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Some British Literary Figures
Amis, Fenton, Hitchens, McEwan, Rushdie: A Portrait Gallery
Martin Amis
James Fenton
Christopher Hitchens
Ian McEwan
Salman Rushdie

Journalist
Christopher Hitchens, poet
James Fenton, and
novelist
Martin Amis,
photographed in Paris in the 1970s
James Fenton

By Paul Quinn
The Daily Telegraph, November 18, 2007
He's the recipient, this year, of the Queen's Medal for Poetry,
and the man who rode the first North Vietnamese tank into the Presidential
Palace when Saigon fell in April 1975. He's a trustee of the National Gallery,
and the one-time film critic of Socialist Worker. He's the Antiquarian of the
Royal Academy, and a man who was kidnapped in Belfast by the IRA.
He's adapting Don Quixote for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he's the man
who was commissioned to write the book for Les Misérables, thus making him
almost the only rich poet in the world. He's sitting beneath a pergola in the
remarkable garden he's created at his house, six miles from the centre of
Oxford. There is, as his friend Christopher Hitchens says, 'a lot of James'.
But the bigness is a solidity that seems entirely suitable to such an eminent
member of the intellectual great and good. Altogether, 'the old curmudgeon'
(Hitchens again) has what the Tories used to call 'bottom'. There's nothing new
in that; as Martin Amis says, 'James always had gravitas, even as an
undergraduate. He always behaved with dignity - unlike the rest of us.'
Had he felt burdened by being called 'the most talented poet of his generation'?
'Well,' he says, 'I didn't necessarily feel I was living up to things. But I
don't think I had an offensive amount of praise.' The Queen has been the most
recent to bestow some of that praise.
Fenton has said that, 'My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you
don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm,
rhyme, simple subjects – love, death, war.' To Stephen Spender, Fenton was 'a
brilliant poet of technical virtuosity.' For Peter Porter, 'It's the way he
writes, with a mixture of poetic language and real directness.'
Fenton first published poems in the national press while still at Oxford, where
he also reviewed fiction for the New Statesman and won the Newdigate Prize for
Poetry. In 1973, he took off for Cambodia, as a freelance foreign reporter.
After an unhappy period in Vietnam, Fenton returned to England. He wrote the
political column for the New Statesman, went to Germany for the Guardian and was
theatre critic and chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times. He translated
Rigoletto for the ENO - a triumph that brought Les Misérables to his door.
Fenton said he got less than one per cent of worldwide royalties, but given that
the show has earned more than £1.4 billion worldwide, the wolf has since been
absent from his door.
His home is the Oxfordshire house, Fenton tells me, that Ian McEwan described as
'the scene-of-the-crime house', so derelict and so likely to contain a murder
victim did it appear when Fenton bought it and the 150 acres around it.
Fenton shares his life with Darryl Pinckney, an American writer. They've been
together since 1989. Fenton was recently asked if he would be prepared to go on
the Pink List as one of the top gay people of influence. He said yes.
Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue,
photographed by
Annie Leibovitz in 1990
One of the most annoying things about Christopher Hitchens is
that, even at his most vitriolic, he makes at least as much sense as the
majority of sober journo-intellectuals buzzing around Washington. This despite
the fact that he is one of the last defenders of Bush’s Iraq war—a position that
has cost the former
Nation contributor
a multitude of friends and gotten him new
ones like Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens has finally written the ultimate attack book,
God Is Not Great.
You say you’ve been writing this book your whole
life. Do you think it’ll mean as much to others as it means to you?
No, it’s one small step for C.H. into one enormous argument dominated by giants
in philosophy and theology and science.
So what makes it different from recent atheist screeds by the likes of Daniel
Dennett and Richard Dawkins?
I don’t think Richard Dawkins would mind me saying that he looks at religious
people with this sort of incredulity, as if, “How possibly can you be so
stupid?” And though we all have moods like that, I think perhaps I don’t quite.
And what if one of your children found God? Would that be a problem?
Not at all. My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found
it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for
them. The schools won’t do it anymore. And I even insist, though my wife [who is
Jewish] isn’t that thrilled, on having for our daughter a little version of the
Seder.
What’s your favorite Bible story?
“Casting the first stone” is a lovely story, even though we’ve found out how
much it wasn’t in the Bible to begin with. And the first of the miracles. Jesus
changes water into wine. You can’t object to that.
Well, you’ve said plenty about the pleasures of drink before
But it also shows the persistence of the Hellenic influence in those regions. If
the Jews had not made the crucial mistake of rejecting Hellenism and philosophy
and submitting themselves, or being reconquered, by the Maccabean
ultra-Orthodox, everything would have been better and we’d never have had to
endure Christianity and Islam.
You’re an even bigger critic of Islam.
If you ask specifically what is wrong with Islam, it makes the same mistakes as
the preceding religions, but it makes another mistake, which is that it’s
unalterable. You notice how liberals keep saying, “If only Islam would have a
Reformation”—it can’t have one. It says it can’t. It’s extremely dangerous in
that way.
Has anyone in the Bush administration confided in you about being an atheist?
Well, I don’t talk that much to them—maybe people think I do. I know something
which is known to few but is not a secret. Karl Rove is not a believer, and he
doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I
think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”
What must Bush make of that?
I think it’s false to say that the president acts as if he believes he has God’s
instructions. Compared to Jimmy Carter, he’s nowhere. He’s a Methodist, having
joined his wife’s church in the end. He also claims that Jesus got him off the
demon drink. He doesn’t believe it. His wife said, “If you don’t stop, I’m
leaving and I’m taking the kids.” You can say that you got help from Jesus if
you want, but that’s just a polite way of putting it in Texas.
Do you consider yourself a hawk?
I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American
power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.
So one day we’ll all see just how right you all were about Iraq?
No, I don’t think the argument will stop, perhaps forever. But when it does
become the property of historians rather than propagandists and journalists,
it’ll become plainer than it is to most people now that it was just.
You’ve complained that American discourse is too polite. But a lot of people
think you’re too rude.
I used to get told by nice old ladies at bookstores, “It’s so nice to meet you,
because I used to think you were very unhappy and just disliked everything, and
you seem quite friendly.” And I would think, Oh, God, is that how I seem?
Boris Kachka, New York Magazine
May 7, 2007

