The Publisher’s Bad Blurb Prize

The Literary Review makes an annual Bad Sex Award for really, really badly written sex scenes in novels which may have other merits but when it comes to sex, none at all.

They should add a Bad Blurb prize. Bad Blurbs are quotes cut and pasted onto book jackets and sometimes onto front pages which are meant to attract readers to the book but in fact display a certain inappropriateness for the book they supposedly blurb.

Until this week I had only accumulated two examples, books which have been previously reviewed on this Blog:

Novel: Alex Preston In Love and War

Publisher: Faber 2017

Relevant plot summary: Hero dies horribly at hands of Gestapo; heroine dies in Auschwitz

Bad Blurb: selected by the Publisher from GQ magazine which tells us that it’s a book for the beach, “The perfect read to pair with that first sundowner”

 

Comment: Gin and Auschwitz, anyone?

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Novel: Megan Hunter The End We Start From

Publisher:  Pan Macmillan 2018

Relevant Fact: Under 20 000 words, disguised by using wide spacing, sixteen pages of end materials, and thick paper

Bad Blurb: “I read it in one sitting” (a breathless Hannah Kent of Burial Rites fame)

Comment: How could one not?

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But this week I can add a third one:

Novel: Sally Vickers, The Librarian

Publisher: Penguin 2018

Relevant plot summary: Mills & Boon. I gave up at page 155-6 where Doctor finally kisses Nurse, sorry, Librarian, “ ‘ What would you wish for, Sylvia?’ But he had stooped and was gathering her body to his, so she didn’t answer./ “I have wanted to do that since I met you in the foundry”’

Bad Blurb: “Vickers writes of relationships with undaunted clarity” (Adam Phillips, no less, who sold the book to me)

Comment: Phillips was reviewing another book by Vickers, Cousins. But in any case there surely has to be a sotto voce continuation to his phrase: “ undaunted clarity as if Freud, modernism, the War, post-Modernism had never happened”. "Undaunted clarity" from the pen of Adam Phillips  gives the game way. It is something no longer available to us, outside the world of Mills & Boon novels.

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Added 2 August 2020:

I have now discovered a variant on the genre. I just bought a Penguin Modern Classics edition of Nabokov's Ada or Ardor. The spare pages at the end are used to advertise other books by Nabokov. This is how Penguin introduces its edition of Lolita:

"Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Lolita Haze ......"

It continues. [ For those who haven' read the novel, her name is Dolores Haze].

Review: Megan Hunter, The End We Start From

The publicity departments of corporate publishing like to decorate book covers with the Ooohs! and Aahs! of the great and the good, sometimes without much thought about what they say or imply. I drew attention to the dangers in my review of Alex Preston’s In Love and War (reviewed 8 January 2017). Megan Hunter’s book is covered with nine puffs on the outside and twenty four on the inside; among those on the outside, there is this from Hannah Kent (of Burial Rites – reviewed here very favourably on 7 June 2014):

Extraordinary …. I read it in one sitting.

Well, yes, how can one not? This first novel may have been fattened to 128 pages of text and 16 of end materials pages on heavy duty paper, but it is comfortably under 20 000 words long (on page 102, for example, there are just 80 words but I am reckoning an average of 150). The average reader will get through in under two hours, between dinner and bedtime. It is only remarkable to read something at one sitting when it keeps you up past bedtime and even into the small hours. Of course, there are novels which are impossible to read at one sitting, like the one I reviewed yesterday: Jane Eyre is well over 200 000 words long and that is twenty hours plus of reading time.

Nowadays, what with electric light and social media, few people are willing to devote ten or a dozen evenings after work or after the children have gone to bed to read just one novel, but with a book which takes only one evening, I reckon you are in with a better chance. The secret of success is to print the long short story or the novella on thick paper, to give the illusion of substance.

The End We Start From has a stripped-down plot: Woman has Baby (as Private Eye reports when royal babies are born) and at the same time The Great Flood submerges London, forcing mother and baby and car-driving partner to flee north to Scotland. Partner goes missing on the way as civil order breaks down and people start to fight each other lethally for food and accommodation. The Flood subsides, mother and baby return, find partner, and story closes as baby takes his first steps in the brave new post-flood world. I understand it is called cli-fi:  climate fiction but that must be a close call in this case because there is as much here about breast feeding and nappies as about floods.

