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.