The best of Richard’s list was bought up by another small publisher, Metro, run by the impressive Suzanne McDadd who, after my time there, had been a director of Faber and Faber. She stayed up half the night reading The Ice People, loved it, and paid me for the paperback rights. Soon they were preparing a mass market paperback, its jacket lavishly decked with quotes. The Mail on Sunday book club made it their book of the week: Rose Tremain wrote a praising feature to accompany the Mail offer. Richard Cohen told me Metro sold 30,000 copies. And now the story almost dips into farce, for Metro Books, in turn, went bankrupt, and I never did get my royalties.
But the book itself has continued to be successful. It is now in its third edition, the most recent described by the Observer as ‘masterly … one of the first great novels of the globally warmed world’. Last year my new agent sold the television rights.
I picked up the threads of my career. I started on what was once unthinkable: rereading, and revising, The Keeper of the Gate, which for years I’d been unable to bear to look at. And I saw Nick had a point. There was something there. In fact, perhaps … could he even be right? Was it possible that actually it was my best book?
And now I come to the nub of this chapter, the point I want to make with this long story of the worst five years of my professional life, a story I don’t enjoy retelling because I have to re-experience the terror of failing. Many novelists stall at a certain point. Their profession deserts them. They are no longer wanted. And I was so nearly one of them.
What I learned was, there’s little logic in this world. No team of angels combing the wind to see that no one good slips through. No internal aesthetic, no guarantee. Literary history is not foolproof, no more than art history is. I realised this long ago, when I first started travelling and visiting the local galleries wherever I went, in Dusseldorf, Salzburg, Berne, Bournemouth: that art history is an approximation. I always found at least one or two painters I had never heard of, but thought remarkable. Perhaps they didn’t paint enough; perhaps they lived in the wrong place, or were ahead of their time, or knew the wrong people, or didn’t live long enough, or weren’t pushy enough. Somehow they slipped off the historical map where the path of the famous is crudely marked out. (I see the same phenomenon on courses I teach. It’s not always the most talented ones who go on to be successful; it’s the luckiest and most determined.) I started to put my observations of the literary world together with my reading on evolutionary biology; life was struggle, and all human activities related to our jostling for advantage. Were the other things just illusory, then, the watchwords I’d lived by, truth, beauty?
I saw that literature had never been the self-sufficient world the modernists tried to make for themselves. They did it, in fact, by self-publishing, by patronage. They also built cliques who believed (or believed they believed) that only beauty mattered; in fact they were cohorts who pushed each other through. Virginia and Leonard Woolf showed sound common sense by founding their own publishing firm. The Hogarth Press liberated them from being dependent on commercial whim, which Virginia was too fragile to survive, but they ran it as professionals, and made money.
What was writing, at bottom, biologically? A human activity, like painting and sculpting, a skill we use to make a reputation in our group. These skills aren’t magic; they come from a connection between senses, dreaming brain, and hand (in earlier times, when narratives were oral, between brain, voice and performing body). Storytellers always had value to the tribe, because humans like novelty, and laughter, the pleasure of adventure, of happy endings, of listening to ancestral memories or sometimes experiencing sorrow safely.
Once we could measure our value at the fireside. The link between story and body was close, and storytellers were close to their audience. But twenty-first-century stories are encoded in books, which are products. The audience aimed for must be ever larger, because the middlemen, publishers, want to make money. Not that they really know what will sell; they are gamblers, the gurus of sales and marketing to whom commissioning editors defer, but all the same, it’s hard to get past them. There is no direct interface where ordinary readers can gauge our skill at storytelling, where we can find and meet our audience—just the vast faceless spaces of the net, where all of us are equally lost.
I saw how late capitalism was transforming the book trade. As the giant firms sucked up the independents, they aimed to sell more copies of fewer books. Easier for them to expend effort on a small range of easy-to-sell products. The logic of copying, of repetition. The technologies of advertising and mass reproduction have grown lethally effective since Walter Benjamin. The more a name is heard or copied, the more, sub-liminally, people think it’s the best. The logic of it all was leading big publishers away from writers and towards celebrities. It cost no money to promote the already-famous; they advertise themselves, by falling out of clubs. Thence the tyranny of the big book chains and their charts, overrun by celebrity novels and autobiographies. Perfectly respected and serious publishers talked proudly about ‘the death of the mid-list’, to show they too were out there, swimming with sharks; but really they were just making sad boasts about the loss of variety and interest.