Christopher Hitchens wielding an AK47 assault rifle in Iraq in 1991
It never seemed to me that there was any alternative to
confronting the reality of Iraq, which was already on the verge of implosion and
might, if left to rot and crash, have become to the region what the Congo is to
Central Africa: a vortex of chaos and misery that would draw in opportunistic
interventions from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Bad as Iraq may look now, it
is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of
coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any
essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the
ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to
reinforce the point.
Christopher Hitchens,
Slate
August 8, 2005
Hitch-22: A Memoir
By Christopher Hitchens Twelve, 435 pages
Reviewed by Dwight Garner The New York Times, June 1, 2010
While studying at Oxford in the late 1960s (he was in the room on the famous
night that Bill Clinton didn't inhale), Christopher Hitchens discovered that
"if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the
podium, then you never need dine or sleep alone."
Hitchens has a mind
like a Swiss Army knife, ready to carve up or unbolt an opponent's arguments
with a flick of the wrist. He holds dear the serious things, the things that
matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the
mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards.
Hitchens is
devoted to wit and bawdy wordplay and to good Scotch and cigarettes and long
nights spent talking. He is also devoted to friendship. His close friends
include Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and James Fenton.
Hitchens was
born in 1949 in Portsmouth. According to family legend, his first complete
sentence was "Let's all go and have a drink at the club." His parents
scraped to send him to boarding school at the tender age of 8. "If there is
going to be an upper class in this country," his mother said, "then
Christopher is going to be in it." Hitchens strode through boarding school
in Cambridge and Balliol College in Oxford.
Hitchens details his
early years as a literary journalist in London, his budding friendships with
Amis and Fenton and Clive James (among many others), and his Zelig-like
ability to be in international capitals when trouble was brewing.
In
the early 1980s, Hitchens moved to America. His drift away from the left
began in 1989, after the fatwa against Rushdie. This drift continued after
9/11. He supported the invasion of Iraq, in large part, because of his sense
of the wickedness of Saddam Hussein's regime.
George Orwell wrote: "A
man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life
when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." Hitchens passes
this test, if only by a nose.
More on or by Christopher Hitchens
A death in the family
God bless me, it's a best seller
Londonistan calling
Atheists with attitude
Chris Hitchens lunches with the FT
Hitchens on Buchanan on Churchill
Sarah Palin's war on science
Mumbai
Blah
Martin Amis

Martin and Kingsley Amis in 1965 ...

