On Vulpes This Week

Well, usually we’d be putting up a nice “What’s Coming Up” post now, complete with picture of attentive-looking fox flicking eagerly through a dictionary…but there’s no point in repetition so I’m just going to direct you to the box on the right hand side of the screen under Bookfox (you might have to scroll down a bit), which will remain all week to tell you what’s coming up.

Check it out.

Our Longest Days edited by Sandra Koa Wing

Looking back on anything from a distance - especially through the lens of ‘history’ - all too often gives us a false perspective. When, for instance, we read about the Second World War, we tend to think of it in terms of vignettes … critical moments that were the highs, lows and turning points: the Phoney War, Dunkirk, The Blitz, The Battle of Britain, the Fall of Paris, Stalingrad, D-Day, Hiroshima.

It runs through our brains like a newsreel … like a compilation of every war film we’ve ever seen, with the ordinary people affected by it just bit part players, flitting around in the background somewhere, like so much moving scenery.

Our Longest Days, published by Profile Books, is a superb corrective. In it, we see the war through the eyes of ordinary British citizens - housewives, civil servants, a teenage land girl, a conscientious objector, a member of the Home Guard, a retired electricity board inspector …

They were actually writing for the Mass Observation project, which recorded the views and opinions of the ‘Man in the Street’. Tom Harrisson (described by Philip Ziegler in his foreword as ‘a turbulent amateur anthropologist’) became incensed by Fleet Street’s regular pronouncements on what the Great British Public thought about this, that and the other. His contention was that they couldn’t possibly actually know what the public thought … so in 1936 he set about finding out. The result was Mass Observation - diaries kept by men and women as they went about their daily lives.

For Our Longest Days the late Sandra Koa Wing chose to follow just over a dozen of the 500 or so people who wrote for Mass Observation. Some we meet in 1939 and stay with them for the duration. Others disappear part way through, to be replaced by new names and voices.

George Springett was a (rather pompous) conscientious objector, absolutely determined to avoid conscription. Kenneth Redmond a civil servant who was an active communist party member. His brother Tom died in the war, and Kenneth’s entries are soaked in grief and anger. Edie Rutherford was a South African living in Sheffield with her husband and family. She worked in the Ministry of Labour and wasn’t shy about sharing her socialist opinions … many of which (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight) were remarkably shrewd.

For me, though, two voices stand out above the others: Muriel Green and Nella Last.

Muriel was 18 at the outbreak of war - naive, frightened, excited - she eventually becomes a Land Girl and we travel with her from 1939 to 1945 as she grows up in a world at war. By 1945, she’s an adult, and she knows it. Along the line, she managed to enjoy herself but the change in her ‘voice’ over the years is quite marked. On VE Day the girl who had earlier admitted to getting herself into a bit of a mess dating two airmen at once was writing:

All the flag-waving and dancing will not bring alive the dead to their homes … Life will always be the sadder for those of us who think.

Nella Last was one of the best known of Mass Observation’s contributors. She achieved a posthumous fame of her own as “Housewife, 49″. An articulate middle-aged woman living in Barrow-in-Furness, she had already been through one world war - and it showed. She knew how to make do and mend, and shook her head disbelievingly at the foolishness of others. She was an intelligent, literate women who in another age would have had an independent career. Her marriage was far from perfect … and by the end of Our Longest Days she makes no secret of it:

I looked at my husband’s placid face blank face critically, thinking with a slight sickness, how dreadfully like his family he was growing, their utter ‘mindlessness’, their fear of anything different in any way. I marvelled at the way he had managed to so dominate me for all our married life, when to avoid ‘hurting’ him, I tried to keep him in a good mood - when a smacked head would have been the best treatment … I know I’m not the ’sweet woman’ I used to be, but then I never was.

