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Flanagan on book culture

On the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club recently (3 August) Richard Flanagan had some interesting things to say about book culture, and in particular prize culture. The panellists were discussing Yann Martel’s next novel after Life of Pi. The consensus was that the book Beatrice and Virgil was something of a failure. Here’s what Richard Flanagan had to say:

“The problem with book culture now is writers aren’t allowed failure. It’s become like the movies – you have to proceed from success to success. Perhaps [Martel] needed to write this book to liberate himself from the terrible enslavement of that huge success of Life of Pi (ie the Booker prize and big sales) in order to go on and write some more great books…”

“The real problem is we have a prize culture and if you happen to have the serendipity of winning one of those your books sell hugely, and if you don’t they almost vanish… twenty or thirty years ago most books sold moderately and they were judged for what they were. [Martel] had great success and now he has global humiliation. That’s a terrible thing to have happen to a writer. Something has gone terribly wrong with the world of writing when it’s been perverted to that extent.

“There are a whole lot of other accessible books, beautiful books, not high-brow books, great books. Great books are those books that people like. Novels are the great democratic art form … but the little bit of public space allowed for discussion of them, promotion of them, the marketing of them, is becoming increasingly restricted to the prizes and we are losing a lot in that.”

I wholeheartedly agree with this. It also feeds into the tendency of publishers to gamble on the next big thing with book auctions netting ridiculous windfall advances for the select few. The publishers, having spent so much, have to protect thier investment so they spend big bucks on promotion and marketing, meaning the spotlight shines down relentlessly on only a handful of books. As Laura Miller noted recently in a piece in salon.com: “Bestselling authors continue to sell better and better, while everyone else does worse and worse”. I live in hope that the cost changes that ebooks will eventually bring to publishing may herald a new democratic age for writing similar to that Richard Flanagan harks back to.

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What are they thinking?

I read and loved the YA novel A Brief History of Montmaray and a main motivation in buying the book was it’s lovely cover that captured something of a love of reading and the solitariness and yearning for freedom of teenagehood. Imagine my horror when I saw the sequel in my local bookshop – The FitzOsbornes in Exile. Okay I haven’t read this sequel yet but the cover looks like something for a non-fiction book. The post next to the girl looks like some sort of farm implement and her hunched-over pose suggests she’s exhausted (the book description says “Sophie’s dreams of making her debut in shimmering ballgowns …” hmm nothing about toiling on a farm!). The publishers have also rebadged the first book to have the same look. This effort is a bit better. At least it has our heroine looking out over the sea but it’s still not a patch on the original cover.

The same thing has happened to The Prophecy of the Sisters by Michelle Zinks. The first cover was evocative and caught my eye and luckily the tale was as spooky as the cover. Now they have rebadged this book to be in keeping with the sequel Guardian of the Gate. These later covers are just ghastly. I refuse to read anything with a cover like that which is a pity because I’d really like to read the sequel. I’m sure the publishers are attempting to position these books in the vampire/zombie/horror teen fiction market when Zinks’ books are much better than that and have cross-over potential.

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Blacklands, Blood Harvest – it’s scary

The Gold Dagger is a UK crime writers’ award for made for the best crime novel originally written in English and published in the UK. Peter Temple won it in 2007 for The Broken Shore.

  •  This year the shortlist is:
    Conman Richard Asplin
    Blacklands Belinda Bauer
    Blood Harvest S J Bolton
    Rain Gods James Lee Burke
    Shadowplay Karen Campbell
    The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge Patricia Duncker
    Still Midnight Denise Mina
    The Way Home George Pelecanos

Interestingly Amanda Flood, writing in the Guardian, notes that this year two of the shortlisted books have 12 year-old protagonists – Belinda Bauer’s Blacklands, in which a boy writes to the serial killer suspected of murdering his uncle and S J Bolton’s Blood Harvest, which has 12 year-old Tom as a main character in the action.

It is also interesting to note that Australian Gabrielle Lord, a gritty crime writer, has now made the move to write young adult crime with a “Conspiracy 365” series (it’s going to be 12 books in 12 months – now that’s series fiction). Of course there’s a difference between writing for a YA readership and having a young protagonist in an adult novel.

Not being a big gritty crime follower (I prefer those snootily referred to as “cosies”) I like the sound of The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge from those above concerning a suicide sect in France, with the writing having, by all accounts, a philosophical bent. The winner will be announced on 8 October.

The Australian equivalent of the Daggers is the Ned Kelly Awards. You can see the nomination list here.  (It’s way too long to include here). The winners will be announced as part of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival on 3 September.

Peter Temple graciously withdrew the nomination for Truth for the Ned Kellys to “clear some small space” for other writers. Temple has won 5 times before and, anyway, Truth took out the Miles Franklin in June.

