Living in the past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sticks and stones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A series of psychotic reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ηὕρηκα

Harry Potter En Die Towenaar Se Steen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Champagne socialisers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuckold comfort

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congestion on the road less travelled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The importance of earnest Byng

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suffering from premature evaluation?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I quite mind being patronised by a sandwich shop.

And now for someone completely different

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't let's run with the dogs tonight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The poetry of the paperclip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hype sensitivity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I suspect it's some sort of premonition.

And when did you last read your father?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing by numbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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