David Blackburn

‘Atlas shrugged. And so did I.’ I’ve always wanted to write that, but the incomparable P.J. O’Rourke has got there first in this summary-cum-review of the new film of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus. By all accounts the book has been reverentially adapted to the screen, and O’Rourke warns that the ‘uninitiated will feel they’ve wandered without a guide into the midst of the elaborate and interminable rituals of some obscure exotic tribe.’ Rand’s exhaustive and exhausting book has long divided critics, a trait that seems not to have been inherited by Paul Johannson’s movie. With the predictable exception of the Atlas Society, critics are panning this film.

At 5pm today, the doors will close on this year's London Book Fair. What have we learned from the publishing industry’s major annual conference? First, most publishers and agents agree that the e-book will soon outstrip the paperback. This, insiders claim, is an opportunity. Speaking at an event on Tuesday, Corrine Turner of Ian Fleming Publications argued that the e-book was more flexible than the strict format of the paperback, which means that publishers can reach a more diverse range of customers. Production costs are also significantly less, so an ever greater number of books can be published to exploit niche markets across the globe.

Jonathan Coe is surprised by his eminence. ‘I’m just a comic Agatha Christie,’ he says. Coe was at the Guardian last night in King’s Cross – the newspaper’s book club has been reading What A Carve Up, Coe’s satire of the Thatcher years. Coe understands the book’s continued popularity and relevance. ‘The political mood has not changed in that time, arguably it’s got worse.’ He welcomes the book’s success; but regrets that society has not rejected the apostles of greed and laments that even the Labour party now dallies with the filthy rich. Coe conceived of writing a political-satire-cum-social-panorama in the mid-eighties, but took several years to complete the project.

Tessa Hadley’s The London Train is the dark horse in the race for the Orange prize for women fiction writers. And it is this month’s Spectator book of the month. The novel has an understated, almost kitchen sink quality to it. Austen Saunders reviewed the book for this blog, and wrote: ‘The London Train is really two associated novellas connected by the themes of love, infidelity, and Bristol Parkway…Hadley’s loosely connected stories attempt a low-key exploration of how even people who have shared a home for years can be very much alone. No myths, just microwave dinners.