A Novel Idea

John Walsh’s illuminating account of the 1980s British literary scene is this month’s recommended read

In the 1980s, something strange happened to the British literary scene: it became extremely glamorous. Out went the traditional pipe-smoking men of letters, and in came a cool new generation of authors and publishers. Suddenly writers were to be found not only in newspaper books sections, but on the front pages too.

So what brought about this unexpected change? Someone in a good position to know is John Walsh who, as a literary editor, interviewer, critic and—let’s face it—bon viveur, had a ringside seat to the new world of razzamatazz.

In Circus of Dreams, he convincingly argues that there were several factors at work. First, there was the sheer quality of the writers. In 1983, Granta magazine chose its 20 Best Young British Novelists. The list—led off alphabetically by Martin Amis, Pat Barker and Julian Barnes— was full of names still dominant today. Then came the televising of the Booker Prize, which transformed it into a major media event—and in turn meant that serious literature began to attract serious money. For the first time, too, authors became popular live performers, with the rise of in-store readings and, above all, literary festivals.

But this is by no means just a book of literary history, fascinating though much of that is. Walsh also gives us plenty of terrific stories/gossip from those far-off days when newspaper offices were full of typewriter noise and cigarette smoke, and the choice of lunchtime drinks was definitely not restricted to still or sparkling.

In this passage, the changes are just getting under way, thanks to the Booker Prize’s wider public appeal— and to another development that seems obvious now, but that certainly didn’t at the time…

‘‘Hunter

In the Sunday Times [in 1982]

Davies reported excitedly on a new boom: ‘Two years ago, the average publisher in Britain was a deeply pessimistic figure. His sales were slipping, his costs soaring. The bestseller lists were dominated by a dispiriting combination of royalfamily books, “TV tie-in” books, guidebooks… In the fiction market, pulp carried everything before it.

‘Since then, something strange has happened. Four novels, all winners or finalists in the annual Booker

Prize, have sold in such staggering quantities that they have begun to change the whole attitude of British publishers to their trade. The serious novel is back.’ The books in question were Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, William Golding’s Rites of

Passage, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and D M Thomas’s The White Hotel. ‘None is an easy read,’ Davies warned his readers, ‘But they have sold and sold.’ This was a startling development. Not only was the serious British novel having a rebirth; it was, amazingly, a commercial success.

Luckily for British readers, another development now made it possible to access new books in numbers unheard of in the days of WH Smith and John Menzies. The new phenomenon was called Tim Waterstone. In his student years, Waterstone spent hours browsing in Heffers, the ‘anchor bookseller’ of Cambridge. One term-time afternoon, he experienced ‘a stunning moment of sudden, unexpected, joyful clarity’. As a friend walked past, ‘I told him that, one day, I was going to do this, like Heffers but better than Heffers, the best in the land, and all over the land.’

Waterstone had identified a niche in the bookselling market. He had noted how WH Smith, despite its 35 per cent market share, were keener on flogging bestsellers than literary fiction and were pulling back from selling books in general, turning to videos, music, toys, cards and stationery instead.

Waterstone recalls in his memoirs that ‘we all found it inexplicable that a city as great and culturally diverse as London had… no stockholding literary bookshops at all, and certainly not one that was open at the weekend

Circus of Dreams: Adventures in the 1980s Literary World by John Walsh is published by Constable at £25