T here was a surreal touch to last Sunday’s newspapers. The
inside sections, which tend to be prepared a little in advance, brimmed, as usual, with pieces about the delights of living in France. The news pages, by contrast, carried pictures of French youths lobbing Molotov cocktails and overturning cars in the great orgy of rage that has overtaken the country in recent days. Cars seem to have had the worst of it. In the truest French bureaucratic traditions, somebody has even been keeping a countrywide tally of those destroyed: by Monday night the toll had reached 1,408 vehicles. On the same day a different news story caught my eye — that new car sales are plummeting across Europe — and a terrible thought occurred to me: is somebody deliberately trying to boost an ailing industry which once symbolised French industrial pride? If I were on the board of Renault, I would certainly be lifting a glass to these latter-day Jacobins.
In these pages two weeks ago Charles Moore recounted the story of George Courtauld who, having had his idea for The Pocket Book of Patriotism rejected by several publishers, published it himself — and in one weekend sold 37,500 copies through his website. The story perked me up because on 1 December I am publishing my own satirical novel, The Great Before. It is difficult to know whether it will work, or result in professional suicide. Some fellow writers have been encouraging, while one or two others have made a predictable remark: ‘So you’re vanity publishing, are you?’ effectively bracketing me with Saddam Hussein, who in his later years as President of Iraq relieved the boredom of dictating by penning the odd love story about young maidens falling for his charms. In as much as all careers, other than, perhaps, that of a Carthusian monk, involve an element of vanity, perhaps they have a point. Yet somehow if I were a chef who, rather than apply for a job at Trusthouse Forte, had decided to open his own restaurant, I don’t think anyone would dismiss it as ‘vanity catering’; on the contrary, potential diners would be inclined to assume that I might serve up a better, more adventurous meal than they would get in a chain outlet.
That I have decided to go it alone with The Great Before rather than seek a big, globalised publisher is an irony, given the subject matter. The Great Before is essentially a satire on the anti-globalisation movement. It was in the late 1980s, when the Green party received 15 per cent of the vote in a European election, that I conceived the basis for the novel: that industrial advance will eventually reach a point where it causes so much fear and revulsion that the developed world, via the kind of rioting seen in France this week, slips back to pre-industrial poverty. Industrialists have always had a Luddite tendency to contend with, but not the powerful environmental, anti-globalisation and animal rights’ pressure groups of today, which have all but driven GM technology from this country, have put paid to nuclear power and, with the help of Prince Charles, are trying to force us all to eat local food. In The Great Before the anti-globalisation lobby gets a lot of what it wants: everyone goes back to eating local food; indeed food is believed to turn toxic when moved more than a few miles. But in other ways the result is far from being a non-globalised utopia: we go back to warfare between neighbouring English villages, the poor are pressed into feudal service and we return to attending parish churches which make even our mosques look liberal.
Sce you ask, I don’t have a large pile of inrejection slips, and no publisher has seen the finished book. But it became apparent from the sighs and curled noses when merely discussing the idea with publishers and literary agents that if I wanted them to publish a satire about globalisation, it would have to be along Michael Moore lines. I would have to bash Bush, take on the fiends of big business, draw attention to the repressed trainerstitchers of Western-owned factories in the Third World. As for a novel attacking irrational fears over globalisation, it was made clear to me that no such genre exists. ‘You write with unfailing verve and intelligence’ was the verdict of one prominent literary agent, ‘but I still cannot see a book that will succeed in the marketplace.’ To which the obvious question was: should I rewrite it and make it less intelligent? I suspect that not all editors who work in publishing are left-wing ideologues; rather I guess they have made the decision that far more people want to read about meteorological Armageddon than wish to read about the values of the anti-globalisation lobby taken to their natural conclusion. Perhaps they are right, and the thousand copies of The Great Before which already lie stacked in boxes in my office will go unread, eventually to be shipped off to some recycling plant in China and to re-emerge as pages for the next Michael Moore bestseller. If so, I will be a little disappointed, but I won’t be broke.
The wonder of globalisation is that it has hugely reduced the costs and increased the marketing possibilities of publishing your own book. The availability of Siberian wood pulp and Malaysian gum has pushed the price of printing 1,000 paperbacks down to £1,500. Thanks to the internet and the falling price of Jiffy bags, which as far as I know may now be hand-stitched by Burmese peasants, it is possible to print small runs of books these days while still undercutting the volume publishing houses: you can buy it via my website, www.greatbefore.com, for £6 including postage and packing — less than half the price at which Random House marketed my last book when it was published in paperback nearly ten years ago.
Judging how readers will react is never easy. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column in the Times praising Scottish devolution — on the grounds that the decoupling of crime statistics now allows us to see that it isn’t England that has the problem with violent crime; it is Scotland a country which, like France, seems to have acquired a misplaced reputation as a rural paradise. The following day the Scotsman, a sister publication of The Spectator, carried a news story headed ‘Fury at Murderous Scots Article’ in which the Conservatives, the Scottish National party and the Catholic Church all condemned my column. Maybe having a Scottish name saved me, but my own postbag told a slightly different story. In fact I had only one angry letter: from a reader near Carlisle complaining that I had used the expression ‘north of Hadrian’s Wall’ as shorthand for Scottish. Did I not realise, he thundered, that 100,000 Englishmen live north of Hadrian’s Wall and they resent being called Scottish?
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