Stooshies and Skirmishes Across Borders

Isobel Dixon

I just can’t help returning to Scotland — at least as a subject here, if not (sadly) actually crossing the border. Perhaps I can plead genetic susceptibility, or the tempting reminders of January’s Burns Night celebrations, and the arrival of the Flying Scotsman on the platform at Kings Cross, alongside my morning train. But the fact is, there’s been rather a lot about Scotland in the world of books of late.

The Scotsman has capitalised on the success of Edinburgh’s latest literary superstar, Alexander McCall Smith — author of the Precious Ramotswe novels — and broken new ground with his new “daily novel” 44 Scotland Street, set in Edinburgh’s New Town. The serialised novel is by no means an innovation, with Dickens, Tolstoy and Balzac famous nineteenth century masters of the form, and, more recently, Armistead Maupin’s weekly instalments of Tales of the City in the San Francisco Chronicle. But this is the first time a British newspaper will be publishing a book in daily bites. (Check out The Scotsman’s site if you want to subscribe to the daily download - no free peeks though! www.thescotsman.scotsman.com)

Then in recent weeks — at a time when HarperCollins have closed down their literary imprint Flamingo, and Random House have merged their Secker & Warburg and Harvill imprints to form Harvill Secker — two major publishing houses have opened up Scottish outlets. Hodder Headline was first, following their successful launch of Hodder Headline Ireland by appointing Bob McDevitt their Scottish head. Penguin (who also recently launched an Irish list) followed soon after, hiring Judy Moir, a Zimbabwean who has worked in Scottish publishing for many years and who left Canongate last summer.

The media love a story of plucky independence and success and Canongate’s publicity-savvy publisher Jamie Byng guaranteed the company a lion’s share of column inches. The 2002 Man Booker triumph of Life of Pi by Yann Martell swelled sales and raised the company’s profile even higher. So when Judy Moir left, the newspapers leaped on the story, ever eager for a rift to report. As editorial director Moir had worked on other Canongate successes like Louise Welsh’s compelling The Cutting Room and Michel Faber’s international best-seller The Crimson Petal and the White. Both these authors are based in Scotland, and after Moir’s departure the papers reported her criticism that her former employer was no longer focusing enough attention on Scottish writers. Now scouting out and nurturing local talent is the brief in her new role as editor at large for Penguin, and both Penguin and Hodder Headline are bound to be flooded with submissions from hopeful local writers. It will be interesting to see what new voices emerge in the months to come, as both companies are able to take on writers across a broader spectrum, from literary through to commercial, than Canongate’s track record, aspirations, or capacity allows.

Readers may or may not care what imprint name or logo graces a book’s spine, but I believe that the more diverse avenues there are through which books can make an impact, the better for the industry, provided that quality remains a watchword. But while a specific imprint can successfully zone in on a specialist area, or publish books with a distinctive flavour or provenance, achieving the right literary — and commercial — balance between focus and flexibility, identity and range, is always going to be a delicate business for a publishing house. And the answer to the question of what that “right” balance is will depend to a varying degree on a blend — or clash — of financial, idealist and personally idiosyncratic concerns. It’s a very subjective business, publishing. Not forgetting as well that this isn’t fantasy football and acquiring editors are constrained by what books are actually written, available and affordable.

As conglomerates like Penguin can admirably add a local-is-lekker stream to their publishing programmes, so a smaller regionally-based independent can aspire to international flavour in its output, if it has a fat enough cheque book. Yes, it would be a mistake for a publishing house to neglect its regional roots, but when one strives to bring books of lasting and universal significance to readers’ attention, it can also be detrimental to be too inward-looking. And surely no author wants to be too rigidly pigeon-holed, her work confined to the tartan ghetto. It should be cause for celebration that a house that publishes classic Scottish writers like Ian Crichton Smith, Alasdair Gray and James Hogg can also acquire a book like M G Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall - a novel about an Indian family living through the Mau Mau revolt, by an author born in Kenya, raised in Tanzania and now living in Canada. It would be sad were Scottish publishers to be so dazzled by international stars that they ceased to look locally, but with Ghosting by Fife author Jennie Erdal out from Canongate later this year, and other independents like Polygon continuing to sign up Scottish authors, it seems there is no immediate danger of that — though now there are other, bigger guns setting their sights on talent up north, the field will no longer be quite as clear as before...