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PM’s literary awards

There might be an election campaign on but it’s nice to know Julia has thought about books at this time. She did choose the shortlists didn’t she or was it Kevin back then on 19 July? Any way the shortlist for our most lucrative prize ($100,000) for fiction was announced then. As the year drags on, the same names are popping up on the award circuit so it’s good to see some titles here that haven’t appeared on other short lists. The list is:

  • Summertime by JM Coetzee
  • The Book of Emmett Deborah Forster
  • The lakewoman by Alan Gould
  • Dog Boy Eva Hornung
  • Ransom David Malouf
  • Lovesong Alex Miller
  • As the Earth Turns Silver Alison Wong 

 Of Alison Wong’s book the judges call it a “haunting first novel … [that] draws on her Chinese family history in its account of New Zealand in the early years of last century”.

The Lake Woman by Alan Gould involves an Australian soldier parachuting down “the night before D Day” and landing “in a vast lake of flooded fields” where he encounters a “mysterious woman”. The judges call it a bold experiment “confidently and affectingly sustained from hectic beginning to peaceful end”.

I’m full of admiration for the ambition of Eva Hornung’s (she previously published as Eva Sallis) novel Dog Boy told from the point of view of a young boy adopted by stray dogs living on the streets of Moscow. The judges say: “To the ancient folkloric and literary traditions of children lost, then raised … in the animal world, Eva Hornung brings her own compassionate and contemporary outrage at the treatment of refugees and outcasts”.

There are also awards of $100,000 each for non-fiction, children’s and young adult books. You can view all the shortlists here.

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Mothing with my head

The Behaviour of Moths
Poppy Adams

One of the thing guidebooks for writing like to emphasise is the compact with the reader. The writer has to play a fair game, no matter how tricksy, convoluted or abstruse they might be to get their story told. At the end of The Behaviour of Moths I had the distinct feeling that Poppy Adams had not kept her contract with me. I can’t accuse her of not laying the groundwork for her denouement because she does, quite carefully. We know from the beginning that her narrator, Ginny, is quirky and obsessive, but it is a fun quirkiness and an endearing obsessiveness (this obsessiveness is later channelled into her work as a lepidopterist, following her father into the field hence the “behaviour of moths”).

The novel starts with Ginny in old age waiting for the return to their family mansion of the sister she hasn’t seen for 47 years. The reason for the estrangement is spooled out in flashbacks over the space of several days. Adams has a facility with words and a wonderful ability to evoke scenes and people through the mordant prism of Ginny’s eyes. For the most part I was enthralled with this book (who would have thought descriptions of moth collecting, dissecting, preserving etc could be so engaging?) I loved the portrayal of the sisters’ relationship, the mother and the father and the house and countryside. So why did I feel betrayed by the ending?

Of course there has to be dark secrets and mysteries and, of course, the seeds for unravelling these have to be sewn throughout the narrative, and Adams does do this quite deftly. She does, for example, have a family doctor who takes an inordinate interest in Ginny, annoying her with his questions and attentions. She does have a terrible accident befall Ginny’s sister and Ginny overhearing her mother complaining that she (Ginny) shows little emotion over it.

Ginny, as the narrator, is able to explain most things away to the reader but we remain wary, as we should. It is the sign of a great (rewarding) writer that they hold these things in balance in a plot. The reader has to be drawn forward in the mystery, be taken down plausible roads and then be left there disoriented as something unexpected happens, only to be reassured and picked up again. Sarah Waters did this masterfully in The Little Stranger. That book, too, left me with the sense I’d been led up the garden path but when I looked back over the story I couldn’t pinpoint where I’d been misled so deftly was the thing knitted together. In the case of The Behaviour of Moths there was a place near the end where Adams used an unfair device to keep information from the reader. I won’t spoil the ending but it didn’t sit comfortably with me. Okay, an ending doesn’t have to be comfortable but it has to feel right. That said, as a debut novel, The Behaviour of Moths is accomplished, enjoyable and beautifully written.

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Beware the blurbs

A Pair of Ragged Claws blog referred to an article about well-known authors being asked to provide “blurbs” for book covers. Laura Miller on salon.com pointed out that “blurbs” aren’t actually the publishers description of the book found on the back cover (which she says is called the flap copy) but that “blurb” really only applies to “bylined endorsements by other authors or cultural figures”.

She has some pretty trenchant things to say about the reliability and (perhaps) honesty of these saying that authors are asked by their publishers to do the rounds begging endorsements from  “name” mentors, colleagues, friends of friends etc: “So when publishing people look at the lineup of testimonials on the back of a new hardcover, they don’t see hints as to what the book they’re holding might be like. Instead, they see evidence of who the author knows, the influence of his or her agent, and which MFA program in creative writing he or she attended. In other words, blurbs are a product of all the stuff people claim to hate about publishing: its cliquishness and insularity.”

This is all the more problematic because research from Book Marketing Limited found that the blurb makes 62% of consumers buy a particular book. Laura Miller’s article is here.