Ithaca (23 page)
“Did you know,” Arthur is whining, “one publisher said of
Lolita
, ‘I recommend it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.’ ”
There are a number of obvious things he could say to this. First, Arthur Blayney is
not
Vladimir Nabokov. Second, there are other equally impressive stories of publishers’ idiocy – Stephen King, John le Carré, John Grisham, J.K. Rowling, Anaïs Nin, Joseph Heller were all rejected by publishers at the beginning of their careers – but it doesn’t prove a thing beyond the fact that in a notoriously subjective and inexact business mistakes will sometimes be made. Third, for every story of ignorance and bad taste there are hundreds of thousands of stories of writers who might have remained unsung if they hadn’t been published with diligence, devotion, and vision.
He chooses to say nothing, because to say anything would be to prolong the conversation. He manages to slip away eventually when Apoorva turns up at his table, even though he knows that upon his return to London he will be inundated by self-pitying e-mails and Facebook posts. Arthur’s problem, not mine, he thinks.
As this is Apoorva’s first fair he has promised to take some time off to walk around Halle 8 with her, give her a feel for the place, introduce her to people she might find useful. Not that he thinks his support is critical; he has caught a glimpse of her from time to time passionately espousing the cause of her launch list to the people she is meeting with and is impressed by how confident she seems. As they walk along, peering into stalls, stopping for impromptu meetings with friends and colleagues in the hallways, he thinks that this Wordsworthian ramble through the publishing countryside, where every form of creativity is on display, from the striking photo books of Taschen and Thames & Hudson to the latest offering from hallowed imprints like Faber and Knopf, is the part of the Frankfurt experience he likes the best. If you’re a publishing professional, no matter how tedious the business of selling and buying rights can be, you cannot fail to be energized by the power of the industry you are part of at a place like Frankfurt – if the book is dead, if publishers are history, you wouldn’t know it here. Everywhere you look there are dozens of publishing people, Poles, Australians, Egyptians, Indians, Canadians, Japanese, and other nationalities that he can’t even begin to guess at, all with one goal: the dissemination of books and literature. What other business can even begin to compare with publishing, its richness, its variety, and its place at the very core of humanity’s cultural soul.
Only the previous week he had spent an exceedingly drunken evening with one of his novelists who had been shortlisted for a minor award. At one point, tears leaking from his eyes, Charlie had leaned over and said to Zach how
fortunate he felt to be a novelist, the most recent in a long line of writers dating back to Shakespeare and even further beyond to when the first stories were told, each generation handing down its custodianship of the story to the next generation. As he thinks about his meeting with Charlie, in the middle of the organized chaos that is Frankfurt, Zach has an epiphany. He sees a river of stories, its headwaters stretching all the way to a time before time, to the beginnings of the human race when the first stories were told to a small band of listeners. Over the ages the river swelled and split off into hundreds and thousands of tributaries, and as it did so there came into being a group of people who were charged with channelling the flow to readers, removing obstructions, plugging leaks, filtering out impurities. And in the future, as the Internet really comes into its own, into being the ocean into which all these rivers would eventually flow, the need for publishers to regulate the dispersal of humanity’s stories to readers would only grow.
He has read somewhere that it is estimated that something like 146 million books have been published since records started being kept, and every year a couple of million more are added. If you added in all the people who write in the online space, the ocean of stories would become a tidal wave, a tsunami that would drown its intended audience without dedicated publishing professionals to tame it, make sure it got to consumers in a way that best suited them. He recalls the argument he got into with that obnoxious professor in Delhi (so much has happened since that encounter that it seems a very long time ago, although barely three months have passed). He thinks, as he did back then, that Malik had
got it wrong. Zach has no doubt that as time goes by the boundaries will become blurred, with retailers, agents, publishers, all those who purvey the work of those who create it, evolving into different versions of themselves but there will still be a role for them.