Of the men, 70 year old Herbert Brush, Digging for Victory with a vengeance, comes across as the most likeable, taking even the accidental destruction of his allotment in his philosophical stride. When reporting on the terrible damaged inflicted by the Luftwaffe on the city and people of Norwich, he can’t resist commenting wryly:

Jerry did not hit the castle or the town hall or the cathedral, mostly shops and small houses. The ugliest town hall in the kingdom: a bomb would have made it look more interesting.

Peter Baxter, a Cambridge graduate, became a corporal at RAF Padgate where he trained recruits. He is one of the most clear-sighted diarists - a humane man who had never learned to hate in plurals. On hearing of the bombing of the Ruhr dams, his first thought was for the ordinary German people caught in the flood waters. He wrote:

I know this is Total War, but are we to abandon all standards of mercy and humanity? An act like this makes us all barbarians. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t yet found anybody to agree with me. The other fellows say, ‘The more Jerries we wipe out the better’ … It’s very saddening. When one’s fellow countrymen are so callous, one can’t feel over-confident about the chances of getting a peaceful civilised world in the future.

What comes over most strongly throughout the book, however, is the way that people - all of them - just ‘got on with it’. Even in the midst of the Blitz, they did their level best to go about their normal lives. They also complained incessantly about food shortages, petty bureaucracy, greedy neighbours, black marketeers, the shoddy standards of utility clothing, pettifogging civil servants … and class prejudice was alive and well and thriving amidst the air raid sirens. The human need to whine remains constant, apparently.

There IS however, in nearly all the diarists, a realization that they can never go back to being the way they were. The peace may have been won, but it wasn’t simply going to be a case of picking up where they left off … like Nella Last, they and the world had changed forever.

The book closes, quietly and fittingly, with dear old Herbert Brush. It is Monday, the 3rd of September, 1945 - a month after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and six years to the day after war was declared:

I wonder what I was doing six years ago: it’s too much trouble to look for my diary of that date, but I remember Chamberlain’s lugubrious tones when he said, ‘We are at war with Germany’.

A dull morning; looks like rain, Barometer 29.74.

—:oOo:—

Each new year’s entries are prefaced by a short explanation of the main events of that year and the endnotes provide details on any comments that need further elucidation, so no in depth knowledge of the war is necessary - although it certainly helps. The book also contains a selection of well-chosen photographs, a short biography of each diarist and a short section on the Mass Observation, which I was very surprised to learn was alive and well and apparently thriving.

Profile Books. Paperback. 2008. ISBN: 978-84668-088-5. 320pp.

Thursday Soapbox. Rosy Thornton: Books Should be Books!

On the Soapbox this week, writer of the political romantic comedy More Than Love Letters and campus novel Hearts and Minds, Rosy Thornton, looks at the way we categorise books.

*Thanks to Natmandu on Flickr for this picture of a beautifully wrapped book, from the Slightly Foxed Bookshop in New Zealand.

Books Should Be Books! by Rosy Thornton

A large, independent bookshop near where I live (which shall remain discreetly nameless) used until recently to categorise its books - of the made-up variety - into two distinct sections: Literature and Fiction.

Before I ever thought about writing novels myself and merely read them by the rucksackful, the distinction used to mystify me. In fact, I experienced it more as an irritating inconvenience than anything else. My reading tastes were – and are – eclectic, and since I could discern no obvious reason why some made-up stories should be located on one side of the shop and some on the other, I generally had to check both sets of shelves before locating the author or work that I was seeking.

Then I began writing my own stuff, and sending it out to agents. On opening the Writers and Artists Yearbook I found the same baffling dichotomy. In order to know which agencies to approach, I had to decide: was I ‘literary’ or was I ‘commercial’?

Literary or Commercial: All that Glisters is not Golding.

Aside from the virtual impossibility of having any objective perspective on one’s own work, the question was an impossible one to answer, because I had never really grasped where the difference might lie. So I went back to my local bookshop and began my investigation. At this point I should perhaps confess that, when I’m not getting up at dawn to write novels, I am a lawyer - and lawyers love to categorise. We define and taxonomise and distinguish: it’s what we’re conditioned to do. We are, in many senses, simply a subspecies of librarian, analysing stories (except ours are of the non-made-up variety, as found in the law reports) and putting them into tidy boxes according to made-up rules. But I digress.

