DIARY
STEPHEN FRY It has been my custom over the last few Saturdays to go about the country dispens- ing what I hope is an inspiring message to the young people of towns like Leeds, Chester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Bristol and Bath. The message is not easy to express in one simple phrase, but I will try. It goes something like this: Please buy my book.' Publishing is a very mysterious pro- fession. It is widely held that publishers wear black, talk about slush-piles, galleys and dump-bins and smell of Campari. There is more to them than that, however. In the tense, vibrant times in which we have the honour to live, the book trade is all about the Harsh Realities of the Market Place. We must each and every one of us be prepared to swing our handbags on our Particular street corners and drum up trade With smiles, winks and discounts for bulk, Whether we be fallen prime ministers, risen Journalists or widely praised cyberpunk dystopians. The 'Meet the Author' session has become so popular an institution in bookshops across the country now that there exist some collectors who will pay a premium for an unsigned copy of, say, Mar- garet Thatcher: The Downing Street Years, citing the extreme rarity value. When VAT on books comes in later this month, as no one doubts it will, margins will be squeezed even further and the real selling frenzy will begin. Authors are being prepared for the possibility that only personally handwritten Copies of entire novels will have a chance of Selling. Books will have to come out of their elitist, snobbish, patronising eyries and face the modern world. Julian Barnes's novel Flaubert's Parrot, after arrangements with his new sponsors, is being reissued as Sains- bury's Parrot, and contains some exciting recipes using fromage frais and coriander seeds. The scratch'n'sniff edition of Paddy Chanel Ha Ha Ha will express the real ‘v9man in you in light citrusy top-notes With, underneath, a hint of vetiver and woodbark, while J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, through an exclusive deal with News International, shows on its third page that Cindy has got what it takes up front and will sell at the breakthrough price of 20p, A. breath of fresh air like this will have its detractors no doubt amongst the group of people that the chattering classes like to call the Chattering Classes, but you can't stand in the way of progress, however vomi- tive. Meanwhile, adhering to the old ways, I Pop into bookshops and sit in chairs just vacated by Lord Archer or Terry Pratchett or Lady Thatcher and scribble happily away- One man in a queue in Sheffield the Other day asked me to sign a copy of Sense and Sensibility for him. 'Urn, I didn't write that, actually,' I said, for I can be almost painfully honest sometimes. 'I know that, don't I?' the fellow said. 'But Jane Austen's dead, so you're the next best thing.' I don't think, sadly, that he meant by this that I was the only living writer to compare with Jane Austen; in fact I know he didn't. I had been on television, that was the main thing. Where will it end, this cult of celebrity?
More importantly, where will it end, this cult of commentators and style-writers asking where the cult for celebrity will end? The vast set of inverted commas that post- modernism puts around the world, the 'disengagement', the 'ironic detachment', the 'commentary' on 'commentary', it all drains the world of warmth. Coolness is all: in the food hall of life every idea is now to be found shrink-wrapped in the chill cabinet and every thought has its sell-by date. Passion is nothing real, it is what Americans, and therefore British style-journalists, call a 'take', an 'attitude'. It is not passion, but 'passion'. I don't know about you, but for me the Sunday newspa- pers have become a living nightmare. Backlashes to backlashes and definitions of definitions, a great tangle of determination to be the first to detect and to name the smallest of quivers and twitches on the media web. To observe and to analyse now mean to 'see through', as if every phenomenon in the human world, from war to art, is a kind of conjuring trick that the journalist is smart enough to have sussed. Well, well, I'm falling prey to the think it's repetitive strain injury.' whole ghastly business myself by writing about it.
The recent humiliation of the Canadian Conservative Party has given me a slight twinge of guilt over one of my favourite books. I was in the city of Oxford some years ago, in one of those streets that they call the Wide or the Long or the Tall, and I drifted into the Oxford University Press bookshop. I had been meaning for some time to treat myself to the brand-new edi- tion of the OED — this was in the days when it was presented in many-volumed book form rather than as a CD or interac- tive game. I ordered the full set, which cost something in the region of £1,400 and would, I was promised, be dispatched to my home address from the OUP's warehouse in Corby. Before paying I browsed for a while and happened upon an item called The Oxford Book of Canadian Political Anec- dotes. I think you will agree that titles like this do not pop up every day and cannot be passed over. It ranks with the American classic Utilising Road Kills and every biblio- phile's favourite, With Rod and Reel in Northern Bechuanaland. I grabbed the only two copies on the shelf and went up to pay. As I did so, who should come into the shop but the thinking man's cinnamon muffin, Jeremy Paxinan? We chatted awhile and I showed him my find. He was suitably impressed, but had to clutch the counter to save himself from falling when the shop assistant said to me, 'That'll be one thou- sand four hundred and fourteen pounds ninety-eight, please.' Paxman could see no purchases I had made other than those two copies of The Oxford Book of Canadian Political Anecdotes. 'What the . . . ?' he mouthed. `Ah,' I said, 'rare and valuable item, The Oxford Book of Canadian Political Anecdotes. Worth every penny.' I left him gaping like a landed perch and wondering at what kind of an arse would pay fifteen hundred quid for a kitsch joke. I think he knows now, but for a while he was easily the most flabbergasted Newsnight presenter in the Thames Valley region.
0 f course he was right: whether at £6.99 or £750 a copy, buying the book was a kitsch joke of the kind that poor old Cana- da has to put up with all the time. Well, she has had her revenge: after an election like last week's the next edition of the OBCPA will be the ripsnorting, barnstorming, cliffhanging, page-turning, tummy-tightening wonder of the age: 'It makes Tristan Garel- Jones: The Catherine Place Years look tame!' the reviewers will screech. 'Move over, Ned Sherrin, I have seen the future of the anec- dote, and its name is Canada.'
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