Anarchy in the UK

Spoiler alert! If you don’t want to know who won the 19997 Man-Booker prize for Fiction please look away now. This post will make repeated references to this and its repercussions. For this author.

               Good to get that out of the way. Now we can begin. So my question to you, ladies and gentlemen; have you ever been at an industry conference – World Plastics Now; Badgers Mean Business , The Global Blancmange Council Summit – whatever, and the next speaker comes up to the podium and says ‘ If You Don’t want to know how my lacklustre organisation is struggling to address the challenges of the future please look away now’? No. Me neither. Would liven things up a bit if anyone dared, wouldn’t it? But no, far more likely that they will kick off by praising the previous speaker, and thanking them for their ‘thought-provoking’ presentation which you thought was bad enough and now realise signals a descent into something even more stultifying. Why am I asking? That too will become clear very soon. Please bear with me, or indeed, look away now.

               I had a yearning to write and be a ‘real’ author from I guess just before I turned thirty. It was a by-product of working in advertising, an industry I had joined because I had thought it would be creative, which it was, but it was also, in every sense, an industry. Which meant the creative decisions about campaigns and concepts for clients were committee-led, unless you owned and ran your own agency and you are the committee. Find yourself in a larger agency, a blue-chip marque and you might as well be working in the civil service or something less adrenalized. Everything has to be de-risked and follow process. Got a great idea? Get it signed off by all department heads and then steered through twenty focus groups, then we can talk.

               So I wanted to do something, to create something, where I was only answerable to myself. To write something I found interesting to write in the hope that someone might find it interesting to read. Around the end of 1997, I had finished my whisky-fuelled breakthrough masterpiece, The Pied Piper’s Poison. Three hundred pages of double-spaced manuscript were lugged to the post office and dispatched to London’s finest literary agents – even in an age of email they insisted it be done this way, an obvious backhander from the Royal Mail presumably dictating this. And one day I got a call, I had representation. And then another day my agent got a call, we had a publisher. Harper Collins would pay a sizeable advance and bring it out under their Flamingo imprint. I was to be fast-tracked through their system as a breakthrough author, sent out on a reading tour with another bright hope, set to star in the very book stores where I used to loiter like a wannabe.

               So, the tour began, and I met my fellow headliner. A fine boned Indian woman, older than me, yet bemused by it all. It had taken her fifteen years or more to write her first book and she was upfront with everyone about not having another one in her. Friendly and somehow fragile. I asked her what her’s was about. An exploration of love and its struggle within the suffocating and ultimately deadly mannerisms of the Indian caste system, she replied, and I felt sorry for her. Who on earth would get a rush reading that, the kind of stuff I spent all my time trying to avoid?

               Fast forward to our fourth joint gig. Our nightly crowd had swollen from sixty or so to over four hundred, all but one of them there to hear her. (Thanks Mum!) Her book was called The God of Small Things and it had just won the Man Booker Prize. Now I’ll let you all laugh and enjoy the misplaced arrogance of this author in that moment but please spare a thought for this author’s dilemma in that moment too; you are on a double-headed tour but overnight have become the overwhelmingly lesser support act. The crowds who come clearly see you as nothing more than yet another intermission before the real show begins. What do you do? Sulk, obviously, but that only goes so far.

               The temptation is to surrender with as much dignity and honesty as you can muster. Look, you don’t want me to be here, I don’t want to be here but in order to conform to mannerisms of the literary caste system I will rattle through my reading and fulfil my contractual obligations. Feel free to look away now. I used to torment myself with thoughts of Elvis Presley; on his first tour his manager, the legendary Colonel Tom, would pad out the bill with a host of mediocre acts – an Irish tenor, a juggler, ventriloquist – all there to bore the audience and make Elvis himself look explosive by comparison when he eventually hit the boards. Pitied, but politely heard out.

               Which is where I have to give credit to the observation that is the crux of this piece. You know what I saw on the news last night? a giggling Arundhati Roy, my fellow performer, asked me. They were about to show the football scores but there was highlights show on afterwards, so they said look away if you don’t want to know the scores! Like they would collude in your disbelief until it was more convenient! There is nowhere else on this earth where they would do that, what does it say about the British? She asked the last question giggling, shaking her head, like she wasn’t really looking for an answer. She saw all our post-industrial decline right there and then, and she was shifting 50,000 units a week.

               Me? I began to realise that we had an audience. Well, she had an audience to be exact about it, one that I had access to. Why not give them something to remember me by? Which is why my reading became more and more of a performance, character voices, shouting and pointing and the lot as I experimented with my own limits. Sure, some people must have wondered who this was and what it was he was getting so worked up about but at least they were wondering. And I knew I was going where Arundhiti would never follow, with her thin rasping voice that had the same 400 crouching to hear. I tried to make mine a harder and harder act to follow, to make her regret ever winning the damn prize and having half a million sales. She didn’t actually. She was charm personified and knew exactly what was going on, enjoying the mischief in it. And me? I made it interesting for myself. Which is what I had done writing my book in the first place. So at least somebody got something from the experience.

               Which brings me to the last industry conference I was at, a Utilities conference, a month or so back. Where it was painfully obvious to the fidgeting crowd which presenters inhabited their material, and which ones were in the Look, you don’t want me to be here, I don’t want to be here but in order to conform to mannerisms of the literary caste system I will rattle through my reading and fulfil my contractual obligations mode. Pride of place were those speakers representing Regulators – Ofgem, Ofwat, OfCom, Off-Course – whatever. Speaking like schoolchildren press-ganged into the sixth form debating society to ponder aloud and without enthusiasm some teacher’s old chestnut whim, and without a single visual slide to support them. Hearing themselves plod through the platitudes – We know we can do better and will work in partnership with key stakeholders blah blah blah – in hand wringing, apologetic for something but just can’t quite remember what style. And I find myself thinking, who are these people and who do they think they are pleasing? Why would educated, informed and senior people get up and put their names to this when the only thing going for them is the politeness of the audience, constrained by the deadly mannerisms of the conference caste system from saying what they think of it? And yes, you’ll have guessed that I have contempt, but it’s not for them being there: it’s for not using their intellect and whatever passion it was that took them into their role and their industry to at least make it interesting for themselves. Anyone else feel that or is it just me? Is the mass outbreak of apathy that goes down in these events actually because the boiled sweets in the bowl on every table really are so captivating, so delicious?

               So, in conclusion – you know you seen a truly bad presentation when the speaker says ‘So, in conclusion’ and then offers no conclusion at all, and you realise it’s just a signal that the turn is grinding to a merciful halt; it’s also a giveaway when the presenter say the words with more enthusiasm than they manged for any other previous words – all I would ask any of you reading this is to consider your role in the next conference. If you are intending to speak, make it worth your while. The rest of us will follow you. If you can’t, then invite us to look away, we will be grateful. And you, the audience. You are complicit too. If you are bored say so. Boo and hiss. That’ll liven things up a bit.