…a group of people who don’t know each other very well are told to read hundreds of novels very very quickly, and then come up with a list of a dozen or so that they all agree on. These people will all have different tastes, of course, because people do, so coming up with this list will involve many compromises; and there have to be other considerations at work, too. This group of people have been asked to judge the Booker Prize, which, according to the prize’s website, is for “the very best book of the year”, written by a citizen of the Republic of Ireland or the Commonwealth. So if, in the opinion of the judges, the dozen or so best books were all written by English authors, they would have to think again – they’d be slaughtered, quite rightly, for ignoring the rest of the world. Nor could they choose an all-male list, or an all-female list. When Michael Portillo, this year’s chair of the judges, expressed satisfaction with a “good spread”,  some of the more excitable bloggers felt that he’d revealed a dark secret, the politically-correct sham at the heart of the process – IT SHOULDN’T BE ABOUT SPREADS, JUST GOOD BOOKS! -  but of course he’d done nothing of the sort, because without a “good spread”, the prize is meaningless.

  The excitable bloggers get cross because they still think – incredibly – that you can prove one book is better than another, that an official ranking would actually be attainable were it not for the idiot judges with their execrable tastes and their dubious political gerrymandering. It’s not true, of course. I have said it before, and, as nobody ever listens, I’ll be saying it again: there is no such thing as an objectively good book, and there is certainly no such thing as a “best book”; there are only books we love, for reasons too complicated and personal ever to articulate convincingly. And any attempt to maintain otherwise always leads you down a dark and disagreeable path towards a community that believes the general reading public is stupid for liking the books it does. Don’t go there, as they say.
 

A recent, terrific episode of the always great American radio series ‘This American Life’ posits the need for a magazine called ‘Modern Jackass’, to which those who finds themselves talking with confidence about a subject of which they are almost entirely ignorant would be able to contribute. (You can download TAL from www.thislife.org – go on, pay something. The episode I’m talking about is entitled ‘A Little Knowledge’). 

The trouble is that the modern world makes modern jackasses of us all. I’m pretty sure, for example, that global warming is happening, and that we are in serious trouble; but if one of those cranky people who deny it all sat me down and started shouting at me, I would have very little to come back at him with, if it got down to facts and figures. Climate-change sceptics, for example, believe that ice-cores indicate a pattern of temperature and CO2 increases every one hundred thousand years or so, but that C02 levels have always gone up after the temperature rise, not before. Is that right? I don’t know – how could I? How could any of us who are not climate scientists? Nor do I know whether it’s helpful, or indeed what it might prove, for that matter. Most scientists, as far as I can work out, seem to believe that it’s true but irrelevant. I am a father, an adult, a writer, so I should have a view, right?  But I have an ‘O’-level in biology. 

Here’s an example of the trouble we can find ourselves in. Christopher Booker, who writes for the Telegraph newspapers, is one of the leading climate-change sceptics. He’s not a scientist – he has written about politics and books, but only in the last few years has he turned his attention to what he sees as the great con being perpetrated on the world by alarmists. Booker’s book, ‘Scared To Death’, was rubbished by the Observer’s Robin McKie, the paper’s science editor, when it was published at the end of last year.  McKie points out that a couple of the claims Booker makes about how we’re all being duped are substantiated by an interview that Cambridge astrophysicist Nigel Weiss gave to Canada’s Financial Post. 

“Except that Weiss never said any such thing,” says McKie. “He never even gave an interview to the Post, which long ago posted a retraction and an apology, under legal threat from Weiss who was infuriated such claims had been falsely attributed to him. ‘I don’t believe solar radiation is the main cause of global warming and I never said so to the Post, as the authors of this book would have discovered if they had asked me,’ says Weiss.” 

Then Booker gives an interview to a magazine called London Book Review.com, hitting back at McKie: “Ignoring most of the book completely, [he] concentrated on just one short passage in our 80-page chapter on global warming, accusing us of having invented two quotations from a distinguished astrophysicist Professor Nigel Weiss (’Weiss never said any such thing’, [McKie] wrote, ‘it is hard to credit such sloppiness’). As Weiss himself conceded, in a letter to the Sunday Telegraph, we had quoted him correctly.”  

If you can be bothered to look up Weiss’s letter to the Sunday Telegraph, then you’ll see that this concession isn’t quite the vindication that Booker claims and needs. Weiss wrote the following:  

“In his column (December 16), Christopher Booker referred to quotations of mine that he used in his book ‘Scared to Death’. The actual quotations, from what I have said or written, may be accurate but they are taken out of context.  