... and in about 1970, with Elizabeth Jane Howard

Martin Amis at the Paddington Sports Club in London, 2006
Martin Amis is a smoker and a raconteur from the Old School.
His taste for both tobacco and tales is unapologetic, and his stories about
girl-chasing in literary London during the seventies ("You get the scent of
one in the wind," his friend Christopher Hitchens used to mock him, "and
you're gone") and
his opinions on the rise of Islamist fundamentalism have
been crafted, like his prose, to be remembered.
I have come to the Paddington Sports Club to talk with Amis, who is relaxing
after a midday tennis match. It's a sunny October afternoon, and the
cheerful wallop of ground strokes fills the air. "One of the reasons I wrote
Koba the Dread was to give myself a political education," Amis explains
over a glass of beer in the club garden, recounting how an author famous
around the world for his devotion to the everyday was first drawn into the
nightmare reality of the Soviet Gulag, one of the twentieth century's
cruelest inventions and the setting of
House of Meetings.
House of Meetings just might be the
most somber book that he has written. "The reviews have been very good on
the whole," Amis says with a shrug, and it seems he'll leave it there. But
then he sits up to deliver the kind of diatribe you might expect from him.
"It's been said by a couple of reviewers that Zoya is a male fantasy figure.
All that means is she's pretty! And what's the subtext of that? Either
people think that novelists can't pull girls, or that book reviewers can't
pull girls." Once again, Amis pauses to relight his cigarette. "The idea of
having a pretty girlfriend is not a fantasy for me."
Benjamin Anastas, Men's Vogue
December 2006

Martin Amis
and
Isabel Fonseca
in June 2007
Martin Amis returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in
Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel
Fonseca, and their two young daughters. "Some strange things have happened, it
seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more right-wing
when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a
distance to the right while staying in the same place."
Amis has been appointed as a Professor of Creative Writing at The Manchester
Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester, and is due to start in
September 2007. "I may be acerbic in how I write but I would find it very
difficult to say cruel things to [students] in such a vulnerable position. I
imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them. ... A campus novel
written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants."
Wikipedia
July 2007

"I have a god-like relationship with the world I've created. It is exactly
analogous. There is creation and resolution, and it's all up to me."
"It is a sort of sedentary, carpet slippers,
self-inspecting, nose-picking, arse-scratching kind of job, just you in your
study and there is absolutely no way round that. So, anyone who is in it for
worldly gains and razzmatazz I don't think will get very far at all."

More on or by Martin Amis
The awful opinions of Martin Amis
The absurd world of Martin Amis
Has Martin Amis lost his marbles?
The Islamist
House of Meetings
The Second Plane
Terrorism Update
Amis the Gynocrat
Agony of the Ayatollahs
Amis on Loss
Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan and
Martin Amis
Dale Peck, the talented young American critic-novelist, in the
New Republic, suggested that
the elite of British fiction - McEwan, Amis, Rushdie and so on - had
systematically "ruined" the British novel. As for Ian McEwan: "His novels smell
worse than the newspaper wrapped around old fish."
Peck continued: "I do not mean to suggest that there are not any good writers in
Britain . . . merely that the writers who have been anointed as the propagators
of the great tradition of British fiction seem to be intent upon destroying all
that is good in that tradition."
Jason Cowley,
New Statesman
June 4, 2001

Booker Prizewinner
Ian McEwan being interviewed at the 2005
Hay Festival by Vanity Fair correspondent
Chris Hitchens
Nan A. Talese recent article in the London Sunday Times made the
matter-of-fact statement that Ian McEwan had emerged in Britain as “our national
writer.” I at once understood the justice of this opinion, but without at first
being able to say what commanded my assent. A reading of
McEwan’s latest novella allows one to be fractionally less vague. The
“national” character of this literary fragment is to be found in its
simultaneous evocations of time and place, which allow the reader—at any rate
the reader of a certain age who is of English provenance—to locate himself with
satisfaction in an identifiable geography at a given date.
But it’s not absolutely necessary to enjoy this shared relationship with either
the story or the setting, for the subject is universal. It is sex—or, to be more
precise, sex and the loss of innocence.
Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic
July/August 2007

