Books

‘To be or not to be’ may be the question but when it comes to eliciting answers, I’ve always preferred Mr Darcy’s epic conversation starter: ‘What think you of books?’ Two hundred years on, it has become harder than ever to find out what anyone actually thinks of books – and not just because our attention spans have been so corroded by dopamine addiction. There are more books published today than ever. TikTok creates relentless literary sensations, and the day after the murder of Charlie Kirk, AI-produced histories were available on Amazon giving ‘the full story’.  If social media is to be believed, everyone is reading so much it’s impossible to keep up. But what matters most is not what you think about books but how your books look.

It’s that time of year when the local librairie-papeterie in your French holiday village is full of signs for la rentrée and English newspapers carry ads for gel pens and shoes with Velcro fastenings. I used to love this season as a schoolboy – discovering if I’d made the under-13 football training squad. For the past 40 years, though, September has been for me a different season: the time of the publishers’ launch party. These used to be lavish affairs, held in a hotel or gallery with themed drinks and food, the whole thing fizzing with romantic possibilities. In 2001 we had a memorable do for my American novel On Green Dolphin Street with a jazz quartet, cheeseburgers and bottomless dry Martinis. (What happened afterwards in Vauxhall Bridge Road has stayed in VBR.

A recent photograph on a BBC website startled me. It was of hundreds of books thrown out of a former library in Croydon on to the ground.  It startled me because I had taken an almost identical photograph 34 years before – in Liberia. The books in the University of Liberia had been pulled from their shelves and scattered in similar fashion to those in Croydon. Of course, the books in Liberia were at a higher intellectual level. The capital city of Monrovia was in those days cut off from the rest of the country by the forces of Charles Taylor, and the only way to arrive was by the Steel Trader, a ship owned by a redoubtable old Africa hand, Captain Monty Jones, responsible, at his risk and profit, for revictualling the besieged city.

I am entombed, like Edgar Allan Poe’s prematurely buried man, listening through headphones to a contemporary Russian fugue for organ and bagpipes. I had asked for a soothing Schubert prelude, but the radiologist couldn’t lay hands on one. The headphones have no volume control I can locate – only on and off, and off will expose me to the diabolic clang of magnetic resonance. Hell will be an eternity inside an MRI machine, praying for deafness. There is a little sponge ball I can press if I can take it no longer. I give it 17 minutes, then press. Shame overwhelms me. I overhear the radiologists whisper: ‘So it works then.’ Which means that in the time they’ve had this machine I am the first person to beg to be released.

When the willowy human Feyre meets the faerie Tamlin in A Court of Thorns and Roses (known as ACOTAR by fans), he is a ‘snarling gigantic beast with golden fur’. Drama ensues when Tamlin, with his ‘elf-like horns’ and ‘yellow fangs’, kidnaps Feyre. He keeps her in captivity, then claims her: turning up in her room at night and clamping his teeth down on to her neck against her will. Two hundred pages later, the pair finally have sex and Feyre marvels that while ‘his claws were out’ they are ‘devastatingly gentle on my hips as he slid down between my thighs and feasted on me’. She moans his name and he ‘sheathed himself inside me in a powerful, slow thrust that had me splintering around him’.

About 15 years ago, I tried to interest my literary agent in a state-of-the-nation novel set in 21st-century London. My model was Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s masterpiece about New York in the 1980s. I’d read Wolfe’s essay in Harper’s magazine called ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’ in which he urges ambitious young authors to dispense with namby-pamby, post-modernist experimental nonsense and follow in the footsteps of Balzac, Zola and Dickens – write realistic novels documenting every aspect of contemporary society in granular detail. I wrote a 10,000-word proposal summarising the story, which began with a black teenage drug dealer coming to the rescue of a posh teenage girl in Shepherd’s Bush by fighting off a group of roadmen trying to steal her puppy.

NHS origins Sir: Your leading article ‘Wes or bust’ (5 July) credited Labour with founding the NHS. In fact, the NHS was founded during the second world war by the Labour, Liberal and Conservative coalition. The speech with the famous line ‘free at the point of use’ was in fact made by Winston Churchill. He made it because he was PM and it was his job. For Labour to claim to be the initiator is somewhat disingenuous. Edward Hirst Aston, Sheffield All aboard Sir: Michael Gove is quite right (‘Tracks of my tears’, 5 July): the retirement of the royal train is sad news for those of us who like trains and their history. Rather than the royal family viewing it as a liability, might it not still be a useful national asset?

The usual piece about public libraries runs like this. Public libraries are for ‘more than just books’. They are in a desperate plight after years of cuts, or better still ‘Tory cuts’. Librarians, who are heroes, struggle to go on serving their local communities. Libraries are hanging on by a thread, and because of those government cuts can’t be as useful as they once were. The only solution, of course, is more money from central government to local authorities, who, of course, will dash to spend the extra millions on reinstating public libraries and not add it to other things they want to splurge on.

Some sorts of books and dramas have very strict rules. We like a lot of things to be absolutely predictable. In romantic comedies, a girl chooses between a charmer who turns out to be a rotter and another man she hates at first but then falls for. In the BBC’s long-running Casualty, if a worried patient turns up with his put-upon wife who coughs twice, it’s the wife who’s got an undiagnosed fatal disease. Bertie Wooster falls for a girl that Jeeves doesn’t care for and the valet goes to some lengths to detach his employer. We like these things because they’re safe and a little bit cosy and we all know what the rules are. One of the most rigid genres at the moment is slightly different.