BOOK REVIEWS

A VERY NICE REJECTION LETTER

by Chris Paling (Constable, £16.99)

Reviewed by Alexander Larman

To be a pale, male, middle-aged literary novelist is, as Jane Austen did not quite put it, to be very much not in possession of a fortune these days. The want of a wife, or otherwise, is largely immaterial. Many writers who these days are struggling to make a crust look back wistfully on the glory days of the eighties, when the likes of Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan bestrode the literary world like tweed-jacketed Colossi, pocketing substantial six-figure advances and prizes for novels that were received with giddy adulation by the books sections of the newspapers and customers in their tens of thousands. Oh, how things change. The hottest writer of the day is Sally Rooney, the stern-faced 30-year old Marxist chronicler of millennial mores; humour and japes are seldom to be found within her intentionally po-faced work. Yet as publisher after editor make their disinclination to publish literary novels by white men quite clear, the pickings that they find within the industry grow slimmer and less productive by the year. Time, in many cases, to find a different sideline altogether.

WHITE SPINES: CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK COLLECTOR

by Nicholas Royle (Salt, £9.99)

“These days, one has to diversify in order to make even the humblest of livings. The era of being able to publish one book every couple of years, set off on an adulatory book signing tour and then have a six-month holiday (or ‘writing retreat’) is long gone”

Book Reviews

“A big-shot Hollywood director expresses a desire to work with Paling, and showers him with meals, cash and creative suggestions. Most of us, on our uppers, would welcome such attention, but Paling stubbornly asserts his artistic integrity, and the film is never made”

This is exactly what the novelists Chris Paling and Nicholas Royle have done in their new books, respectively entitled A Very Nice Rejection Letter and White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector. Paling is a former BBC radio producer who published nine critically acclaimed but commercially negligible novels between 1995 and 2010, and who has found it difficult to replicate his earlier success in an entirely changed market. And Royle, meanwhile, is, according to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, ‘an English novelist, editor, publisher, literary reviewer and creative writing lecturer.’ Only the harshest might point out that that makes him sound like five different people; these days, one has to diversify in order to make even the humblest of livings. The era of being able to publish one book every couple of years, set off on an adulatory book signing tour, and then have a six-month holiday (or ‘writing retreat’) is long gone.

Paling’s book is splendidly entertaining, although I was unsure how funny it was supposed to be. He bears more than a passing resemblance to Ed Douglas’s splendid comic creation Ed Reardon, a misanthropic failed writer who takes immeasurable pride in his modest achievements, and although Paling is obviously a good deal more self-aware than Reardon (whom he compares himself to at one point), one cannot help but feel that this diary of rejection is shot through with a certain amount of unintentional Pooteresque comedy.

A big-shot Hollywood director expresses a desire to work with Paling, and showers him with meals, cash and creative suggestions. Most of us, on our uppers, would welcome such attention, but Paling stubbornly asserts his artistic integrity, and the film is never made. On another occasion, he is offered a book deal by a respected literary publisher, but is shocked to be informed that his advance will be a mere thousand pounds; he instructs his no doubt weary agent to check that a zero (or, more optimistically, two zeroes) has not been omitted somewhere from the offer.

Royle comes across as a rather jollier and more contented figure, although his saga is a rather more modest one. He has a great penchant for collecting the distinctive white-spined Picador paperbacks, and, over the course of this highly readable memoir, details his visits to various bookshops and charity shops of varying degrees of eccentricity, in search of titles of increasing degrees of scarcity and interest. Now that Picador seems to be less of a thing than it once was – Royle’s publisher, Salt, has painstakingly created the look of their iconic publications, in a pleasing example of actually making an effort – some of Royle’s references may seem archaic to many. Yet anyone who has found one of the two most common titles, Graham Swift’s Last Orders and DM Thomas’ The White Hotel, lurking somewhere in a Picador edition will surely enjoy Royle’s good-natured and enjoyably unpretentious quest.

It is not for me, a hardy venturer at the base camp at the mountain of literature, to make sweeping statements about what the modern world of books ‘is’, or ‘should be’. The vast majority of people who buy books, especially fiction, these days are women, as men have been fobbed off with podcasts and Netflix and pornography and the like. It remains unsurprising that the market is therefore geared towards their tastes and interests, and the likes of Paling and Royle might, justifiably, feel like they are yesterday’s news. But it would be an enormous pity to neglect such engaging and talented writers simply due to a lack of modishness. Their abilities remain both vital and vibrant, and these enjoyable books demonstrate their continued ability to tell fascinating stories, and to do so exceptionally well.

SHORT REVIEWS

By Alexander Larman

Book Reviews

SORROW AND BLISS

By Meg Mason (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £14.99)

Fleabag meets Patrick Melrose’. So sayeth the publisher’s blurb of Meg Mason’s brilliantly written and engaging novel, and indeed there are a great number of comparisons to Phoebe WallerBridge’s superb show. Mason’s protagonist Martha Friel is a bright but deeply unhappy woman, who has struggled for most of her adult life with an unnamed mental illness that has laid waste to any possibility of her finding any kind of peace. Even marriage to the apparently saintly Patrick has failed to save her from the abyss on the edge of which she teeters. Time, perhaps, to invest in a pointless tattoo. But does salvation lie at hand?

Mason’s novel has attracted considerable praise since its publication and it isn’t hard to see why. The prose style is effervescently sparkling and witty, its protagonist believably flawed but somehow entirely sympathetic, and some of the minor characters, in particular the worldly aesthete Peregrine, are a particular joy. It threatens to become buried in navel-gazing around two thirds of the way through, and there are a surprising number of parallels with Bridget Jones’s Diary, but it triumphantly resurrects its pathos, charm and humour to rally towards a stirring, surprising and wholly satisfying conclusion. This will undoubtedly be one of the best novels of the year.

GUARDED BY DRAGONS

By Rick Gekoski (Constable, £18.99)

Ihave been known, now and again, to sell antiquarian and second-hand books to dealers, and generally speaking to turn a profit. But compared to the legendary rare book dealer Rick Gekoski, I remain an amateur. In this latest volume of memoirs from a life in books, Gekoski has a wealth of entertaining and revelatory stories about dealing with writers, publishers and collectors, many of whom regard him with a mixture of suspicion and distaste, not to mention a soupcon of anti-semitism.

Gekoski abandoned an academic career (‘it made me feel a little like a hooker’) in order to deal in books, and swiftly found that he could acquire items of near-legendary rarity, such as Sylvia Plath’s annotated copy of The Great Gatsby, and sell them on at a profit. Sometimes, he would acquire them again later at a significant mark-up, and sell them on again at an even higher price. Although Gekoski is dealing in rarefied and hugely valuable items, I was able to relate it to my own experience: there are countless books that I sold for comparatively small sums, only to wish that I had put them aside and could sell them again. But one of the delights of this enjoyable book is to bring a world of cunning and even venal types to life, with Gekoski as the fast-talking, hard-bargaining but always honest and literate connecting thread between them all. n