Books

In case you hadn’t noticed, the London Book Fair has been gracing our nation’s capital this week, down in Earl’s Court. There, the publishers, agents and buyers of the literary globe (London is second only to Frankfurt in ‘book fair importance’) have been feverishly buying and selling the rights to hot new titles, hot new authors, maybe the odd lucky midlister, while identifying the trends, writers and genres that conceal the ultra-precious kernel of hotness to come. In today’s market it’s likely that buyers have been looking for visually rich comic books for children – enjoying a resurgence – and anything in a newish genre called ‘romantasy’ (think Fifty Shades of Grey meets Game of Thrones, with more vampires and less spanking).

What began in 1998 with Tony Blair standing in the Globe Theatre to announce a new celebration of books has morphed into something much bigger. Along with Black History Month or World History Day, tomorrow’s World Book Day is now a full member of the woke calendar. This calendar has grown – largely thanks to the UN, which spends millions inventing such initiatives – into a global non-profit industry. In March alone, we have Zero Discrimination Day, World Wildlife Day, and World Day for Glaciers. As an author of several books, I’m all for celebrating reading, poetry and especially book buying.

I had been kicking my heels in a dusty two-star hotel on a dual carriageway in Leon, central Mexico, for days. One afternoon, I spotted a battered old English language hardback in a junk shop window: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.  I had read the book before, half a lifetime ago, in maybe 1985, when I knew nothing about Mexico, failed relationships or alcoholism. Almost 40 years later, with a more than working knowledge of all three, I felt better placed to appreciate Lowry's 1947 masterpiece. With nothing else to do or read, I bought it. I haggled the shopkeeper down to 100 pesos – about £4. Barely 24 intense hours later – the same time span that the novel unfolds in – I had finished it. Or had it finished me?

I have just finished writing a book and am moping about the house at a loose end. The conventional advice to anyone thinking about writing a book is: don’t. Unless you’re one of the 1 per cent of authors who make 99 per cent of the money, it’s a mug’s game as far as making a living is concerned. Your cleaning lady earns more per hour. So my advice is only write a book if you have an alternative source of income. One of the hardest things about writing a book is stopping. The temptation to tinker persists until the publisher screams at you to stop and mutters that publishing would be a good business if it weren’t for the authors. Still, the end is in sight, and now I need something to do.

Antique shops are melancholy places. The deep leather armchairs, Anglepoise lamps and bamboo bookshelves. They ask questions: who sat, worked or read using these? Banal questions, possibly, but life is generally banal, and no less poignant for that. It’s not an unpleasant sort of melancholia. Quite the opposite. If I had to create a word to describe the feeling, I’d say it was melanphoria: ‘a state of intense excitement arising from a feeling of deep sadness’. One feels both a nostalgia for the lives of strangers and a sense of life’s possibilities. If this is abnormal, I would ask any amateur psychiatrists to write to The Spectator offices. I am physically unable to go into any antique shop without buying something. It is rarely a grand purchase.