What, I asked myself was the ratio decidendi: the reason or reasons for placing a book on one side of the shop as opposed to the other? In Literature, with its resonances of Eng Lit, of the academy, of giants’ shoulders and the power of the written word - or in Fiction, with its suggestions of storytelling, of unreliability and untruth?

The main criterion for being shelved in Literature, I discovered, was being dead. Not merely the long-dead, like Austen and Dickens and Eliot and Hardy – survivors of the test of centuries – but the more recently deceased were located here, too. I found not only the William Goldings and the Muriel Sparks but also Nevil Shute: a favourite of mine, in fact, but surely only a good, old-fashioned storyteller, who if he were starting out today would be submitting his work to agents handling ‘commercial’ fiction? Yes, being dead for a couple of decades was definitely your best bet.

For the living, the key thing seemed to be to get on to a GCSE or A level syllabus. Any author routinely read in a schoolroom seemed to qualify as Literature. This is the point at which I shall not name names, for fear that any examples I choose - in either direction - might prove invidious. But I will say that the dividing line did not seem to relate to genre in any simplistic way. Dorothy L Sayers (dead) was Literature; PD James (happily very much alive) was Fiction.

Off the Shelf Solution

There, then, is the difficulty: so what, you ask, is my solution? Well, let me take you for a moment to the Cambridge University Library. There the books are classed and shelved according to an idiosyncratic variant of the Dewey Decimal system. The number which indicates a book’s subject matter is followed by a letter, which classifies the volume according to its approximate height. (I know, I know. But even though this means books about the same thing being located inconveniently in four different places depending on how big they are, it apparently maximises efficient use of shelf space.) A version of the same system should, I believe, be mandatorily adopted by all libraries and book stores. The books should not be classified as Literature or Fiction, they should simply be allocated to shelves according to size. (Think how handy it would be if you were looking for something small to slip in your aircraft hand luggage.) Stephen Fry’s QI empire, I understand, runs a bookshop in Oxford which is a pioneer of a similar kind of iconoclasm. There, apparently, the stock is ‘arranged thematically so that a novel might end up next to a work of popular science or a reference book’. Mr Fry, I salute you.

Books Under Cover

Covers, of course, would remain an obstacle. Cover design is the enemy of the level playing field: the insidious perpetuator of stereotypical assumptions. Look at that figure-in-a-landscape in oils: Literature. Look at that soft focus photograph of a child’s feet: Fiction. In my brave new world (Aldous Huxley: Literature) all publishers would be obliged to turn out novels in plain brown covers, bearing only the title and the author’s name – rather like those lovely old orange Penguin paperbacks which filled my parents’ bookshelves.

Did I say the title and the author’s name? That would be no good, either. Beatrice’s Betrayal by Belinda Blacklace: most decidedly Fiction. Titles, therefore, would be replaced by the ISBN number alone, and covers would have the author’s name removed and a code number substituted - much as we have with anonymised examination scripts, to prevent examiners from subliminally awarding higher marks to Steve than to Stephanie, to Ms Singer than to Ms Singh.

Problem solved. In my Utopian future book world, the text would stand alone; the author’s voice would speak for itself. I’m neither Literature nor Fiction, I just write books, OK? Now pigeonhole me, if you dare!

More on Rosy Thornton

Rosy Thornton’s Writewords page

Reviews of Hearts and Minds

Vulpes Review
Tales from the Reading Room
Of Books and Bikes
Reading Matters
Other Stories

More rants from the Thursday Soapbox here.

Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve

Adapted from my Chicklish review.

Here Lies Arthur is a look at the legendary Arthur, but not as we know him. Arthur is no king, instead he’s a sixth century leader of a rag tag band of fighters, all pretty merciless, with the exception of Arthur’s most loyal employee, the harp-twanging storyteller, Myrddin. Myrddin makes his living spreading heroic tales about Arthur’s exploits up and down the Westcountry, and the suggestion is that we have Myrddin to thank for everything we think we’ve heard about his master.

