Ithaca (29 page)

The ten people in the audience who are paying attention, Zach among them, look to where he is pointing. Nobody answers, and Zach feels the tension building within the pit of his stomach, the same sensation that he had felt all those many years ago when he was preparing to answer the question another keynote speaker had put to a class of publishing wannabes.

“Nobody?” Hellman asks.

“Nataraja,” Zach says.

“Exactly right,” Hellman says, “Now who was that?”

Zach raises his hand.

“Could you stand up, please?”

He does so. Reluctantly. He sees Mortimer looking at him and gives him a weak smile.

“And what do you know about Nataraja, my friend?”

“He is an avatar of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.”

“And creation,” Hellman says, motioning for Zach to take his seat. “In the great Hindu trinity, Shiva is the god of both destruction and creation. This image was created about a dozen centuries ago, and it is the perfect metaphor for all of you who are involved in the creative industries. In it, Lasya (creation) and Tandava (destruction) are held in perfect balance. As Shiva dances, old worlds collapse under his thundering feet, to be replaced instantaneously by new worlds. The mantra that a lot of companies are muttering to themselves today as they try to reinvent themselves to cope with a rapidly changing world is ‘Creative Disruption.’ That is what the Dance of Shiva symbolizes, that is what creative disruption means: break everything you know and reassemble it in new and unheard-of ways. That is the future of the book, my friends, and it is incredibly exciting.”

Hellman takes them on a swift journey through all the relevant developments taking place in the digital world, then predicts that in five or ten years these developments will be seen as the first stuttering steps taken in a transformation that will be more wide-ranging than anyone today can foresee. But he says this should not worry them because the future is there to be grasped by those who have the vision and the courage to do so. “For two hundred years, the
reading of books, the telling of stories has been a largely passive experience, but as the wheel turns it is being returned to what it once was, a lively, enriched, layered experience in which the soul of a culture resides. The future is not something you should be afraid of. Just as Shiva destroys the old and brings forth the new, so will the world of books and publishing rise, and rise again in fresh and exciting ways.” He bows to the assembled crowd, holds his interlocked hands up, and says by way of parting, “Range far and wide, mash it all up, the future has never been as exciting.”

As Hellman returns to his seat, Zach glances across at Mortimer. The president’s face is alive with excitement. Zach thinks about his rousing speech, his obvious determination to make Globish a leading player in the digital age and feels that being part of Mortimer’s company might not be such a bad thing at all, Gabrijela’s reservations notwithstanding.

T
he old men stagger wearily out of the coffee-coloured ocean and head for their burrows, shaking the moisture from their bedraggled waistcoats. They are about a foot tall and look grumpy. No wonder, Zach thinks, he has never been as cold and miserable in his life and he is just visiting. He and a bunch of other tourists have waited for over an hour in driving rain to watch the parade of fairy penguins on Phillip Island. Their guide explains their mating and nesting habits, and then as quickly as it has begun the show closes and they take the van back to their hotel in Melbourne.

On the long drive back, as the chill gradually leaves his bones in the heated interior, his mind lazily drifts over the events of the last six months. The highlight, without a doubt, was the day Julia invited him to her parents’ home in Surrey for Christmas lunch. He had taken the train on a clear, crisp morning and had been met at the station by her father. He had always got on well with his parents-in-law, and with
Julia’s younger sister, Natalie, and the family had seemed to view the first slow steps towards a rapprochement positively. After lunch, where he had eaten and drunk too much, Julia and he had taken the family’s Labradors, the black one named Troilus and the golden one named Cressida, for a walk. He has always liked the English countryside – its domesticated palette of colours, the orderly hedgerows, the disciplined tweeting of birds – and on this afternoon it was at its glorious best. Julia was chattering about the abrupt exit of a well-known publisher. “His farewell party was like something out of
The Tudors,”
she had said, while struggling to control Cressida. She had finally let the Lab off the leash, and it had bounded ahead, farther into the woodland where they were walking.
This is what makes me happy
, he had thought – the woman I love beside me, talking of everyday things! Before he had left to catch his train, he had asked her when exactly she was intending to move back in with him, and to his great relief she had replied that she was all packed and ready and would return to their Kensington flat before the year was out.

She would have loved the fairy penguins, he thinks. It is unfortunate she couldn’t make the trip, but she had to spend time with her mother, who was in hospital. He is in Australia for the Sydney Writers’ Festival; before he gets to Sydney he has taken a couple of days off in Melbourne to visit friends and, naturally, along with koalas, cockatoos, and kangaroos, he has been told to take in the little penguins.

He laughs as he thinks about his initial impression of the city; after he had passed through the sprays and sniffer dogs with which the island nation tried to keep out unwelcome
imports, he had spent a few hours worrying about unexpectedly encountering some of the world’s deadliest snakes, most of which (somehow this was what bothered him the most) had astonishingly innocuous names – brown snake, fierce snake, tiger snake and so on – it was almost as though the Aussies were so tough that they couldn’t be bothered to give their venomous cohabitants scary names. His nervousness had gradually dissipated – after all he was born in the land of the king cobra and the krait. Once he discovered that Gorgon’s knots of writhing reptiles that could kill you in the blink of an eye weren’t suspended from every street lamp, he had given himself over to enjoying the city and its friendly people.

A couple of days later he is in Sydney where he has been invited to participate in a panel discussion on the editor’s changing role in publishing, and to give a talk on the life of Massimo Seppi and the five great Angels books.

