"Under the Net" by Iris Murdoch

I found this book in a second-hand bookshop in Norfolk and it steadily worked its way to the top of my "TBR" pile. I must confess that I had never heard of it, and it was not until after I completed it that I found out it was in fact Murdoch's first published novel. When I did, the news did not surprise me, for it has a very different feel to it than all the Murdoch novels I have read before. It may be a very unfair thing to say of someone who has won both the Booker (for The Sea, The Sea) and the Black Tait (for The Black Prince), but I have always felt that this she was not someone who had written lots of different novels, but rather the same one many times. One always seems to encounter the same sorts of characters wrestling with the same sort of issues, but with different names and in different situations.

Under the Net is undeniably different, and it is interesting to conjecture what might have happened had her writing continued to develop in this way. It actually reminded me very much of John Braine, one of whose novels I reviewed on this blog recently. It is part picaresque, featuring a male protagonist, Jake, who is a shameless user, believing other people have been put on earth solely to assist him with finding somewhere to live (rent free), and incidental spending money along the way.

Jake is a translator of French writers, and an important part of the plot revolves around a novel which has been written by a writer he despises. Jake's translation goes missing, and it subsequently transpires that two of the other characters are planning to make an English language film of it, but cutting Jake out of any financial reward. The writer is later surprisingly (as far as Jake is concerned) awarded the Prix Goncourt, thus shaking Jake's faith in his own literary judgement. However, it all sparks a hilarious and somewhat anarchic sub-plot whereby Jake kidnaps the German Shepherd dog belonging to one of these two characters and holds it to ransom. Leftist political claptrap, rants and riots also feature heavily.

First novels are often interesting, as setting the groundwork for the writer's later endeavours (think Under the Greenwood Tree), but not particularly enjoyable or gripping, yet none of this is true in this case. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, which I must confess is not something which I can say about all Murdoch's works. At the same time, her later writing seems to have developed in very different directions. Perhaps along with her own development as a writer went an awareness of cultural change, however. There is a lot of intellectual content which would probably be unacceptable to a publisher today (Under the Net was published nearly sixty years ago) and would require substantial dumbing down.

Perhaps surprisingly for such a good book, Under the Net is still in print (in a 2002 publication by Vintage Classics), so there is no excuse for not getting hold of it.

"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand

Some months ago I compared The Berlusconi Bonus with 1984. So might one Atlas Shrugged, though the latter is much, much longer.

Ayn Rand was born in Russia before the Revolution, but managed to escape to America in 1926, where she spent the rest of her life. She was a philosopher and historian as well as a novelist and at one stage founded an institute to promote her ideas, run by and named after her lover, Nathaniel Brandon.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand constructs a nightmarish alternative reality which is truly Orwellian. Private enterprise and entrepreneurialism are first attacked and finally banned altogether in a rising tide of repressive regulations, driven by the unwillingness of the "moochers" to take responsibilty for their own affairs, and their envy of those who are successful in business, and the greed of the "looters" who, whether state, group or individual, would rather steal the fruits of someone else's labours than create wealth for themselves. Doubly nightmarish, in fact, since much of what she portrayed as science fiction in 1957 has largely come to pass in real life, at least here in the cuddly old European Union.

There is much more to her philosophy than that. She champions the use of reason as the only valid basis for decision on making and government policies, and the right of the individual to self-interest as long as this does not harm any third party. There is much talk of Aristotle, though I was reminded also of Kant and John Stuart Mill.

Here we find what is perhaps the main objection to the book for, though extremely well written, it is undeniably a piece of propaganda for a particular set of beliefs. She was happy for it to be referred to as "a philosophical novel", and the old question of where literary persuasion ends and propaganda begins rears its eternal head. There are long, strongly reasoned and strongly expressed speeches which sound oddly in the mouths of the characters. There are "good" and "bad" characters. There is clearly expressed "right" and "wrong".

All of which gets in the way, rather. Which is a pity because this is a very well written book indeed, which also works perfectly satisfactorily on the level of a simple narrative. A book, moreover, which every politician and regulator in the world should be forced to read, as an awful warning of what can go wrong.

The Fountainhead, her earlier novel from 1943 is now on my reading list.

Stieg Larsson and the state of publishing

Interesting to read in the press today an extract from Kurdo Baksi's forthcoming book on his friend, Stieg Larsson.

It seems that the manuscripts were originally rejected by one major publisher when sent in unsolicited, and only accepted by the second on the recommendation of a mutual friend. Shades of Harry Potter.

It really is high time that authors started putting a page right at the front of their books saying "This book was rejected by the following publishers ..."

I think this highlights everything that is wrong with the state of publishing. It is no longer run by people who really care about books, and finding and introducing new authors, but by people who think they understand about business. Sadly, they do not. The sort of books which they want to publish are "celebrity" books, either ghosted auto-biography of a particularly nauseating kind, or diet or recipe books (what one publisher disarmingly described to me as "crap books"), or books by established authors. However, they can source these books only the cost of large up-front advances, and the heavy discounting practised by on-line booksellers means that only occasionally will any large profit on the book result. Perhaps more publishers should go to business school ...

There is actually a direct parallel here with the world of venture capital, about which I happen to know rather a lot. In VC, it is accepted that many ventures will fail to produce any return at all (about half of all companies started, in fact), but that a very small number of so-called "home runs" will more than make up for this and will actually contribute about 80% of total gains across the whole portfolio. One thing which dramatically raises the likelihood of a home run occurring is a low entry cost. Publishers please note.

If you follow this logic, then publishers should only publish books which they can source without the payment of an advance, perhaps offering a better royalty deal instead. This argues for going back to the old days of trying to find quality books by little known authors. Every so often one of them will turn out to be Stieg Larsson or J.K.Rowling, but even the others will have a chance of breaking even in these days of print on demand production and distribution.

