Category Archives: Features

On Monday, the renowned Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawn passed away. He left a book with a publisher three months before he died, which will be published next year. It promises to cover both economics and culture, dealing with sweeping changes in the last two centuries from the disappearance of elitism in sports to developments in a mass consumer society.

As well as his Age of….trilogy covering the social and economic changes of the 19^th century, Hobsbawn’s Age of Extremes is seen as a major historical work dealing with the turbulence of the 20^th,- a lucid, dense but inviting inquiry into the chaos and order of our wars and peace.

We wait with baited breath for the latest instalment of a fine man, a committed communist and a brilliant historian.

The Digital Strom clouds have broken; they are beating down on the wettest, most self-published summer of all. Is it ‘that fine rain’, in the words of Peter Kay, or is that slush pile rain, in the words of many a publisher? Well, there’s been Fifty Shades of it this year and next year self-publishing looks set to expand even more-and expand aggressively.

There are, of course, many reasons potential authors want to publish their own books. They have an idea or manuscript they has not passed the gauntlet of various agents and publishers; they may just want to print a few copies of a personalized piece of work like a memoir for family members which is unlikely to be published; they may want to ‘have a go’ since they don’t think their book is very good or they may indeed want to sell a lot of books and make their living as writers.

And how have the major publishers reacted to the new aspirations of self-published writers? Well, some have embraced the trend whilst other lag far behind. HarperCollins has launched Authonomy.com, a website dedicated to “flushing out the brightest, freshest new literature around”. Writers upload their work and HarperCollins  publish the best. In 2011 Penguin launched  Bookcountry.com, based on the same model.

Recently,  Penguin bought out Author Solutions Inc, one of the world’s largest publishing services, in a bid to become leaders amongst the self-publishing pack. Many publishers hwoever, buoyed up by the revenues of ebooks (which they objected to at first) are slow to manouvre to the self-publishing challenge.

The success of Fifty Shades, which was both a self-published book to begin with and a piece of fan fiction, shows what turbulence is hitting the publishing industry. It’s now bottom-up, with the publishers seemingly now at the bottom of the ‘what’s hot’ list.

It’s thrown us many a controversy over the years but perhaps its most controversial aspect of all is strangely overlooked by  a public and punditocracy focusing more on its individual gems than its process of mining great literary talent.

So, does the Booker Prize reflect and amplify existing social prejudices? So often we hear about the tragic exclusion of this author or ‘that book’, and so often literary luminaries who have been overlooked decry the Prize as bunk. But is the prize actually prejudiced against non-English authors? Does the Booker Prize have a British bias? An English bias? A London bias? Does the coveted literary award lack the plurality of its commonwealth-wide, network of booming voices? Are the Booker judges overtly middle-class, insular and inward-looking?

Let’s start with the Celtic fringe. The stats are illuminating. Only 3.5 % of Booker winners have been Scottish. This is surprising, considering the wealth and depth of Scottish writing. Wales has only produced one winner; Northern Ireland none. Ireland has won three times. In isolation, these stats are perhaps not as damning as one might think-there are of course ten times as many Englishmen as Scots. But vis-à-vis, commonwealth success, the celtic fringe has not done particularly well.

So what about further afield? Well the Booker is far more generous to former British colonies than it is to home Celts. Australia and the African nations have both won four times, Canada has won three,, India twice, New Zealand once. What does this tell us? Perhaps that books from our nearest neighbours are quite exotic enough for when the judges feel the prize must go abroad.

However, there definitely is a trend working against foreign authors in British and U.S publishing These Commonwealth success stories actually run against the grain of a renewed protection impetus emanating from the British domestic scene, with a Cameron-supported, ‘British Books for British Readers’ rolled out last year. The U.S is similarly reluctant to branch out into global literature. They are happy to export, but less so to import.

Beyond the commonwealth, and the awarding merits of Booker’s criteria, there is a dearth of ‘foreign’ books hitting UK shelves. Take a walk around Waterstone’s and you will only find Russian authors at least fifty years dead! It is strange that in Britain we have such a pedigree of respect for Russia’s antiquated authors yet contemporary Russian fiction is practically invisible. You may similarly struggle to find any Chinese authors on the 3 for 2 shelves..

Yet, strangely, Russian literature is healthy; booming even. Russian has more than its fair share of equivalents in terms of its own book prizes. These Russian awards are held in high esteem in their own country but simply do not translate across the waters.

India now represents the biggest new market for British books with its emerging, literate middle class. It is third behind the U.S and the U.K in terms of total book purchases. However, the rest of the world are catching up and it is now non-English books which are selling the fastest. India is also flocking toward its teen ficiion too, with a third of the country’s population under 30.

If Britain won’t accept more foreign authors on its shelves, will there be a backlash in terms of our exports?

It’s the fastest-selling novel for adults of all time. It’s mommy porn. It sold 4 million copies in the UK and 15 million in the U.S. In just four months. Wow. It’s saucier, rompier and dirtier than almost anything before. But you don’t need a Bard and Muse review of 50 Shades of Grey. What you need is to know the important sub-plots that’s the book’s meteoric rise to stardom has revealed about the publishing industry.

Two Important Shades Indeed

So, this is what women want!  50 Shades’ popularity has sent shockwaves down a publishing industry’s much-buffeted sonar system. They presumed that sexual and fantasy fiction must be suggestive to work. The sex is all in the mind, publishers like to state, so make it just juicy enough to get the imagination running wild. But that premise has been turned upside down with 50 Shades’ graphic descriptions of sexual activities. For this reason 50 Shades must be seen as a hugely important book. Readers don’t want sharp inhalations of breath in the voyeuristic age of Facebook and Youtube, they want triple penetration with double fisting for good measure.

