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.
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