The heavyweight champions of the book world

Press, 2 March 1982, Page 19

The heavyweight champions of the book world

Which of the three books, pictured right, are the best sellers — the paperback with its lurid cover or the two serious novels behind it? The answer is unexpected and the figures staggering: world sales of serious novels have outstripped others. HUNTER DAVIES, of the “Sunday Tinies,” London, reports on a revolution in reading habits that has caught British publishers by surprise.

Two years ago the average book publisher in Britain was a deeply pessimistic figure. His sales were slipping, his costs soaring, and his catalogues being cut back. The best-seller lists were dominated by a dispiriting combination of Royal family books, “TV tie-in” books, guide books, or “list” books — the kind that seem to be aimed deliberately at the non-reading public. In the fiction market, pulp carried everything before it. One way and another, it looked as if the British had gone off the whole idea of buying serious books. Since then something strange has happened. Four novels, all winners or finalists in the 1981 Booker Prize (an annual competition open to a Commonwealth. Irish, or Pakistani writer) have sold in such staggering quantities ■that they have begun to change the whole attitude of British publishers to their trade. The serious novel is back. The books which have created such a stir are William Golding's “Rites of Passage”; Anthony Burgess's “Earthly Powers”; Salman Rushdie's “Midnight’s Children”; and D. M. Thomas’s "The White Hotel”. All are what might be termed in the trade "heavyweight” works; none is an easy read; they are intellectually demanding; a lot of innocent buyers will have found them thoroughly daunting. Yet they have sold and sold. A few figures demonstrate the scale of the thing: by the end of this month there will be half a million copies of these four books, in hardback and paperback, either sold or on sale in Biitain. In the United States this.figure will be nearer two million. Between them the. four have sold foreign rights in 40 different countries. On book sales around the world, the total turnover should in the end be worth around $2O million.

It is hard to think of any occasion since the Second World War when four such serious novels have made so great an impact. Most publishers consider sales of 5000 for a literary novel of this kind as more than respectable. Ten thousand and the champagne is broken out. But a British hardback sale of 32.000 for a previously unknown writer (Salman Rushdie) or 60,000 for a highbrow novelist (William Golding) has broken entirely new ground.

“It takes a great leap of the imagination to wonder what will happen next,” says Liz Calder,, editorial director of Jonathan Cape, which pub-

lished the Rushdie novel. “If you had asked me in the beginning what I expected, I would have said I’d be very happy to sell 2500.” The reverberations are detectable throughout, the industry. Although the bestseller lists still carry a weighty share of packaged books and romantic fiction, there are signs that publishers and booksellers are prepared to put their best resources behind books of quality.

• The Book Promotion Council is launching a sales drive called the Best of British Authors, promoting 20 of its top writers. It hopes that a million extra copies will be sold in the next few weeks.

• William Collins, which caused widespread alarm in the business in 1979 when it recorded a loss of $600,000, estimates that profits for the current year will be $lO million on a turnover of $l6O million. “Our prime producer is still the author and I now think we have in Britain more creative writers. than we had 10 years ago,” says Collins’s chairman, lan Chapman.

• W. H. Smith, Britain’s biggest bookstore chain, has discovered, to its surprise, that books, not magazines and newspapers, are its most profitable line. It intends to spend $1.4 million this year in promoting books, giving them extra space and providing new facilities for readers. From this week, for instance, the public will be able to order any book from each of its 350 shops. • Poetry is booming. Matthew Evans, chairman of Faber, the leading publishers of poetry, says: "It's phenomenal. We're selling more poetry now than at any time in the last 15 years. The latest Ted Hughes has sold 35.000: Seamus Heaney has sold 25.000 copies so far. The last two years have been a terrific period.” • Literary newspapers, against all expectations, continue to flourish. The three new publications ’ which appeared during the closure of the Times Literary Supplement in 1979 are still alive and have a loyal following. Yet another — “Fiction Magazine,” devoted to the work of young writers — is due in April. Not all of these, of course, can be ascribed directly to the success of the famous four, but what is undeniable is that British publishing has turned a quite unexpected corner. What is less easy- to explain is why. Salman Rushdie is a young Indian, living in Kentish Town, north London, who worked as a freelance adver-

tising copywriter during the writing of his novel. "Midnight’s Children." His previous, and first, novel had not been a success. It sold about 1000 copies and in all made him $4200. Some reviews were hostile and upset him deeply. “The one that really hurt said that I was painfully unable to construct a decent sentence,” he recalls. “Others suggested I should think of another way of earning a living.” His first worry on finishing his new novel was whether anyone would publish it. He sent it to Liz Calder at Cape, who liked it; but a Cape manuscript reader damned it. The book then went to Cape’s chairman, Tom Maschler, who agreed it was worth publishing. It appeared first in America because a dock strike held up the British publication by three weeks.