A week before he arrived in Australia,
Storm of Angels
had been published and predictably shot to the top of the bestseller lists on the day it was launched. The inconvenience of a volcanic eruption in Iceland had delayed the launch slightly from April to the second of May, but nothing could dim the euphoria over the publication of Litmus’s biggest book of the year, although the general feeling of well-being was soon tempered by everybody’s sadness over Gabrijela’s departure a day after the launch and their move to Globish’s London headquarters. As the senior surviving member of staff, Zach had done his best to lift people’s spirits. The main thing was that they were all still together, he’d said, and the four people who had quit notwithstanding, that was indeed the case.
Mortimer had agreed to dedicate Litmus’s existing sales and marketing staff to Litmus’s books, and although three people in accounting and admin were absorbed into the Globish back office, by the end of the first week of the merger people had begun to relax and take an interest in their work again.

He saw very little of Mortimer after the launch, as he visited London only once a quarter, and he found working with Hayley, his new boss, uncomplicated.

We never know what it is about the world’s most iconic objects that make them real to us, helps us make them our own. He remembers that when he first saw the Taj Mahal it wasn’t its slender minarets outlined against the sky, or its perfect symmetry, that grabbed hold of him; its beauty made a real impact only when the guide who was taking them around shone a torch on the marble, and revealed the translucence of the stone and the delicacy of the gems embedded in it. From within the stone, the gorgeous workmanship spoke to him, and the Taj Mahal was no longer a clichéd abstraction, a commonplace image, but something that he would carry within him forever. In similar fashion, the soaring petals of the Sydney Opera House, resplendent under clear blue skies on a crisp winter’s day, would have remained just another picture-postcard image if it wasn’t for the opening ceremony of the festival that took place in the enormous main hall of the building.

In an inspired move, the festival’s organizers had invited an Aborigine elder to give them permission to hold the festival
on his people’s ancestral ground, and bless the activity that was about to take place. The man had cut a rather unimpressive figure as he approached the microphone, but as he launched into the welcome ceremony his whole aspect had changed. His ancestors had sung this land into existence and on this evening their whispering spirits filled the building for just a moment, hallowing it.

The next day, at the editors’ session, the room is filled with aspiring writers who are hoping the panel will impart to them the magic formula that will make them famous published writers. They have no formula, magic or otherwise, to give the aspirants but they do their best, relaying whatever wisdom they have – about the craft of writing maybe, but not the art. He reminds one persistent woman about Saul Bellow’s observation that he didn’t probe too much into where his art sprang from, that he left it well alone. He tells her she should read, read, and then read some more, strategically and intelligently; there was no writer, alive or dead, who hadn’t benefited from a careful reading of the greatest writers in whichever genre they were working in. But it is in the nature of this particular aspirant to question and question, to seek concrete suggestions on how it is done. He has nothing to give her beyond standard tips on pacing, characterization, plotting, POV, and the like, stuff that can be got for nothing online or for a few dollars in any of the dozens of books and writing programs that claim to be able to teach writing, and she sits down frustrated and angry. The panellist next to him, who works for one of the big Australian independents, leans across and whispers in his ear, “We get her
every year; she has been coming here for at least five years, with nothing to show for it. She seems to hold it against us that she hasn’t been able to publish anything.”

The Q and A that ends the discussion is uneventful except towards the very end, when he finds himself defending the global publishing corporations because he is the only one on the panel who works for one. This is a novel experience for him but the defence is easy to mount. He points out that the Big Seven corporations between them publish more first novelists than most of the other houses put together, they keep the careers of thousands of midlist writers alive, and if it weren’t for them the book trade would be severely diminished. He accepts that the big players might not be as responsive to the needs of every writer as some of the indies but as demerits go that was a small one.

He has a couple of hours to himself after the sessions end and decides to go for a walk, he would like to track down some opal earrings for Julia. It is her birthday next month and he has always liked giving her jewellery. Up a steep sloping street he finds a cluster of opal emporia, and selecting the one that looks the most promising he goes in. He often thinks he might easily qualify for the title of world’s worst shopper, but he has found that because his incompetence is so manifest sales people tend to take pity on him and help him out. A friendly middle-aged saleswoman, noticing the utterly helpless look on his face as he regards display case upon display case stacked with opals, takes him in hand, tells him how to choose opals, ascertains his budget, finds out who the gift is for, and then starts pulling out stones to show
him. He finds one stone in particular completely spectacular, a gem-quality Lightning Ridge black opal with a harlequin pattern – reds, violets, purples, greens, and blues pocking a deep midnight-blue background – a stone that might have surfaced from the imagination of some demented disciple of Seurat who had decided to shoot bullets of colour into the night sky. It would look perfect on Julia, he thinks. But the stone is several thousand dollars over his budget so he settles for a pair of earrings that has green lightning flashes and bands against blue. After buying the opals he walks around downtown for a while, then goes back to the festival hotel for a quick nap before the evening program begins.

He wakes up refreshed, and after a quick shower joins one of his fellow panellists in the bar downstairs. He finds the stories his drinking companion has to tell about his nation’s publishing environment fascinating. For a small country Australia has several world-class publishers, ranging from independents like Text Publishing and Allen & Unwin to the outposts of the Big Seven, but here, like everywhere else, things are getting tougher and the publishing community is nervous about what the future might hold.