Ian McEwan surrounded by fans
Ian McEwan Receives Stellfox Prize
Dickinson
College, Carlisle, PA, September 26-28, 2005
Renowned British novelist and Booker Prize winner
Ian McEwan
became the first recipient of the college's Stellfox Prize and Residency for
Literary Excellence, funded by the Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting
Scholars and Writers Program.
A Sinner’s Tale
By Deborah Solomon
The New York Times, December 2, 2007
Atonement has been made into a film. Most novelists run from film, afraid
that the care they lavished on their prose will be squandered.
I know. Well, it will be squandered whether they run or not.
So why are you the executive producer?
So I could stay involved but not write the screenplay. I refused to write the
screenplay.
The film is bleaker than the novel.
I hope it's not entirely bleak. It's a love story.
It seems the impulse to atone is a religious one, and
yet you are a self-declared atheist.
Yes, I am an atheist. Atheists still have the same problem of how they reconcile
themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god
to forgive you.
You have two grown sons.
They're much nicer to me than I was to my parents. I was managed as a child.
You were probably already a nonbeliever.
No, I was just beginning to see through it all, but not quite.
Martin Amis is being shredded in the British press
after criticizing various aspects of Islam.
He was attacked in The Guardian, in a shrill manner. All religions make very big
claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute
them. It should be possible to say, "I find some ideas in Islam questionable"
without being called a racist.
Which ideas do you mean?
Well, the idea that any apostate should be punished is revolting. This is
completely hostile to the notion of free thought and everything we hope to stand
for. I think Martin has suffered terribly at the hands of The Guardian.
More on or by Ian McEwan
Atonement
Chesil Beach
Revelation
Salman Rushdie

Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie
(some years ago)
The row over Muslim women's dress codes reignited today after
author Salman Rushdie declared that "veils suck". Rushdie, whose book
The Satanic Verses triggered death threats from Islamic clerics, gave his
full backing to Leader of the Commons Jack Straw for raising the issue.
Rushdie was forced into hiding for 10 years after Iranian cleric Ayatollah
Khomeini served a "fatwah" on him over his book's alleged slight on the prophet
Mohammed. He had round-the-clock police protection costing nearly £1 million a
year, although that has been downgraded in recent years after Iran indicated the
death sentence no longer applied.
But Rushdie has always insisted he was right to publish
The Satanic Verses and
today he risked fresh Muslim anger with a savage attack on the wearing of veils.
"I think the battle against the veil has been a long and continuing battle
against the limitation of women, so in that sense I'm completely on [Straw's]
side. He was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which
they do. I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women."
thisislondon.co.uk
October 10, 2006

March 2006: Salman Rushdie and his fourth wife, TV star and former Indian model Padma Lakshmi