It is clever and readable with nicely weighed sentences. The author understands that you can leave things to the reader’s imagination since we have all read about flood disasters, about refugees, and about the war of all against all which develops as people struggle for survival. Hunter even dispenses with names for her characters – they just get initials: the baby is Z. You can’t get much more stripped down than that.

Review: Alex Preston, In Love and War

Click on Image to Magnify

The cynicism of the cover drew my attention to this book on the Waterstones table. We have seen this cover before: it normally targets the person walking into W H Smith to buy the Rothermere paper and a bar of Toblerone and who wants the past – not the distant past, but anywhere between the 1930s and the 1950s (before Suez) when England was posh and glorious and Toblerone was a very special treat. It could have been more cynical: the novel features a dog but we are spared Tatters on the cover. Maybe Faber and Faber drew the line; it cannot be very many years ago that they would have committed suicide rather than commit to a cover like this. It's gold-embossed, in case that's not clear from my scan.

All’s fair in publishing nowadays and, indeed, I bought the book. I looked around for the Toblerone but Waterstones doesn’t stock it yet.

I read the novel and felt ambivalent. I don’t often feel ambivalent – the last time was when I read a copper’s autobiography (Clive Driscoll’s The Pursuit of the Truth) and felt I was being led by an unreliable narrator. With this novel, the cover had primed me to look for cynicism and it is there all over the text if you want to find it, the tropes we are familiar with wheeled on to the page one after another: posh country house England, young chap up at Cambridge, ambivalent sexuality, unwise flirtations with fascism, the woman who reminds him what decency is. For the first hundred pages I was inclined to give up. It all seemed lifeless, the prose even or flat, no anguish and remarkably untroubled passion which I suppose goes with the privilege of being posh. When Preston kills off his first heroine Fiamma at page 110, it doesn’t matter very much.

The novel then becomes more stylistically inventive and gets better but there are relapses. Thus Preston’s leading man, Esmond, recording privately on disc for posterity after the outbreak of War finds a new love and delivers himself of the following thoughts:

If it strikes you as strange, after Philip, after Gerald, that I should love Ada, it shouldn’t. It is not only that Fiamma, dear dead Fiamma, served as a copula, a springboard, a bridge. I have always loved beauty and the gender of those I love matters to me as little as their shoe size. It seems odd to me that so many humans limit themselves, slavishly. For now, it is Ada. (page 201)

It’s true that Esmond does grow up a lot after recording this drivel, but what he records does rather suggest he has done a tick-box degree in Queer Studies where you learn that sex is not acceptable in polite society and must be replaced by gender. But this point of social etiquette dates from the 1980s not the 1930s.  I now felt sorry for Fiamma.

By page 241 Esmond is reading The Communist Manifesto but by this point the dog has entered the story so the reader can feel Esmond must be on the right path notwithstanding. Dogs enter novels at the author’s peril. Milan Kundera does it extremely well in The Unbearable Lightness of Being so it can’t be absolutely wrong. 

Thanks to his new love, Ada, Esmond finds himself a fighter in the Italian Resistance and it is the exploits of the resistance which make up much of the text in the latter part of the book.

I made it to the end (page 340) by which time Esmond is horribly but courageously dead and Ada in Auschwitz. I didn’t shed any tears and that may explain why one of the jacket reviews, quoted from GQ, tells us that it’s a book for the beach, “The perfect read to pair with that first sundowner”.  Those who signed off the cover at Faber and Faber presumably had no qualms about that product endorsement. Gin and Auschwitz, anyone?

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The late Stuart Hood’s Pebbles From My Skull, later reworked as Carlino, is an impressive  memoir of escape from a Prisoner of War camp and a year spent in the Italian Resistance in Tuscany. This seems a good place to recommend it. Hood (1915 – 2011) was what used to be called “a man of the Left” but in the 1940s he was a British military intelligence officer - though one should say, British as in Scottish. Sometime in the 1980s, I discovered he lived in Brighton and got him appointed as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sussex to contribute to the MA programme I directed. The University was too stupid to recognise his many distinctions and  refused to give him an honorary doctorate for his lifetime work, preferring local notables. Hood’s wartime experience was clearly an ever-present fact of his life, not only in the form of reunions with old comrades (a Piazza is named after him somewhere in Tuscany) but also in doubts and anxieties. I recall walking across the Sussex campus one evening and asking him if his experience still affected his everyday, ordinary life. Yes, he replied, in the evenings I get anxious about where I am going to sleep – his own house and home a couple of miles from where we were walking.