Time for literary MySpace

“In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends,” wrote FR Leavis in his 1930 pamphlet Mass Civilisation And Minority Culture.

Leavis argues that in order to make good cultural choices, you have to be able to appreciate Shakespeare, Milton and Baudelaire. Heaven knows what he would have made of POD, publishing on demand, which looks like creating the literary equivalent of MySpace.

Sadly, since he has been dead for 30 years, there is no way of knowing. But I like to think that he might look on the bright side. Book publishing and selling in this country is in a parlous state; on my way through Borders on Oxford Street the other day, I noticed more magazines, cards, computer programs and board games than actual tomes. Vast and brightly lit, the place has an inherently stressful feel to it, like a supermarket. But then, I only went in for a frappuccino. To find interesting or unusual books, things I’ll actually read and think about, I invariably head for the likes of Oxfam Books, where the books feel read and loved, unlike so many pristine copies of Jordan’s latest autobiography in Borders.

To find new authors, though, is more difficult. With large publishers nowadays employing market analysts more than Milton enthusiasts, writers are most likely to get a book deal if they’re famous or have some sort of tale of personal trauma to reveal. It’s not that publishing houses don’t take any risks, but unless they have confidence in your name, face or idea having mass-market appeal, you will find it difficult to get a manuscript past them.

As a result, new writers, as musicians like the Arctic Monkeys have done, are looking into how the internet can help them. MySpace has benefited music buyers massively – we now rely less on radio stations or music magazines to tell us what to listen to, and more on what our ears tell us. Production has become less generic, the market has become more diverse, and – crucially – the cost of music has dropped like a stone.

Literature, in its turn, can only stand to gain from a new trend for self-publishing, with writers selling their own books on Amazon, or via their own websites using POD, where manuscripts can literally be printed copy by copy, as required.

One self-published book that I came across a few years ago seems particularly relevant to this – but then The Loom, by William J Clough, is one of those books that you never quite get out of your head.

Focusing on Mr Johnson, a naïve graduate on his first day in a new job, it takes us on an enticing journey through the layers of a large corporation. As Mr Johnson tours the the labyrinthine building’s different departments, struggling to find his place in the company, the story gets more and more surreal – his induction takes days, and no one seems to leave the building to sleep. While searching for the mysterious “Golden Clock”, he comes across one office with no discernible purpose apart from filling up sheets of paper; its workers are making regular sacrifices of food and consumer goods to the feared “systems manager”.

What’s so compelling about The Loom is that while the story is strange and confusing, its characters are not unfamiliar from real workplaces. Phrases like “conceptual initialisation” and “the strategic development cross-functional area” are apparently meaningless, but they have the quality of business language. Mr Johnson is looking for meaning in a company which doesn’t make sense.

But then, people do define themselves by their jobs. Mr Johnson, the earnest young man trying to ingest his company’s philosophy and business model is as tragic in his own way as the old man whose colleagues want him to make way for new blood, but who continues to turn up although he is effectively redundant. (There is a character like this hanging around the coffee machine in The Loom).

If you wanted to put Paul Knight’s A Trail Of Burnt Paper into a shareholder-pleasing box, you might compare it to Japanese (and later Hollywood) horror film The Ring.

Thomas Gloucester and Phillip Bishop have died, and so has the policeman sent to investigate their deaths. The story is told through fragments of Bishop’s diary, interspersed with narrative from different places in time (New York in 1926, Damascus in 738AD, East Anglia today), all linked by the same sinister book.

The writing can be savage, brutal at times; at others, it is controlled and delicate. It hasn’t been edited into a neater style or more conventional structure, but that is part of its beauty.

In a digital ‘two-fingered salute’ to Leavis, both authors are making their work available online. The Loom is available on Amazon, and A Trail Of Burnt Paper is out on October via Forbidden Books. I commend both to you. But not on the basis that I can read and understand Shakespeare, Donne and so on – just because I liked them. Therefore even more strongly, I urge you to leave the coffee and board games to Borders, and go looking for your new reading material online. Sorry, FR, but we’re ready to make up our own minds.