June 2007: The freshly minted Sir Salman Rushdie and his wife Padma Lakshmi are soon to divorce
Salman Rushdie was
"thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour, and am very grateful that my
work has been recognised in this way," while others saw a belated endorsement or
even recompense.
In the House of Islam, the reaction was all too predictable. "Salman Rushdie has
turned into a hated corpse, which cannot be resurrected by any action," Mohammad
Reza Bahonar told the parliament in Tehran, where the knighthood was angrily
denounced as a further provocation. Iran was, of course, the country where the
fatwa was pronounced on Rushdie by the ayatollahs in 1989. In Islamabad, Robert
Brinkley, the British representative, was summoned to be rebuked for the "utter
lack of sensitivity" in knighting Rushdie.
All this was familiar from the eruption over Rushdie's novel
The Satanic Verses
18 years ago, but the response in England was also painfully familiar.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft,
Slate
June 20, 2007
The Enchantress
By Andrew Anthony
The Observer, April 6, 2008
Salman Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress
of Florence, is a hymn to the creative and destructive power of female beauty.
'Ridiculously beautiful, comically beautiful' was how he once described Padma
Lakshmi, the woman who became his fourth wife. But in fact, Rushdie insists, he
had the concept of the novel before he met her.
According to Rushdie, the irony is that not only did she not inspire the book,
she was very nearly the cause of its demise: 'To put it bluntly, I had to write
it in spite of her. Because what happened to me last year when I was writing
this book was a colossal calamity.' In January of 2007, Lakshmi asked for a
divorce.
We meet in the Bloomsbury offices of his agent, Andrew Wylie. He's pleased with
the novel, a fabulous interweaving of fiction and history across two continents,
though his critics would say this is nothing new.
He says there was a period, after Lakshmi left him, that he worked eight or nine
hours a day for six weeks and produced 'about three pages'. But at the end of
this block, he refound the story.
Indeed one of the pleasures of the book is the sense of delight that the prose
takes in conjuring seductive myths from the solid foundations of history: 'One
of the things that I came to feel more than before, while writing the book, and
it's not a very complicated truth, is the idea that human nature really is
constant.'
He is pessimistic about the future of East-West relations: 'I hope I'm wrong but
the best-case optimistic argument I can make is that if you look at the
phenomenon of Islamic extremism, the places where it's most hated are the places
where it's most powerful.'
Having graduated from Cambridge in 1968, his politics were not untypical of his
generation and class. In The Satanic Verses, he writes of 'the Coca-Colonization
of the planet' and refers to New York as the 'transatlantic New Rome with its
Nazified architectural gigantism, which employed the oppressions of size to make
its human occupants feel like worms'.
Rushdie still has his criticisms of America, where he lives for much of the time
in the architectural gigantism of New York. He remains a committed
multiculturalist. 'I couldn't exist were it not for that transcultural movement.
So obviously I'm biased.'
Rushdie would argue that he was never a proponent of cultural relativism. The
event that made him an outspoken opponent was the fatwa on his life issued by
the Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine's Day in 1989. It was a defining moment in
the cultural wars that have grown dramatically more political in recent years.
Rushdie found himself in the strange position of having to rely on the support
of Margaret Thatcher: 'I only met Margaret Thatcher twice. The thing that I
thought about meeting her was how extraordinarily intelligent she was.'
He developed not just an admiration, but a fondness for many people he came to
know within the security and intelligence services: 'I've met a lot of Special
Branch officers both at the everyday and higher levels and, with one or two
exceptions, I liked all of them.'
It's been a decade since the Iranian government withdrew their support for the
fatwa, effectively allowing Rushdie back into civilian life. He says it now
feels like something that happened to him in the past.
There was a brief reprise last year when Rushdie was awarded a knighthood. A few
opportunists in Pakistan tried to generate a firestorm of protest, but it came
to nothing.
Since 2001, he's been joined in the political arena by a number of fellow
authors, some of whom have taken up a more controversial position than Rushdie:
'It's a big subject that everybody's thinking about. I don't agree with all
Christopher Hitchens's views but that doesn't stop him being my friend. And I
don't agree with everything Martin [Amis] said, but he's entirely entitled to
say it without being abused in the way that he was.'
The point for Rushdie is that he and his friends remain on the progressive side
of the argument. 'My instincts are completely liberal, but I do think we live in
a very weird world and we do need to realise that the world has changed. And
when Martin, Ian [McEwan] and I say that we get called conservative. But we're
not conservative.'
We discuss politics but Rushdie resents being recruited to positions he does not
hold, a legacy of the fatwa.
The Satanic Verses, 20 years on
Kenan Malik
Spiked, November 2008
When
The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, it had been expected to
set the world alight.
Salman Rushdie was
then perhaps the most celebrated British novelist of his generation. Almost five
years in the making, there was something mythical about the novel even before it
had been published. Within a month
The Satanic Verses had been banned in Rushdie's native India. And then on 14
February 1989 came the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa. The fatwa transformed the
Rushdie affair into a global conflict with historic repercussions.
To see how much the ground has shifted in the past 20 years, we only have to
compare the response to
The Satanic Verses to that to
The Jewel of Medina. Written by an American journalist, Sherry Jones,
The Jewel of Medina is a tale about
Aisha, the Prophet Muhammad's youngest wife. It had originally been bought
by the American publishers Random House. Then an American academic, Denise
Spellberg, condemned the book as offensive. Random House immediately dropped it.
No other major American publishing house would touch it.
In 1989 even the Ayatollah's death sentence could not stop the publication of
The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was forced into hiding for almost a decade.
Translators and publishers were killed, bookshops bombed and Penguin staff
forced to wear bomb-proof vests. Yet Penguin never wavered in its commitment to
keep it published. Today, all it takes for a publisher to run for cover is a
letter from an outraged academic. In the 20 years between the publication of
The Satanic Verses and the withdrawal of
The Jewel of Medina, the fatwa has in effect become internalised.
Twenty years ago, most liberals defended Rushdie's right to publish
The Satanic Verses despite the offence it caused many Muslims. Today, many
argue that in practice one must appease religious and cultural sensibilities. By
accepting the fiction that hostility to
The Satanic Verses was driven by theology, that all Muslims were offended by
the novel and that in a plural society speech must necessarily be less free,
liberals have helped create a culture of grievance in which being offended has
become a badge of identity.
Christopher Hitchens
Vanity Fair, February 2009
Salman Rushdie, raised a Muslim, concluded that the Koran was a book made by
the hands of men and was thus a fit subject for literary criticism and
fictional borrowing. Various intellectualoids argued that Rushdie got what
he deserved for insulting a great religion. Others remarked darkly that
Rushdie knew what he was doing. He certainly did know what he was doing. He
had studied Islamic scripture at Cambridge University. We live now in a
climate where every publisher and editor and politician has to weigh in
advance the possibility of violent Muslim reprisal. Though I can think of
many circumstances in which I would take a life, the crime of writing a work
of fiction is not a justification.

