Full details of the program are available on the NSW Writers’ Centre website, or you can download the program. I’m on at 3:15pm, along with the impossibly charming Tom Gilling, my old pal Ashley Hay and Catherine Jinks. Given all three of them know more than a bit about the questions thrown up by the Festival’s title it should be an interesting event.

Hopefully I’ll see you there.

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The first is my review of Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, which was published in The Australian a few weeks back. I may have some more things to say about Rachman’s book in the not-too-distant future, but for now the review will have to do.

The second is also from The Australian, and is of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s follow-up to the truly unsettling Let The Right One In, Handling the Undead, a book which despite its subject matter (zombies in Sweden) and Lindqvist’s bizarrely unmodulated prose, is both oddly beautiful and more than a little upsetting.

(If you feel like hunting out the print versions I’ve also had pieces on Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow, Richard Powers’ entirely wonderful “enhancement” Generosity (one of the most exciting books I’ve read in ages), and Jim Crace’s All That Follows).

I’d also like to suggest three (or four, to be precise) things from elsewhere which are very definitely worth reading (assuming you haven’t already). The first is Anthony Lane’s breezy and entirely entertaining tour of the history of 3D (in the context of which I’d refer you to my post on Avatar a few weeks back). If you’re not completely over Avatar by now Daniel Mendelsohn’s piece on the film is also worth a look (though I have to confess I think anything by Mendelsohn is worth reading).

Also worth a look is Jason Epstein’s piece in The New York Review of Books on the future of publishing: I suspect I feel less wedded to the past than he does but it’s a pretty good summary of the situation at present.

And last (but very definitely not least) Jonah Lehrer’s fascinating piece from The New York Times Magazine about the controversial but tantalising studies suggesting depression may confer evolutionary advantage, a piece which is distinguished not just by being the only place I’ve ever seen the word “heterogeneity” used in a newspaper article, but by meshing suggestively with the desire of a wide range of writers (including myself) to try and understand depression in terms beyond the simplistically pathological.

Enjoy – I’ll be back online later this week.

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A page of the manuscript of George Orwell's 1984 with corrections

Just a quick reminder that the March issue of the Australian Literary Review is available for free in today’s Australian. I’ve only had time to scan the issue but it looks good, with pieces by Luke Davies on the novel in the Age of Terror (a term which must surely be as close to its use-by date as it sounds) and Hazel Rowley on French intellectuals under Nazi Occupation (neither of which, annoyingly, are on line).

Further in though you’ll find a piece by James Ley which uses the new, deLished edition of Carver’s Beginners to ground a broader discussion of the role of the editor, and which features some fabulously unguarded comments by yours truly (“anyone who tells you books are as carefully or rigorously edited as they were a generation ago is either lying or deluding themselves”).

I’ll let you read the piece in full, because there are a number of smart people saying smart things in it, but looking at it this morning I was struck by the fact that my own comments don’t go far enough. As you’ll see if you read the piece, I suggest it’s worth remembering that editing is only one part of a larger equation for publishers, and that as a result the question of how much or how little a book gets is really a commercial decision. As a publisher acquaintance (who shall remain nameless) once pointed out to me, editing is often a process of diminishing returns: there comes a point with every book when spending 20% more won’t make the book 20% better.

As I say in the piece, I think this is a useful way of thinking about the question, both because it reframes the question in commercial terms rather than as an unwinnable argument about artistic standards and because it reminds us that questions about editorial standards are intimately connected to the changing landscape of contemporary publishing (kudos to Jane Palfreyman for pushing back against the tedious narrative of decline that usually comes riding shotgun with discussions of editorial practice).

I think what’s really interesting though is what our anxiety about editorial standards tells us about our attitudes to writing, and more particularly how difficult we find it break free of Romantic notions of the artist as solitary genius when we’re talking about authors and authorship. Because in the end that’s what this whole conversation is really about: our unease with accepting that literary fiction and non-fiction are not, in many ways, all that different to more collaborative forms such as television or film.

I’m not saying they’re exactly the same. Books are always going to be more defiantly expressions of individual vision than film or television, but they’re not fundamentally different, more different points on a spectrum. But while we have no problem with the idea that script editors and directors work in a relatively utilitarian manner with scriptwriters we’re made very uneasy by overly intrusive editing of books. But in the end, what’s the difference between David Chase rewriting an episode of The Sopranos from the ground up and Gordon Lish rewriting Carver?

