Amanda's blog
TOO MANY BOOKS
Blog Category: Uncategorized
Posted on: 24 January 2012
TOO MANY BOOKS
How can anyone have too many books? If you’re a reviewer, this is a stupid question. Every day, my postman brings a giant, bulging mail-bag to my door, filled with the latest children’s books, and quite a few adult literary novels. I get around 100 books a week, and can only choose two to review – and that was in the days when my column in the Times was once a week. Now it’s once every three weeks, it’s a nightmare.
So this particular blog is what I can and can’t cover. I’m very aware that there are only four other people on national newspapers who have this kind of problem, and that to a number of authors we must seem like gatekeepers. It’s often not obvious even to me as a literary writer why some books get reviewed and others don’t.
Most importantly, I can’t review self-published books (so please don’t send me yours) and it’s not my job to read them – it’s an agent’s, or a publisher’s. I can only review what will be released to bookshops nationally, because the Times is a national newspaper.
For my part, a review has nothing to do with whether the book has had a lot of hype, or even advance praise. It has nothing to do with whether the publisher has invited me to an expensive restaurant (something that only annoys me because the money would be far better spent on placing an advertisement in my newspaper, which would then persuade the editor to allow Books more pages), whether there is a launch party or whether my review copy arrives with a free T-shirt, mug, or sparkly sprinkles. Nor does it matter to me whether a book is inspired by a true-life story, or a centenary event, or a heartbreaking news item. All that matters to me is whether the book is good – so good that whether it’s a picture book, a novel for 8-12s or YA fiction, it beats off the competition.
On the subject of which, I have now made it a rule that I’m not going to review an American book unless it’s as remarkable as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games or Where the Wild Things Are. An American book has already sold to its own, vast market, and whatever a British newspaper says about it is just the icing on the cake. American authors, like American movies, are competition for the home-grown, and in these dire economic times it’s British authors who need the publicity. By and large, it’s British authors who think outside convention and come up with something extraordinary anyway. But if I get a press release telling me that the book has already been on the New York Times best-seller list then why on earth am I going to add to this?
I am not going to review books about tweenagers’ OMG dilemmas over boys and fashion, cute animal stories about fluffy kittens, or anything more about vampires, angels, werewolves, ghosts and dystopias in which only teenagers survive to rule the world. Some people confuse books with sausages. I don’t.
Nor am I going to keep reviewing series. There are some I, just like millions of children, am especially fond of – whether this is Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books, or Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon. They have done phenomenally well and established themselves as a brand and a bench-mark of quality; but if you want the latest, you’ll have to go to a bookshop to find it, or join the author’s Facebook page, because though I may have given them their first push, they no longer need my help. Of course if a book is really good then I long for a sequel too. But from now on, all I can do is mention it in passing because there just isn’t space.
If, by the way, you happen to think that children’s literature IS a literature, rather than a genre to be on rotation with Crime and Thrillers, then do by all means write to the Editor of the Times, James Harding (james.harding@thetimes.co.uk) and let him know. Nobody else has the power to decide on a rethink, but all the cross and bewildered readers, parents, grandparents, librarians, literary scouts and publishers can change matters should they be so inspired. Meanwhile, I only have 600 words every three weeks. I can slice that into covering 6 books in 100 words – barely enough for three sentences – or 2 books in 300 words or any combination in between.
So that gets rid of about half my mailbag. I have to carry those six sackfuls out of my house myself by the way, so if my postman feels cross, I feel crosser. No matter how often I ask not to be sent them, I still get endless reissues, board book versions of picture books, duplicates and triplicates of paperbacks whose hardbacks I’ve already reviewed (or not). Please, stop these! It’s great for all the local State schools around me, and Oxfam, but a waste of resources otherwise.
The really heart-breaking thing is what to do about the remaining 20 or so books that are really good. So here are some further pleas.
The two things that I, like any parent, look for above all are great picture books for pre-schoolers, and great books for younger children, ideally 6-9s. Books for teenagers are really distractions from the classics that, in my view, they ought to be tackling from 13+. Of course teens need fun and fantasy too, but they aren’t going to pay much attention to reviews, just to their peers. Yet in recent years there has been a rush of talent to address these age groups. While I completely see the point in the case of authors as good as Meg Rosoff or Anthony McGowan, far too much YA stuff is just turkey Twizzlers for the brain. Of course if you get a Twilight or a Hunger Games fan-base going then you’ve hit the jack-pot commercially. But as a critic, what I’d really like is more for the audience that Beatrix Potter, CS Lewis, E Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett addressed. I’d like more original books which are for children with imagination, initiative, a sense of humour and a sense of prose style.
