This Christmas, in a tradition almost as
hallowed as carol singing and turkey dinners, more than half of all the titles
sold annually in the UK will have been traded in the frantic bazaar that
dominates autumn business. This festive bonanza remains one of the few
landmarks in an environment that, roughly since the millennium, has been rocked
by a succession of seismic aftershocks, apparently threatening the very
existence of Grub Street.
This year, however, has
seen a breathing space, a “year of print” (Bookseller), in
which the end of the world was postponed yet again. For a nail-biting decade it
was said that e-reading would spell death to the traditional book. Actually,
the reverse has been true. A body of evidence now suggests that ebooks have
actually stimulated the market for hardbacks. Waterstones, once facing
meltdown, has returned to profit; independent bookshops are making
money. So the seasonal glass turns out to be (just) half full, with all kinds
of print flourishing, and the digital tide receding, as the e-boom stalls and
hardbacks rally.
A Brief History of Seven Killings, this
year’s Booker prize winner, is symbolic of this sea change. An edgy, 688-page
tour de force by Jamaican Marlon James,
published by Oneworld, a bold new imprint with an appetite for risk, seems to
suggest that it’s business as usual in Grub Street. Perhaps, after some very
difficult years, English language literature is no longer on life-support.
From a global
perspective, too, James is part of an almost unprecedented riot of print. The
21st century has sponsored a new age of writing and reading. From China to
Peru, on screens, laptops and mobile phones, more people than ever explore and
receive the written word in many formats and transmit it in tweets, texts and
PDFs. Moreover, across the developing world, in addition to the biggest
upheaval in literary consciousness since the Renaissance, there’s a parallel
boom in conventional, English-language publishing, with India leading the way.
So, two Christmas cheers
for the book. One for the resilience of the thing itself, and one for its
astounding popularity. But never mind the quantity, what’s the quality? Does
it, bluntly, earn its global audience?One thing is certain: behind a glossy,
surprisingly confident facade, the remorseless hand of Time is rewriting the
narrative of the contemporary book, especially within the hegemony of
Anglo-American literature. First, as the baby-boom generation that sustained
the cultural boom of the 1980s and 1990s ages and dies, much of its dominant
literary culture is fading. This is the inevitable progression from spring to
autumn. Austen trumped Ann Radcliffe (no contest). Dickens gave way to George
Eliot. Middlemarch was
supplanted by Heart of
Darkness. DH Lawrence replaced Thomas Hardy. And so on.
Second, a combination of
no-cash and hi-tech (the credit crunch and the IT revolution) has almost
annihilated a verdant literary ecosystem. In one part of the forest, the novel,
once a boisterous and newsworthy genre, faces competition from TV and new
media, box sets and bloggers. Writing in the Observer New Review, Geoff Dyer recently confessed a fresh, and possibly middle-aged, preference
for non-fiction, noting that his “changing tastes were shaped by a general
cultural shift occasioned by the internet, the increased number of sports
channels and made-for-TV dramas”.
And yet the essential act
of writing has not changed. Poets, playwrights and novelists still have to
sequester themselves to put black on white Their creative act is timeless, but
the environment in which they work, and the means by which they operate, will
never be the same again. Commercially speaking, a series of small but
significant insurrections has placed the language and habits of the market at
the heart of every literary transaction. Probably this is just a transitional
moment.
One hundred years ago, an
oddly parallel literary environment (the demise of the Victorian novel; global
capitalism; a telegraph and telephone revolution; an explosion of print,
especially in magazines) inspired a new consciousness and finally a new
approach to the imagination. This phenomenon would become known as Modernism,
whose literary dividend would be Ulysses, The Waste Land,Mrs Dalloway and a
library of literary innovators from Faulkner to Beckett.
So where, when the
conditions are so propitious, is Modernism 3.0? Does it lurk within the graphic
novel? Or on YouTube, with some cyber poet we’ve never heard of? Probably we
won’t know until it bursts into view, on the printed page (in whatever format),
as it has always done.
Dyer, betting on a genre
that’s sprung up in the no-man’s-land between history/biography and that
notorious tautology, “the literary novel”, suggests that “it’s the shifting
sands between fiction and non-fiction that compel attention”. We’ll see. If a
butterfly’s wing in the Amazon rainforest can generate a hurricane, it only
takes one book, or one writer, to reignite the reading public’s imagination. Tristram Shandy did that in 1759; Pickwick Papers in 1836; Sons and Lovers in 1913; Lolita in 1955. When Ian McEwan
published his exhilarating collection of stories, First
Love, Last Rites in 1975, it felt as though an oppressive
postwar hangover had finally lifted. Every generation throws up new talent, not
all of them recognised at first. Shakespeare was dismissed by an embittered
rival as “an upstart crow”.
A hundred years ago saw
the publication of The Good Soldier by Ford
Maddox Ford, perhaps one of the greatest novels of its age. Arguably, the 21st
century still awaits its Ford, Eliot, Joyce or Woolf. While it would be wrong
to pattern future innovation on the past, I think it’s inconceivable that these
years of technological change will not lead to a new literature.
Possibly this will be
found, globally, in the far-flung inspiration of a book such asA Brief History of Seven Killings. The
international varieties of English have long promised to reshape our tradition.
Who knows? Perhaps that hour has come. Literature, as Ezra Pound said, has only
one task to perform, which is “make it new”. In the society of what Michael Lewis calls “the new
new thing”, the conditions are ideal for innovation. Now all we are
waiting for is that “upstart crow”.
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