This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Forty years and more ago, when a job in publishing seemed a slightly less awful prospect than some of the other options available, The Secret Author once attended a careers talk addressed by a representative of one of the big London outfits.
It was a deeply unedifying experience in which that age-old question about the future of the book was turned on its head to yield up a much starker enquiry: did the book even have a future?
An hour later, we all wandered out into the grim Oxford twilight convinced that whilst the survival of English Literature hung by a thread, there might just be employment for one or two of us selling educational textbooks in Nigeria.
All that was back in the early 1980s, when gloom hung over the publishing industry like fog above a Lincolnshire wold. Four decades later, we can congratulate ourselves that the book has survived a great deal better than most of the savants predicted, which is to say that books are still being sold and read and criticised. The rise of online culture has not quite addled the collective consciousness beyond repair — even if most of the nation’s teenagers are apparently unable to function for more than a few moments without their digital toys, and GCSE texts can only be taught in fragments owing to students’ inability to take in more than a page or so at a sitting.
At the same time there are other threats to literary culture beyond the cyber-morons and collapsing attention-spans. One of them is the way in which — sometimes without realising it, at other times with a kind of gleeful deliberation — we go about devaluing what might be called “the idea of the book”.
Before we go any further, it should perhaps be said that a great deal of nonsense is talked about literature and its supposed benefits. The look of starry-eyed romanticism with many a pundit approaches the subject does nothing but harm.
Culture, as the Marxists remind us, is a painfully ordinary affair, and one always suspects that the increasingly devitalised artefact known as the “literary novel” would have much more of an impact on the general public if it weren’t so smitten by the abstract glamour that surrounds literary novels.
On the other hand, many of the routes by which books are brought to potential readers seem almost expressly calculated to deny them any significance and trivialise their worth.
The Secret Author recently spent an instructive few moments eyeing up the roster of guests who helped the radio presenter Sarah Cox steer BBC2’s eight-part Between the Covers home to port.
To be sure, there were one or two bona fide writers of the Richard Osman school, but the vast majority were medium-grade celebrities such as Graham Norton, Stephen Mangan and Adrian Edmondson — clever chaps, but what makes their opinions about books better than yours or mine?
One wouldn’t complain quite so much about this were it not such a flagrant contravention of laws that apply to every other part of the Corporation’s remit.
After all, Strictly Come Dancing is judged by people who know something about dancing; Match of the Day is staffed by retired footballers. For some mysterious reason when it comes to books no expertise is required — a process which, if taken to its logical conclusion, ought to see Sir Kazuo Ishiguro invited to discuss the Spurs–Liverpool game on MOTD. Why isn’t this Nobel Laureate’s take as valid as Alan Shearer’s?
It is the same with the celebrity children’s author, the recent recruitment of Keira Knightley to whose ranks provoked a stream of ridicule. The Secret Author used to be tolerant of the celebrity author phenomenon on the grounds that it produced a revenue stream that irrigated the work of non-celebrities.
Now he has come to the sad conclusion that, no, publishers are not interested in using the profits of My Story by Anne Actress or whatever children’s book to which Ms Knightley will ultimately put her name to underwrite all those promising first novels we used to hear so much about. Rather, they simply want to use them to subsidise a whole lot more celebrity tat.
If Between the Covers and Keira Knightley’s bid for authorship are, in however minor a way, examples of how we devalue the book, then so are the activities of most of the institutions in whose care one had previously thought literature fairly safe.
Alas, they are all to a greater or lesser degree guilty of the cardinal crime of marginalising the book and making it seem trivial and inconsequential.
The Royal Society of Literature, the Bookseller, the Booker Prize, the Arts Council Literature Panel … In fact, practically all the august bodies in whom the Secret Author used to place such trust in his hot youth have let him down. If there is one lesson for us here in 2025, it is that all of them should be stoutly resisted.