Strangely, this is exactly what I get least of.
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WRITING FOR TABLOIDS
Blog Category: Uncategorized
Posted on: 28 November 2011 WRITING FOR TABLOIDS
Let me start by saying that, although I principally write novels and review them, I do write occasionally for a tabloid. The Daily Mail, commonly called The Daily Hate by the people I know and like, is both one of the most admired and the most hated of the tabloids. Admired because, in among all the fluff and celebrity gossip which is currently being excoriated by the Leveson enquiry, it does break real news stories and employs some of the sharpest pens in the business. Hated because it is widely perceived as everything that a liberal, intelligent person should detest.
Nor am I going to defend that side of it, although Janet Malcom’s famous words about the indefensibility of all journalism is one that should be written up in letters of fire. I write books and book reviews for love, but I also need to make money – not a huge amount, but just the national average minimum wage. Without the odd piece for the Mail, I simply would not have that. In addition, the section for which I write perhaps three or four times a year, Femail, seems to be edited by people who are professional, polite, pleasant and thoughtful. Even if they chop my sentences in half and commit solecisms such as inserting “And” at the start of sentences, they have excellent subs and careful lawyers.
Yes, they have an agenda, as do I. What people never know is the number of times I say “no” to a commission, even if it is financially tempting. I say “no” about five times more often than I say “yes”, sometimes because it’s something I feel is ethically wrong, or because I don’t feel I’m the right person to write the piece.
A long time ago, my father wrote for tabloids like The Express, when it was a fairly respectable newspaper of its ilk. He had little choice: he had given up his job as a distinguished columnist on the Johannesburg Star, as had my mother, as a result of fighting apartheid. Although he was British, his entire career had been founded in South Africa, and he had no contacts in London. Nor had he gone to university, which was the pre-requisite for joining newspapers such as The Times (for which I now write regularly.) He was just a bright, self-educated, brave man who had survived things like being blown up in World War Two, and who had such charm that people like Noel Coward and Gracie Fields adored him. He was completely fearless, never smart, and I’m afraid he tended to be more polite to dustmen than to dukes. (Though he had a life-long loathing of London cabbies and waiters who failed to bring cold white wine.)
But my father also had a strong ethical sense which, unlike many of today’s hacks, he never forgot. He hated “door-stepping” people, and passed up on the story of his career when he found himself on holiday on Capri just as the first whiff of the Profumo scandal was breaking. The Profumos were also there having, as it were, a second honeymoon after Jack Profumo had privately confessed all to his wife and she had decided to stand by him despite the affair with Christine Keeler. My father was rung on Capri by the editor of the Daily Express and asked to ask him about the rumours of an affair were true. But he, having seen how besotted with each other they were, and loathing that kind of thing, said there could be no truth in it, and refused…..
My father had all kinds of ruses with which he got out of asking questions he found despicable. One of them was to ring the Speaking Clock, if his editor was standing over him demanding he call some aristocrat or other to ask whether she could confirm she was sleeping with, say, her valet. The voice on the other end sounded so impeccably posh that when my father said, “She denies everything”, it was believed. In the end, my father left his job before he got fired, because he hated the ruthless blood-lust of the reporting pack. He was asked to “doorstep” some poor person whose son had been killed, and he found he just couldn’t. He told me that he wrote a note and put it through their door saying that he was ashamed of the way the Press were behaving, and walked away.
At the time, he had two small daughters and a sick wife to support, in one of the coldest winters in living memory. He went down with ‘flu, and for a while things became pretty bad. I remember not having all kinds of simple things like sweets and nice clothes for much of my early childhood, which I think was to do with this. We certainly suffered (not for the first or last time) because of his principles. When I think of what must be driving journalists on to commit the deplorable acts of intrusion and spying on people in their private lives, I do feel a grain of pity mixed with the contempt. It’s a terrifying thing to know that you’re only as good as your last story, even if that story is a piece of filth. It takes a lot of courage to refuse.
But then a miracle happened. Somehow, a very distinguished journalist called James Cameron (whose name lives on in the annual James Cameron Prize) and who had also worked at the Express heard about the story, and told my father that there was a job going in Italy, in the Press Office of the UN. So my family were transported out of the cold and grey of London, to Paradise, where he lived for the rest of his life.