The Royal Astronomical Society press release, to which Mr Booker referred, said “although greenhouse gases released by burning fossil fuel are almost certainly responsible for the rapid current rate of global warming, there have been many previous episodes of climatic change that cannot be explained by such human activity”, and then went on to quote me directly.  

Those were my views then and those are my views now. I believe that solar variability, along with volcanic eruptions, was important in the past but is now dwarfed by warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.” 

I know who I believe, after following this particular trail. It’s clear from this that Nigel Weiss, through no fault or ambiguity of his own, has repeatedly been used to support ideas he clearly doesn’t believe. How much time, though, can we reasonably be expected to devote to the truth of his position? I would have believed Robin McKie’s review; I would have believed Booker’s feisty comeback, if I hadn’t been curious enough to look up the letter to which he refers. And this stuff matters. Booker writes regularly for a broadsheet newspaper. He is one of the people responsible for the idea that climate change is still debatable, a matter of opinion. 

Last week, Channel 4’s documentary ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ – a programme which by all accounts took a similar line to Booker’s -  was found by regulators to have breached rules on impartiality, and to have misrepresented the views of the government’s former chief scientist. But Ofcom, the media regulator who made the ruling, did not believe, “given the nature of the programme, that this led to the audience being materially misled”. That bland-looking phrase “given the nature of the programme” is curiously significant, however, because Ofcom’s argument went something like this: everyone knows that global warming is happening, and the link between man-made emissions and climate change was formed way before the programme was broadcast.  In other words, “the nature of the programme” was – what? – harmless fun? The ravings of eccentrics?  So nobody could possibly be persuaded by it. But of course that’s precisely the point that the film-makers and people like Christopher Booker are making: everyone knows that global warming is happening because we’re all the victims of a giant conspiracy. And in any case, there is no consensus on climate-change, as far as I can tell. Some people are terrified; some people think it will simply enable the growing of grapes in Manchester; some people think it’s a lot of alarmist liberal hogwash; some people simply don’t give a toss. 

I have chosen – as I believe we all must – someone who can represent me, someone who will do the work for me and present it in a way that I both understand and trust. (This is what politicians are supposed to do, but in the Reagan/George W. Bush era, the meaning of representation changed, from “I trust that guy to speak for me”, to “Hey! That guy’s just like me!”  This alarming development is responsible for a great deal of damage, I fear.)  My representative is Elizabeth Kolbert, whose book ‘Field Notes From A Catastrophe’, based on three articles she wrote for the New Yorker, is calm, authoritative, brilliantly researched and devastating. In a recent article, Kolbert quotes NASA’s chief climate scientist, James Hansen:   

“Twenty years ago, NASA’s chief climate scientist, James Hansen, testified on Capitol Hill about the dangers of global warming. Just a few days ago, Hansen returned to the Hill to testify again. “Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic,” he said. “Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding ninety-nine per cent. The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule.” Hansen went on to warn that there would be no practical way to prevent “disastrous” climate change unless the next President and Congress act quickly to curb emissions.” 

Call me gullible, but I can find no reason to mistrust James Hansen; I don’t know why he would want to lie to us. And he sounds like a worried man.

Once a week, I walk past an Italian restaurant that has a printed sign in the window saying NO CHANGE GIVEN. And then, underneath, in felt-tip pen, one of the staff has added the explanation ‘For Parking Meters’. What I love about it is the argument you can imagine might have preceded the handwritten addition:  

MARCO: I’m telling you, Antonio. That’s what they are thinking. They’re thinking, ‘If I go in there and I want to buy a cappuccino and I only have a twenty-pound note, that cappuccino going to cost me twenty pounds’. 

ANTONIO: You’re crazy. Who would think that? 

MARCO: So why do we have no customers? Come on. It can’t do any harm to explain what we mean.   

I’m not sure Marco is right, though.  Sometimes it pays to be enigmatic. If I ever open a shop, I’m going to put the sign “NO CHANGE GIVEN” in the window, no handwritten explanation, and see what happens.

…It’s not finished, and one of the interesting things for  a writer – for anyone interested in film who doesn’t work in the industry, maybe – is just how unfinished  a film can be, post-production, how many choices are still open to the film-makers. It’s not so different from writing a novel: given endless time (which film-makers, especially on a low-budget production, seldom have), one could draft and redraft. You can make a film longer or shorter, obviously, but you can also make it funnier or sadder, more (or less) dramatic, you can change the tenor of an actor’s performance by judicious choice of takes and shots.  The range of choices still open to us is bewildering, although everyone seems to agree on what still needs to be done, fortunately. We’re probably halfway through this finessing process, and there’s no music yet, but the film-makers felt sufficiently confident in what they have to invite a ‘virgin’ audience yesterday, people literally recruited from the street who had no idea what they were coming to see. 

