Books

Some of the most tantalizing pieces of George Orwell’s journalism are the reviews written on the hoof, filed against deadlines, sent straight to the typewriter while World War Two raged above his head. One of them is a round-up of four reprinted dystopian novels supplied to the weekly magazine Time and Tide in July 1940, shortly after the fall of France. (Today, it’s rarely reissued and barely available outside the stout bindings of volume XII of Orwell: The Complete Works.) The four books are Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1910), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Ernest Bramah’s The Secret of the League (1907).

Pamela Anderson cites Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the template for her memoir, Love, Pamela. The pop literary critic’s analysis of mythical heroes famously inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars. As Lucas deconstructs the heroes of western literature, Anderson dismantles the banal Madonna/whore template that has dominated tabloid coverage of her life. Unfortunately, Anderson supplants one boring motif with an even more tedious one: the archetype of the celebutante victim.

James Bond may have battled the nefarious forces of SMERSH, SPECTRE and other international terror organizations, but surely he has never faced quite so implacable a foe as the sensitivity reader. Following in the footsteps of Roald Dahl, the wholesale revision of whose books led to international outrage, Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, which have been re-released to mark the seventieth anniversary of the first publication of Casino Royale, have undergone their own exercise in alteration. But is it an egregious travesty à la Dahl, or — whisper it — might someone have had an idea arising from nobler motives?

I was dozing, a little hungover, on the morning flight from Prague to London, when I saw them for the first time. Ten men on a beach, dragging a landing craft up the sands. Where? Can’t tell yet. When? The fourteenth century. Who? Don’t know, but they look like trouble. I woke up. Through my AirPods I heard the Blur singer Damon Albarn growling the final song from their 1997 album Blur. “In these towns, the English army grinds their teeth into glass / You know you’ll get a kicking tonight...” I opened my laptop and started making notes. The men came surprisingly well-formed. They were soldiers of fortune in the Hundred Years’ War. They already had names. Faces. Talents. Foibles. Yearnings. Secrets. I wrote down as much as they could tell me before the plane landed.

It is a trope of dystopian literature that once-beloved works are censored beyond recognition by blank-faced apparatchiks, removing apparently subversive or dangerous content at the behest of the state. As ever in our brave new world, reality has come to imitate fantasy, with Roald Dahl the latest author to face that most implacable of nemeses: changing social attitudes. It has been revealed by the Daily Telegraph that Dahl’s books — published in the United States by Penguin Young Readers Group, and Puffin in the United Kingdom — have been quietly but systematically edited to make them more "acceptable" for a 2023 readership. These changes, of which there are hundreds across Dahl’s canon, fundamentally alter some of the most beloved children’s titles ever written.

When J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972 at seventy-seven, he had been director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-eight years, ever since progressive attorney general Harlan Fiske Stone had promoted the then-obscure twenty-nine-year-old Justice Department bureaucrat in 1924. With fewer than 400 agents, limited responsibilities, and a reputation badly tarnished under a corrupt previous attorney general, what was then called the Bureau of Investigation offered modest prospects. Still, the new boss set out to clean house, institute stringent hiring standards and impose a culture of science-based crime-fighting on his federal agents. One new hire in 1928 was Clyde A.

Stephen Rubin may not be a household name, but one gets the impression that doesn’t bother him much. Since he began his career in the '80s, he has built his reputation on publishing zeitgeist-baiting fiction and non-fiction alike, ranging from the undeniably good (John Grisham’s The Firm) to the undeniably bad but hugely lucrative (The Da Vinci Code), along with George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points. You may not like all, or even most, of the thousands of books that Rubin has been involved with, but you cannot deny his commercial acumen. He knows what people want to buy, and has been as responsible as anyone in the United States for bringing it to them.

A lot of new books grow old fast. It isn’t even the fault of their material, necessarily, but their milieu. Hour by hour, the means of cultural production are accelerating at an evaporative rate. Today more than ever before, irrelevancy looms large over the shoulder of the novelist. It’s an environment within which thirty days of relevance is a feat, but thirty years? A fiction in and of itself. Yet, throughout three decades of cultural churn, the words of Irvine Welsh have remained steadfast; as culturally relevant and artistically avant-garde as the day they first hit the shelves.

“I don’t know how many times in nearly forty years I have come back to this novel,” Graham Greene said of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, published shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. The fiction of both English authors — both converts to Catholicism — share a deep cynicism towards modernity and a depiction of the English establishment as decadent and in decline. The Good Soldier, whose original title The Saddest Story was canned by the publisher because it would render the book “unsaleable” during World War I, tells the tale of two married couples, one British (British Army Captain Edward Ashburnham and his wife Leonora) and the other American (John and Florence Dowell). Both pairs are, on the face of it, young, prosperous, and happy.

The Shards is about 600 pages long. “Should anyone even publish a 600-page novel?” asks its author Bret Easton Ellis. “I happen to believe, yes, if it’s justified.” Such books are rarely justifiable, and often, novelists become buzzed-about simply for executing them, but not many can boast that every word, scene and sentence is necessary. This is how it feels to read The Shards: not a detail is to be missed. It contains the thematic elements that run through Ellis’ oeuvre: the social lives of the wealthy, or nearly wealthy, drugs, sexuality and desperation painted over with bursts of violence. The through line that connects his work isn’t that sex and violence are taboo.