Salman Rushdie
(illustration by André Carrilho)
Salman Rushdie
Born 1947 in Mumbai, read History at King's College, Cambridge
1981 Midnight's Children, won Booker Prize and 1993 Booker of Bookers prize
1988 The Satanic Verses, earned a fatwa by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini
1995 The Moor's Last Sigh, won Whitbread prize
June 2007 Awarded a knighthood
The iPod Moment
By Robert McCrum
The Observer, May 25, 2008
When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world
of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing. The business
of books was run by anonymous men in suits whose judgments were largely ignored.
Trade was trade. Literature was another calling.
Now that world is more or less extinct. But the appetite for print is growing.
In 1996, there were between 60 000 and 100 000 new titles in the UK each year.
By 2007, it was pushing 200 000. That's the biggest annual output of any country
in the Western world, turning over some £4 billion a year.
All this has been fuelled by an explosive mixture of global commerce and
technology. In simple terms, you could say that Amazon plus Microsoft equals a
new literary stratosphere.
New Blood
Zadie Smith, the author of White Teeth, was
first noticed in 1997 when she landed an unheard-of advance for her work in
progress. When publication came in 2000, there were plenty of envious critics to
pronounce her book dead on arrival. But White Teeth was exhilaratingly and
distinctively new.
With worldwide sales of more than 2 million, White Teeth won success that was
sustained by a new global market. The effect was almost instantaneous. In
London, Sydney, Delhi and New York, publishers were now on the alert for "the
next Zadie Smith."
Amazon
In the excitement of the dotcom boom, from
which Amazon emerged as a survivor, the most visible symbol of change was a
marriage between the 600-year-old printed book and the high-tech world of online
selling. By 2007, sales had soared to $3.58 billion in 200 countries. Without
Amazon, there would have been no "long tail" and no online bookselling.
Across the English-speaking world, Amazon united the market. Previously, new
editions of books had been confined to territories like North America,
Australasia or the West Indies. Now books could be accessed by and sold to
customers across the world. Almost as revolutionary, Amazon put the customer
first.
New writers who found a readership in the global marketplace began to command
substantial advances. By the end of the 1990s, a new generation of market-savvy
literary entrepreneurs was beginning to emerge. The headline news was that the
book trade was now bestowing extraordinary riches on a privileged and talented
few.
J.K. Rowling
I began to grasp the true dimensions of the
Harry Potter phenomenon on the morning of July 8, 2000. Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone had been published with a tiny first printing of 500 in
1997, to modest but enthusiastic reviews, swiftly followed by Harry Potter and
the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Bloomsbury
took the unusual step of releasing the new book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of
Fire, to the literary media at 6 am on a Saturday morning. As I drove at dawn to
Bloomsbury's central London offices for my copy, I passed a long line of Harry
Potter fans, all waiting to devour the latest volume.
Ms Rowling has now sold some 400 million copies of her books and is worth £545
million.
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen spoilt his publisher's lunch
by refusing to allow The Corrections, his "sweeping account of a dysfunctional
American family" and the surprise literary bestseller of the stricken 9/11
season, to be selected for Oprah's Book Club.
What Franzen objected to was that in order to join "Oprah's authors" he had to
allow the chat-show queen to label The Corrections with her garish orange book
club logo. Just in case his message had been misunderstood, he added: "I feel
like I'm solidly in the high-art literary tradition."
The Franzen episode illustrates the paradox of this decade that the more golden
the opportunities available to the book, the more marginal it has seemed to
become. Behind the brilliant façade of new technology, new money, and new
markets, there has been a massive interior renovation in the house of books.
Festivals
When Peter Florence and his father launched the
first Hay-on-Wye literary festival in 1988, the experience was distinctly
unpromising. Hay's tipping point came in 2001 with the visit of ex-US President
Bill Clinton. With his genius for infectious slogans, Clinton declared Hay "the
Woodstock of the mind." Literary festivals became the new rock'n'roll.
Traditionally, the special joy of the book was that you communed with it in the
