The Year Without Atmosphere

It has been a year without micro-expressions. Those little momentary flickers across someone’s face that tell you everything, absolutely everything. So, mediated by a screen, you blunder on, or you nod heavily, willing your eyebrows and the creases around your eyes to do more work. You stoop to chat through your twelve-inch window like a prisoner, a grid of blank, pixel-smoothed faces unreacting, their forearms Sphynxlike on desks just out of shot.

It is two months into your new job when someone mentions, in passing, that your microphone fails to capture the first few words of every sentence you utter, so no one has heard almost anything you’ve said. Until that moment, you believed that you were uninsightful and off-topic and you actually cried, getting off one call, at the feeling that you were a kind of business ghost, haunting meetings without ever provoking a response. You felt that your disappearance might actually be a relief to your colleagues. And then, when you realised what was happening, you overcompensated, ploughing into conversations like you were trying to rugby tackle the previous speaker, going in head first, hard and loud and fast and fluid.

You have had a lot of conversations, but it has been a year without background noise. No café murmurs or pub chatter, no train announcements: no belongings to keep with you, no buskers, nothing suspicious. No gaps to mind. No shared adverts, only the private, solipsistic ones that follow you from the desk to the sofa to the bed, offering something you don’t need but thought about buying four weeks ago because it reminded you of the vividness of the new. By now, the only square metre of the flat you aren’t sick of is the shower. It has been a year with one sky, hanging over the park you tread for fifteen minutes a day – at 12.30pm when the local Shiba is being walked, and the sausage-cross – in a figure of eight to make the path feel longer.

It’s nice to see the dogs playing, but they are the same dogs every day and you know, by now, that you won’t bump into others. The year has no felicity. No oil in the gears. You push harder to keep it turning, hoping that nothing will snap until the atmosphere returns. But you didn’t realise how much you relied on that felicity, how much you took for granted all those friends of friends. Of course you miss the book and album recommendations – you told your partner that the only album of the year you liked was Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell and she gently reminded you that it came out in 2019. You like hearing what someone else found important, those little tertiary obsessions that offer a little friction to your brain, a reminder that it’s part of a big world. You had never thought of it this way before, but you need people who have never heard your story because they give you a chance to tell it for the first time. It allows you to make tweaks, to try new versions of yourself out for size.

Without this felicity, you are reduced to riffing on the familiar: you want a new jumper like the one you own, but more comfortable. You have finally tried precisely one new recipe from the cookbook you bought two years ago and sometimes leaf through, disconsolately imagining living near a shop that sells asafoetida, and have given up on the idea of giving your money to a real shopkeeper and just ordered the asafoetida from Amazon. You only then discover asafoetida is also known as hing, so perhaps it was there on the shelves all along. You wince at the weakness of the punchline: it wasn’t asafoetida you were missing, but deggi mirch. And it feels somehow typical that an Amazon order is the most interesting thing that happened that day, a revelation so minor it can barely be massaged into an anecdote. Instead, when you see a handful of friends for a Zoom catch up, you compare notes on which dregs of Netflix contain enough moisture to live off for another 23 minutes.

The summer offered a respite, though it was missing so many of the things that usually make up a summer. You went to a restaurant that had a large aquarium without any fish in it. Summer was like that: blue and still, lacking bodies. You lay in the park on your own, looking up at the sky. For your birthday, you found your carefully numbered friends a beer garden table where you ordered drinks using a shonky proprietary app. When a drunk guy on the next table along told your friend he looked like Jared Leto, and then found out it was your birthday and hugged you, the contact was shocking. You hadn’t hugged your mother in months; you hadn’t held your baby niece yet.

But who do you tell? There’s no one outside this, outside the year, who doesn’t know what it’s like. You and your partner take it in turns to listen to the other’s exasperated outbursts. You just want to go to a house party! You want to be in a club and feel a stranger’s sweat slip against your back, you want to do shots and feel music in your ribcage like your lungs are speakers, and squash onto benches and go to festivals and grab people by the face and kiss their forehead. You drink about the same as you ever did, but no longer in bouts, your intake smeared across the week. You know that by all rights the world’s aircraft should be grounded, but you want to go on holiday anyway and feel a stronger sun, trick your tongue with new flavours, glide through water like a fish in a goddamn aquarium, smell perfume again, because no one wears perfume any more, because no one shares an atmosphere this year; it’s the year without sharing: food and drink, touch, place, space. You are starting to forget what it’s like when a whole cinema laughs together. You forget the swelling roar of a stadium, the harmony of choirs.

