Danuta Kean - Freelance Journalist

My website

Danuta Kean — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:13:27 +0000

Dear all
I have suspended this site until I have time to completely overhaul it following to serious spam attacks. As a result you can read and search articles here, but they do not include my most up-to-date work. Also, you cannot contact me or comment on articles through this site. Watch this space for changes soon. Don’t you just love technology?
dx

A Bill of rights for writers

Danuta Kean — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:14:47 +0000

The Deal Online
The UK is a world leader in the creative industries, but digitisation has undermined its competitiveness. The government has responded with the Digital Economy Bill, but this landmark legislation is under threat
At the end of October British Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson surprised everybody when he announced in the middle of a consultation period proposals to deal with digital piracy to be contained in the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill.
Among measures to stop online piracy will be caps on downloading and bandwith restrictions for serial abusers. If the abuse continues pirates will be disconnected from the network. It is a measure already introduced in France.
Quoting the figure that only one in 20 music downloads are paid for, Lord Mandelson said: “I want to be absolutely clear. The British Government’s view is that taking people’s work without due payment is wrong and that, as an economy based on creativity, we cannot sit back and do nothing as this happens.”
A key element of the bill will deal with collective licensing and orphan works in bid to “make the process of clearing rights less painful without eroding the position of rights holders”. Another is an undertaking to educate the public about copyright. Both provisions are expected to get cross party support.
Less likely to be voted through without opposition are the most severe sanctions against pirates. “The protection of IP industries is absolutely critical,” says Don Foster, Liberal Democrat shadow secretary for culture. He rejects the idea of account suspension. “We are firmly of the view that account suspension not only should be a very last resort, but should only be contemplated if there is a judicial process,” he says.
“I would be unhappy with the idea of cutting people off entirely,” says John Whittingdale, Conservative MP and chair of the culture, media and sports committee. Emphasising that he does not speak on behalf of his party, he added: “Broadband access now is becoming so much of a necessity of life that I don’t think Parliament would agree to a full suspension. That will deal with a large proportion of offenders.”
However, though the Digital Economy Bill appears to be good news for the book industry, there is a strong chance it will fall victim to the forthcoming General Election. “That is the big debate,” Whittingdale adds. “The government at the moment is still saying it’s still aiming to get it on the statute book before a General Election, but in my view the timetable for achieving that is extraordinarily tight.
He adds: “It is terribly important that we try and get this legislation passed, but one cannot be entirely confident that they are going to manage it.”
If the legislation fails and Labour loses the election, any new government is unlikely to have time to resurrect the bill. If that happens, an important chance for the government to defend its creative industries, a sector worth £16bn, responsible for 4 per cent of exports, will be lost.

Questiontime: digital policy:
General elections are to be held everywhere from Britain to Brazil in 2010, so what three questions should the book industry ask politicians?

1. How will you tackle online piracy?
This isn’t just a question of cutting off pirates’ internet services, it is about enforcement, policing and education.

2. How will you support the traditional creative industries?
This is a question of support, financial and otherwise, for the creative industries’ to develop digital platforms that both protect IP rights and enable greater public access.

3. With which copyright regime do you identify? The US or European Union?
Because US copyright law is weaker and has fundamental differences to European copyright law, their answer will demonstrate their understanding of the problems faced by the trade.

The © Word: Copyright and the Google Settlement

Danuta Kean — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 12:08:11 +0000

The Deal Online
Whatever happens to the Google Settlement on 9th November, the impact on the global publishing industry will take longer to decipher

When, on 9th November, both sides of the Google Settlement case file an amended agreement, there will be only one group of guaranteed winners: copyright lawyers. But for authors and other rights holders affected by the case, the outcome looks bleak whatever is agreed.
Under the Settlement, Google, which made a profit of US$21.79 billion in 2008, allows publishers to set the price of works available through its Google Books service. In return for Google’s distribution, 45% of the revenue earned from either the download price or, if the book is free, accompanying ad revenue, will be returned to the rights holder. As well as complete texts, the service enables users to search within texts and cherry pick sections for download – it is the advent of slice and dice publishing for the masses.
Opponents fear the service drives a Trojan Horse through global copyright legislation, leaving rights holders vulnerable to exploitation and piracy. Supporters claim the service will re-energise authors’ backlists and revivify out-of-print and long forgotten classics.
Should the Authors Guild of America and Association of American Publishers fail to reach an agreement with the megalithic search engine, it will go to court, But as Richard Charkin, executive director of Bloomsbury, warns that is the last thing the book trade needs.
“A big concern is that this will all end up in court, because if we lose it will be a disaster because copyright will then be fatally damaged and if we win then Google will appeal,” he says. “If we then win again, Google will appeal and so it will go on. Either way we are screwed and bankrupted by lawyers.”
If the trade is to avoid years of litigation worthy of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a formula that allows Google Books to continue scanning, distributing and selling the intellectual property of publishers and authors should be in everybody’s best interest.
Not that that makes the Settlement good news for an industry already battered by recession, digital downloading and increased piracy. It is the best worst option, Charkin says, though he adds that the ability of copyright to survive sustained attacks in the past offers some comfort. “Copyright is in good shape, it’s proved it’s flexible,” he says.
It is, he adds, in everyone’s interest, including Google’s to maintain copyright. “We’ve had so many reviews of copyright over the years, and no one has come up with a better solution.”
Others are less optimistic about the ability of copyright to withstand the onslaught of Google – or any organsation that follows its lead. “One of the real worries about the Settlement is that it hacks at the roots of the Berne Convention,” literary agent Meg Davies of MBA warns.
Davies is the Association of Authors Agents’ expert on the Settlement. Her expertise on the subject has not allayed her fears. “It could completely bring down the global law on copyright and all the conventions that we live by at the moment,” she adds pessimistically.
But Richard Charkin’s hope for the Settlement is no Pollyanna daydream. Rather he is one of those in the trade who feel that whatever the decision next week, pragmatic solutions must be found. They argue – usually off the record, so controversial is the subject – that the trade needs to move forward and avoid the wasteful attempts to resist change that followed the end of the Net Book Agreement 14 years ago, because the digital revolution that created this mess is irreversible.
Mention of the NBA may be why so few book trade organisations are willing to talk ahead of the 9th November about what the long-term affect of the case may be. There is a strong sense coming from the Booksellers Association, Publishers Association and Society of Authors that, though the Settlement, is not good news, if an agreement is not reached and it goes to court, the outcome will be even worse for the trade.
One thing unites those calling for outright resistance and those, albeit unwillingly, embracing change: rights holders have been placed in an unenviable position. On the one hand their demands for fair payment in return for content are attacked by the Free Access Movement as “standing in the way of free access to information”. On the other they are vulnerable to pirates, who align themselves with Free Access activists, marketing themselves as the Cap’n Jack Sparrows of the information high seas.
It is an appealing image, but one undermined by two points: many of those whose content pirates steal are individual authors with little power to fight back and existing on much-reduced incomes; furthermore, the fact that these sites carry advertising implies their motivation for appropriating authors’ work is less high romance and more a down-to-earth desire to generate ad revenue off the back of free content.
In the middle of this is the public, which has been raised on the idea that the internet and everything within it should be free. The public has even less understanding of the impact of piracy on creators’ incomes than it does of the role of sweat shops in subsidising throwaway fashion.
Add to that the impact of iTunes, whose track-based business model has effectively destroyed the album and in the process undermined consumption and appreciation of complete creative works, and you have a market ripe for Google’s slice and dice approach to books.
From the point of view of those who earn a living from their writing, it is not an optimistic outlook. No wonder Andrew Franklin, managing director of Profile Books says, whatever the outcome on the 9th November, the future for authors is bleak. “This could decimate authors’ income,” he says. Writing will become even less professionalised, a pursuit for the amateur. “Authors who live by their writing are in a far worse position than those who earn a living from other things, such as lecturing.”
The most controversial aspects of the Google Settlement are its opt out system and so-called orphan works – work that is still within copyright, but where the copyright owner cannot been traced.
As it stands, rights holders are expected to register their copyright with Google. If they do not wish to have their works made available, they may opt out and their work will be removed from the system. Simple as it sounds, this can be an administrative nightmare requiring agencies and publishers to search the site for every edition of their clients’ work. Inevitably only the highest earning authors are looked after in this way, authors lower down the pecking order are left to check for themselves.
“It’s like inertia selling,” claims Anthony Beevor, author of worldwide bestsellers Stalingrad and D Day: The Battle For Normandy. “Why should we have to make sure that they are not selling any of our different translations? My books are available in more than 30 languages, so I have to opt out for every bloody language. When you are talking about 12 titles in each language it is preposterous.”
Even when authors’ work is opted out, there are reports of it reappearing on Google Books. “Who is policing Google itself?” asks Meg Davies, who is among those who have seen ISBNs reappear the day after they were removed. No one is accusing the search engine of dishonesty, the administrative problems are regarded as symptomatic of the scale of Google Books.
But the most controversial aspect of the whole Settlement is orphan works. Google is adamant that it does not wish to breach copyright, but relying on rights holders to police the service leaves it open to criticism of its systems for tracing IP holders. “Orphan works is a misnomer,” says Profile’s Andrew Franklin. “The fact that Google haven’t been very good at finding who a book belongs to doesn’t mean it hasn’t an owner.”
For its part Google has hit out at critics of its plans. In an article published in the New York Times last month, the search engine’s founder Sergey Brin wrote: “This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to rights holders, be they authors or publishers.” It is reasoning that has obvious attractions to authors in a business where the shelf life of their work is rapidly shrinking as publishers cut costs and in print time.
But Google’s plans for orphan works have even raised hackles in the digital economy. The Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation, is working to clarify US copyright law and enable anyone to take content from orphan works. It opposes the Settlement because it would give Google the exclusive right to sell advertising or access to orphan works.
From the point of view of European rights holders, a further disturbing aspect of the Settlement is that in effectively internationalising US copyright law it threatens cherished rights not available in Stateside. A cardinal principle divides the two continents: in the US IP is a branch of property law; in the European Union it is a human right.
Does this matter? Yes, especially if you are a non-fiction author, because US law does not assert the moral rights of the creator, European law does. This means that authors whose copyright is registered in the EU have some control over how their work is used and where it is reproduced.
Without this protection, it is not unfeasible for an author like Richard Dawkins to be helpless if he finds his work selectively quoted in a book supporting Creationism. “It means that my work couldn’t be selectively quoted in a book by a Holocaust denier,” explains Antony Beevor, clearly enraged.
Carole Blake of the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency explains the danger: “The problem is that very few people understand moral rights, but they are very important. It is your right to have your words appear as you put them down and not out of context.”
Vehemently opposed to the Settlement because of its implications for copyright jurisdictions, she adds: “We have no idea where this is going to lead. That is what makes this so frightening.” Those fears are unlikely to be allayed on 9th November, whatever the outcome.

