Sunnyside up

The uproar which met Sceptre's announcement that Glen David Gold's Sunnyside would be a Waterstone's exclusive for three months, an imbroglio in which I am gratified to have played a small part, has concluded in notification today from Hachette CEO Tim Hely-Hutchinson that the deal is off. What's more this news came out on Radio 4's Today this morning, which I think reflects how important, practically and symbolically, this issue really is for the trade.

This is wonderful, a testament to indie power. Having finished the book since I first posted about it, my attitude could only harden, as it really stunningly good and I don't want Waterstone's being able to use it as part of any deluded claim that they are the guardians of literature in the UK.

So, my fellow indie booksellers, the ball is in our court: let's keep our eye on it. Let's make this book ours. It deserves the support of real booksellers. I can't think of an instance, in my time as a bookseller at least, where such a long hiatus between books has concluded in a novel of such wit, beauty and ingenuity.

A colleague of mine said recently that she regretted having read Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance because she would never again experience the wonder of first reading it. Sunnyside will, for many of its readers, will be a book like that. And we want them to remember that it was that knowledgeable bookseller at their local who told them they just had to read it.

Mind you, I'm not sure about that cover....

First impressions

I've just read, at the suggestion of a fan at Faber, The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews, an author about whom I know nothing. I wouldn't say I was smitten but I was certainly quietly impressed by an author who can make a simple, and in many ways overfamiliar, story into something fresh. It's a variation on the great American road trip and its concomitant personal enlightenment, but it eschews the wearisome pretensions which started with Kerouac and have had their exponents in every generation since.

Two children - well, young teenagers - are taken to find their drop-out father by their aunt, when their disturbed mother is taken into hospital; initially, I had visions of yet another attempt to ape A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But Toews' attention to detail and dry wit allow the interplay between Thebes, Logan and their aunt to give a plausible portrait of the entire family dynamic and how it has come to where the book begins and then travels. Few writers do children or teenagers well, crediting them with more adult psychologies than seems plausible, but the slight precocity of both children is given backstory and context. It reminded me of The Outcast in that respect.

Even if I can't quite bring myself to recommend this book wholeheartedly, Toews is a thoughtful writer, who resists the temptation to smear her ego all over the text. She's written an anti-Beat novel, I suppose.

German literature, meanwhile, is embracing 'the new impressionism'. Supposedly, How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Saša Stanišić (he's actually Bosnian, but now lives and writes in Germany) is in the vanguard, but I felt he fell into every trap which Toews was able to step over with so little fuss. It's a mish-mash of snapshots and episodes, the cumulative effect of which is to convey the brutal intrusion of sectarian conflict and its corruption of human decency, but I really felt it needed a bit more narrative backbone. Thumbnail sketches result in little more than the imprint of character.

Stanišić is endlessly inventive and the novel has innumerable great set-pieces, but the trickery starts to wear thin long before the end. I'm all for style over content when the writer has imagination and originality to pull it off - and, in this case, it may be that some of the dazzle is dulled by translation - but the hype with which this book was heralded ultimately does it a disservice. He's one to watch too, but no more.

Sunnyside down

I've just started reading Glen David Gold's, Sunnyside, a book not so much long-awaited as very much unexpected. I'm only forty-odd pages in, so I'll forbear to comment for now, other than remark that it would seem that Gold's time since Carter Beats the Devil appears to have been very well spent: rich prose, delightful vocabulary and the purposeful research of little details which can make a book come alive.

But my beginning the book coincided, coincidentally, with the receipt of a letter from Sceptre , outlining their disturbing plans for the book. The UK hardback edition is to be a Waterstone's exclusive in July, with the rest of the trade allowed a trade paperback edition in October.

I can guess at the commercial rationale for this. Sceptre are an imprint of the Hachette group, which remains in dispute with Amazon about discount; this has forced Amazon to source to stock from wholesalers or to leave sales to sellers on Marketplace, so, principally, it's two fingers up to Amazon, telling them that their support for what I assume will turn out to be Sceptre's biggest title of the year is not required.

The executive director of one UK publisher recently me me that their German counterparts had received a letter from amazon.de telling them to choose between giving them 2% more discount or extended credit terms. They literally had to tick a box to choose their 'preference'. It was heartening to hear that they simply had told them to get lost, as had many other publishers.

So, up yours, Amazon, indeed; and wouldn't it be great to see another publisher stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them, instead of seeing HarperCollins jump in with a rather gauche letter from CEO Victoria Barnsley on their homepage plugging their new releases (and, gloriously, misspelling the name of one of her own authors)?

But promising signed trade paperbacks to the independents to make up for three months without the genuinely desirable hardback (trade paperbacks: all of the unwieldiness with none of the quality) is poor compensation and will continue to drive people away from independents, who have enough trouble trying to compete with chain discounts without being deemed unfit to help launch a major new novel.