You see, what the publishers have failed to realise is that they are selling low margin items. There are two different margins here. The first might be called the gross margin, and represents simply the difference between what an item costs you to produce and what you can sell it for. This an be improved in one of two ways: raising prices or cutting production costs.

The former has probably gone as far as it might, since cover prices are now so high as to act as a deterrent for all but the most dedicated book buyers. Is it a coincidence that so many establihsed book-bloggers are now running exercises to see how few boks they can buy this year? In any event, in many cases publishers have no control over what price the book is actually sold at - Amazon routinely discount even best-sellers by 40% or so, and the publisher usually gets only half of that - 30% of the cover price!

As regards the second, if you have committed to payiong a big advance then you have boxed yourself into a corner before you start. Assume that you pay a £100,000 advance on a book priced at £30, each of which costs £5 to produce. Assuming all were sold on Amazon at a 40% discount, then you would need to sell 25,000 copies just to break even on your production costs.

However, even this is only part of the story, since it ignores the business's operating costs such as salaries, rent and taxes, which are used in calculating the net margin. In these days of the internet, a publishing business could of course be operated (like many VC companies) from somebody's garage or spare bedroom. Instead, they feel the need of plush offices in the West End, and salaries to match. It is entirely possible that these could be two or three times the company's book production costs. Which means that, on the above figures, you are now struggling even to break even.

Speaking as one who teaches post-graduate students at business school, it does seem to me that this model is unsustainable. I know of various publishers (including the two who were at different times offering to publish my history books!) who have effectively stopped accepting new proposals and, if I am right in my analysis, the next year or two could see various publishing firms going out of business altogether. It also seems to me that there are some fairly obvious things which could be done about altering the model, but I would be happy to hear feedback on what others may think, particularly some of the publishers who I know read this blog.

"Swallows and Amazons" by Arthur Ransome

During the recent book-bloggers' get-together in London (kindly organised by Simon Thomas) it emerged that some unfortunates had never read any Arthur Ransome, and as I happened to be re-reading Swallows and Amazons, the way one does from time to time, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to introduce him to the hitherto Ransome-deprived.

Ransome was an amazing character. Escaping an unhappy marriage (itself a daring step in the prevailing culture of the time) he went to live in Russia in 1913, thereafter experiencing both the First World War and the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. This seems to have led him into an almost Bruce Lockhart type of existence (read Ace of Spies), resulting in him falling in love with Trotsky's secretary (who was to become his second wife), and engineering their joint escape from Russia, in the course of which he narrowly escaped death. Due to be executed for having passed through the enemy lines to rescue her, the officer detailed to do the job recognised him as a regular chess opponent from pre-Revolutionary days, and connived in him slipping away to freedom instead. Ransome, and his many readers over the years, owe the unknown Russian a debt of gratitude.

There are twelve completed books, and though they are set in deliberately vague geography, many of them fall into two broad groups set in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads respectively. A book by Christina Hardyment (Captain Flint's Trunk) successfully identifies many of the real life places and people upon whom Ransome based his work. Mention of that book points up one of the dangers of getting drawn too closely into Ransome's world. Before you know where you are, you are reading books about Ransome, about small boat sailing, about the Lake District ...

Though aimed predominantly at children (until the coming of Enid Blyton, Ransome was by far the most successful children's writer in history), the books, like Richmal Crompton's William series, yield a whole different range of nuances when read by adults. For children, they offer an escape into a fantasy mock-serious world of adventure. For adults, they conjure up a vision of a long-vanished time of innocence and straightforwardness, an almost Orwellian yearning for a former version of Britain, a world before television when people read books, and observed certain conventions of courtesy and mutual respect. In reality, of course, one knows all too well that while life may have been at least a little like this for the sort of middle class children whom Ransome depicts, reality for the bulk of the country in the 1930s was much grimmer. However, for reality one reads The Road To Wigan Pier. For the willing suspension of disbelief, and the enjoyment of what follows, one reads Arthur Ransome.

Reading Update

By way of a quick update, I am going to lump together various books which I have been reading over the last couple of weeks.

The Fall of the West by Adrian Goldsworthy is a valuable addition to anyone's library. Like most people, I suspect, my Roman history gets a bit hazy after Augustus, and Goldsworthy remedies this omission by telling the story of the last three centuries or so of the Empire (mostly in the West), challenging a few established views along the way. Goldsworthy has previously written Caesar (which I have read) and In The Name Of Rome (which I have not).

Henrietta's War by Joyce Dennys was a recommendation from Simon at Stuck-in-a-Book, and a good one. The book takes the form of a series of letters to an imaginary "Robert" who is away on active service, which were originally published in Sketch before later being compiled in book form. It is full of gentle humour, as well as some genuinely tender moments. Well done Bloomsbury Group for re-publishing this. They were also responsible for The Brontes Went To Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson, which I read last year and which was also a recommendation from Simon.

Kant and the Platypus by Umberto Eco is impossible to describe or explain, so you will have to read it for yourselves to find out. Let's just say that it is a wide-ranging discussion of a number of philosophical issues.

All the King's Women by Derek Wilson is not, as the title suggests, a bodice-ripping piece of historical fiction but a serious piece of historical writing focussing on Charles II's relationships with the various women in his life and exploring the influence which each had upon him at different times. It also helps to explain the rather tangled genealogy of the Stuart family which eventually led to William and Mary sitting on the throne.

Up The Line To Death is a collection of war poems which I re-read about once a year. By the way, did you know that for quite a while war poems were excluded from the Oxford Book of English Verse?