The Insider: Ros Ramsay

Danuta Kean — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:01:22 +0000

Mslexia, Summer 2009
If Ros Ramsay had preferred haircuts to a good read, a host of writers would have been robbed of certain income. Ramsay is one of the best-known literary scouts in London, matchmaking overseas publishers and UK film producers with books that will work in their markets.
The child of English teachers, publishing was as much a calling for Ramsey as a choice. Having dropped out of her uni modern languages course, she needed a job – fast. ‘I was offered three, and one was at the head office of Vidal Sassoon, so I would have got free haircuts, which was very tempting,’ she recalls, laughing. But books won over hair, thanks to an offer from illustrated publisher Conran Octopus. ‘I just thought, “Books are good. I’ll do that then.”’
Ramsay’s fluency in Russian and German led to selling translation rights for agency Rogers Coleridge and White. ‘Some writers can make more money and have a wider readership in translation that they do at home,’ says Ramsay. ‘If you have an advance for a UK book and it comes in three parts and you have bills to pay, it’s great to get $1,000 from Poland, or have a big sale in Germany. The royalties you get from various territories offer more of a sustainable income.’
At 29, Ramsay set up her own business as a literary scout, a job which baffles many outside the publishing hothouse. In essence, it meant a move from representing authors to representing publishers. ‘Most of our business is looking after foreign publishers, being their eyes and ears in the UK,’ she explains. ‘We advise our clients about what is coming out in English that would fit their lists, so that they can acquire the the translation rights.’ A sign of how diverse her work is, is reflected in a pan-global client list.
And authors don’t just benefit from Ramsay’s sale of their translation rights. ‘We also look after a couple of film and television clients in the UK, although we are looking for something slightly different for them,’ she says. Her current film and television roster is impressive, including, as it does, the producers of the Oscar-laden Slumdog Millionaire, as well as Framestore animation, responsible for the critically-acclaimed The Tales of Despereaux.
Though the acquisition by Film4 of Vikas Swarup’s Q & A – the novel which begat Slumdog – occurred before Ramsay took over the account, she says it is typical of how scouts work: the book was spotted by a scout who had lunch with Transworld editorial director Jane Lawson, who had recently acquired the book. The story also highlights the job’s social element: ‘It is often a question of building relationships, so that somebody sees a book and thinks, “I know that Ros will love that.” And then they call me and tell me about it.’ These relationships are forged over lunch, at parties and in the halls and bars of book fairs. ‘Agents and editors call us, but it is best to have the ear of an editor who is considering something before it has been sold.’ Such is the trust with which a good scout is held, that they are in the know about big auctions as they happen.
Matchmaking may be at the heart of the scout’s job, but what does that mean? ‘First,’ says Ramsey, ‘we are looking for what will work in a certain territory: something that works in Germany might not work in Southern Europe. Then we are looking for what will suit a particular publishing house. Finally, we are looking for what will work with specific editors within that publishing group. So it comes down to quite a personal level.’
What works for Ramsay is a fresh voice that offers new insights and perspectives. Enthusiasm is key. The author of whom she is most proud is Sarah Hall, whose books include The Electric Michelangelo. ‘I think that she is amazingly accomplished,’ she says. ‘She’ll eventually be recognised as speaking for her generation in a way that male writers claim to.’
Though the global market is reeling, there are books that are selling. Top of the list are vampire romances, following the success of Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series. What about the future? She won’t predict trends, but notes that ‘people will always want to be surprised and delighted and transported. Something wonderful will always sell.’

Dear Lily Allen

Danuta Kean — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:34:32 +0000

This is really going to divide all of you: it’s a response to the copyright debate so helpfully aided by Ms Lily Allen. It raises the question of how on earth do you make people realise that copyright theft is theft, without looking like you are in thrall to The Man? Or, perish the thought, throw copyright out of the window….Thanks to Suzanne Moore for the heads up on this btw. Let me know what you think

Dear Danuta: the Mslexia Authors’ Advice column

Danuta Kean — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:57:36 +0000

Mslexia, Summer 2009
Dear Danuta,
My book agent tells me that my book has been rejected by the large publishers as ‘too literary’ and ‘not commercial.’ I don’t understand: what is the difference between literary and commercial? Surely being literary is a plus?
Diane, King’s Lyn

Dear Diane,
Every year a story appears to the effect that Jordon’s latest ‘novel’ outsells the entire shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. Result: literary hacks bemoaning the dumbing down of our literary culture – and Britain as a whole.
Well, quelle surprise. In publishing everyone may yearn to discover a Nabokov, but it is the Jades and Jordans who pay their wages. Commercial fiction sells for a reason: it is accessible and appeals to the widest common denominator. Who would express surprise at Heat outselling the London Review of Books?
What publishers generally mean by commercial is actually genre (crime, horror, romance, etc.), and novels with strong narrative drive. In commercial fiction, literary merit is secondary to the thrill of the story. A good example is Dan Brown’s work: it may be page-turning, but the quality of his writing is….And the same goes for Jordan.
In so-called literary fiction the story is secondary to the quality of writing and ideas expressed. Ulysses is a book in which nothing very much happens but a lot is discussed.
Of course, there are many novels straddle the two worlds. Think of Kate Atkinson, Scarlett Thomas and Amanda Craig, who all tell stories well, but also deal with major themes.
There are also ‘difficult’ literary novels that become commercial successes – David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers spring to mind.
So why is the trade wary of literary work? Because it is less easy to predict their success, and in a competitive climate such as the current one, that matters more than ever. If buyers in book chains don’t ‘get’ a literary work, they will not order enough copies pre-publication to justify printing costs. (Bear in mind that printing a book relies heavily on an equation by which the more copies printed, the lower the per unit cost. So a higher print run should mean a better return on profit per unit – simple!).
Of course, readers are – thankfully! – hard to predict. If your literary book is failing with large publishers, try those smaller houses who aren’t yet giving up on the intelligence of us dear readers.

Rape abortion incest: is this what CHILDREN should read.