This novel, although ostensibly aimed at children/young adults, is gritty, realistic and often gory. Arthur is portrayed as a brute of a man. He’s not a cold-hearted schemer, but he has a nasty temper and he murders those standing in his way without a second thought.

However, Arthur isn’t the main character: Here lies Arthur is the story of Gwyna, a girl in the service of Myrddin. Gwyna spends half of the novel dressed as a boy*, pretending to be ‘Gwyn’, since the war band is apparently no place for a girl, and Myrddin is only allowed to employ male servants.

Gwyna learns to be male, she speaks up and laughs loud. Instead of the girl who went unnoticed by everyone, she learns to walk tall and make her presence felt. Gwyna only regrets her ‘boyhood’ when she is forced to go to war. The battle scenes she witnesses are frightening - Phillip Reeve does not pull any punches. Yet despite her aversion to the violence in the lives of men, when Gwyna is required to become a girl again - thanks to adolescence - she finds it very difficult to acclimatise to the quiet (and as she sees it boring) ways of women. The brilliance of having Gwyna as the main character is that she is uniquely placed to observe both the male and female spheres of sixth century society, which makes her tale even more fascinating.

There is also an interesting message about stories. Gwyna sees Myrddin’s myth-making first hand and she comes to understand how people want to make sense of the world around them, even when they know the tall tales aren’t really true. Gwyna herself becomes part of certain legends, simply by participating in Myrddin’s tricks. The power of stories is an important idea and I found myself remembering all of the legends and myths that were told to me as a child, as well as questioning many of the notions that are ’spun’ even in the twenty-first century.

The style of writing is lyrical and beautiful, but quite ‘literary’, although I must admit I loved that element.

And I sat on the wet grass and watched that hand beckon to me from the shining middle of the mere. White as a stripped twig.

I was already wet as I could be, so I went down to the shallows and waded in. My torn skirts flowered out round me. The water was clear. There was grass on the bottom, neat and green and standing up on end, like it was startled to find itself under water.

Gwenhwyfar lay on the drowned grass.

If I had any criticism it is that I couldn’t always suspend my disbelief. I was so in awe of Reeve’s irreverent rewriting of the Arthur myth that I kept cross-referencing things in my own mind and contrasting Here Lies Arthur with what I thought I knew, which got a little in the way of me enjoying this purely as a story. In terms of characterisation, however, the book is brilliant and Philip Reeve establishes himself here as an exceptional, risk-taking writer.

Scholastic. ISBN-13: 978-0439955331. 304 pages. Hardback. £12.99.

For the Guardian review of Here Lies Arthur, click here

For my original Chicklish review, click here

* It is interesting that Gwyna, while female, spends much of the book appearing and acting like a boy - one way to get around the problem of YA novels allegedly requiring a male lead character in order to appeal to young male readers?

The Known World by Edward P Jones

The Known World opens in the years before the American Civil War with the death of Henry Townsend, a freed slave who, at the time of his death at 31 years of age, was the owner of a significant landholding and 33 slaves. Henry is probably the book’s central character although the narrative rambles across a wide cast of up to one hundred characters all touched in some way by the effects of slavery.

It is a surprising fact that some slaveowners were black although most of those listed in official records technically owned members of their own family; their wives, children, relatives. Henry Townsend is one of the exceptions who operated similarly to a white landowner. ‘Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master.’

Henry’s father, Augustus, a talented woodcarver who bought his own way to freedom and then bought his wife’s and son’s freedom, is at odds with his son’s choice of life.

‘“I ain’t done nothin I ain’t a right to. I ain’t done nothin no white man wouldn’t do.”…

Augustus took down a stick, one with an array of squirrels chasing each other, head to tail, tail to head, a line of sleek creatures going around and around the stick all the way to the top where a perfect acorn was waiting, stem and all. Augustus slammed the stick down across Henry’s shoulders and Henry crumpled to the ground. “Augustus, stop now!” Mildred shouted and knelt to her son. “Thas how a slave feel!’ Augustus called down to him. “Thas just how every slave every day be feelin.”