Paradoxically, it has been a year without solitude, for you. The two of you are not more than three metres away from each other for more than half an hour a week. There is only the bed, the desk, the sofa. You alternate between them depending on which part of your body is aching, or who has a meeting that requires a neutral background. You put up a menu in the kitchen to remind you of the meals you both like and you alternate between those. You take it in turns to alternate between monologuing at each other about the minor entertainments you have cultivated to keep up the pretence of a distinction between your lives. (She has given up on Animal Crossing and is now devoted to BTS, whereas you have become an Arch-mage in Skyrim.) In the months that you are permitted by law, you go and sit in a café, take your face mask off and just sit, watching the convection on the surface of your coffee as it cools.

Has it been a year? It sometimes feels like it could have been many years, that you are one of a decimated population sitting in one of fifteen empty chairs in Caffè Nero. They don’t quite feel real, those days when you had to queue for ten minutes to buy the coffee, and when you could barely get a seat, let alone one of the coveted armchairs. Now you are splayed out across a sofa; you leave your laptop on the coffee table when you go to the loo because there’s no one there to steal it.

Most of all, you feel ungrateful. This year, there has been a great transfer of wealth from service, retail and entertainment workers to office people like you, who are normally lucky enough to spend half your monthly pay having fun. This is what being lucky looks like: being locked down for a few weeks while it’s raining, browsing for flannel pyjamas on your smartphone. All this yearning for life and yet behind it, you know that many people are not just indoors but gone, really gone. You weren’t thrown to the ground this year. The year didn’t eat your lungs and heart. In news briefings, you are encouraged to think in the fatalistic terms of other seasonal respiratory illnesses, but the comparison only makes the death toll harder to comprehend. You imagine a bomb being dropped on Exeter and survivors in other cities quietly venturing out to Tesco the next day to check if Pizza Express pizzas are on offer this week.

The fact is that, by coincidence, nothing fell on you. You feel acutely that you are reacting sullenly to a life that is perfectly pleasant. You can even see your friends for a winter walk, and do, and it’s nice to catch up. And you sit at a pub bench and have a mushroom risotto because it’s not on your home menu and it feels like an opportunity you shouldn’t pass up. And when, eight days before Christmas, your friend texts you to tell you that they have tested positive, and that they and you will have to isolate for Christmas, you are glad that they aren’t suffering too much. Neither are you. Sitting on your bed, you feel fine. Things could be a lot worse.

The long 2020 ended on 31^st January 2021, a year after the first coronavirus case came to the UK. What do you do at the end of a year that is so hard to celebrate? Perhaps it would be better simply to forget. In Japan, there is a long held celebration called ‘the forgetting of the year’ (bōnenkai). Now, it is mostly for getting drunk, but it originated in sixteenth century feudal Japan as a time for writing, contemplation, and then feasting. As the anniversary of the arrival of the virus approaches, you know without searching that you can forget this year. It has not taught you anything. You know you aren’t perfect and it’s too much to expect that you will become so; you know you have a good life and sometimes take it for granted. Given so much time to decide what you want, you have decided that you want things to go back to normal.

You want to work in an office, go out for dinner, spot something in a shop window, catch up when you get home. You want to have something to catch up about. The tabloids dangle foreign holidays as an emblem of the dream life that awaits us all, but what you actually fantasise about is the symphony of little variations on your old weekly routine. Walking to a desk in the British Library, padding on the thick carpet through the momentous silence of hundreds of people deep in thought. You want to meet your friend outside a café and hug them, and buy them a coffee and bring it to them while they rush for the last available seat. You want to go on the hunt for a nightcap after the pub closes, striding down Old Compton Street and squeezing, elbow first, into a gap at the bar in Café Bohème, passing back drinks to two people you know and one you don’t. You want to take your niece to the park on the weekend, put her on your shoulders and support her little hands in yours. That would be perfect; it will be perfect.