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English v Russian novels
Blog Category: Uncategorized
Posted on: 16 November 2011
English v Russian novelists
I returned home in a rather cross mood last night, having had a conversation with George Walden, judge of the Russian Booker. The setting was a jolly Faber Finds party for Marc Polonksy's book USSR, and not surprisingly the room at Pushkin House was heaving with "expatskis", Russianists and former Russia correspondents, as well as a few old friends like myself. Amid the Soviet era canapes cunningly recreated by a caterer, noisy Russian music and enormous quantities of vodka, people got down to discussing such burning topics of the days as Abramovitch v Berezovsky, and how rich the best show in town is making various English lawyers.
Anyway, George Walden and I got into conversation about contemporary Russian and British literature, fired by an enjoyable piece I'd read by Edward Docx in this month's Prospect http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/10/among-the-russians/, in which he describes the passion and seriousness with which Russian novelists address their art. One key paragraph jumped out at me in it :"We are democratically privileged in Britain and this means that our writers tend to “matter” less because—to oversimplify—there is fundamentally less to fight for politically. Most of our writers do not give voice to the disenfranchised because, compared to Russia, most people in Britain are, well, enfranchised. Conversely, the best of the Russian novelists are not primarily entertainers (although they are this too), but also political parsers, revolutionaries, elucidators, protestors, “soldiers” as Igor puts it. They take up their work more seriously because there are more serious issues to be taken up. And because the novel—not the newspaper, nor the theatre, nor film, nor television—has always been the best place to say the unsayable in Russia."
This is perfectly true, though it seems to me that there is a good deal in our culture still deemed unsayable. I was absolutely shocked earlier this year when, for instance, one of the judges of the Orange Prize told me that the reason why Emma Donaghue's extraordinary novel Room hadn't won was because it would have been too divisive and controversial a choice. (I don't think I misheard this.) There are also plenty of serious issues to discuss, as the protesters outside St Paul’s and the rioters well know, but rather less enthusiasm for political fiction. Anyway, George Walden, who is a very clever chap who resembles one of those dangerously attractive Nazis in a Speilberg film, was bent on insisting that contemporary British novelists are all mediocre unlike Russian novelists, and that one reason for this is that the Russians never trot out the usual rubbish about this year being a wonderful year for fiction. "They'll say to me, 'Nothing good this year,' or 'There's not much good but there are one or two novels that are interesting,'" he said. “Whereas in this country, fiction is never addressed with that level of honesty.”
As someone who sees present-day fiction as a succession of heroic failures, I might have been expected to be less annoyed by this than I was. Perhaps it's my nature to put more emphasis on the heroic than the failure part; in any case, I also feel that many works of art aren't understood or appreciated at the time they become public, and that that mysterious judge Posterity is more impartial than those sitting on prize panels. I count myself lucky to be alive in a time when a play as good as Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and a novel as good as Ian McEwan's Atonement were written; and there are a handful of other books, like Lord of the Flies, which will last as classics. Otherwise, though I’ve read an enormous number of contemporary novels which have been fascinating, charming, gripping and funny, the jury is pretty well out. I’m fairly sure that JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun will last, but am also fairly sure that not one novel that has won the Booker Prize will – not even those that I thought pretty good.
Too often, our fiction does seem to be about pure entertainment – and yet, the other frustrating aspect of this is that a serious novel which tells a story, and which has a plot, is dismissed as middlebrow. For far too many readers, the literary has become synonymous with the deadly dull. As Philip Pullman has said, “In adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They’re embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would.” I remember telling my children the story of Jane Eyre, among others, when they were under ten; it was so exciting that they forgot all about the fact that, at the time, we were sitting on an aeroplane in a storm. Fiction’s job is above all to get us through life’s storms. The greatest compliment ever paid me about one of my own books came from a woman I knew very slightly who told me that she took my second novel, A Private Place, into hospital with her, and was so keen to find out what happened next that she delayed being put under by the anaesthetic.
What one loves about classic Russian fiction is not so much its plots but its characters, who live and feel and speak to us as people we know and whose lives we care about. I am still enthralled by Irene Nemirovsky (whose photograph is reproduced above), the Russian Jewish novelist murdered in the Holocaust; it's clear that she learnt almost everything about how to depict thew human heart from Tolstoy, and might well have equalled him in Suite Francaise had she lived. Her novels are also, however, stories - packed with passion, hatred and the desire for revenge - and even lesser works like The Dogs and the Wolves (which I chose last year for the Radio 4 programme A Good Read) grip a reader.
Despite an enthusiasm for classic Russian novels and plays, I haven’t read any contemporary Russian fiction apart from Boris Akunin’s amusingFandorin detective series (I tried and gave up on the much-hyped Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, feeling that, as it wasn’t actually as good as War And Peace, life is too short.) Maybe it is stuffed with novelists who, due to their political seriousness, are also great story-tellers. But whatever George Walden says, I somehow doubt it.
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