Henry squirmed out of his mother’s arms and managed to get to his feet. He took the stick from his father. “Henry, no!” Mildred said. Henry, with two tries, broke the stick over his knee. “Thas how a master feels,” he said and went out the door.’

Another fact that comes through clearly - one I’m not sure I understood fully before - is how the relatively high monetary value of the slaves influenced all dealings to do with them. A slaveowner who killed his own slave tended not to be punished by the law as ‘the loss of his property was considered punishment enough’. Setting a slave free was a costly thing to do and even those who, on principle, rejected slavery thought twice before doing so.

The tone of the novel is distinctive and takes a little getting used to at first. It is a curious mix of journalistic, detached reporting and confidential, almost gossipy, asides such as when the author breaks away from the current moment when Elias, one of Henry’s slaves, is carving a wooden doll for his six-year-old daughter to tell us that she would live until she was ninety-six years of age and would ask for the doll on her deathbed. Often we are made privy to information about what will happen to a character in years to come even while we are unsure about how he will survive the next twenty-four hours or the narrative might suddenly follow another seemingly incidental character in another direction. There is a certain omniscient distance created between the reader and the characters which is unusual in today’s fiction but for me it worked well in the end as it reinforced the idea that each person is the lead actor in his own life and follows his own destiny.

Edward P. Jones explores the moral complexities of slavery through the eyes of many without judgment or condemnation but what becomes clear through the mosaic of accounts is that this system is corrupt and that it corrupts utterly, even those who start out with relatively pure intentions. For example, Skiffington, the sheriff, a devout Christian who personally wants no part of slavery, is given a wedding gift of an eight-year-old girl, who he keeps because he doesn’t know what else to do with her. Initially, he acts to protect her but the purity of his relationship with her wavers over the years. Also, he has the responsibility of patrolling the slaves and ensuring that they don’t run away but even his relatively good intentions have tragic consequences as he fails to control his deputies and to understand the fragility of life for the black people in his territory, even the free men and women.

This is a very different but complementary approach to Toni Morrisson’s Beloved. Where Beloved plumbs the depths of slavery in one woman’s psyche, The Known World has a breadth of vision which shows its impact not only on a wide range of individuals but on society itself. Both approaches give us other valuable perspectives on a situation whose existence most of us now have difficulty imagining.

HarperPerennial (5 Jul 2004), 400 pages, ISBN-10: 0007195303

Articles and Interviews
The Guardian on The Known World
Interview with Edward P Jones from IdentityTheory.com

Rat: How the World’s Most Notorious Rodent Clawed its Way to the Top by Jerry Langton

A lot of people would be put off reading about the world’s most infamous rodent, but this book might turn your disgust into admiration. The author is genuinely fascinated by his subject and it’s contagious. His conversational style is a mix of anecdotes and facts, it feels like a friend is sharing a story they read in that morning’s newspaper. He gleans information from not only biologists and historians, but also exterminators, rat fanciers and high-rise apartment custodians. Langton went into sewers, alleys and staked out restaurant dumpsters to see rats in their native habitats.
He tells us the difference between the original black rat, which is smaller and climbs higher and the misnamed Norway, or brown rat; which is larger, more aggressive and has supplanted the black rat in most areas of the world. We learn that rats can leap 4 feet straight into the air, can hold their breath for 3 minutes underwater and have a membrane behind their teeth to prevent swallowing when they are chewing inedible items such as concrete. One of the most amazing things I found was that rats have a collapsible rib cage, this is what allows them to squeeze through such small spaces. And they prefer scrambled eggs to all other food.
Expansions and explorations of humans have enabled rats to flourish, their migrations have closely followed our movements, so we get a nicely done overview of history and how it has been mutually influential. He compares the view of rats in various cultures; in the Chinese Zodiac, the Karnimata temple in India, as a food source in Africa.
Of course, there is much discussion of them as pests and how eradicating them is nearly impossible. “I like to think of street rats as being like really bad transvestites, “ said Ben, a Brooklyn-based exterminator. “You put ‘em someplace like Iowa or your living room and everyone’s going to make a big fuss, but here in New York, people just keep on walking… they’ve got too much to do.” But nearly all of the exterminators bear a grudging respect for rats’ intelligence and ingenuity. Perhaps, by the time you finish this riveting book, you will too.

