I get up early and head to Liverpool Street. Meet Isabelle Ralphs and Amy Batley from Hutchinson Heinemann publishers and we take the train to Colchester, then a taxi to the giant Penguin Random House (PRH) warehouse, where I am to sign 3,000 copies of my new novel, Farewell to Eden. (I have already signed 3,000 loose title pages or ‘tip-ins’ at home.)
Dave, the local PRH chief, brings in the wooden pallets full of books on a sort of fork-lift arrangement. Isabelle passes each one in from the left, I sign, and Amy, on the right, makes small piles which Dave shifts onwards and replaces with new piles taken from the pallets. Thus the stacked 10ft-long table in front of me remains ever full. I am the Sisyphus of rural Essex. To clear the table takes seven-and-a-half hours.
Why am I doing this? It feels a bit like the death throes of a wounded animal. In ten years’ time there will be no call for it. Probably in three. The appetite for books will be exhausted because no one under 30 has the neural networks to deal with reading one. Thank you, Meta.
But hang on. The Charlotte Aitken Trust (CAT), of which I’m chair, sponsors the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award (for authors under 35) and every year I’m amazed by the quality of the entrants, across fiction, poetry, memoir, biography and reportage. The list of previous winners is dazzling. So some younger people are still reading. How else can they have learned to write so well? At CAT, we’re nevertheless hedging our bets by also giving a large sum to the School Libraries Association to encourage reading in Year 8, the point at which many children abandon books for screens.
After the marathon signing, Isabelle and I take the Central Line west from Liverpool Street. A man in brief shorts sits opposite us with his legs spread. Ear buds in, he calls into a phone held at arm’s length. ‘Oh, Julian, Julian, Julian! That’s the last thing I wanted to hear from you!’ On it goes, a little louder as the stations tick by. You can tell from his vocabulary that he is educated, but he has no awareness of being in a public space. Isabelle (who is young and not grumpy) thinks this collapse in manners began with Covid. She may be right. I’m just glad that she’s got off the train before the man begins the thorough scratching of his genitals. Our eyes meet. He looks back at me reproachfully, as if I have been eavesdropping on his phone call and spying on his groin-itch for my own gratification.
My birdsong recognition app is struggling against the noise of the three-house building works next door. The app used to identify blackbirds, wrens and parakeets, but I have not consulted it since the deafening dig-down began a year ago. ‘Arctic piledriver.’ ‘Eurasian angle-grinder.’ ‘Lesser-spotted landlord (Nondomus spondulixlaunderens).’ And to think the three houses used to be a single concern: a home for retired gentlefolk. They were the perfect neighbours – inaudible but friendly when you bumped into them on the street. We’d invite them in each year to join us for Christmas dinner. Or we did until it turned out that one of the ‘old ladies’ was younger than I was.
A message from the distinguished biographer Hermione Lee. She asks if I sent her an email about her biography of Anita Brookner. Because when she replied, her mail bounced back saying her correspondent’s address was invalid. Mystifying. I didn’t email Hermione. Someone is impersonating me. So if you get an email from infosebastianfaulks@gmail.com, it’s not from me. To the person who presumably thinks it’s fun to ‘be’ me, I would say: ‘Yes, it is, on the whole.’ Mustn’t grumble. But have you factored in the self-destructive dog, the noisy neighbours (see above) and the constant back pain? It isn’t all fun and games, you know.
I wish Andy Burnham all the best. I’m eager to understand what made the Labour party think that there was not one of its 404 MPs up to being leader and that only this non-MP would do. I’m not sure yet what this quality or vision was, but I suppose it’s still early days. In any event, I think it’s interesting that he’s called ‘Andy’. History might have looked different if prime ministers had gone for shorter versions of their first names. Stan Baldwin could have starred in Coronation Street and Willy Pitt could have been a bare-knuckle prize fighter. A postwar list sounds like a heavy metal band. Tony Eden (lead guitar), Jack Major (bass), Harry Wilson (keyboards) and Terry May (drums). With screaming Lizzie T on vocals, they could have owned the Pyramid Stage at Glasto.
Sebastian Faulks’s Farewell to Eden is out on 17 September.
Comments