Danuta Kean — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:34:46 +0000

Daily Mail 9th July 2009
At a publishing event in Berlin recently, one well-known children’s author was chatting to another. They were comparing notes on their next novels when one started laughing.
‘Guess what?’ he said, as a wolfish grin spread across his face.
‘I am in a competition with another children’s author to see which of us will be the first to shatter the taboo about anal sex in children’s fiction.’
His shocked companion later told me: ‘I couldn’t believe it. That’s not literary endeavour, it is puerile boasting from a moron. It’s cynical beyond belief.’
I have to agree.
But I shudder, because the bestselling status of the writer in question means it is a threat he is likely to pull off.
I thought of that exchange while reading Tender Morsels, the new book by Australian author Margo Lanagan, who has already published 13 novels, which range in subject from science-fiction to some fantastical stories which reinterpret fairytales.
With a title that sounds more like a paedophile website than serious literature, it feels as if the author had a similar list of taboos to tick off as she wrote. In the first line, a character is described as a ‘slut’; within the first chapter a father commits not one but two abortions on Liga, the 15-year-old daughter he has sexually abused.
Worse is to come as Liga suffers a bloody miscarriage in the snow and is later gang-raped.
By the end of the book, the sexual violence has extended from rape and incest to the sodomising of Liga’s attackers. It is a novel populated by abused girls, abortionists, murderers and violent men who like to use their sexuality as a weapon.
It is the kind of sordid wretchedness usually only on offer in the stacks of misery memoirs found in supermarkets, or in the seedy extremes of violent crime fiction. But this is not yet another piece of emotional pornography pumped out by publishers as a supposedly ‘inspirational memoir’.
This is a novel published by one of the most respected children’s publishers in Britain, David Fickling Books, which also publishes Philip Pullman and Mark Haddon.
Doing it
Enfant terrible of teenage literature Melvin Burgess has written novels that feature drugs and prostitution
That’s right, children’s publisher. For this book is aimed at a teenage market. The story is inspired by Snow White And The Red Rose by the Brothers Grimm. But anyone expecting singing dwarves and a comedy cruel queen, followed by an innocent peck on the cheek by a handsome prince, is in for a horrible shock.
Lanagan puts the grim into the fairytale, writing in a folksy dialect that makes the degenerate action more disturbing, not less. Even one of the book’s strongest advocates, bestselling children’s author Meg Rosoff, believes it needs an age warning on the cover. ‘I think books like this should go out with a clear warning on them that they are not for under-15s,’ she says.
Having read Tender Morsels she was left ‘literally gasping with shock’.
Parents’ groups in the U.S. have already expressed concern about the book’s appeal to young readers.
On Amazon, one appalled parent wrote: ‘For my daughter to come to me after one chapter and ask “Why would a dad have sex with his daughter?” is very disturbing.
‘I know it’s my fault for not reading the book first, but who would think a responsible children’s author would write such filth for a child?’
Her book may be elegantly written, but it’s hard not to shudder at the kind of nightmares an 11- year-old would have if they picked it up. Sadly, this is just the latest venture into ‘grim lit’ in children’s publishing, a world that used to be a peaceful haven from the sordid realities against which most of us would rather shield our children.
Take Dame Jacqueline Wilson, whose million-selling books for girls are routinely built around divorce and single parenthood. Another children’s favourite, Louise Rennison, fills her own works – with graphic titles like Angus, Thongs And Full- Frontal Snogging – with early fumblings behind the bikeshed and at the school disco.
Even teachers are at it – last year West Yorkshire teacher Leonora Rustamova was forced to defend her novel Stop! Don’t Read This!, because it includes underage drinking, drug use and ‘pupil fantasies’.
Her defence? It would get boys reading. Another author who positively revels in his reputation as the enfant terrible of teenage literature is Melvin Burgess, whose canon of work has more in common with Jerry Springer than Enid Blyton.
His most famous novel, Junk, aimed at young teenagers, featured underage prostitutes and heroin addicts, while Lady: My Life As A Bitch features a young girl who turns into a dog before having sex, lots of sex.
No wonder hardly an eyebrow was raised when he published Doing It in 2004, a tale of underage teenagers sleeping with each other, with a cover that shows a girl pulling her underwear down.
‘Oh that’s just Melvin doing what he does’ was the general consensus in the publishing business. What does this say about our teenagers, the target market for these troubling books? The publishers would say that they are a troubled generation, facing tough choices about everything from drugs to sex.
But in my experience, this is a distorted image that owes much to the soft porn pumped out almost daily by Channel 4 in shows like Big Brother and the controversial teen drama Skins – which appear to confirm the idea that the average British 15-year-old is a sex-obsessed, foul-mouthed drunk or junkie.
The teenagers I know are not so different to the way we were as children: sure, there are bad apples out there, but behind the gawkiness and monosyllabic grunts are not abused monsters ready to kill their gran, but nice kids who care about the world and regard drugs and sex with suspicion and fear, and swearing as a sign of ignorance. That is why the biggest group of volunteers for charity in the country is teenagers.
But it’s a brave parent who sticks their head above the parapet to say this. When one woman from County Durham, Anne Dixon, complained to Jacqueline Wilson’s publisher Random House about a four-letter word she found in My Sister Jodie – a book she had bought to read to her nine-year-old niece – she was rebuffed with the suggestion that the books were aimed at an older audience.
But what might be acceptable to parents who frequent publishing industry haunts like the Groucho Club was not acceptable in the playgrounds of County Durham, and the 56- year-old fought back, raising such a stink that the publisher removed the offending word. Children’s publishers may face stiff competition from video games, DVDs and music, with content that’s designed to make the average parent’s hair stand on end.
But those are cynical businesses. Until recently, the same could never have been said about children’s publishing, in which Britain is a world leader. Those in the adult publishing business may be craven in their willingness to exploit the grossest extremes of human behaviour in order to make a bestseller, but the people who run children’s books have, in the past, had higher motives.
Tender Morsels publisher David Fickling, a father of two, defends the strong content of Tender Morsels by saying: ‘I think books like this can do more to prevent things like rape than anything else, so it’s a tremendous force for good.’
He baulks at the idea that children under 15 may read it. ‘It is not a book to be read by younger readers,’ the 56-yearold claims. ‘It is not a book they would understand.’
Having read the book, I disagree. I think the average 11- year-old would understand what is happening, and they would be perplexed and horrified.
There are genuine concerns in the industry that the decision to publish two editions of the book, each with a different front cover – one for adults and one for teenagers – will lead parents to buy it in the mistaken belief that, like Harry Potter, which was likewise published in two editions, this is a book that can be read by all the family. Despite a weak injunction on the inside of the dust jacket of Fickling’s edition that the book is ‘not suitable to younger readers’ – whatever ‘younger’ means – an edition for adult readers published by Jonathan Cape carries no warning.
Does it matter? Well, yes. Because even David Fickling is concerned young children should not read the book. Its jacket, he claims, reflects his concern. Fickling is a respected publisher who clearly cares about his younger readers.
And I agree, there is no attempt at prettiness on his cover, just the battered face of an abused girl with blood smeared across her mouth and despair in her eyes. It is an unedifying image he thinks sends a clear message about the book’s violent adult content. Which makes it all the more extraordinary that the socalled ‘adult’ edition of Tender Morsels reflects no such sensibilities.
What more whimsical image can you imagine than a bear frolicking hand-in-hand with two girls surrounded by birds? Yes, the birds may be crows and the bear may be in silhouette apart from its long teeth and claws, but how many of us on a fast run through a bookshop to buy nieces and daughters a present have time to notice such details? What can Cape – a respected firm which publishes the likes of Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, have been thinking?
Like the anonymous writer mentioned earlier, there are some children’s authors who regard it as good sport to go to extremes in their depictions of sex, violence and swearing. Others are motivated by a mistaken belief that if they write about ‘street smart’ subjects, they will be seen as being ‘cool’. But to me, it’s no more than irresponsible. I believe there is a real danger in underestimating the innocence of our children.
Too often we mistake smutty playground banter or curiosity about the world of adults for signs that they know more than we did at the same age. But the truth is that when children are exposed to deeply disturbing scenarios in teenage fiction, they are made painfully aware that the world contains cruelty beyond their experience and their imagination.
Of course it does. But through books we can teach our children that the evil out there is an aberration, not the norm. Or we can suggest, as stories like Tender Morsels do, that this is ‘reality’ and that, like poor Liga, they need to get over it. I prefer the former, not just because it protects their innocence, but because it happens to be true.

The Insider: Maria Rejt

Danuta Kean — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:06:34 +0000

Mslexia: Summer 2008
If you want Maria Rejt, Macmillan and Picador publishing director and one of the most respected editors in London, to notice your manuscript it is simple: create a unique outsider’s voice and characters that move her. Not as easy as it sounds, but that formula is what makes a script shine out like a ‘little golden nugget in the Yukon River’ from the mountain of scripts that clutter up her impossibly untidy office near King’s Cross.
‘I am always asked what am I look for, and there are obvious answers like: what is selling at the moment,’ she explains, name-checking some star performers – C J Sansom, Kate Moreton, Sue Grafton. But most important is a unique voice that instantly engages.
In a world where publishers seem to slavishly follow the market, aspiring authors often feel confused by repeated demands for a ‘unique voices.’ Rejt attempts to illuminate: ‘What moved me about Kate’s first book was the awesome respect she showed old people. I thought, “Why is it that I am so moved?” And I realised it is because it doesn’t happen that often. That respect and love for her older characters spoke to me. That is the voice.’
Subject matters too: ‘It is also what the voice is speaking to you about.’ Sansom’s debut, Dissolution, made an impact because it was ‘this most amazingly constructed and written moral crime novel.’ His Tudor ‘tec stories may sound like Brother Cadfael in ruffs, but, Rejt explains, hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake is unique. He engages and develops, not only within each book, but across the series.
Shardlake, like Colin Dexter’s Morse, had something else that made Rejt respond. ‘If I try and analyse what makes me make the decision to go with an author, there is one common thread: whether it is a literary book or a commercial book, it’s always about an outsider.’ So what’s the attraction? ‘I think the best criticism comes from that perspective. It is very lonely and isolated place to be but it is one that we have to respect.’
It is a perspective that suits Rejt. Her wry observations about everything from the state of feminism to misery memoirs are refreshing in an industry dominated by suits unwilling or unable to voice an opinion. It is easy to see why her authors, who also include Minette Walters and Charlotte Mendelson, are fiercely loyal. ‘She is a fantastic editor,’ enthuses Walters. ‘You want to give her your best as a writer.’
The commitment is mutual. Rejt is not interested in pouncing on the fresh meat of ‘stunning debuts’ in the way her rivals do, like wolves going one fresh kill to another. She is wary of over-priced first novels, regarding them as a short-term career move that reflect the neophile culture of the wider media rather than the quality of the books being marketed
‘If your ambitions as a new author are to make a big splash with your first book and then not be too bothered about your career as a writer, then obviously go for the money,’ she warns. ‘But if you feel that you want to grow as a writer and learn and mature and be in it for the long game, then you go for less money but a longer commitment – a multiple book deal.’
She winces when I mention the rapidity with which some authors are dropped after they fail to live up to their advances: ‘I prefer to publish an author over their entire career.’ This ambition explains her glee at her publisher role at Macmillan. While passionate about shaping an author’s work for publication, she also relishes strategic planning, whether it’s deciding when to publish or which book to back as their breakthrough to the A-List. ‘It’s like doing a Rubik’s Cube,’ she says of the challenge.
Her nose for the market is legendary. She famously launched Kathy Reichs in January, at a time when it was regarded as a deadzone. Rejt realised the crime author would have the market to herself. Her rivals watched in awe as the book sailed up the charts – and promptly followed her lead.
Given her ability to read the market, what is she tipping as the Next Big Thing? ‘I know some people are saying the Western is coming back and that the horror novel is about to be big, but I would like to make a personal pitch for the ghost story.’ She cites her friend Kate Mosse’s success with Sepulchre – ‘one of the best set piece openings I have read. It’s just brilliant.’
What she will not publish are the gorefests of writers like Karin Slaughter and Mo Hayder, or the grinding anguish of misery memoirists. ‘If [violence and sexual abuse] is used as a tool for entertainment, I have problems with that, I really do,’ she says of the increasingly explicit abuse that features in some books. ‘The longer you are on this planet, the more misery you have seen the less you want to exploit it.’ As long as Rejt’s instincts for finding nuggets in the Yukon last, it is unlikely she will have to be forced to compromise.