I suppose one answer might be that those of us who write books do so at least partly because it allows us more control over our work. I know one of the reasons I gave up writing film was that I wasn’t temperamentally suited to the collaborative process (though if I’m being honest I’d have to say the fact I was crap at it also played a part). But again I think it’s really a question of how much collaboration we’re comfortable with, not whether we’re comfortable with collaboration at all: even the most arrogant and single-minded author can’t help but take on board at least some of what an editor says.

But I suspect that at a fundamental level this anxiety about editing and editing standards is as much about a refusal to give away very old and cherished ideas about the primacy of the artistic imagination as anything. That and a failure to understand that publishing, like television or film, is essentially an industry, and that the process of transforming a manuscript into a book is as much an industrial process as the process of transforming a script into half an hour of television.

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Of course Byatt’s written about fairy tales before, as well as rewriting a few, and exploring the social context and cost of such tales and their celebration in her remarkable 2009 novel, The Children’s Book. But her introduction to the Tatar is particularly interesting, not least because of its invocation of the work of Max Lüthi:

“The best single description I know of the world of the fairy tale is that of Max Lüthi who describes it as an abstract world, full of discrete, interchangeable people, objects, and incidents, all of which are isolated and nonetheless interconnected, in a kind of web of two-dimensional meaning. Everything in the tales appears to happen entirely by chance – and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated.”

I assume the book Byatt’s referring to is Lüthi’s The European Folktale: Form and Nature, which explores this precise quality, and which is itself a pretty remarkable document. But whether it is or not, she’s right: along with the sense that they are accessing something dreamlike and below the level of language, much of the unsettling (and beguiling) power of fairy tales arises from their weird inversion of the normal processes of fate and coincidence. Indeed I’d go so far as to suggest that this inversion is effective at least in part because it reminds us of how the world must appear to children, for whom everything is full of mystery and hidden meaning, and for whom adults must seem both purposeful and frighteningly capricious.

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These days they prefer vans.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, this piece (and the second instalment) from The Guardian about the rules of writing fiction is definitely worth a read. Highlights include Geoff Dyer (“Don’t be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov”), Anne Enright (“Only bad writers think that their work is really good”) and Jonathan Franzen (“Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting”).

Which reminds me of rule number one of writing blogs, which is – as with novels –actually write them. To which end I’ll definitely get something up later today. Or tomorrow. Or soon, anyway.

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The other day, over at Spike, the delightful Jessica Au posted some thoughts about genre, and the rather vexed question of its changing relationship to the literary.

Jess’ thoughts were sparked by China Mieville’s The City and the City, but they echoed a series of questions I’ve been pondering for a while now. Certainly a cursory glance across the bookshelves of your average reader is likely to reveal a rather more catholic collection of books than one might have found there a generation ago. Where once the white spines of Picadors jostled with writers such as Peter Carey and Raymond Carver, now one is apt to find Harry Potter jammed next to Cormac Mccarthy and Stiegg Larsson.

The usual reaction is to say one of two things. On the one hand, people will argue that the literary as a category is changing, growing more diverse and inclusive. And to an extent that’s true: Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin are in the Library of America these days, and literary readers seem perfectly willing to embrace work that is essentially SF from writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood. But while I think the category may be more inclusive than it was a decade or two ago, I suspect it’s always admitted work which drew on the fantastical and SF (Angela Carter, anyone? Riddley Walker?). And I think it’s important not to overstate the extent to which the category has actually changed: conventional literary fiction is, 99% of the time at least, still conventional literary fiction (and, as a quick flick through the prize lists of the last year or two will demonstrate, in surprisingly and even counter-intuitively good health).

The other response usually comes from those outside the literary world, and takes one of two tacks. One is to argue, as writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Adam Roberts (author of the rather excellent Yellow Blue Tibia) do in articles published in New Scientist and The Guardian last year, that the literary novel has already been so efficiently colonized by science fictional conceits it’s already dead, and it’s only the insularity and elitism of the literary world that stops us acknowledging that fact. The other is essentially the line that Jess runs on Spike, that what we’re seeing is a larger breakdown of the categories that once structured and organised our reading, and that the whole idea of SF, or Crime, or even the literary is now essentially meaningless, and what matters is story.

I have some sympathy with both points of view, not least because I think both are, to some extent, correct. But I also think that by continuing to understand this in terms of the comparative merits and businesses of genre they put the cart before the horse. The shift in reading habits and tastes in recent years isn’t about reality and SF becoming indistinguishable, or the old canard of readerly impatience with unreadable literary novels, it’s part of a much larger shift in the power structures that underpin our culture, a shift that’s as visible in the increasingly belligerent populism you see on display amongst younger Australians (the “Aussie Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi” and tattoos of the flag crowd) and the manner in which the outside-the-Beltway world of new media keeps pushing back against old media’s highly controlled, scripted and insider-friendly coverage of politics as it is in shifting reading habits.

