The Good News or the Bad?

The news is that the number of independent bookshops went up last year, in 2018 by fifteen and in 2017 by one. That’s the good news, though the recovery is not spectacular. The bad news is that in 1995 there were 1,849 of them and in 2016 there were only 867. Is this “bottoming out” or the tanker slowly turning round and is the growth in the indies going to accelerate over the next decade back to previous levels – and beyond?

That’s not a question I can even speculate on, but what I can say is that independent bookshops are not mere shops, but places that have a key societal role. As with most people working in the book business, booksellers work with a passion and usually for little financial reward. Independent bookshops are places of expertise and can be places where things happen beyond the core activity of presenting good books to the public to be browsed and chosen from in a way that the unfiltered offer of everything on the web cannot do.

The independents are not alone of course, and chains like Waterstones and Blackwell provide a bastion against Amazon and the monopolisation of the book retail industry (with less that 900 indies, many areas have no bookshops, so the Wordery is a good choice if you want to support an online business that supports publishers and writers).

So that’s the statistics: there’s a glint of hope but we’re not that much the wiser. And here comes the main point of this newsletter, based on absolutely no hard evidence at all, as though I had gone out the front door and sniffed the air to arrive at my opinion. I live in Glasgow near a busy road so inhaling has its hazards; on the other hand, Glaswegians exhale wonderfully, generating a good deal of chatter and skilfully delivered sarcasm.

Could it be, I ask myself, that all this misery and anxiety in the world will increase our reliance on books (I won’t list the examples of said misery, because we all know them though we may perceive them differently, given the high levels of propaganda particularly in the West)? There should be more reliance on books for escapism of course, and why not? But also books that ask hard questions and sometimes answer them at least partially. Books that are important not only in themselves, but also as part of an even more important wider debate. We only have to remember Edmund Burke’s Reflections of the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine’s riposte, The Rights of Man: whichever of those two books you find more genial, they are part of an ongoing and perhaps irresolvable discussion, and are as intimately linked to each other as they are polar opposites.

What am I suggesting? Well, many things really, not all of which I have fully worked out myself. Above all we need to be more thoughtful in a world that is driven by an economic system out of control, and what little control there is is in the hands of a plutocracy signally incapable of any strategic thinking because it lives entirely in the moment – in the nanosecond, to be precise. It lives by the sensitivity of a neurotic, computerised market, and the market and its sensitivities are more important than the human outcomes, let alone the outcomes for other species and the planet. Being angry is not enough and despair achieves nothing except our own neurosis. Artistic activities and in particular reading are the route towards an informed and effective population that could restore the demos to democracy. We need harsh polemic, because there’s good cause for outrage, but when it comes to solutions we also need more open texts, and nothing is more open than a great novel, which is an array of voices, many of which are contradictory. A novel can contain both Paine and Burke, and Pain and Burke themselves and all the many others are a huge, centuries-long novel. History is a novel written by the craziest and cruellest of writers – a novel in which the well-meaning nearly always fail, but never fail totally. That’s the fading ray of hope we need to cling to.

So I feel that there will be good news for the publishing industry – and this is not a matter of money but of quality. Of course greater profits mean that publishers will be less risk averse; money and art are not mutually exclusive, never have been, but money often ignores art or the best art. I feel that we will be wiser because, as Machiavelli said, “People learn from evil and surfeit on good.” Or in other words, times of plenty make us stupid and egotistical, and times of want, danger and oppression make us cleverer and more altruistic. We will go with the grain of literature and our greatest humanistic writers, of whom the great Russian dyad, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, immediately spring to mind. We will understand, because they are more relevant as will be more recent writers and the new ones who will appear. That’s the good news.

The bad news arises from the obvious question, “Will this be enough?” Our times resemble the thirties, and dark xenophobic and profoundly dishonest forces are at play. The powers that be are more powerful, more intrusive and have surveillance techniques that Stasi could only have dreamt of. Our societies are fragmented, and working-class institutions have been either destroyed or hollowed out. We are, Neil Postman said long ago before the time of computer games and the internet, entertaining ourselves to death; we barely have time either for novels or for the “public thing”. And in the end, the horrors of the thirties were reversed by war, and for a while it was a close-run thing. The talented and often underrated Austrian author, Stefan Zweig, committed suicide because he had decided that European civilisation was at an end. Perhaps his nightmare was only postponed.

I may be wrong in thinking that a bookish society is a better society. Perhaps my belief is an act of faith, and no doubt many will object. Certainly bookishness shouldn’t be elitist, but equally it should not dumb down. The twentieth century was the century of literary obscurantism on one side and “populist” literature that was little more than a soporific on the other. Let’s hope that the twenty-first century will produce a literature that is challenging and thought-provoking but also accessible and relevant to the lives of the many.

by Allan Cameron