Why Dan Brown’s latest novel is guaranteed to be a success

Danuta Kean — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:34:02 +0000

Independent on Sunday, 20th September 2009
A campaign for global domination is afoot, following months of planning, and executed with almost military precision. And by this weekend it will almost certainly have achieved its aim: to claim the top spot in every English-language book chart in the world. The campaign? The launch, at midnight last Tuesday, of The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s much-anticipated follow-up to the global megasmash The Da Vinci Code.
It is a perfect example of “event publishing”, in which the usually fusty world of books swaps its cheap-white-wine approach to launches for the kind of splashy glamour and media clamour usually associated with Hollywood blockbusters.
Security surrounding the novel is as much a part of the hype as the drip feed of information, handled in the UK by Alison Barrow, the publicity director at Transworld, part of Brown’s global publisher Random House. Before its launch, only four of her colleagues had read the new novel, while email communications were heavily encrypted and retailers were forced to sign sales embargoes that exacted a heavy penalty if they were broken. It’s enough to make The Da Vinci Code’s hero, Robert Langdon, proud.
Though Barrow says the secrecy is all aimed at preventing hackers and bloggers from spoiling the fun, she admits that it helps to create a buzz. “Speculation and building a sense of anticipation are an integral part of the enjoyment for Dan’s millions of fans,” she says of a campaign that is claimed to be the biggest ever for a book in the UK.
We’ve been here before, of course. If the name is big enough, event publishing is the best way to avoid bad reviews – which, if The Da Vinci Code is anything to go by, are a given for The Lost Symbol. They also give a book water-cooler cachet: you have to read it to join the conversation.
Midnight launches and media embargoes of eye-watering severity follow a template created for novels starring Harry Potter and Hannibal Lecter. The brouhaha surrounding these books begins with a slow reveal of information designed to entice rather than inform, and ends with late-night parties in bookshops aided by ample amounts of Polyjuice Potion, chianti or communion wine. And it works: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final instalment in JK Rowling’s series, sold a record-breaking 2.65 million copies on its first day of sale in 2007.
“If you were to distil these campaigns down to one word, that word would be anticipation,” says Colin Midson, the publicity director at Rowling’s publisher, Bloomsbury. But, as with any anticipation, the fulfilment can come as a mixed blessing. For Bloomsbury, the end of Harry’s adventures coincided with a drop in its share price, which more than halved the company’s value from £285m to £134m. The City may understand success, but it does not understand publishing, and too often reads the success of one book as a recipe for guaranteed profits.
For books that go massive, a pleasing aspect for publishers is dealing with supermarkets. “Books like that give you greater negotiating ability when dealing with the retailers,” says Jenny Todd, the sales and marketing director at Canongate, which publishes Philip Pullman’s controversial event book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, next Easter. “Retailers are obsessed with missing out on market share,” she adds, of how the clamour gives publishers rare clout. “In the week that a book like that goes to number one, anyone without good market share will have to explain to their bosses what happened.”
Canongate previously enjoyed stratospheric success with Yann Martel’s Man Booker-winner Life of Pi and, last year, Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, both of which sold in the millions. As the company is privately owned, its head, Jamie Byng, is able to plough the money back into the business, investing in expansion and new staff.
The biggest problem raised by event books is managing the news agenda: a job made harder by the internet. The PR agency Colman Getty manages publicity for the Man Booker Prize as well as for JK Rowling, and last year had a leather-clad blonde and a cohort of marines speed down the Thames to deliver to a bookshop the first copies of Sebastian Faulks’ James Bond novel, Devil May Care. The photo opportunity made the News at Ten and the front page of almost every newspaper.
The Bond launch, like Brown’s, was global, which raises previously unseen turf wars between their publishers. “There are these issues around what time a book launches and who gets first dibs,” explains Dotti Irving, Colman Getty’s chief executive. “Is a book launched at midnight in the UK or midnight in the US? Do you stagger the launches around the world over 24 hours, or have them launch at exactly the same moment with a tea party in the US and breakfast in Hong Kong?”
It’s not just that leaks can spoil the story and destroy a book’s news value. They have an economic impact. If a book makes the News at Ten, it will bring into bookshops customers who rarely buy a book. And although only a very foolish publisher would launch a children’s book in the same week as Harry Potter or a thriller to coincide with The Lost Symbol, there is strong evidence that queuing punters do buy other books once they get in front of the displays, says Jeremy Neate of Nielsen BookScan, which monitors sales through the tills.
“In July 2005, when Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince appeared, the book market was running at sales of £23m a week,” he explains. “It then jumped to £41.3m, of which Harry represented £15m, which suggests that sales of other books didn’t suffer. The same sort of pattern is true of the last Harry Potter.” Given that the UK book market shrank for the first time last year, it is a pattern everyone in the book trade will hope to see repeated.
But Neate issues a warning: at its height, Dan Brown fever resulted in the reclusive author’s entire backlist taking the top spots in the books charts. Which means that, by the time you read this, we won’t just have been defeated by Brown’s publicity machine; we will be sick of it too.

The hit list
‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martel
Canongate
In 2003 the Booker-winning title accounted for 45 per cent of Canongate’s turnover, but the publisher couldn’t rest on Pi’s success. Happily, it has just announced record profits for 2008, thanks partly to two more surprise bestsellers it bought in 2007 by a then barely known author, Barack Obama.

‘Harry Potter’ by JK Rowling
Bloomsbury
With worldwide book sales of more than 400 million, the Harry Potter brand is worth $4bn. But, once lauded for getting kids to read, the Bloomsbury marketing machine has come in for some stick – and reached its nadir when heavies at a launch apparently “manhandled” the literary editor of The Independent. Bloomsbury’s profits fell by a third in 2008, the first post-Potter year.

‘Devil May Care’ by Sebastian Faulks
Penguin
The fastest-selling hard-back novel in Penguin’s history, the 36th Bond book sold 44,093 copies in four days. But Faulks says he won’t write another. “Once funny, twice silly, three times a slap,” he said, quoting “nanny’s popular saying”.

‘The Lost Symbol’ by Dan Brown
Random House
When its 15 September publication date was announced, much of the fiction due this month (just before the Booker deadline) was rushed out ahead of it. The Lost Symbol is already Amazon’s number-one seller on pre-orders alone.

Supermarkets: no more Mr Bad Guys?