Another rumble north of the border centred on what Gillian Bowditch, writing in The Scotsman described as “a minor literary spat over the moral responsibilities of the author, which the Scottish literary scene has chosen to misrepresent as a stooshie between McCall Smith and Irvine Welsh over whose books best define Scotland.” There is something depressingly familiar about the sound of that debate, and I have little patience for the idea that writers somehow have to become official standard bearers, representing the whole of a nation in their work, whether this is their intention or not. This responsibility seems more often to be laid at the door of writers from communities which have found themselves in conflict with dominant cultures, feel under siege, and are grappling with the question of national/ethnic/religious identity. While origins will always shadow one’s words, it must be frustrating for authors who see the question of their Irishness/Welshness/Indianness/South Africanness debated more fiercely than any of the other attributes of their work. Did people ask Shakespeare whether his writing defined Elizabethan Englishness, I wonder?

A young Indian author whose sense of moral responsibility has prompted him to take public action beyond the page is Hari Kunzru, who turned down the £5,000 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for fiction, sponsored by the Mail on Sunday, on the basis that the paper, along with its sister paper the Daily Mail demonstrated “hostility towards black and Asian British people”, and pursued “an editorial policy vilifying and demonising refugees and asylum seekers”. He asked for the money instead to be donated to the charity the Refugee Council. His novel The Impressionist, a lively picaresque tale which races from India at the time of the Raj, to 1920’s Oxford, and finally to an imaginary African country, adds to a burgeoning literature of diaspora and integration. One hardly has to think for a moment for a host of immigrant characters to spring to mind: Zadie Smith’s intertwining multi-cultural families in White Teeth, Jonathan Raban’s illegal Chinese immigrant to post 9-11 America in Waxwings, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Calcutta family becoming Americans in The Namesake, and Thomas Kenneally’s Middle Eastern refugee in The Tyrant’s Novel, his searing indictment of Australia’s harsh asylum policies. All voices of the polyglot, the hybrid and displaced, stories for our times.

Right now the UK number one - for the third week running, with a quarter of a million copies in print - is a novel about displaced people, in flight from famine and racist bigotry. Yet unlike the list above, it is a historical novel, a moving narrative tale in the Dickensian tradition — in which Dickens himself has a walk-on part. Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea is set on board a “coffin ship” en route from Liverpool to New York in 1847, transporting desperate Irish people in flight from the famine to the hope of life — survival — in the New World. In the author’s skilful depiction, the desperation of those on board knows no class, nor are the boundaries of villainy and victimhood clear-cut, but you cannot put the book down without being outraged at social injustice, an outrage that should extend beyond the confines of “Ireland” and “history”.

TV personalities Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan picked the novel as one of a shortlist for the launch of their Book Club, which has had the hoped-for “Oprah effect” and helped to catapult a critical success to even greater heights. Discussing Star of the Sea on the programme Sir Bob Geldof spoke of the Ethiopian famine which he witnessed first-hand during his Band Aid campaign, emphasising the book’s pressing contemporary relevance. Perhaps there is no greater accolade for an author who believes in moral responsibility than that the reader is left with an enduring impression, not just of certain dark episodes in history or the plight of individual nations, but also of the humanity, the “people-ness”, of all people.

Some further notes:

Canongate’s website http://www.canongate.net/main.taf

The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru is published in Penguin paperback.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri is published in Flamingo hardback (in future Flamingo authors will be have their hardbacks published under the Fourth Estate imprint within the HarperCollins group).

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor is available in Vintage paperback (but the hardback was published under the now-to-be truncated Secker & Warburg imprint).

For another tale of displaced people, try Consider the Lilies by Ian Crichton Smith, a Canongate Classic, about the Highland Clearances. Though of course we have no shortage of powerful fiction on this subject closer to home — but that’s another story in itself.

LitNet: 25 February 2004

boontoe / to the top

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