Mark Mason

There are normally three problems with reviews of books which, like This is the Way by Gavin Corbett (Fourth Estate, £14.99), concern the Traveller community. The first is that while most people have only just got used to the fact that Traveller now has a capital ‘T’, the reviews must avoid those other words you’re not supposed to have in your head any more, though everyone does. Yes, even Guardian journalists and BBC editors; I once heard one of the latter breed say, after everyone had discussed a radio drama about Travellers using the ‘correct’ terminology: ‘Oh, you mean the pikey play?

Warning: this is a very January 17th sort of thought. It’s meant to be comforting, though you may well find it the exact opposite. Try it on for size, anyway, and see what you think. (You might want to keep hold of the receipt.) The thought concerns something in The Ghost by Robert Harris. The book is as gripping as any of his works, and as if that wasn’t praise enough it also gave us, via a truly woeful film version, the comedic delights of Ewan McGregor’s London accent. Next to that performance Dick van Dyke becomes Ray Winstone. At one point in the novel the unnamed ghostwriter penning the memoirs of ex-Prime Minister Tony Bl-… sorry, Adam Lang, muses on the act of starting a book: A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities.

It is, if Noddy Holder is to be believed, Christmas. And so those of us who pen trivia books listen for the ring of tills or, as is increasingly the case these days, for clicks on Amazon’s ‘Add to Basket’ icon. Will our offering be the one bulging the stockings this year? Will the royalties tide us through another few months? And even if they do, what is the long-term future for the trivia book in an age when so many factoids (TM Steve Wright in the Afternoon) are freely available on the internet? The subject is one I discussed recently in a Covent Garden pub with some elves. Some QI elves. Yes, these creatures really do exist. They’re not just names invented to pad out the credits on BBC2.

Loins are girded and members tumescent, for next Tuesday sees the presentation of this year’s Bad Sex Award. The Literary Review’s annual prize for the worst description of sex in a novel never fails to raise the spirits. (Yes, I know there’s a double entendre there, but at first I wrote ‘raise a titter’, so think yourself lucky.) Hoping not to follow in the footsteps of Melvyn Bragg, Norman Mailer and Rachel Johnson are, inter alia, Tom Wolfe and Craig Raine. Wolfe must be a strong contender, his Back to Blood containing the sentence: 'Now his big generative jockey was inside her pelvic saddle, riding, riding, riding, and she was eagerly swallowing it swallowing it swallowing it with the saddle’s own lips and maw.

Could you write a novel in a month? Plenty of people around the world are trying to do just that right at the moment. November, you see, is National Novel Writing Month. Organised by a Californian outfit called the Office of Letters and Light (I know – please stick with me), the event has been running since 1999, and now answers to the moniker NaNoWriMo, which sounds like a toddler doing R2D2. The rules are simple: starting on November 1st, you have until November 30th to write a novel of at least 50,000 words. You upload it to the event’s website, which checks your word count, and assuming you’ve passed the 50k mark you’re given a certificate and a web badge. Your novel is never readable on the site: it’s deleted as soon as the wordcount is performed.

The rainforests must be jumping for joy these days. Which is ironic, as they’ve largely got Amazon to thank for it. As the e-book continues its rise, there’ll be less and less demand from publishers for that horrible, immoral, eco-balance-wrecking stuff called ‘paper’. But before the trees get too complacent, they should remember that there’s one group of people who are still curiously insistent that our leafy friends make the ultimate sacrifice: writers. When it comes to one particular stage of the book-writing process, paper remains the only acceptable tool. It’s perfectly possible these days for a book to be conceived, written, edited, published and promoted without a single word of it ever existing on paper. Laptops and e-readers are all we need.

There is a famous piece of film — well, famous to those of us who know more about the Beatles than is possibly good for our health — where John Lennon encounters a fan who has broken into the star’s Berkshire estate. Clearly a lost soul, the fan is searching for meaning, signficance, some sort of connection with his idol. Lennon replies, very calmly and kindly: ‘I’m just a guy, man, who writes songs.’ Sadly, this book proves him right. The good stuff first. It looks beautiful: the cover is ‘Imagine’-white, the pages carefully designed to weave Hunter Davies’s commentary around both the letters themselves and their transcripts.

Literary pseudonyms have been on my mind lately, for a couple of reasons. The first is Salman Rushdie’s revelation that he chose ‘Joseph Anton’ as his cover name when in hiding during his fatwa, in tribute to Messrs Conrad and Chekhov. The second (and brace yourself, because this is going to hurt like pluggery) is that my own literary alter ego, Charlie Croker, has a new book out. Why do writers use pseudonyms, and how does it feel to see a book you’ve written get published with someone else’s name on the cover? Strictly speaking this isn’t what happened to Rushdie. Joseph Anton was his actual pseudonym rather than his literary one; his fictional books continued to appear under his real name, while his real life was lived under a fictional one.

‘Write your own name a hundred times,’ T.H. White once commented, ‘and you will be bored; seven hundred times and you will be exasperated; seven thousand times, and your brains will be reeling in your head. Then you realize that you have only written one-tenth of a new novel.’ No surprise that White should display such a familiarity with the mathematics of writing; all authors do. At least the professional ones do – they have to. When your living depends on not missing deadlines, one question looms all the time: how many words are there in a day? Actually, assuming that White meant a name comprising one forename and one surname, he was making things slightly tougher on himself than he had to.

Funny the ways you can learn about a book. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones alerted me to one recently, 43 years after his death. I was at Somerset House for the exhibition of photos marking the band’s half-century, and one shot saw them leaving Heathrow Airport in 1966, bound for America. Brian, in a blazer whose stripes were quite shockingly vibrant (ten years later it would have felt perfectly at home on Ronnie Barker as he read the news), was carrying a book. A small, slim volume, its title was hidden away in a tiny font, but the photo had been blown up so large you could just make out that title: The Good Loo Guide.

If Britain is serious about this Olympic legacy thing, we should get ‘talking about the weather’ added to the list of official sports. We’d clean up at Rio. Strange, mind you, that we don’t actually know very much about the subject which consumes so much of our conversation. How rainclouds form, why lightning happens, where Britain’s first windmill was — that sort of thing. One man determined to put this right is Charlie Connelly. Bring Me Sunshine (Little, Brown, £12.99) is his anecdotal, layman-friendly exploration of the elements and what they do to us.

How much attention do you pay to the physical descriptions of characters in novels? Interviewed on Five Live recently about her latest book NW, Zadie Smith said that she never really bothers with them, either as a reader or a writer. ‘Descriptions of how people look – how many of them have you read?’ she asked. ‘They go on and on. They never really add much, though. I usually pass over them.’ My initial reaction was: really? They never add much? I haven’t read NW yet, but my mind went back to The Autograph Man, Smith’s second novel. It only struck me halfway through that I didn’t know much, if anything, about the characters’ appearances, even whether they were black or white.