“I got a call one day from a Pakistani friend in Washington, a journalist, who read out to me on the . phone a rave review in the Washington ‘Post.’ That was the first sign that something might happen,” Rushdie says. Despite the . reviews, it failed to sell well in America. Rushdie had been warned that it was a risky book, that the Americans did not warm to novels set in India, and he was therefore not unduly surprised. In Britain, Cape too thought it a risky book , to. publish. At 448 pages it was considered too long for the average English fiction work and the first print was restricted to 2500.

Again the reviews were favourable, but ’ it was not until it reached the shortlist of the Booker Prize last September that it began to get real attention. Then, in October.. it won the prize itself and shortly afterwards appeared on the fiction bestseller list where it has remained ever since. Rushdie himself is diffident about the book’s success. “I was just so pleased that it got a decent publisher; ‘that was the first hurdle,” he says. “I worried about its length. From an unknown author that could be very off-putting. I hoped that people would hear about its comic side and realise that it wasn't going to be 500 pages of ponderous glue.” Rushdie believes that the success of all four books may have something to do with the scale of the themes they tackle. “I think all four are ambitious books,” he says. "British fiction has gone through a stage these last 20 years of being small and local. We've produced a lot

of little slithery novels. Perhaps we’ve been going through a cultural realignment, a loss of confidence; writers have gone into, their shells. I certainly think that London as a city has lost confidence in recent years. "But we’ve gone out and attacked big subjects and perhaps the spirit of the time is now readv and people want big subjects. I can't tell you why we did so. Writers write what they want to write. It can’t be’ staged.” D. M. Thomas, whose novel “The White Hotel” is still at number four on the "Sunday Times” best-seller list, echoes this belief. He is the author of two previous novels, neither of which had been a commercial success. Thomas lives in Hereford, England, and during the writing of "The White Hotel” he became unemployed when the technical college where he taught was closed. He had set out to write a poem and had no idea it would turn into a novel. The poem was about Freud and, as he was writing it, the image struck him of a young man and a young woman travelling on different trains.

“I had no commercial thoughts about it when it was finished,” he says, "I was just so pleased that Gollancz liked it. “It was the American paperback rights that started it all. I had no idea that Viking (the United States publishers) were organising an auction. I was rung up and told that the floor bids had to start at $20,000 which I thought very good. Then at midnight they rang me in a champagne haze to say it had gone to Pocket Books for $199,500. The only drink I had in the house was cooking rum. So I got tight on that.” "The White Hotel” had a mixed critical reception in Britain, with many reviewers actively disliking it, and it sold very poorly until it appeared on the Booker shortlist. Until then, Thomas had decided that it must be an un-English novel, more in the American and European tradition. It is the most difficult to read of the four novels, the most experimental, and the most literary, but it is also by far the most shattering, with a recurring theme of sado-masochism. finishing

with the mass slaughter of Jews. “It does have a major theme,” Thomas says, “which, I suppose, makes a change from many modern novels. Perhaps it's well written. That’s for other people to say. I can’t really explain its success. The Americans are trying very hard at this moment to work it out. "I suspect that there is a thirst for good literature which nobody has been aware of till now. In this country there’ is an acceptance of middle-brow tastes. The retailing system is in the hands of a few big firms and they have gone along with this. The national press hasn’t helped by separating ‘literary and elite’ novels which, it is then assumed, will never sell. The system all round has prevented good books from selling. “With these four novels we have suddenly broken out of the mould. People want to try large themes and large books.” It is, of course, true that all four books have been helped by their success in the

Booker competition. In each case author and publisher assumed that the resulting publicity doubled the possible sales. But that is only part of the answer. Indeed it could be argued that it was the books which made the Booker Prize. The Booker was in danger of drifting into obscurity until two years ago. The 1979 choice, for example — a slim novel set on a Chelsea house-boat — sold only 7000 copies. Through being identified in the last two years with four bid books, in either intent or scale, they have perhaps caught the mood of the times. There is unlikely to be a flood of imitations. Each novel is too unusual, too different, to be copied. When a historical romance gets to the top then you know that dozens will follow — until the next fashion comes along. But the success of these four-will give all good books, and good publishing, the sort of boost that has been so desperately needed.