Maybe, if its was something from one of Hachette's more commercial imprints, something which would sell a bigger proportion in WHSmith or supermarkets, then it would be less of an attack on the integrity of independents' stock ranges. But this is grim news for the book trade and a precedent to be deterred.

In the short term, it may have some benefits for Hachette, and Waterstone's are doubtless thrilled with their coup. Amazon won't be stopped from flogging the US edition (which is due two months earlier) instead, but the rest of the UK trade will be probably be intimidated into withdrawing any copies they source from the US.

Three possible responses suggest themselves. First, the rest of the trade boycotts the book entirely, trade and mass-market paperbacks included: glorious but impractical. Second, we all order in the US hardback and make sure we have it for those two months before the UK release: Sceptre wouldn't be able to send threatening letters to all of us (and I'm not sure if their territorial copyright applies before the UK release). Third, we all go and buy copies from Waterstones and and resell them at a slightly higher price: a bit wet, frankly.

All of these unfortunately mean giving the whole affair the sort of press which will probably boost sales. I suspect that may be part of Sceptre's grand plan. So, fourth, we all give in, go home and let Waterstone's impose their pitiful vision of range bookselling on the general public.

I don't care how good Sunnyside turns out to be. If these bleak possibilities are what we are left with, I'd rather the book was never published.

My first lock-in

I was fortunate enough to be invited along to an after-hours tour of the Saatchi Gallery, courtesy of Jonathan Cape, set up to promote the series of books they publish to coincide with each major show. The current exhibition is New Chinese Art and even the more expert booksellers amongst the party found it quite eye-opening to have our tour conducted by the Gallery's Senior Curator, who took us from room to room, picking out one piece from each for a commentary.

The restrictions on political expression in China offer pitfalls for an artist with a remotely radical agenda, so I was surprised to learn about the subversive ideas symbolically secreted in so many artworks. Political mandarins, so steeped are they in dogma, tend not to be well versed in contemporary art, I was told, and so these subtle interpretations are beyond them.

This got me thinking about the language of artistic criticism in China. Words give up their meanings rather more easily, so I came to the conclusion that there must be some sort of artistic argot or metalanguage with which these ideas are discussed. Chinese languages, being pictogrammatically based, are full of loosely defined words which are given more precise meaning through their context. No wonder east and west sometimes struggle to reconcile their cultural differences; the basis of communication is structured in fundamentally different ways.

Fascinating though our little tour was, halfway round it occurred to me to wander off on my own for a bit. To stand alone, in silence, in the open space of such a gallery, contemplating exhibits without distraction, is a profound thing to do. When I returned to the fold, I mentioned this to our guide, who confessed that she rather likes being able to do just this herself.

Maybe it has something to do with being a booklover, in my case at least. Reading is a solitary activity and, while discussing books with others who have also read them is an important part of the experience, that initial time alone is essential in letting their ideas and images coalesce.

I suspect one of the reasons that I don't 'get' graphic novels, aside from my usual glib comment that it seems like a lot of effort for very few words, is that I want my mental image of the world in which I am immersing myself to form spontaneously, without prompts and clues.

One new book which confronts this dichotomy of the verbal and the visual is a debut novel due in May, The Selected Works of T S Spivet by Reif Larsen. It is illustrated throughout with the purported diagrams and designs of 12 year-old boy, whose maps mark him out as quite the prodigy. Though he lives on a working farm in Montana, his mother is an entomologist, from whom T S (Tecumseh Sparrow, for reasons which I suggest you read the book to discover) apparently inherits his instincts for meticulous cataloguing.

Recognition of a series of his works leads to his being awarded a prestigious title by the Smithsonian, who are unaware of his youth, but he accepts the accolade and elects to travel alone hobo-style on trains to receive his due.

Most of his maps represent scientific observations, but usually of the things which might preoccupy a boy of his age and it is this juvenile dalliance in an adult world which seems to have encouraged the book's publisher, Harvill Secker, to compare it to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Such comparisons always make me wary. Every time a catalogue suggests a book might be the next Kite Runner or Captain Corelli or Secret History, I, and I suspect many other booksellers, begin to suspect that the book in question lacks the imagination or quality to stand alone. Comparisons with other works can be useful, but far too often they are made with reference to books which have freakishly outsold all expectations. The circumstances of such a success are almost always too obscurely unique that to claim to be able to repeat them is always preposterous.

All of which is a protracted way of saying that comparing Larsen with Haddon is pointless; and in this case, its entirely erroneous. This is an adult novel in ways that Haddon's simply isn't, endearing though they both might be.

This bubbles with ideas, gives its characters complex depths beneath their raw emotions and makes the the minutiae of T S's adventure into as engrossingly a part of his grand journey. Harvill Secker know they have a special book on their hands and it will be interesting to see whether they can convey its originality in their marketing of it at the same time as making it a very commercial prospect.

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.