I’m reading another book I don’t like. It’s something I do; it annoys the Man, he can’t understand why, when we’ve got so much high quality literature at our fingertips, I would deliberately choose to plough my way through something that makes me visibly angry. But a part of me likes the sensation; I’m an arguer, and a reader, and if I can combine the two, I see it as an effective use of time.

So this time it’s Saturday by Ian McEwan. The critically acclaimed account of a wanky neurosurgeon in the throes of some sort of middle-class crisis. The objection I have is simple enough: that the book makes me feel stifled, that Perowne, the protagonist, and his lawyer wife, his successful poet daughter, his groovy blues-playing rebel son, are suffocating in their perfection, their carefully measured angst. They slouch through their expensive London house like a parody of the perfectly imperfect family, just off-beat enough. It makes a fallacy of the ordinary struggles of everyday life. These people, they don’t struggle. They glide. Everything has propelled them toward this life, towards the ownership of modestly luxurious things, towards the London life, the clean, comfortable London life. Not a manor house, or a vintage car, or even an esoteric loft apartment, but the old house that overlooks a tree-lined square. It’s all so ordinary, so alarmingly propagandistic–this is what happy people look like, this is what ordinary, talented, beautiful people do. They flirt with unhappiness, but it’s never a personal unhappiness. They gaze out windows and consider the state of the world with the same glib resignation that most of us reserve for a consideration of our outdated hairstyles or strained bank balances. It’s as if all the life has been sucked from them, replaced by a distinctly urbane imitation of the stuff.

So why read it? Because after all that, I’m impressed with the language. The precision of it. A quasi-imitation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway suits McEwan’s ability to describe a thing–a feeling, usually–specifically. Each moment of Perowne’s morning is outlined, amplified, enhanced by the way it is written. A dull man’s dull activities, explained beautifully. That’s worth something.

(Plus, I like a good rant, and reading something that agitates me allows me to do it on my blog. Win!)

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The books on our shelves arrange themselves. A visitor to our house might wonder what perverted system of order we’re using, what method of organization. It’s not like a library; there are no numbers on the spines, no categories. Nothing is arranged alphabetically, by genre or by import. We’ve lived together for two years now, but from the moment I moved in our books have co-mingled, kept each other company. There was never any question of separating our collections. It would be futile at best, disastrous at worst; we both saw this (contrast with the experiences of other book lovers, for whom a marriage of libraries is a Major Event–I start to think the Man and I are stranger than anyone thought possible). A separation of books would be like a separation of selves; it would be akin to sleeping in separate beds. A false intimacy.

Two years later the books have shifted, as books tend to. Very few are still where they started out on the shelves; and some don’t make it on to the shelves at all, but lie in piles by the side of the bed or on the desk. We have many books. This haphazard system ought to perplex us; but the funny thing is this: mid-sentence, sometimes, one of us will need a very specific book, maybe one we haven’t looked at properly in years, and we always know where it is. We know exactly what books we have and don’t have and could, if pressed, probably tell the story of every single volume in this house (that one bought second-hand in Boston, that one stolen from an ex-girlfriend, that one borrowed and never returned to a friend, that one purchased from an anonymous Waterstones somewhere). It’s as if we both have this massive, mental catalog, shared, full of shifting information.

But this is why I think there is an order, after all; this is why I think the books arrange themselves. Because the way they are means that whatever you are looking for, whatever you need most to read at any moment, will suddenly pop out at you. In any room of the house you will find yourself looking at a wall of books, or at least a pile, and if you’re desperate enough, one of them will start to shimmer, or to call to you, will demand all of your attention, and when you pick it up you will realize that yes, of course, this is what you were looking for–even if you hadn’t known you were looking for anything at all. Maybe it’s because of this, which I found in the book I hadn’t realized I desperately needed until I slid it from the shelf last night: “the meaning of things lies not in things themselves, but in our attitudes to them.”*

*Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as quoted at the start of A.C. Grayling’s The Meaning of Things

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Not often, but sometimes, it occurs to me that I am very, incredibly, out of touch with the rest of the world.  It has always been thus, but living in Oxford makes it easy to forget that once I was a geeky Converse-clad girl with a bad hairdo. (I am now a geeky Converse-clad girl with a better hairdo. And sometimes I wear boots.)  My life has become something completely ridiculous, in a rather wonderful way.  Take this, for instance: one of the highlights of my existence is the rush I get when I swipe my card at the Bodleian and open my bag so that they can check to make sure that I’m not trying to smuggle a bottle of water in and walk up the stairs and smell the books.  And there are all these other people there! Doing the same thing! Loving the books! And outside (this is the best bit) there are a bunch of tourists who can’t come inside.  It’s a perverse (and very British) revenge of the nerds; and I’M PART OF THE CLUB!  I actually have a special walking to-and-from the library swagger.  Just so that everyone will know that I belong. (Sometimes, but not often, I even manage to swagger without tripping over my own feet.)