one place that no one else can trespass: your head. Not any more. The novelist
had become a cross between a commercial traveller, a rock musician and a jobbing
preacher. In just over a generation, the novel had gone public in the most
astounding way.
Prizes
In 2002, the Booker administrators moved their
prize-giving dinner from the Guildhall to the British Museum and appointed the
witty and provocative Lisa Jardine as the chair. Professor Jardine immediately
set the tone by declaring that the shortlist for 2002 marked "the beginning of a
new era."
Some of her fellow judges then waded in with snippy comments about the novels
they had been required to read. "It's like a formula," complained David Baddiel.
"They attempt to grab a big theme, and have a vulgar, obvious seriousness, even
a kind of pompous pretentiousness, about them."
Next, in another defining moment of literary prize marketing, Jardine took her
panel for an impromptu ride on the London Eye. Jardine also steered her
committee to choose a novel that the reading public actually enjoyed.
Book prizes now began to play a new and important role, one previously played by
reviews. In 2008, the literary prize has become one of the most reliable guides
to the literary landscape.
Kate Mosse, founder of the Orange Prize, says: "Prizes, far more than star
reviews, are what make books succeed now and it's also prizes that give readers
the confidence to trust a new writer."
Ian McEwan
Saturday is probably not McEwan's best book,
but when it was published in 2005, it enjoyed the kind of success that can only
be explained by the new worldwide market for English literature.
After its first week of publication, Saturday was doing so well that it actually
became a news item on the ITN evening news. The conventional reviews had been
far from ecstatic but there it was, piled up in the supermarkets and reported on
commercial television.
After a decade of change, many of the old, elite signposts through the
contemporary jungle of books and writing had become smothered in a profusion of
comment, from blogs to book clubs. It became harder and harder to achieve a
serious-minded consensus. The dictates of commerce seemed to threaten the
traditional authority of the critic.
The Wave
American democratic instincts have transformed
its literary landscape as surely as its colossal market has revolutionised
bookselling. Anyone can review books, and now, in America, everyone does.
Book blogs now have such power and influence that a publisher's editor in
Manhattan is likely to advise a new novelist not that they will be reviewed in
the New York Times but that they will be covered on curledup.com. This,
according to Trish Todd of Simon & Schuster, "is the wave of the future."
Readers had been posting reviews on Amazon for year. Now these book blogs could
take over and hand the power back to the common reader. The equation of Amazon
plus Microsoft has left the common reader dazed and confused.
Lynne Truss
Lynne Truss's plea for proper English usage
touched a nerve. Eats, Shoots and Leaves spoke to an anxiety about usage and
standards in an age of cultural upheaval. Word of mouth on a worldwide scale
made the book a bestseller in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.
The Kindle
This spring may be the tipping point in the
innovative commercial development of e-reading. While the market expanded, and
more and more readers were enfranchised by the English language, the technology
was racing to keep up.
In November 2007, these two forces finally converged with the American launch of
the Kindle. The Kindle, in direct competition with the Sony Reader, is a
handheld, wireless reading device that can hold all manner of digital text
files.
The Kindle is the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. It has many of the
features of its e-book predecessor, the Sony Reader. What sets the Kindle apart
is wireless connectivity via a system called Whispernet. As a result, says
Bezos: "This isn't a device, it's a service."
The marriage of Amazon with the world of internet technology may herald the
"iPod moment" for books, the moment when electronic technology finally swept six
centuries of ink and paper aside.
For five years and more, there had been a steady trend towards the digitization
of the world's copyright material, pioneered by the Google Print Initiative. To
Google's alliance with some of the world's greatest libraries, including the
Bodleian, all the major publishers had responded by digitizing their back lists.
The iPod moment in the book world is expected to happen this year. It's an
awesome prospect. The indexed part of the world wide web is around 40 billion
pages. The deep web is much bigger.
Universal access to this virtual library is an enthralling prospect. These are
the birth pangs of a golden age.


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