Danuta Kean — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:09:44 +0000

The Author: Summer 2009
How do you frighten a publisher? Ask it about supermarkets. That is the impression I gained while researching this article about the pantomime baddies of the book trade. One large publisher after another shut down when asked how the sector operates. “The information is contentious,” said the corporate relations director of one big name. Another pointed me to Nielsen BookScan with the comment that my questions were “too commercially sensitive”.
To understand the roots of this fear one need only look at supermarkets’ share of the book market – a share that eclipses that of chain booksellers in certain categories. Put simply, supermarkets shift a lot of books: according to Book Marketing Ltd, by the end of March this year supermarkets accounted for 14.3% of the total book market by volume, 9.4% by value. In comparison chain booksellers accounted for 33.5% by volume (38.7% by value) and internet retailers 13.9% by volume (16.7% by value) (source: BML/TNS Books & The Consumer 2009).
These figures become frightening when one bores down into sales of the biggest selling genres. Supermarkets outstrip the chains in volume – and often value – terms across most leading genres. In crime supermarkets accounted for 11.8% of the market by volume and 10.8% by value in 2008: the chains accounted for 7.3% and 6.5%. In the general popular category, supermarkets sold 14.7% and 12.9% by volume and value against the chains’ 7.4% and 6.5% over the same period. In biography the supermarkets overtook the chains for the first time with volume and value shares of 11.4% and 15.9% against 8.6% and 10.5% (source: BML/TNS Books & The Consumer 2009).
They dominate fiction to the point where it is almost impossible for a book to sail straight to number one without supermarket support. At Christmas the balance shifts towards non-fiction, says Clare Harrington, group communications director at Hachette Livre UK, but they are less rigid than other book retailers about their book offer and will stock fiction or non-fiction out of season, if they deem a title appropriate. “They may place a very large order for a non fiction title to promote at a given time of year, e.g. Mother’s Day,” she adds.
These “very large orders” are usually placed late– as little as four weeks pre-publication, compared to six months by traditional booksellers. Though late orders may disrupt schedules, their size, usually a minimum of 10,000, merits their own print run. “The supermarkets have more power than ever to shift volume sales of a book. It can make or break certain titles,” says the key account manager of one large publishing house – like others she wished to remain anonymous for fear of offending the sector. This power means that on average supermarkets match chains when it comes to trade terms – usually between 60% and 65% and are able to ask for substantial sums in order to promote books in their stores.
That supermarkets have negotiating power and know how to use it is beyond doubt, but does that mean they are the bad guys of the book trade? Not everyone thinks so. Jeremy Neate, Nielsen BookScan head of research and international development, is one of those who regard the sector as much maligned. “There are an awful lot of people who just don’t go into bookshops,” he says. “They might like books, but they don’t really go into bookshops. Supermarkets give publishers the footfall of those people.” Faber UK sales director Neal Price agrees that supermarkets reach readers other booksellers cannot reach. “It’s not about transferring the sale elsewhere, it is about broadening the market,” he claims.
Faber’s support for supermarkets will come as a surprise to many, who may ask what business could an independent literary label like Faber have with a retail sector that bungs books on the same shelves alongside beans? The question reflects pervasive myths about supermarkets based upon the idea that chains and supermarkets operate in different economic universes. In fact they have much in common. Both have demanding shareholders whose knowledge of the book market is influenced more by the market share of brand authors than cultural cachet. Asda may be part of the giant Wal-Mart, but Waterstone’s is part of multimedia megalith HMV. W H Smith is as much in thrall to its institutional investors as Tesco and Sainsbury.
Both sectors are fierce negotiators that use market reach to screw better terms from publishers. “The great myth is that publishers give it all away to supermarkets and don’t give the same terms to anyone else,” one anonymous sales director told me. “In fact the terms we give supermarkets are almost identical to those given the chains. And the chains can be far more demanding in terms of co-merchandising payments than the supermarkets.”
The most significant difference between supermarkets and the traditional trade is the ability to operate on very tight margins. Price is key for supermarkets. You need only look at Asda and Tesco TV ads that swipe at one another’s claims to be cheapest to understand that value for money is their vital selling point. Books are no exception, with the average paperback sold at less than £4 and the average hardback at less than £10. In fact, if you want to know what is selling through supermarkets look at the Average Selling Price in the BookScan charts: books sold at approaching 50% below RRP are almost certainly supermarket hits.
The huge number of shoppers visiting their stores – Tesco makes more than £1bn a week in sales – mean tight margins work. Unlike traditional booksellers, supermarkets pass on to customers the majority of their trade discount. Their mark up is typically 20% or less, compared to 50% to 120% in the traditional trade. For supermarkets, a 20% profit is healthy when compared to core food product, whose profit margins are measured in single percentage points. More shocking for most authors will be the knowledge of how marginal books are for supermarket. They represent only 0.3% of Tesco’s total UK sales. That is not a misplaced percentage point. They are a nice little earner, which along with readers’ continued resilience to downloadable formats explains why Sainsbury, Waitrose and Morrisons are expanding book stock at the expense of rival entertainment product, especially music and DVDs.
For trade outsiders, the economics of books are mystifying. Selling bestsellers at high discount seems like madness – it is in terms of the profit lost to the author and trade as a whole. But supermarkets will not sell books at full price – cheap as chips is their usp. Large publishers take a hit because they can absorb the loss on cover price, But the more they do, the more reliant they are on a handful of fast-moving bestsellers whose slim profit margin is offset by high volume sales through supermarkets. Generally stores have only 60 slots for paperback promotion, which will mix fiction and non-fiction, and a hardback top 20. Larger stores may have up to 200 promotions and carry up to 5,000 titles, but they are rare. As a result, supermarkets’ ability to deliver megasales on a handful of titles has polarised the market into very high sellers and very low sellers with disastrous consequences for midlist authors.
Authors whose books make it into the supermarkets may find the benefits are mixed. On one hand they have a possible number one – without a supermarket listing, it is unlikely a book will make number one in its first week. On the other, high discount clauses kick in eroding profits per unit. They also face another long term problem: unless you are a Grisham level brand, supermarkets buy titles not authors, so subsequent support is not guaranteed, as Simon Trewin of United Agents points out. “The danger for an author from an agent’s point of view, is that you may be trying to do a new deal with publishers and the first book sold 100,000 copies, but 70,000 of those were through supermarkets. You don’t know whether those sales are based on straw because supermarkets make their decisions based less on the book and more on the product and packaging,” he explains.
So how do supermarkets choose their books? Packaging and plot are vital, not for literary reasons, but because supermarkets know their customers better than anyone. “The key to getting a book into us (and probably most supermarkets) is all about looking at who the target customer is and what they are reading or buying for someone reading,” David Cooke, Tesco category manager, explains. “The plot has to be key – i.e. correct for the genre and obviously offering new angles especially, on crime and historical. After that it’s really for the publishers to make sure it gets a good package.”
A good cover gives a book “kerb appeal”, the ability to encourage impulse purchase. One supermarket books category manager stands in front of her book displays, closes her eyes, turns around and tries to remember what she has seen. The more she can remember the better, because it means the books have strong covers that entice passing shoppers to pick them up. David Cooke adds: “Our customers are discerning, but as we face all our books out the jacket is very much the hook as to whether they will pick it up.”
That supermarkets are able to anticipate customers’ impulse buys so well reflect the mountain of data they have on individual purchasing habits. All the large supermarkets use clubcard systems that mean they can tweak their book offer according to their book buying customers – from when and what they purchase to their socio economic group. They have data and use it well: Sainsbury and Tesco both improved their upmarket fiction offer after looking at the number of people who buy the Guardian and Independent in store.
This data has had a profound impact on the book trade. Perceived demand from supermarket consumers for true story magazines like Best and Bella helped kickstart the misery memoir market. But supermarkets do get it wrong. Brand name misery lit authors’ adventures into fiction have been an overwhelming failure. And when the supermarkets get it wrong, it’s the publishers who are left picking up the price.

Battle of the heart: Was war poet Rupert Brooke a closet heterosexual?

Danuta Kean — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 08:56:41 +0000

The Independent on Sunday 25th January 2009
Over the past three years, Jill Dawson has been involved with another man. The Fens-based author candidly admits her feelings were so intense that she once signed her name “Rupert” instead of “Ruby”, the nickname used by her family. Rupert is Rupert Brooke, one of two narrators in Dawson’s latest novel, The Great Lover, an exquisitely rendered fictional account of the poet’s last years. Brooke’s fellow narrator is Nell Golightly, a housemaid from the Orchard Tea Rooms in Grantchester where Brooke was a tenant. She is dark and diminutive, with glittering eyes and a fierce intelligence. It is a description not unsuited to Dawson, who sits opposite me, a knot of intense enthusiasm.
There is one big difference, however: whereas Nell is tight-lipped and priggish, Dawson is vivacious. Sentences tumble from her, ideas skitter off in all directions. At times I feel she has provided me with as many questions as answers. “How do you write the appleness of an apple or the Brookeness of Rupert Brooke?” she asks. Later she muses on the literary possibilities of sea horses. Being in conversation with her feels like running after a greyhound.
Nell and Rupert are drawn together. Rupert desires Nell’s certainty, stillness and self-assurance. Nell envies Rupert’s exoticism, education and freedom. They dance around one another in a will-they-won’t-they love affair that also features walk-on parts by leading free thinkers of the 20th century, including Augustus John and the salonista Lady Ottoline Morrell, as well as Brooke’s lovers Ka Cox, Noel Olivier, Cathleen Nesbitt and the Tahitian Taatamata.
Sexist, a show off and a snob, Dawson’s Brooke reflects his time and his youth, though he remains attractive. “I ended up a little bit besotted with him,” Dawson confesses when I ask about her research from his letters and diaries. “I imagined at the start that I would feel infuriated and excluded by him – his very privileged world has nothing to do with me, I thought.” Dawson’s own background is steeped in the working class north-east: only two generations separate her from family who were in service like Nell.
She has also, like Nell, experienced the invisibility of the servant class. In her 20s she worked as an au pair to a wealthy family. “Nell tells her sisters who come to work with her that they must pretend not to hear or see anything. That is exactly how I felt as an au pair. I had to pretend not to see or hear the rows, the affairs, whatever, but to be there in an instant if suddenly I was required.”
Though Nell feels an outsider to Brooke and his world – he spouts from socialist reports on poverty but mocks Nell’s struggle to keep her family above the breadline – she finds him hard to resist, and, like Dawson, realises that beneath the crass class prejudices lies compassion. “The more I read his work and got involved in the novel, the more I felt he was more interested in me than I might have imagined,” admits Dawson. “I feel very affectionate towards him now,” she says with the smile of someone remembering a fond friend.
It is easy to see why the author fell for the Brooke of The Great Lover. He may have the face and body of an Adonis (a body that was often on show during nude midnight dips) and the ambitions of many a floppy-haired Cambridge man, but his idealism and self-doubt are appealing. He is not the fey creature of myth living in the shadow of a heroic death, yearning for an England seen only by posh boys buried in foreign fields. Tangled in with his dreaming is a bawdy youth, ironic and playful and desperate to shift the burden of his virginity – with man or woman, whichever comes first.
“He looked to people like Augustus John and Henry Lamb, these great seducers, and I feel a little part of him wished he was more like that. But he wasn’t,” Dawson says of Brooke’s nagging desperation about sex. He is also hampered in his quest to lose his virginity by the fact that the women he is drawn to are strong, not necessarily attractive, but intelligent and aware of the potential disasters of sex – which are far worse for women than men. Sleeping with men, for this Brooke, is a question not of preference but necessity.
The decision to portray Brooke as a reluctant bisexual is the most controversial aspect of the book but his ambivalence in the novel reflects his real views, the author claims. “It was an area about about which I felt I had to be extremely cautious and not impose my views.” The scene in which Brooke loses his virginity with his school friend Denham Russell-Smith is based on a letter to James Strachey. It is told with perfunctory detail and some humour, but there is no passion, just relief that the thing – his virginity – is gone. His lack of ardour in the letter leads Dawson to believe Brooke preferred women to men. “I felt that in his letters, poetry and other writings, his feelings were strongly about women. He is so open in the letter to Strachey that if he had strong feelings for men they would have been there – but they weren’t,” she says. “I felt I could take my lead from that and show his feelings torn between the idealistic women he can’t have and the motherly one he can.”
It comes as a surprise to learn that Dawson’s inspiration for The Great Lover was not the poem of the same name, or stories of Brooke’s sexual encounters, but a postcard picked up on a visit to fellow writer Martin Goodman. It featured two maids who worked at the Orchard House in Brooke’s time, and though both were probably the daughters of Brooke’s landlady, in Dawson’s imagination one evolved into Nell.
It is not the first time Dawson has created a lead female whose ambitions have been denied by class. “She is slightly a version of Madame Guerin, who looked after Victor in my novel The Wild Boy,” the author explains. “She wasn’t educated but was very strong- willed and, had she been better educated, would have been a very different person. I think Nell is an amalgam of her and Edie Thompson, in her aspiration to do and be more.” In 1923 Thompson and her lover Fred Bywaters were hanged for the murder of Edie’s husband Percy. It was a notorious case, which Dawson visited in her novel Fred and Edie, published in 2000.
I wonder what attracts Dawson to mythologised people? As well as Edie and Brooke, The Wild Boy is based on a case from the early 19th century. “It is about trying to rescue someone from that myth-making but also trying to include the myth,” she explains. “Edie has been written about in every decade since she was hanged. Each writer took a view of her that reflected their time: in the Seventies she was a battered wife who fought back, in the Fifties a poor victim. I think with Brooke there is something similar; with each decade, biographers have taken a different stance on him that reflected their own time.” Biographers’ interpretations of Brooke began with patriotic pride, moved on to discrediting his status as a War Poet (he died before seeing action), and more recently have reflected popular culture’s obsession with sex.
Though Brooke’s homosexuality has been the main focus of current interest, other details, especially about the naked dips that led Virginia Woolf to dismiss Brooke and his “neo-pagan” friends as “dew dabblers”, embellish the legend. “His hard-ons were really famous!” Dawson blurts out loudly – so loudly that a group of tourists seated at a nearby table gawp and our waiter eyes us, sniffing the air like a terrier sensing trouble. Dawson giggles – as do I. It is a moment at which Brooke would have laughed.
That I can imagine Brooke laughing at a smutty comment says much for Dawson’s ability to create vigorous characters. Nell and Brooke breathe. They feel nearby, full of blood and vitality. Before we part she tells me of a visit to the Orchard House when the owner, Robin Callan, left her alone in Brooke’s old room, clutching the poet’s diary. “I just sat with it and thought, ‘he would have had that in his breast pocket, close to his heart’,” she says. It is as if a lover has just left the room.

