer is going to lose out. Anyone who thinks the authors are the non-essential cog in this process are going to lose out spectacularly.

A future is opening up in which retailers and major publishers will in all likelihood merge, probably bloodily, and will start cannibalising each other’s traditional roles. The biggest book publisher in ten years time could be Amazon. Or Apple. Or perhaps the biggest books retailer in ten years time will be Barnes & Noble. Or Apple. But certainly, something has to give. Probably not Apple.

It may be that big corporate publisher/retailers will become simply an annexe of the entertainment industry, publishing only the brand name authors with guaranteed returns. And that literature will be carried out elsewhere, by smaller, independent publishers working both with old fashioned physical books and their digital counterparts, selling directly online to a worldwide readership. Some would argue that this is exactly what’s happening now.

But I’m not simply whistling past the graveyard here. At least I hope I’m not. Authors are the books business. In all the shouting that’s going to go on (and on) in the next while, listen out for the businesses - be they retailers or publishers or both - who are putting writers at the centre of their plans. They’ll be the ones left standing.

amazon fail

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