St. Martin’s Press 2006 207 pp. ISBN-13 978-0-312-36384-0

On Vulpes this Coming Week

We have a great mixed week coming up on Vulpes.

Monday
Jackie reviews Rat, wherein Jerry Langton answers the question of whether the ubiquitous rodents are cute or craven.

Tuesday

Mary looks at The Known World, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner by Edward P. Jones that “explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who owned blacks in the antebellum South.” (Publisher’s Weekly).

Wednesday
And it’s the book that everyone’s been talking about: Lisa reviews Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve.

Thursday
Hearts and Minds author, Rosy Thornton, is on the Soapbox this week, with her dry and witty look at what makes “fiction” and what makes “literature”. Should we categorise books by genre or author - or should we cut all that nonsense and start measuring the length of the spine?

On Friday, Mhairi will be reviewing Our Longest Days edited by Sandra Koa Wing: poignant extracts from the diaries of the ‘Mass Observation’ writers - including Nella Last, now famous as ‘Housewife 49′.

*Thanks to pbo31 (Patrick Boury) for this stylish image to launch our upcoming week.

Asboville by Danny Rhodes - Guest Review by Luisa Plaja

Guest Review by teen writer, Luisa Plaja, author of Split by a Kiss.

After sixteen-year-old Londoner JB is served with an Anti Social Behaviour Order, he’s sent away to live with his uncle. Under the conditions of the ASBO, he must spend the summer painting beach huts, one per day, and be back at his uncle’s caravan by seven every evening. He settles reluctantly into a task which allows him a lot of thinking time, and also enables him to observe and eventually meet the local teenagers, including a gang like the one he was in back home, and Sal, a girl with problems of her own.

I found this book immediately engaging, with settings that are skilfully brought to life. Even though we only see the seaside town in the summer months, there is a strong sense of what it would be like to live there all year round. The beach hut painting premise is very effective, providing an intriguing and symbolic hook.

However, I was initially sceptical about the character of JB. I struggled to see JB’s situation from his own perspective, as the evocative descriptions in the first few chapters did not seem to sit right with JB’s alienation and his attitude to life. But as the novel progresses and the sensitive side of JB emerges, his character begins to ring true and the earlier chapters made more sense to me.

Sal initially appears as an italic addition to the end of JB-focused chapters, so that by the time JB meets her, the reader already has considerable insight into her life. The developing relationship between JB and Sal had Romeo and Juliet-style complications that kept me guessing and turning the pages. The characterisation in the novel was excellent: JB’s reluctant rivalry with Moey was realistically threatening and his friendships with Scooby and Carla were touching, but perhaps my favourite character was JB’s uncle, who is resigned to his lot in life, but has not given in to despair. Asboville gives off a faint note of hope that I felt was largely carried by this character.

I’ve heard this book compared to The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton and I can see the similarities in its non-judgmental depiction of disaffected youth. Personally, I considered it closer to a Kevin Brooks novel, perhaps with fewer thriller elements. There is also a slightly incongruous scene involving JB’s mother that borders on preachiness, but manages to avoid it to become one of the most memorable parts of the book. It is possibly this scene which marks the book out as an adult rather than a teen read. However, I think this novel could be appreciated equally by either audience.

Asboville effectively combines realistic characters and scenarios with social commentary, mystery and a touching love story. I found it a thought-provoking and original read.