I’m back and this season I won’t be reading an eReader

Danuta Kean — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:14:46 +0000

I’m back: proof positive that updating your blog software is a good idea if you want to keep posting. I will be updating the site with my latest articles when I get time.

In the meantime it seems I’m not alone in wanting to keep up to date at the moment. There appears to be a rush of Old Book Brigade eager to show that beneath their dusty jackets lurk technophiles bang on trend.

Listening to Radio 4 yesterday, I was struck by a discussion about new Sony Readers between Peter Florence and John Sutherland. “Marvellous and so shiny and cool” was the general verdict of the newly launched kit. “I’m a convert,” they concluded.

I nearly dropped my croissant.

I’d been to the launch of the readers a fortnight ago, and yes, they looked okay but essential cool kit? I don’t think so, lacking as they do the casual hipness all Apple products. They are big (too big for the average pocket) and their screens black and white. One responds to touch, the other clunks along like an old style notebook or iPod wannabe. One lets you book mark pages and even write on them with a stylus. All very practical and workmanlike – the kind of tool middle managers on road trips to Swindon would love.

And of course, there are lots of free books that you can load onto them: out of copyright books that you could pick up for 99p from any good book website without having to splash out £250 for an electronic device with which to read them.

And therein lies the problem – be they Sony or Kindle, why do you need a bit of kit to read books you can buy for less than half the price in hard copy and read without downloading?

One point made by Peter Florence highlighted why he and John Sutherland were not the right people to talk about ereaders: they both talked of how great they were for anyone reading manuscripts. Yes, it’s true: for professional readers, who have to carry round bulky manuscripts, the readers are perfect.

But what percentage of the reading public is that? Less than 1% I imagine. For the rest of us, is there really any need for a piece of kit that costs a fortune to buy and even more – when compared to hard copy prices – to load with up-to-date reading?

Books cannot go through an iPod moment in the way that music did for a number of reasons. First, iPods took off because it was free and easy to upload your music library to a computer. You cannot do that with your existing library of books – and I wonder how many would want to? Books are to some extent wallpaper that maps your intellectual development, tastes and memory. We display them more to show off than to reread. People won’t be replacing paper libraries with vast electronic ones, as happened with iTunes.

Even if it were possible to download everything you have read and may wish to reread, the cost would be high. Until ebooks can match supermarket prices for hardbacks and paperbacks they will not sell in the numbers needed to justify the hype. The high price of ebooks, like audiobooks before them, risks killing off a market by making it seem expensive and yet another rip off by The Man.

Yes I know upfront investment from publishers is considerable and is reflected in prices, but that is not how the average person in the street sees it. They see that they have to shell out a lot for a reader and then even more for every book they buy that isn’t out of print. They also see that the same book is available for under three quid in Tesco without the faff of technological intervention.

Perception is everything in sales. And until consumers perceive electronic readers as value for money product that they must have, they won’t be buying them in droves.

If Peter Collingridge of Enhanced Editions and Canongate get their way the iPod moment will happen. They have released an ebook, Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro, for iPhones. Here’s the app link on the App Store: http://tinyurl.com/noxks8

Collingridge says that he and his partners were “underwhelmed by the monochrome view of the ebook future forecast by the Kindle or Sony Reader”, and so their iPhone ebook is “enhanced” with a range of features, including audio and video as well as social networking and other interactive elements”.

That to me is the future of ebooks. Not just because it recognises that ereaders are a totally different medium, which should demand a different approach to storytelling and factual content (just as iPods have ended the supremacy of the album), but because they don’t require the reader to go out and buy a new piece of kit with which to read the book.

I say “future” for a reason. IPhones are hard on the eye and have a way to go before they become great reading devices. But that will happen.

The market also has a way to go before consumers are convinced to buy ebooks. One thing is needed: prices must drop, something that will happen if the supermarkets start retailing ebooks. But that is not necessarily good news for publishers.

* If any of this looks familiar, it’s because I wrote much of it on Twitter at the time of the press conference. So, I can do technology after all!

Book scheme set for overseas chapters

Danuta Kean — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:59:59 +0000

The Financial Times 2nd March 2009
Mick Neville had not read a book in 10 years. Now, three years after joining a workplace reading movement, he cannot get enough of books.
Last Thursday he was welcomed at 10 Downing Street as one of a handful of Reading Heroes honoured by Gordon Brown, the British prime minister. And the scheme he is involved with is soon about to spread overseas.
Backed by his employer and in his role as a union learning representative in a government-backed scheme at Fletchers Bakery in the northern English town of Sheffield, Mr Neville turned the company’s redundant smoking room into a library and learning centre where colleagues could improve numeracy and literacy skills.
Central to the initiative at Fletchers are Quick Reads – short, fast-paced books by bestselling authors such as Ian Rankin or the business angels from BBC Television’s Dragons’ Den. Six titles, including one by Kate Mosse, are being published for World Book Day next Thursday.
British publishers launched the Quick Reads series in 2006, and their success at helping adults with reading problems has spawned plans for similar schemes in Canada and mainland Europe.
“Quick Reads have been so popular here that we couldn’t keep up with demand and we had to get Sheffield City Library to bring a mobile library here once a month,” Mr Neville says. As to the benefits for Fletchers Bakery, he says the scheme raised morale among the 200 employees and strengthened relationships between management and staff.
In workplaces across the UK, Quick Reads are being used to raise literacy standards as part of a collaboration between trade unions and companies as diverse as Boots, Tesco and VT Shipbuilders under the government’s Skills for Life scheme. At First UK Bus, which employs 20,300 drivers, Quick Reads are central to literacy programmes operated in 51 learning centres based in bus depots. The centres represent a considerable investment for First UK Bus. As well as giving 100 union learning representatives time to operate the scheme, the centres employ 36 trainers from a vocational training scheme.
Costs for employers in the UK are mitigated by government subsidy.
Dave Kaye, First UK Bus chief operating officer, says the centres opened five years ago to raise literacy and numeracy from low levels among drivers, many of whom had few qualifications. Such has been the success of the centres that they now offer 1,500 courses, which can go up to training at director level.
“Four years ago, our staff turnover among drivers was 32 per cent. Now it is 19.6 per cent,” Mr Kaye says, ascribing part of that to the literacy and numeracy scheme. He also attributes a reduction in collisions to better literacy among drivers.
At VT Shipbuilding, which employs 1,000 people building warships in Portsmouth on the south coast, the total outlay for its workplace learning programme was £109,000. The return on investment, calculated on improvements attributable to training, was 140 per cent, or £153,000, it says.
Part of the literacy scheme’s success derives from its being administered by union learning representatives rather than, say, the human resources department. Employees are reluctant to admit failings in literacy to HR in case it puts their jobs at risk.
In Canada, the ABC Canada Literacy Foundation, Grass Roots Press, a publisher, and the government are commissioning 12 Quick Reads from Canadian authors, although they have not yet been named. Six will be published in about 18 months’ time. “We are just beginning the programme but have secured a few authors and will begin in earnest in April 2009,” says Margaret Eaton, president of ABC Canada Literacy Foundations. Talks with employers are at a very early stage, however, she says.
Government-backed alliances of librarians and publishers in Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium have held talks with Quick Reads in the UK with a view to launching similar schemes. So far, they seem to be surviving recession-induced cuts. For good reason, says First UK Bus’s Mr Kaye. “Everything comes at a cost, but you have to look at whether it is a cost or an investment and with this so far we are getting a good return on investment.”