Just then they run into the Archangel Gabriel. Eight feet tall, with golden wings, and balls of fire shooting from his hands, he looks spectacular. There are three other archangels wandering around the fair. The walkabout signals the beginning of an ambitious marketing campaign for
Storm of Angels
that will cover every possible marketing channel – print, television, online, digital downloads, movie screens, outdoor, transit, video streaming and bundling, in addition to bookstore promotions. The “Reach Out and Touch an Angel” campaign will revolve around the four archangels (in keeping with the book’s premise, God will be known only by his absence until the moment of revelation). And here is where it has all begun, with these four stilt walkers from a circus in Hamburg, covered in non-toxic gold, silver, bronze, and emerald body paint, handing out goody bags containing an
Angels
T-shirt, a halo, a sample chapter, and for twenty-five lucky customers a day a Kindle loaded with the first five sections of the twenty-five-section tome. He watches Gabriel make his stately way down the aisle, then catches sight of his watch, bids Apoorva goodbye, takes a quick bathroom break – to his good fortune the queues aren’t long – and heads for his appointment with Julia at the agents centre in Halle 6.
The Literary Agents and Scouts Centre has the best security of the fair. Uniformed guards ask Zach to show his ID and to state his business, with precise details as to with whom he has an appointment. Needy authors like Arthur Blayney do not stand a chance of gaining admittance. These days it is inordinately difficult to secure a good agent; you can always self-publish, but as publishers cut back on their lists, the only way to secure a triple-A publisher is to find yourself an agent who can deliver the sale.
The centre is a vast barnlike space with tables arranged in horizontal rows. There are no walled-off cubicles or stalls as in the publishers’ halls, and every agent can look around and see which of her colleagues is having a successful fair and how she stacks up against the rest. He is early for his meeting with Julia and when he sees she is deep in conversation with two serious-faced Dutch publishers – he knows them slightly – he goes for a stroll around the place, reading the names of the agents on the signs that mark each row. The established ones are predictably enough very busy but he can see more than a few with nothing to do, gazing out into space, either eating something (at Frankfurt everyone is eating or drinking all the time) or falling back on that old staple, reading a book. He wonders how many of the smaller agents will be back next year – the hotels are scandalously overpriced and if you add up the cost of the flights, rentals, and the like, along with dwindling advances, the Cassandras are probably right: the best days of Frankfurt, London, the BEA in New York, and every other rights fair, big and small, may well be over. He remembers a time when on the eve of
Frankfurt every agent would flood publishers with their best submissions of the year, hoping enough would bite so that a heated auction could take place, with the winner more often than not paying seven or eight times what the book was worth. Those days are over, but he wouldn’t write Frankfurt off just yet. This year the digital revolution is the focus of the fair and its leading proponents have gathered here, a sign that the fair, which is as old as Gutenberg and has insouciantly negotiated every convulsion in the publishing business, will probably figure out a way to ride the digital wave successfully as well.
He sees the Dutch publishers with Julia rising from their seats, kissing her cheeks one-two-three times, and leaving. She glances around, waves him over. She looks impossibly fresh in a dress that is both light and formal, and he thinks the same thing he thinks every time he sees her after an absence – there is nothing he wouldn’t do to win her back.
He has already taken the first major step in that direction at some cost to himself. After his return from Toronto he had finally managed to summon up the resolve to break up with Mandy. Over pizzas at an Italian restaurant, he had said his piece without equivocating as he had in the past, and he was grateful she had absorbed the news without throwing a tantrum. They had parted civilly enough and he had felt a great sense of relief not unmixed with guilt as she walked towards her Tube station. Within a week she revealed an unexpected
side to her personality; he discovered that she had managed to hack into his computer and send a message full of squalid fabrications about him to everyone on his Contacts list. She had followed that up with phone calls to anyone who was willing to listen to her stories about his unconscionable behaviour. He had never given the relationship a chance, but this was contemptible. He had been surprised by the calm manner in which she had received his announcement that it was over, and although he had been preparing himself for the possibility that she might lash out at him, he was blindsided by the dishonesty and malevolence of her reaction. Although Julia was upset on his behalf, she had counselled restraint, as had most of his close friends. A few had suggested he retaliate in kind, but after giving the matter sufficient thought he had decided it would be beneath him to do so; the best course was to put as much distance as he could between himself and the drama that was being enacted.
As the weeks passed Julia’s attitude towards him began to soften perceptibly. She still refused to move in with him, but when he had proposed that at some point in the future, Christmas maybe, she might consider doing so, she had said she would think about it seriously.