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…on the shelf:

• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh edited by Michael Davie
• Selected Poems by Louis MacNeice (a constant presence, of late)
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• British Poetry Since 1945 edited by Edward Lucie-Smith
• Towards the End of the Morning by Michael Frayn
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

…on spotify:

• Stuart Murdoch
• Polly Scattergood
• Florence + The Machine
• Fleet Foxes
• Neko Case
• Regina Spektor
• Take That (Yes, really.  I’m convinced that in many ways “Shine” is the ultimate walking-down-the-street-on-a-sunny-summer-day tune)
• Johnny Flynn

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I’ve been semi-following the #queryfail and #agentfail debacle for some time, with guarded interest.  Yes, a morbid part of me wants to watch a bunch of authors and agents have a web 2.0 go at each other, just as a morbid part of me loves cheesy action flicks and sappy romances (it’s entertainment, pure and simple).  But frankly, the whole thing also makes me feel dirty: I don’t like thinking that the agent-author relationship has been reduced to a high school drama, because, if you really want the truth, I’m not any good at dealing with high school drama, and I don’t want it to be true that a world I fundamentally respect, in spite of its faults, is no more virtuous than some bitchy cafeteria.

So it’s been interesting trawling through the ostensibly educational comments that agents have made about authors, and vice versa.  And, yes, it’s so terrible, the agents are just so mean, and, like, really, can I help it if they don’t think my last name will look good on the cover of a book?  And equally, those agents are rats, they never respond, and ohmygod all I want is a form rejection letter but boo-hoo they’re too busy on Twitter and Facebook and getting drunk at inappropriate hours to spend ten seconds on the masterpiece that took me ten years.

But still.  So much has already been written about all this since #queryfail debuted as an idea in March that I couldn’t really find anything to write about it that wouldn’t seem like a needless rehash (no pun intended) of a needlessly popular topic.  But yesterday, something clicked in my mind as I was reading this post by Jean Hannah Edelstein on the Guardian’s book blog.  For several paragraphs the post is a spectacularly uninteresting, though possibly necessary, reminder that literary agents do a lot more than sip champagne at the Ivy over glamorous lunchtime meetings.  But towards the end of her post Edelstein finally hits upon something genuinely intriguing.  “Agents serve as a crucial linchpin,” she writes, “…ensuring that the publisher-author relationship stays positive so that nuanced contractual disagreements don’t get in the way of the writing and editing of a good book.”  She then reminds us of a growing trend, whereby writers, frustrated perhaps by the enormity of the conventional publishing-machine, the hoops, the rejections, the time spent crafting fiddly query letters which may or may not end up hash-tagged to the general amusement of a thousand onlookers, hungry for fodder or a quick ego-boost, reject the machine entirely and bray that self-publishing will bring about the happy end to literary agents.

“All of which is fine,” writes Edelstein, “so long as these writers are happy to devote their lives to all of the extensive hard work that goes in to making a book exist – and sell – long after the final words have been written. The problem, of course, is that all of this work is so extensive that it can really eat in to your writing time.”

Funny, that.  Edelstein has hit upon something that many of us, as writers, may have forgotten in the scramble to get back at the cruel agents who participated in #queryfail, or may have forgotten even before the first Twitter-savvy agent hit “#”: the point of obtaining a literary agent, surely, is not so we can make another tick in the success column and feel that somehow, we’ve won the game.  It’s so that we can commence a complicated and rewarding relationship with someone who will, ultimately, allow us to do what we most desperately want to do: write for an audience.  Agents are enablers, not sticker-happy 2nd grade teachers who are there merely to reward our hard work.

So how has it come to this?  I don’t know for sure, but I can hazard a guess.  The problem is not that writers, as a species, are fundamentally stupid and self-loathing, nor that agents are universally vitriolic and inhuman.  The problem, as illustrated by the #queryfail and #agentfail trends, but certainly not started by them, is that somewhere along the line, the literary world stopped being so much about words and ideas and started being about winning and losing.

We see this every day.  The only aspect of the literary world that’s continually stressed is that it’s competitive.  As a writer, it’s all you hear.  Publishing houses, literary agencies, newspapers, magazines, tiny online literary journals, seem to exist solely to remind us of the unlikelihood of our success, to remind us that from the vast pool of writhing would-be authors, we’re probably not going to be picked out as special.  It’s not personal, just circumstantial: statistics matter most.

I understand the necessity of reminding people that they need to work hard, produce nothing but the best–it keeps you from becoming lazy, from thinking for even a moment that you do not have to care deeply about what you do and then spend more time than you thought possible crafting and nurturing every sentence.  What I don’t understand is why that’s all we’re ever reminded of, and I applaud Edelstein for suggesting that there’s more depth to the agent-author relationship than failing or not failing.

So the problem with #queryfail and #agentfail, and the subsequent deluge of commentary about both, is not that either is fundamentally unfair, mean-spirited, or an example of Twitter gone wrong.  But neither can we laud #queryfail and #agentfail for providing a much-needed insight into the minds of agents and authors–articles attempting to glean anything useful from the stream of drivel and hilarity, such as this one, fall spectacularly flat (anyone who is seriously looking for an agent already knows to read submission guidelines like they’re going to save your life).  What we can do, however, is wonder why we’re so worried about failure, and so desperately convinced that writing and publishing is some sort of blood sport, that we’ve forgotten to do whatever it is we love–and, more crucially, forgotten that each party, the agents, the authors, needs the other.

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