Melvyn Bragg: Why I’m still haunted by my first wife’s suicide

Danuta Kean — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 19:10:52 +0000

The Daily Mail 28th February 2009
There is a book in Melvyn Bragg’s library that he cannot bring himself to read. It isn’t badly written or one he finds distasteful. It has featured on literary prize shortlists around the world and earned its author plaudits. Yet still the book broods on a shelf, ignored, because TV’s King of Culture fears that what it might show him would be just too painful.
The book is Bad Faith by Carmen Callil, the story of French Nazi war criminal Louis Darquier. It is not Darquier’s story that repels Bragg, 69, but what it might reveal about Darquier’s daughter, Anne, who died in 1970.
The reason is that the presenter of The South Bank Show blames her for the suicide of his first wife, Lisa Roche, in 1971 – a tragedy that devastated not just Bragg’s life but that of his daughter, Marie-Elsa.
Lisa was a patient of Anne Darquier, a renowned psychoanalyst, and Bragg has no doubt it was Darquier’s self-inflicted death from alcohol and drugs that finally drove his wife over the edge after years of struggling with depression.
This is the first time he has been able to talk about Lisa’s death in 38 years, and it’s clear that the man whose TV persona is marked by smooth confidence is finding it incredibly difficult.
‘Why someone who is ill continues to…’ the words trail off and the affable charm gives way to a quiet rage. ‘Why they don’t say to their patient: “I am ill, but I recommend Dr X instead of me.” I can’t understand it.’
His teeth are clenched, the words extracted rather than spoken. ‘I thought maybe I should talk to the author Carmen Callil about what happened with Anne Darquier, but I just didn’t have the energy,’ he says. ‘I still don’t have the energy to read her book.’
He is only now willing to talk about the traumatic months leading up to Lisa’s death because he has written Remember Me, the fourth in his series of Cumbrian novels, which fictionalise the characters and events of his own life.
In the novel, the stories of the invented Joseph Richardson and his wife Natasha ‘twist like rope’ with the true story of Bragg and his wife Lisa.
So close are the parallels that at times it’s hard to distinguish whether he is talking about Lisa or her literary counterpart Natasha.
Bragg met Lisa Roche at a party in his final year at Oxford University in
1960. A bright boy from a working-class background – his parents ran a pub in Wigton – he had suffered his first nervous breakdown in his late teens. Perhaps it was the mental scars he bore that drew him to the enigmatic French girl.
Bragg’s books mirrors events in his own life, though they are works of fiction
An aristocratic artist, Lisa was five years his senior. Rather like Bragg, she was trying to distance herself from her roots. A year after their marriage in 1961, she finally admitted that her father was not a mere schoolteacher, but a member of a grand French family – and her childhood had left deep but invisible scars.
It is easy to see how the darkness inside this intense, artistic woman would be drawn to the light given off by Bragg and his fierce intellect.
Coupled with a considerable ambition, his easy manner has enabled him to rise through the ranks of the media to become controller of arts and features at London Weekend Television and, more recently as Lord Bragg of Wigton, a popular member of Tony Blair’s charmed inner circle.
‘The Sixties was full of working-class arrivistes who were clambering over television, music journalism and the art world,’ says Bragg, describing his early ambitious self. ‘They saw a few open doors and made a mad rush for them.’
He laughs as he mimes ferociously elbowing the competition out of the way.
Though that atmosphere thrilled the young TV executive, it did not suit his wife. Lisa – like her fictional counterpart Natasha – was not comfortable with Swinging London, and pulled back from the mayhem.
‘She didn’t want to go out there and he did, not just because he was a working-class arriviste,’ says Bragg.
For a moment, it is not clear whether he is talking about his own past or the characters in his book.
‘That was part of Lisa’s character, too, but I developed it for the novel,’ he adds hastily.
As a BBC trainee producer, Bragg settled with Lisa in Kew, South-West London, before buying a house in an unfashionable part of Hampstead.
In the novel, Natasha and Joseph’s lives mirror that exactly – and Natasha’s loneliness is heartbreaking to witness.
She spends her days waiting in their Kew home, then in Hampstead, for the return of her husband, who, full of excitement at his new job, is oblivious to his wife’s desperation.
When I point this out, Bragg looks shocked, as though struck by a sudden thought. ‘She needn’t have been then really,’ he says, barely audible. ‘There were things to do. Kew wasn’t in the middle of the bush, nor was Hampstead.’
Again, though he is talking about the character of Natasha, the intensity of his reaction makes me wonder whether he’s really referring to his wife.
Then he rallies and adds: ‘You see that was different from Lisa, because in that time she built up a group of friends who also stayed at home.
‘These were all women who lived in Kew while their husbands worked in London. We were only 20 minutes away.’
At the time of Lisa’s death, the couple had separated and Bragg was with Cate Haste, who he now has two children with
At the time of Lisa’s death, the couple had separated and Bragg was with Cate Haste, who he now has two children with
He trails off, as if unsure what he says is true. The line between fact and fiction is fine.
When the Braggs moved to Hampstead, Lisa decided to go into therapy after suffering years of depression, a condition rooted in an unexplained traumatic childhood and suicide attempts before she met her husband.
Though he undoubtedly feels enormous responsibility at what happened to Lisa, he believes Anne Darquier’s decision to take on a woman in such a fragile mental state was irresponsible.
The analyst’s own severe mental problems meant she was unable to provide the duty of care such a vulnerable young woman needed.
‘It is totally reprehensible what happened,’ he says of Darquier’s decision to treat patients as she struggled with drink and depression herself.
Her death came as a result of a fall while under the influence of alcohol and
barbiturates, regarded as a suspected overdose. In Bragg’s new book, the Natasha/Lisa character is told of the death of her psychoanalyst in the most brutal way and then dumped from therapy, without any professional help, to pick up the pieces.
Anne Darquier broke the rules with her patient in more ways than one: it is highly likely that her father knew, or was known to, Lisa’s father in France.
The psychoanalyst would have been aware of the link, and it would have affected her judgment in treating Lisa because she may have known about the family background.
‘This woman came from the same part of France [as Lisa's family] and it is more than possible that Lisa’s father or grandfather knew her father, or would have known or known of him, without question,’ says Bragg.
‘We are talking about neighbouring villages in Haute Provence, so I could imagine the two of them…’
He judders to a halt. ‘I just don’t want to go there,’ he sighs. Suddenly he looks his age. The boyish face is deeply lined and the once lustrous locks have faded to grey.
What’s clear is that the death of her analyst in 1970 devastated Lisa. She was left floundering.
Those who knew what had happened were unwilling or unable to help. Friends and relatives were not told of the reason for her mental turmoil and were left perplexed as Lisa unravelled before their eyes.
‘What I portray in the book is absolutely accurate to what happened in Lisa’s life in so far as what I learned later, because she didn’t tell me at the time,’ says Bragg, and there is guilt in his voice.
Bragg’s relationship with daughter Marie-Elsa, from his relationship with Lisa, was strained for a long time
He has reason to feel guilty. At the time of Darquier’s death, he and Lisa had become estranged. Bragg had left her for another woman, the writer Cate Haste, whom he married in 1973 and by whom he has a son, Tom, and daughter, Alice.
There were arguments and pleas from Lisa for his return, but to no avail. On the night Lisa died, Bragg refused to visit her, saying he would see her the next day. There was to be no next day.
That night in 1971, Lisa took her own life. Bragg is reluctant to go into details of how. Even in the book when Natasha kills herself, the method is left to the reader’s imagination.
Shocked and racked with anguish, Bragg had to explain what had happened to their six-year-old daughter, who went to live with him.
For many years, Marie-Elsa was – unsurprisingly – deeply troubled by her mother’s death, and that affected her relationship with her father.
When Lisa died, she and Bragg were living separate lives, he in Hampstead and she in Chiswick.
But it was their split that seemed to have caused her breakdown. And, indeed, Bragg had a second breakdown after Lisa’s death.
Only after years of talking to their friends and relatives has he realised that the blame is not entirely his own.
‘I had this kind of out-of-body experience very severely for about a year and a half at that point, which was frightening,’ he says.
In the novel, a terrifying Tube journey in which Joe has a panic attack and is almost overwhelmed by suicidal urges is taken from real life – Bragg admits he still has ‘flutters’ of panic on the Underground.
He says that he was ‘determined not to hide’ his mental problems, an openness which led to his involvement with the mental health charity Mind, of which he is president. It is a subject about which he is passionate.
‘Anything that happens in your own mind is seen as your own fault, or people think you have been afflicted with something and no one wants to know about it,’ he says, angry at the way the mentally ill are shunted aside or ridiculed.
‘Mental depressions or disturbances are something that need to be treated and lived with.’
He is, of course, not the only one who has had to live with the harrowing consequences of Lisa’s severe depression. His daughter, Marie-Elsa, is 40 and a vicar in a tough North London parish. She, too, suffers the pain of what her mother did.
The book is a powerful reminder that the impact of a suicide resonates in the lives of the family and friends for many years. ‘Yes, it does,’ he says, almost inaudibly. ‘It does for quite a lot of people…more than you could imagine.’
Pouring out his feelings and memories about his wife’s death does at least appear to have brought Bragg closer to his daughter. ‘I showed the book to her and she was glad for me that I had faced up to it,’ he says.
He looks out of the window of his penthouse office across to West London and Chiswick, where Lisa died.
His voice sinks to a whisper. ‘My daughter had faced up to it far earlier than I had, because she had been through stuff on her way to being a priest that made her think more deeply and clearly than I had.’
It is a shocking admission, especially when you consider that the book took 30 years to gestate and, he says, five years to write.
Did he find writing it cathartic? ‘No, it wasn’t,’ he says. But the book’s story feels redemptive.
Joe is absolved of some guilt, as are their friends. Natasha’s death in the novel feels inevitable – no one could have saved her.
‘Redemptive?’ he asks. ‘Well, in the sense of…’ He takes a long pause and appears lost. ‘Redemptive in the sense of a properly considered response, but not in terms of absolution.’
Mining such painful territory for literary inspiration seems to have weakened him.
‘I grew up at a time when you didn’t let your feelings go,’ he says. ‘When you are of that mould, you become quite good at “fortressing” yourself.
‘You build up huge defence systems. These can become quite dangerous, boiling up inside until things explode, but what you also get is strength, because they are defence systems.
‘I found that after Lisa’s death, though I wasn’t trying to do it, I built up a defence system.’
That defence was work, ironic given that since completing Remember Me he has been unable to write a scrap of fiction. It clearly pains him.
‘It’s the first time since I was 20 that I haven’t written fiction,’ he says.
In Cumbria last summer, while recovering from an eye operation, he says he had the urge to write.
‘I started drafting a book, and then I completely ran out of steam,’ he says looking glum. ‘I just thought: “Stop it!” It is a little bit frightening.’
There is no self-pity in his voice. ‘Look, it’s not the end of the world, and who’s waiting?’ he shrugs.
His wife’s death may seem like a lifetime ago, but there is no doubt that the shockwaves are still buffeting this complicated and brilliant man.