It felt to me as though it went well – people laughed in the right places, and the friend I went with cried in the right places, too. (Other members of the audience may have cried too, of course, but crying tends to be a quieter activity in the cinema. If you can actually hear people bawling like babies, your film is probably too sad for general consumption.) And I enjoyed it, much more than I thought I would, given one’s natural distaste for one’s own work.  It looks great, and the performances are fantastic.  But four years’ work went by in a flash, or in an hour and forty-five minutes, anyway. Part of me felt as though the audience should experience the same kind of slog as we endured. And though I wouldn’t want people to sit through, say, a four-year long film, it wouldn’t kill them if it lasted twelve hours or so, would it?  Here are two stills from the film, pictures of the extraordinary Carey Mulligan.

…just given up ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading’, my monthly column in The Believer, after five years. The column worked best, I felt, when I’d read three or four books in a month, and pretty much any Dickens novel, apart from Hard Times, my least favourite, takes time. So I’m marking my retirement by re-reading Great Expectations, an experience all the more enjoyable for knowing that I won’t have to write two and a half thousand words about it.

  One of my favourite literary facts is that Dickens is estimated to have created thirteen thousand characters, an astounding number – the population of Ely! – that’s always taken as evidence of his extraordinary energy and indefatigable imagination. Every now and again, though, you start to wonder whether it’s not some form of incontinence.  For example, he introduces fourteen new characters between pages 209 and 214 of my Penguin edition of Great Expectations – fifteen if you count Mrs Pocket’s deceased father, who gets a couple of pages more or less to himself anyway. Do the Pockets have to have seven children? And two nurses? And two lodgers?  And a quirky next-door neighbour? There’s something almost animal about this level of production – this is Dickens as seahorse, popping out tiny creatures apparently uncontrollably, and with very little effort. It’s not his best passage of writing, understandably, those six pages. Maybe someone should have taken him discreetly aside and told him what precautions were available for great novelists.

…I started to write, I had three ambitions. I wanted to be published; I wanted to support myself, and one day my family, through my books; and more than anything I wanted my work somehow to provide the inspiration for a bath or shower product. Sonic Death Monkey is the name of Barry’s band in High Fidelity, but it is also the name of a (frankly peculiar) chocolate shower gel on sale at Lush, and until anyone from Lush tells me otherwise, I am claiming it as the fulfillment of a lifetime’s work – it seems unlikely to me that they hit on the name coincidentally.

If you are a young writer currently trying to whittle your ambitions down to a manageable number, and you’re currently trying to choose between, say, a Best Original Screenplay Oscar and a name on a shower gel, I should warn you there is very little razzmatazz that comes with the latter: you go into a toiletries shop, and there it is. No awards ceremony, no letter, not even a lifetime’s supply of the product that bears your name, or the name of the band that your character plays in, anyway. Not even one free sample-sized bottle. But then, if you’re in the shower-gel naming game for the glory, your motives are all wrong anyway. Knowing I’ve cracked it is all the glory I need.

…I’m on here, but Entertainment Weekly’s “New Classics: the 100 Best Reads from 1983 to 2008″ isn’t such a bad list, honestly.

www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html

 It finds room for Adrian Nicole Blanc’s brilliant Random Family, a book that anyone who lives in a city should read; it recognises that Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, both published in the last couple of years, don’t need to sit around and wait for the praise they deserve. Gilead, Birds of America, The Secret History, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Clockers and Mystic River are all present and correct.

Like any list, though, its omissions are startling, so I have chosen another thirteen that really should have been included. Why thirteen? Because that would be enough to push High Fidelity down to 101, and I can then claim impartiality.

1. The Giant’s House – Elizabeth McCracken
2. The Accidental Tourist – Anne Tyler
3. Empire Falls – Richard Russo
4. This Boy’s Life – Tobias Woolf
5. The Sportswriter – Richard Ford
6. What A Carve-Up! – Jonathan Coe
7. The Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
8. The Blind Side – Michael Lewis
9. Spies – Michael Frayn
10. Feed – MT Anderson
11. The Railway Man – Eric Lomax
12. Revolution In The Head – Ian McDonald
13. The Van -  Roddy Doyle.

I put my friend Roddy Doyle last only because he’d be the one to get the
most pleasure out of shoving me off the bottom – that’s how literary
friendships work.

