Circus Of Dreams: Adventures In The 1980s Literary World

John Walsh Constable €35 ★★★★★

For two weeks in 1971, an air of ‘skittish playfulness’ hung over London’s Bloomsbury district thanks to an event calling itself the Bedford Square Book Bang. Along with a marquee selling books, a poets’ corner and a cookery tent whose attractions included a young Mary Berry, it offered a programme of debates and readings with authors from Alan Sillitoe to Barbara Cartland.

The Book Bang made a deep impression on 17-year-old Londoner

John Walsh, and would help steer him into a career in literary journalism. Looking back half a century later, he asserts that it also marked a sea change, luring writers out from behind their desks to mingle with fans.

By the time Walsh had graduated from Oxford and started work at the publishing house Victor Gollancz, a book renaissance had begun. The 1980s were to become a golden age – not just of what was written but how it reached its audience.

As publishing went from being a gentleman’s occupation fuelled by clubland lunches to an industry noted for whopping advances, Gatsby-esque launches and televised awards ceremonies, it inspired boozy bad behaviour and hot gossip.

Walsh himself never could resist a party, and he isn’t coy about relating some saucy shenanigans involving everyone from Nigella Lawson and Princess Margaret to Rupert Murdoch, Tina Brown and Sue Townsend parade across these pages to varying degrees of eyebrow-raising effect.

Determined to become a literary editor on a national newspaper by the time he turned 35, Walsh was cautioned to keep his boyish enthusiasm in check.

It’s advice he continues to ignore, with gleefully prose exclamations here such as ‘Hooray’ and ‘Whew!’ He’s also an irrepressible caricaturist. The late agent Pat Kavanagh was a ‘regal dominatrix’, Jilly Cooper (above) ‘an 18-carat gossip’.

And yet, threaded through these irresistibly louche vignettes is a seam of serious lit crit.

Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Rose Tremain, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie and Pat Barker – a glut of talented new writers, and Walsh casts a shrewd eye over their careers, as well as his hero Martin Amis.

Towards the end, engaged nostalgia gives way to faint melancholy. The lionisation of Mayo writer Sally Rooney, whose Normal People Walsh finds ‘a blandly written, linguistically unadventurous, Young Adult novel of schoolgirl romance’, sums up for him today’s bleak publishing landscape.

Newspapers were once fond of asking a writer to review their own book.

How would Walsh review his own? He might plump for a characteristic, and not inappropriate, ‘Gosh!’

SEES SALLY ROONEY’S NORMAL PEOPLE AS A BLANDLY WRITTEN ROMANCE