That may sound like a long bow to draw, but I’m not sure it is. One of the signal features of political and social discourse in recent years has been the accelerating pushback against traditional loci of cultural authority. The increasing sophistication and power of the new media, and in particular the rise of political blogs and websites such as Crikey!, Mumble and Possum’s Pollytics in Australia and Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo in the US, are probably the most visible aspect of this process (if you’re interested in exploring this question a bit further you could do a lot worse than read Michael Massing’s recent piece in The New York Review of Books, ‘A New Horizon for the News?’). But I think it’s also visible in the rise of right wing populism: Fox News and Sarah Palin are signal example, but here in Australia it’s also pretty clear that a lot of the fairly belligerent populism is about an anti-politics pushback by working class and lower middle class people once excluded from the political process (here in Australia I think that process is being amplified by the boom of the last few years, and the now not-inconsiderable wealth of many such people: once you’ve got a big house and kids in private school you’re probably a little less likely to put up with being told what to think by the educated middle classes).

While it might be a sideshow, reading tastes are being transformed by the same process. While it’s fashionable these days to deride the “literary” as simply a marketing term, it’s in fact much more than that. “Literature”, like high culture in general, is one of the more significant repositories of cultural power. What you read matters (or did until very recently), not least because it’s a powerful signifier of membership of the educated middle classes. It’s certainly not accidental that the boundaries of what’s acceptable was (again until very recently) pretty ruthlessly policed by academics and critics writing for major broadsheets and magazines such as The New Yorker, The Monthly and The New Statesman, since those publications are read by the educated middle classes. I don’t want to sound too much like some Refectory Trot, but basically the middle classes are a club, and you get in by going to the right schools and universities, and by reading and watching the right things.

But in recent years these loci of cultural authority in the literary world have been experiencing exactly the same pushback as the newspapers and the accepted boundaries of political discourse. Critics no longer make or break books, TV shows such as Oprah and Richard and Judy do, reading groups and word-of-mouth are on the rise, as are any number of online services allowing readers to share and disseminate their own views on what’s good and what’s not. Indeed what’s really interesting is the way the last decade has seen not just the rise of the Harry Potter/Da Vinci Code-style literary blockbuster, a phenomenon which seems to have almost nothing to do with the way books once found success, but also any number of reader-driven, word-of-mouth successes such as Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Part of it’s certainly about the increasing preparedness of publishers to explore non-traditional avenues of distribution, such as supermarkets and petrol stations, and the increasing sophistication of marketing, but most of it’s about the rise of the reader.

At this point in the argument a lot of people are likely to start banging on about the rise of the reader being a reassertion of the power of story over the dreary worthiness critics and academics once foisted upon us, but – not to put too fine a point on it – that whole line of argument is anti-intellectual crap. Reading pleasure and sophistication aren’t mutually exclusive. Sure there are lots of boring literary novels, but there are just as many boring SF novels, or boring Crime or Fantasy books.

But I think it is worth recognising there’s another factor at play here, which is education. “Literature”, and the literary may be socially contingent cultural constructs, but they’re not arbitrary, at least within the context of our culture. What’s good and what’s bad is defined by relation to the canon, and by standards of judgement which (while they change over time) have been developed over hundreds of years.

Nor do they come for free. Until very recently our education system, both at a secondary and a tertiary level, placed great emphasis upon understanding literary tradition. That didn’t just mean reading the canon, it meant learning how to read, a process which embraced an understanding of Latin grammar, the memorisation of slabs of poetry by Homer and Shakespeare and Tennyson, a grasp of the Bible, and the Classics, and an attentiveness to the way language works on the page.

Things might be different overseas, but nobody in Australia gets this sort of education anymore. In its place we have a system of literary education that emphasises personal response and personal expression, and which privileges comparison of groups of texts over close reading of particular texts. At one level this is great, since it opens us up to new forms of expression and empowers the individual, as well as breaking down the hegemony of the literary, but it also means almost all of the criteria that once allowed us to define “Literature” have slipped away, and our judgements about books and writing are now made on quite different criteria.

I should emphasise this isn’t meant as a jeremiad or a lament: it seems to me there are now extremely sophisticated cultures of critical judgement and appreciation operating within forms such as SF, cultures which have their own criteria and agendas. And while I want to scream every time I hear a reader talk about a character’s “journey”, I recognise they’re using a critical language that makes sense to them, and which they find enriches their reading experience, which is, at the end of the day, what criticism should be about.

