Half life
Who wants books?
Carole Morin
he moaning mizmies who are fretting about the demise of the Net Book Agree- ment are worrying about the literary novel, rather than the thousands of cookery books and kiss-and-smell biographies that there's a demand for. The Arts Council employees are awake all night because as the price of popular fiction goes down, the price of the first novel is likely to go up. And who wants to buy a novel that isn't subsidised?
The Art's Council illiterates don't seem to have noticed that the average 300 copies a hardback first novel sells are bought by relatives and enemies of the writer, and other aspiring novelists. Raising the price from £15.99 to £20 is unlikely to deter this schadenfreudig faction.
It's easy to put the frighteners on an edu- cated audience who feel guilty because they don't like reading. The death of the literary novel would deprive them of something they were never going to buy anyway. This threat of a philistine culture is absurd in a country where the majority of publishers and literature lags are philistine already. The subsidy they are most worried about is their salaries. Only the Arts Council of England could put a portrait of Samuel Beckett (as Irish as the IRA and Guinness) in their hallway and not recognise the irony.
The anti-NBA argument is that buying cheap paperbacks about Princess Diana's personal life may lead later to a Dos- toyevslcy hardback habit — the way student cannabis use is supposed inevitably to progress to the purity of heroin. But all trash and class have in common is that they're bound and labelled as books. Cloth- ing coupons for the unemployed probably wouldn't affect sales in the Prada shop. Cheap titles in supermarkets may end up competing with magazines, rather than hardback fiction for the exotic elite.
In real life, there's no obligation to pick between high and popular culture. Reading Wuthering Heights with a torch under the duvet didn't stop me from running home from school to see Penelope Pitstop. Real readers know that any book worth reading is worth the price of a bottle of champagne, or joining the local library. Treating books as medicine to be swallowed for your own good, whether you'd rather be watching Pride and Prejudice on television or not, is sick. Stanley Kubrick said that reading should be random — what you're interest- ed in, rather than what you think you're • supposed to be.
Millions of readers aren't foaming at the mouth desperate to get their hands on the latest Booker short-listed novels, because their image of literary fiction is the swim- mer with chins, A.S. Byatt, and the middle- aged enfant terrible, Martin Amis. Both are predictable in their own way, playing the maiden aunt and laddish uncle of the bour- geoisie. Middlebrow fiction appeals to the intellectually insecure, who live in hope that finishing a long book will make them clever; unlike Wild John (a retired editor) who insists that any 90s' novel over of 200 pages is an insult to the reader.
After Dangerous Donald had cured my latest headache with acupressure, I put on my Blur CD and read my favourite novel, Two Serious Ladies. Maddie used to com- plain, 'all that reading will make you too brainy for your own good.' She dumped one of her many fiancés for giving her a book for Christmas after she'd built herself up for a sapphire or a ruby. 'It wasn't even a real book! It was,' she lowered her voice in disgust, 'a collection of poetry by some galoot I'd never heard of.'
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