Melvyn Bragg: I just don’t want to go there

Danuta Kean — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 11:22:32 +0000

The Independent on Sunday 22nd February 2009
Behind the charm, the soft Cumbrian lilt, the flashing smile and twinkling eyes, something darker festers in Melvyn Bragg, award-winning broadcaster, acclaimed novelist and ennobled member of the Labour elite. Despite the success and celebrity, the dapper grammar school boy from working-class Wigton carries within him a mixture of guilt, rage and bewilderment that others would find hard to conceal. The thought crosses my mind as a late sun pours its weakening light into his office on the 22nd floor of LWT’s Waterloo HQ at the end of a freezing Tuesday in February.
The room is packed up for a move to the sixth floor. Boxes are strewn around. A handful of books are abandoned on a shelf; like forlorn drunks they lean against one another for support. I am here to talk about Bragg’s book Remember Me?, the latest in a series of autobiographical novels and the most searing of them all. It is an account of the doomed relationship between Bragg’s literary doppelganger Joe Richardson and a troubled French poet, Natasha, who bears a striking resemblance to the author’s first wife, the French artist Lisa Roche. Both were gifted artists, both tried to distance themselves from aristocratic roots, both had troubled childhoods and both ended their lives as their marriages fell to pieces. As with all suicides, both left a legacy of guilt, regret and profound sadness with the friends and family, including a young daughter.
In the novel, Bragg anatomises the relationship from hungry courtship and heady marriage through to a gradual breaking apart and bitterness as Richardson leaves for another woman. Cutting into the narrative are conversations between Richardson and his daughter Marcelle. They feel real rather than imagined, and Bragg admits he sought the approval of Marie-Elsa, his daughter by Lisa, before handing over the manuscript. “She was glad for me, that I had faced up to it,” he confides. Then adds, barely audibly: “She had faced up to it far earlier than I had because she had been through stuff on her way to being a priest, which made her think more deeply and clearly than I had.” Marie-Elsa, 40, is an Anglican vicar in a “tough” London parish.
The relationship flourishes and fades against the fluid social background of the 1960s; a time, Bragg recalls, “full of working-class arrivistes who were clambering all over television, music, journalism and the art world. They saw a few open doors and they rushed for them like a herd.” He mimes ferociously elbowing out the competition and laughs loudly. It is one of the few times he laughs throughout the interview.
The line between Bragg’s life and the plot of Remember Me? is so thin that at times it is hard to distinguish whether he is talking about fact or fiction. Like Bragg, Joe graduates from Oxford, a grammar-school boy made good, works in the BBC and becomes a published author. Both work on acclaimed arts documentaries and films, marry their French girlfriends and leave for other women 10 years later. Both fail to return to their wives on the eve of their suicide, and the guilt they carry down the years is unbearable. For Bragg it unravelled into a second nervous breakdown – the first happened in his teens.
Even Bragg seems confused about where fact ends and fiction begins. When I ask about the loneliness that engulfs Natasha and whether her character would have been more fulfilled in a post-feminist world, he looks shocked, as though a thought had just struck him. “Maybe, maybe,” he says, his voice sinking to a whisper of regret. “There were things to do. Kew wasn’t in the middle of nowhere, nor was Hampstead.” He gazes out of the window across to west London. Kew is where his wife committed suicide – as does Natasha.
He looks weary, the lines on his face betray his 69 years and the famous lustrous locks are grey. The book was hard to write – he pulled it from publication three times – and is even harder to discuss. When the hardback finally appeared last year he cancelled all interviews after appearing at the Oxford Literary Festival. “I just couldn’t do it,” he says. When I begin the interview he draws in his breath apprehensively.
Though he admits to still feeling guilty, there is one person he feels contributed to his wife’s suicide: her psychotherapist. In the novel Natasha’s therapist kills herself, leaving her psychologically marooned. The impact of the death on her already fragile psyche is heartrending. “One thing that is absolutely accurate, and I think really terrible, is the death of the psychoanalyst,” Bragg explains, and rage bubbles to the surface.
Lisa’s analyst was Anne Darquier, the daughter of a French Nazi war criminal. She committed suicide, leaving her patients (including the Virago founder Carmen Callil) to flounder. Bragg clearly believes the news pushed his wife into the psychosis of suicide. “Why somebody who is ill continues to treat patients and doesn’t say ‘I am ill but I recommend Dr X’? I can’t understand it.” His teeth are clenched as he speaks, the words extracted rather than spoken. He has been unable to read Bad Faith, Callil’s book about Darquier’s father Louis, though he realises it may provide answers about what happened. “I am just too tired,” he says.
His anger is compounded by the notion that Darquier, through her father, had links to Lisa’s past that Bragg finds hard to stomach. He almost spits out: “This woman – I don’t mean to be rude but I can’t remember her name – came from the same part of France, and it is more than possible that Lisa’s father or grandfather knew her father, or would have known or known of him. We are talking about neighbouring villages in Haute Provence, so I could imagine the two of them?” He pauses and sighs, suddenly drained. “I just don’t want to go there.”
His pain in talking about his wife and the way his life twists “like rope” with that of Joe, is palpable. He scrambles around for words in a way that contrasts sharply with his image as the frontman of high culture on television and radio. Autobiographical fiction is not new, but his high profile made it inevitable that readers would pore over the novel digging for concealed truth. Was he not concerned about that level of exposure? “I really didn’t think about its reception.” He runs his hand through his hair. “I am a target and I am handing them the bows and arrows,” he admits with a shrug. But he could not hold back, he maintains, because the fact spun into the fiction held the story together. It is a reminder that before Bragg the Broadcaster was Bragg the Writer, which makes it doubly hard that he has been unable to write a scrap of fiction since completing Remember Me?
All this character-building perseverance, giving unwanted interviews and writing articles that fail to sate the appetite for intrusion. I wonder what does Melvyn Bragg have left to prove? Is all this activity an outcome of his “working-class lad made good” roots?
Bragg takes a swipe at his alter ego when Joe joins the Garrick – a club to which Bragg belongs. Is this a sign he feels like an imposter, straddling two conflicting worlds? “I think I still am [an outsider],” he acknowledges. “I know it is a curious thing to say, but I still feel it, I don’t feel inferior in the slightest to anybody – or superior to anybody, let’s get that clear. But I do feel different.”
Does he feel guilty about the Garrick? Not a bit, he says, he joined the club in very different circumstances to Joe. “I was being a bit wry and also wanting to be a bit hard on Joe. It is a bit like Candide. But I didn’t want him to escape censure.” He giggles and looks down at his hands.
The sun has disappeared into a blood-red gash across the sky. The office is dark, yet Bragg leaves the lights off. It seems the right moment to ask whether the book was cathartic. “No it wasn’t,” he shoots back. But it feels redemptive, I say: Joe is absolved of some of the guilt, as are their friends; Natasha’s death feels inevitable, no one could have saved her. He peers at me through the gloom. “Redemptive?” he asks. “Well, in the sense of?” He takes a long pause. The penumbrous light suits the sombre atmosphere. “Redemptive in the sense of a properly considered response and considered answer, but not in terms of absolution,” he finally answers, precise to the last.

The extract

Remember Me, By Melvyn Bragg (Sceptre £7.99)

“…He would attempt to fly free and alone. And Natasha, who meant to tell Joseph of her decision that night, but delayed it because she sensed it would take away from the innocent pleasure of the celebration, had finally decided to go into analysis, to re-examine herself, to sink as deeply into her past as she dare, to claim it back whatever the risk.”