A second shade of importance might be in the explanation of 50 Shades’ E-Book success. Instead of reading Lady Chatterley in full view of train companions, the commuter can now get their smut in the cover-less black vortex of the Kindle. No one knows what your reading after all. But this is perhaps a minor point compared to the great news that 50 Shades started its life as an E-book and then a print-on-demand paperback. This does add a hidden depth to the 50 Shades explosion and provides a reassuring example of how the hidden gem in the digital library can enjoy global acclaim every bit as much as those found in the 3 for 2 section of Waterstone’s (apostrophe included.)

But perhaps the most intriguing  shade in the 50 Shades explosion is in the power of the accompanying parody.Almost instantly, two separate 50 Shades of Grey parody books have, somewhat surprisingly, hit the charts in their own right.50 Shades of Black & Blue by I B Naughtie  has risen to #38 on the Amazon Kindle Store’s UK Bestseller list  even though most critics agree it’s a commercial hi-jack with no literary merit. Similarly, 50 Shades of Red, White & Blue by Maggie Muff has also enjoyed success in the direct aftermath of the 50 Shades ‘motherbook’. What’s important about this? Well, for a start such parodies could only arrive in time in E-book form which is another example of the versatility of the digital book world compared to the more protracted paperback counterpart but also that when a ‘silly’ book comes along the e-book can always test just how far the silliness can fly. E-books probe; paperbacks wait. With that in mind, my new novel The Book That Made Even Cartman Spew will be out soon. Parodies welcome.

We all lie. We all like to thing we’ve done things we haven’t and when it comes to claiming we are well versed in the greats of literature we like to lie even more than usual. So you read the Beowolf did you? And all seven volumes of Remembrance of Things Past?  Well we don’t believe you. Here’s ten books which we have all read at some time or other…allegedly;

1) House of Leaves; Mark Z. Danielewski’s 

Even for those who’ve read it, describing House of Leaves is nigh-on suicidally difficult. You hear people who definitely haven’t read it saying things like ‘it’s a book within a book within a book’. Hmmm.Whatever it is, it’s fiendishly impenetrable to understand-House of Leaves  is a maze of diaryesque jottings,  convoluted footnotes, appendices, poems and letters, and general literary subterfuge. It reads like a nightmare  but you haven’t read it.

2 Moby Dick; Hermann Melville

“Call me Ishmael.” With these three words,probably recited with pride and smugness, you know someone’s lying if they say they’ve read it. Another giveaway is a well-rehearsed speech on the whale being a metaphor for all kinds of crap. An epic tale, woefully under-read, reading Moby Dick is like reading the New Testament of grand moralizing.

3 Dead Souls; Nikolai Gogol

‘it’s this clever, satirical, witty book about corrupt officialdom and peasantry..it’s about life more than death in fact…’ Few have read it. Gogol’s only novel, Dead Souls concerns  a young man who travels around Russia buying up “dead souls” – that is, peasant workers who have died, but who are still registered as living in the census records. Hugely satirical, strictly a name-dropper.

4 Middlemarch; George Eliot

No you haven’t-you say you have but actually you haven’t.  Eliot uses a small, fictitious town as a model for civilisation in general. Apparently it’s superb; epic in its scope and vision. Virginia Woolf later called  it “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

5 War and Peace; Leo Tolstoy

An obvious one and of course you haven’ read it. It’s a long old book, covering an outrageously wide cast of characters in  19th Century Russia during the Napoleonic  invasion. The conflict on the battlefield is compared to the squabblings and intrigues  amongst Russia’s elite. More of an event than a book, it remains  desperately under-read

6 Madame Bovary; Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert was an outright nut but, with madame Bovary, he produced a heroine of lasting literary stardom. She is a flawed and pathetic creature, caught up in the whiffiest of French pretensions but ultimately madame Bovary is perhaps the most sympathetic character in all French literature. A brilliant story of adultery, social mores and the need to keep up appearances, few have read it despite its palatable length and easy style.
7 Crime and Punishment; Fyodor Dostoevsky

Are those cheeks still blushing? Another classic which is left on the bookshelves for all eternity, Dostoevsky’s message is beautiful and clear;  ’humility sanctifies whilst humiation damns’

The novel itself tells the intense tale of a young  student who sees himself as above the law. He decides to commit murder but later becomes sick with guilt and shame whilst the noose around him tightens.

8 Dracula; Bram Stoker

Criminally under-read and no it isn’t just about Transylvania and silver bullets ….Dracula actually spends most of his time in London. Dracula certainly isn’t elegant but it was released to instant critical acclaim. Stoker’s prose uses diary-style jottings which recount the frantic pace of Dracula’s evil doings. It swithches between characters and perspectives,  and boils with menace. The original, and best, vampire story.
9 Finnegans Wake; James Joyce

‘Yeah it’s like the hardest book i’ve ever read, really experiemntal prose and ….’ Written over 17 painstaking years in Paris, scarcely anyone has read Finnegans Wake and for good reason. Ulysses is difficult enough as it is. FW mixes up words, and jumbles prose styles; its sentences come flying off the page on parachutes of apparent nonsense. a masterpiece..we are told.

10Paradise Lost; John Milton

‘erm…it’s…erm’

The expulsion of mankind from the Garden of Eden its a tale of Christian morality. And that’s about that.