Asboville by Danny Rhodes is published by Maia Press. ISBN-13: 978-1904559221. 214 pages. £8.99

For the Vulpes Libris interview with Danny Rhodes, click here.

Flower Hunters by Mary Gribbin and John Gribbin

One evening, while dining with the Viceroy of Chile (as one does), Royal Navy surgeon Archibald Menzies spotted some unfamiliar nuts on top of his pudding. Instead of eating the nuts, he smuggled them out. That act of felony resulted in the introduction to the UK of a very familiar tree. If you want to know which one, you’re going to have to read this book … because I’m a teasing little ratbag and I’m not going to tell you.

Reading the book, however, is no penance - even if your interest in plants is only of the variety usually referred to as ‘passing’. Flower Hunters from the Oxford University Press has it all … violent death, horrible lingering illnesses, blood sucking leeches, torture, sex (well - reproduction, anyway …), gorgeous cover (I know, I know … I’m shallow … but it IS a gorgeous cover - I kept on stopping halfway through a chapter to admire it).

I thought I knew what to expect when the book thudded onto my doormat because, inasmuch as I’d given the matter any thought at all, I’d always imagined that the men who brought our now-familiar garden plants back to this country were dilettante gentleman-adventurers, swanning around the world with elegant insouciance, culling the plants at their leisure and returning with them eventually to a grateful, garden-loving public.

Inevitably, the truth is completely different. Some of these characters - indeed many them - were men (and indeed women) you wouldn’t want to get in the way of. They were as tough as old boots, for one thing (not a quality I ever associated with botanists, I have to say) and while some of them showed themselves to be supreme diplomats, others were not beyond resorting to low cunning.

Robert Fortune, for instance, became adept at disguising himself as a Chinese native … even to the extent of possessing a fake pigtail - which worked because the locals all assumed that he was just from another part of China. Joseph Hooker meanwhile dodged Tibetan border guards by taking them unawares while they were being obstreperous with his companions (an incident which eventually ended with the map of India being slightly redrawn).

David Douglas (he of Douglas Fir fame) could have won an ‘Iron Man’ competition in his sleep and the account of his life and travels is nothing short of jaw-dropping. He came to a very unfortunate end - but then, he really should have stopped ‘botanizing’ after his sight went …

As well as telling the extraordinary stories of the botanists, the authors add a useful and enlightening section at the end of each chapter listing the main plants that we have in our gardens today because of them. Now I know who to thank for Winter Flowering Jasmine. It was that naughty Robert Fortune and his false pigtail.

Told badly, this story could have been tediously worthy, but the Gribbins have an eye for quirky detail and human foibles, a very obvious enthusiasm for their subject and a light hand with language. They introduce some thoroughly entertaining related facts - about, for instance, the problems of transporting plants and seeds half way around the world. The mortality rate was enormous until an absent-minded East End doctor sporting the perfectly wonderful name of Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward accidentally invented what we now know as herbariums. We also learn that Captain Cook was a dab hand at psychology. Sauerkraut was, he knew, an excellent way of preventing scurvy on long sea voyages. The trick was getting the crew to eat the stuff. So … he initially only allowed senior crew members to have it, thus implanting in the minds of the sailors the idea that it was a rare delicacy. When he eventually offered it to them … they wolfed it down. They were thoroughly conned, but it saved their lives.

The rhododendrons are coming out across the road from me at Muncaster Castle. In previous years, I’ve just gone and admired them. This year, as I walk through the Sino-Himalayan Garden, I’ll be thinking of Joseph Dalton Hooker galloping hell for leather across the Tibetan plain with the border guards in hot pursuit.

Oxford University Press. Hardback. ISBN 978-0-19-280718-2. 332pp.

Thursday Soapbox: Roger Morris on Marketing

We have invited Roger Morris onto Soapbox this week, to tell us his views on Marketing. The author of the Porfiry Petrovich detective series - the first two novels of which are A Gentle Axe and A Vengeful Longing - talks about marketing, the thorny issue of promotions and what it is like being a “brand”.