On further reflection, I now see that these are my thirteen favourite books
of the last twenty-five years. Whoever compiled that list is insane.

Regrettably, these are the truest words ever spoken about the arts.

The Cancellation

On the day of the cancellation
The librarian phoned at two.
My reading at Swillingcote Youth Club
Had regrettably fallen through.

The members of Swillingcote Youth Club
Had just done their GCSEs
And demanded a rave, not poems,
Before they began their degrees.

Since this happened at such short notice
They would still have to pay my fee.
I parked in the nearest lay-by
And let out a loud yippee.

The librarian put the phone down
And muttered, ‘Oh, thank the Lord!’
She was fed up of chaperoning
While the touring poet toured.

The girl from the local bookshop
Who’d been told to provide a stall
But who knew that the youth club members
Would buy no books at all

Expressed with a wild gyration
Her joy at a late reprieve,
And Andy, the youth club leader,
And the youth arts worker, Steve,

Both cheered as one does when granted
The gift of eternal life.
Each felt like God’s chosen person
As he skipped back home to his wife.

It occurred to me some time later
That such bliss, such immense content
Needn’t always be left to fortune,
Could in fact be a planned event.

What ballet or play or reading,
What movie creates a buzz
Or boosts the morale of the nation
As a cancellation does?

No play, is the simple answer.
No film that was ever shown.
I submit that the cancellation
Is an art form all of its own.

To give back to a frantic public
Some hours they were sure they’d lose
Might well be my new vocation.
I anticipate great reviews.

From now on, with verve and gusto,
I’ll agree to a month-long tour.
Call now if you’d like to book me
For three hundred pounds or more.

From Selected Poems by Sophie Hannah (Penguin, £8.99)

… of Borders, they are trying to flog us their e-book reader, the ‘Iliad’, for £399. Meanwhile in the London Evening Standard, David Sexton seems quite taken with Amazon’s version, the Kindle. In my branch of Borders on Monday, the Iliad was piled high on the left, just as you walk in; on the right is their wall of bestselling paperbacks, many of which are being sold at half price. It was a quiet Monday morning, and there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four hundred quid e-book reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either. Attempting to sell people something for four hundred pounds that merely enables them to read something that they won’t buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task. (A member of staff at Borders told me that he attempted to persuade a young and famous comedian to buy an Iliad last week. He seemed interested, until he was told the price, at which point he swore loudly and walked away. So at the moment, they are priced too high for millionaire showbusiness entertainers.)

 There is currently much consternation in the book industry about the future of the conventional book, but my suspicion is that it will prove to be more tenacious than the CD, for the following reasons:

1) Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs. Vinyl yes, CDs no. They are too small for interesting cover art and legible lyrics, the cases break easily, and despite all promises to the contrary, they are extremely easy to break and scratch. Books have remained consistently lovable for several hundred years now. For readers, a wall lined with books is as attractive as any art we could afford to put up there.
2) E-book readers have a couple of disadvantages, when compared to mp3 players.  The first is that, when we bought our iPods, we already owned the music to put on it; none of us own e-books, however. The second is that so far, Apple is uninterested in designing an e-book reader, which means that they don’t look very cool.
3) We don’t buy many books – seven per person per year, a couple of which, we must assume, are presents for other people. Three paperbacks bought in a three-for-two offer – expenditure, fourteen pounds approx – will do most of us for months. The advantages of the Iliad and the Kindle – that you can take vast numbers of books away with you – are of no interest to the average book-buyer.
4) Book-lovers are always late adaptors, and generally suspicious of new technology.
5) The new capabilities of the iPod will make it harder to sell books anyway. How much reading has been done historically, simply because there is no television available on a bus or a train or a sun-lounger? But that’s no longer true. You could watch a whole series of the Sopranos by the pool on your iPod touchscreen, if you want.  Reading is going to take a hit from this.

But – and this is the most depressing reason – the truth is that people don’t like reading books much anyway: a 2004 survey of two thousand adults found that thirty-four per cent didn’t read books at all.  The music industry’s problems are many and profound, but you never see advertisements asking us to listen to more music; there are no pressure groups or government quangos attempting to ensure that we make room in our day for a little Leona Lewis. The problem is getting people to pay for music, not getting people to consume it.  Can you see every teenager in Britain harassing their parents for a Kindle? Me neither.

 I’m not naïve –  I’m sure that in the future we’ll be able to take a pill that saves us the trouble of having to read anything ever, and books will die overnight. But while people are so resistant to the act of reading itself, the four hundred pound reader is not going to be the must-have accessory of the near future.

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