But it does mean that at almost every level our capacity to regulate or even define the boundary of the literary is diminished. What’s good is no longer defined by gatekeepers schooled in the right universities and armed with an intimate knowledge of Renaissance poetry and the Russian novel (though there are plenty of them out there). Instead it’s defined from the ground up, by readers, who are finding ways of communicating and sharing things they like online and elsewhere, and bypassing traditional organs of cultural authority such as the newspapers. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, part of that process has been the falling away of many of the old status anxieties about genre and the literary, and a freeing up of readers to seek out books unhindered by those anxieties.

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Launch of the James Caird from the shore of Elephant Island by Ernest Shackleton and his men, April 1916

As the ongoing silence in Tonguesville no doubt suggests, I’ve been a little busy, mostly trying to whip The Penguin Book of the Ocean into shape. I’m pleased to say that it’s finally beginning to take shape (indeed I’d go so far as to say it’s looking really good) and I’m not going to reflect too much on the irony that I’ve been so busy reading about the bloody ocean I’ve barely visited visit the beach all summer (admittedly the three month old baby may also have something to do with that, but it sounds better if I blame the book).

My irritation at being kept from the beach aside, I think it’s safe to say the real joy of putting this book together has been the reading it’s involved. Some of it’s been achingly beautiful, a lot of it’s been fascinating, and some of it’s been deeply chastening in its reminders of the sheer dangerousness and brutality of life at sea.

That being the case, I thought I’d share two snippets from the masses of books and documents I’ve worked my way through that have really stuck with me.

Both are from records of almost unimaginably dreadful struggles against the elements (there have been moments in the making of this book when I’ve wondered whether I shouldn’t just retitle it The Penguin Book of Truly Appalling Journeys by Open Boat and be done with it). The first is from Hakluyt’s account of the journey of Captain John Davis and his men aboard the Desire in 1592. Separated from the rest of their fleet in the Straits Of Magellan they made their way east to the Falklands, where, mad with hunger and thirst, they fell upon the local penguin population with a vengeance, killing 14,000 in the space of a few days. Without salt they could only attempt to dry their haul, which they did, and so, on a boat piled to the gunwales with rotting penguin meat they set sail for England, and home. The trip was difficult, to say the least, but eventually, after managing not to die of thirst or go mad while becalmed they reached warmer waters.

Which is when things got really bad:

“After we came near unto the sun, our dried penguins began to corrupt, and there bred in them a most loathsome and ugly worm of an inch long. This worm did so mightily increase, and devour our victuals, that there was in reason no hope how we should avoid famine, but be devoured of these wicked creatures: there was nothing that they did not devour, only iron excepted: our clothes, boots, shoes, hats, shirts, stockings: and for the ship, they did so eat the timbers, as that we greatly feared they would undo us by gnawing through the ship’s side. Great was the care and diligence of our captain, master and company to consume these vermin, but the more we laboured to kill them, the more they increased; so that at the last we could not sleep for them, but they would eat our flesh, and bite like mosquitoes.

“In this woeful case, after we had passed the Equinoctial toward the north, our men began to fall sick of such a monstrous disease, as I think the like was never heard of: for in their ankles it began to swell; from thence in two days it would be in their breasts, so that they could not draw their breath. . . . For all this, divers grew raging mad and some died in most loathsome and furious pain. It were incredible to write our misery as it was; there was no man in perfect health, but the captain and one boy. The master being a man of good spirit, with extreme labour bore out his grief, so that it grew not upon him. To be short, all our men died except sixteen, of which there were but five able to move.”

Choice.

The other, much shorter snippet is from Shackleton’s account of he and his men’s extraordinary journey from Elephant Island, just off the coast of Antarctica, to South Georgia in April 1916 (if you haven’t read South, do: it’s one of the more amazing books ever written).

After more than a fortnight alone in an open boat in the waters of the Southern Ocean they came into sight of land, only to discover the seas were so huge, and the shore so hazardous they couldn’t land. At which point they:

“stood off shore again, tired almost to the point of apathy. Our water had long been finished. The last was about a pint of hairy liquid, which we strained through a bit of gauze from the medicine-chest”.

My OED’s in storage, so I haven’t had a chance to check whether “hairy” has an archaic meaning I’m not aware of, or whether it’s just poetic license on Shackleton’s part, but the notion of “hairy liquid” certainly isn’t one I’ll be forgetting in a hurry.

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