(*Thanks to Mr Bren on Flickr for our funky branded fox this week. Artwork by Matt Sewell)

Look at me, I’m a brand.

“Buy my fucking book, you fucking bastards!” Those seven words represent the most frequent form of marketing I engage in: transmitting abusive messages telepathically to complete strangers in bookshops. It never seems to work. I’ve not once seen anyone come close to picking up one of my books as a result of my silent raving. Anyone other than me, that is.

Of course, the reason I’d be picking my own book up is either to ‘turn it out’ (sad author parlance for thrusting your own cover into prominence on the shelf – Look! It’s a beaut! Aren’t you impressed? Whaddya mean, no?), or to move it from the shelf to one of the tables on which it so obviously belongs. Modern Classics, for example. Or This Season’s Best Reads.

The funny thing is, I never actually go through with it. Not any more. I just pick the book up, look around shiftily, then slip it back in its place on the shelf and slip myself out of the bookshop with my head hung low, nursing a terrible feeling of inadequacy and, yes, shame. I don’t even take consolation from my reason for bottling. The fact is I always end up thinking it’s unfair to the other authors, the ones who have genuinely merited being placed on that table, by virtue of their publisher paying for it.

Now I don’t know a lot about modern book marketing (the Foxes said they wanted an opinion piece – nothing was mentioned about it being a well-informed opinion piece) but it seems to me that the core part of a publishers’ marketing budget these days is spent securing prominent positioning in bookshops, at least in the major chains. If you get anything above that spent on you, you’re doing very well indeed. Anything less, and it’s going to be an uphill struggle.

I’ll come clean and say that I believe I have been the beneficiary of this practice, based on the fact that both A Gentle Axe and A Vengeful Longing have, in their time, been prominently positioned in some bookshops. (The key phrase is ‘in their time’. The world doesn’t stop turning when your book is published. The 4-6 week window you have to breakthrough and earn your spot on the front tables is over before you know it.)

I am enough of a realist to understand that none of this happens by chance, or because someone at Waterstone’s likes my work. It’s done because stores like Waterstone’s look upon the space in their shops as an advertising channel. They are, in effect, media owners. The front cover of the book is the ad for that book. If you want a good slot, you have to pay.

If that upsets you, then I suggest you start a revolution, or open a bookshop of your own, where you WON’T STAND FOR ANY OF THAT NONSENSE. Alternatively you can move to France, because I have it on good authority things are done differently there.

In marketing terms, securing a book good short term placement in-store is sales promotional activity, rather than long term brand building. Yes, like it or not, we authors are brands these days. The only real brands in publishing.

With books, in contrast to most other consumer products, every penny spent on an individual brand (= author) benefits only that brand. There’s little or no halo effect for the other brands (=authors) in the company’s portfolio. In fact, the other authors (=brands) lose out, because there’s less money in the pot for them. I’m not complaining – especially when the money is being spent on me. That’s just the way it is.

Anyhow, limited funds mean that publishers are bound to concentrate on short term promotional work around the launch of a book. That’s all the money allows. The hope is that a title will build up enough of a head of steam to take off. Any long term brand building the publisher engages in will be limited to developing a consistent look and feel for all the author’s books, an area in which Faber have done me proud.

The fact is that the real long term brand building is entirely in the author’s hands. It’s one of those activities, like checking your amazon ranking and googling your title, that you just have to do yourself, because no one else is going to do it for you.

That’s because the secret of long term brand building for authors is simply this: working hard on your writing and making each book as good as, if not better than the last one. Easier said than done, maybe. But it turns out being a brand and being dedicated to your craft are not so incompatible after all.

More about Roger Morris

Roger’s Website
Roger’s Plog

Vulpes’ review of A Vengeful Longing

More rants from the Thursday Soapbox, tackling subjects such as Genre Wars, Success and Self-Publishing and Books and The Environment. Check out our other Special Features, including our stats-busting Fox in the City and An Interview with Harry Enfield.