First published by the London Magazine.

How to win at literature

On the evening of 5th July 2018, carefully selected guests filtered into Buckingham Palace for dinner with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. You might say that the invitation list had started to be compiled fifty years previously. There were ten authors present, oddly biased towards the first half of the alphabet: Julian Barnes, Paul Beatty, Peter Carey, Eleanor Catton, Kiran Desai, David Grossman, Alan Hollinghurst, Howard Jacobson, Marlon James, V.S. Naipaul and Ben Okri. These gathered men, and two women, had won at literature.

The impending death of literature has been proclaimed so many times now that it might be best to refrain from further comment until the head is fully severed from the shoulders. The truth is that what we now call ‘literary fiction’ – a publishers’ term almost unrecognised until the 1970s – was always a pretty tough sell. As Tom Maschler put it in 1971, when he was director of Jonathan Cape: ‘Given the relative lack of interest in serious books among the British reading public (and alas, also among many booksellers) we depend on at least one or two bestsellers a year to subsidise out programme as a whole.’ He wasn’t lying. Then Cape chairman Michael Howard admitted that, at the time of Ian Fleming’s death in 1964, sales of the Bond books ‘accounted for a proportion of Cape’s income which corresponded closely to the total profit’. They were worried, too, about ‘the future of the dwindling band of private companies in the face of takeovers by large commercial corporations and American interests, and the powerful agglomerations of competing groups’.

One idea they had was to find a sympathetic company to band together with, and eventually in 1969, after two years discussion, they would go into partnership with Chatto & Windus (which had itself merged Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1945). As Chatto poet Jennifer Couroucli put it,

Chatto’s is merging with Jonathan Cape –

Better to marry than burn,

Better to wed than give in to rape

By a tempting Big Business concern.

But Tom Maschler had one other idea to shore up business. He wanted to found a literary prize on the model of France’s Prix Goncourt, a prize of prizes that would help propel sales for the kind of literary novels published by Cape. What he needed most was a backer with serious money.

Before he had died, Michael Howard noted, Ian Fleming had arranged the ‘transfer of his copyrights to a complex web of trusts, and to his private company, Glidrose Productions, of which in 1964 he sold control to Booker Brothers for one hundred thousand pounds. Tax free, that sum seemed to Ian a good deal, but as an investment it proved cheap for Booker Brothers.’ Tax shelter schemes looked particularly attractive during Harold Wilson’s Labour government, but even so Bookers did get a good deal: buying up other copyrights, including those of Agatha Christie, their Author Services division made profits of £100,000 in 1968, four times that by mid-seventies.

It was a slightly odd offshoot of the company, which had been founded by George and Richard Booker in 1835 as a shipping company and quickly got into the sugar business in British Guiana. At its peak, the company owned over three quarters of all trading interests in the country, leading some to refer to the country as ‘Booker’s Guiana’. By the time Sir Jock Campbell first visited in 1934, he said, ‘I was as appalled as I was fascinated by the sugar industry. The workers were treated as chattels. I was told either I did not understand or that “they are a different sort of people”.’When he became chairman in 1952, he worked hard to correct some of these historical wrongs, offering free housing and loans to the workers, as well as medical and pension plans. It was the least he could do, really – by the mid-sixties sugar still employed half the country’s labour force. But much as Guiana needed them, Bookers began diversifying to make sure their fate did not rest on Guiana, particularly once it gained independence in 1966. And so, strange as it might seem, Bookers became one of the only companies, publishers included, that believed there was money to be made in the book industry.

When Tom Maschler approached Charles Tyrell, he and the other Booker execs might well have pointed out that Britain had a number of prizes already: the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize (1942), the Somerset Maugham (1946), the W H Smith (1959), Guardian Prize (1965), Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1965), Silver Pen (1968). But while some of them were prestigious, and in books one respects one’s elders, none could deliver the drama, nor the sales boost, of the Prix Goncourt. The idea was to make this Booker Prize not only the biggest literary prize in the English language, but to make it an event, to engage the public and even perhaps to persuade them that a book might be both literary and worth reading.

Because they conceived the project in those all-encompassing terms, the stated criterion for the winner was studiedly vague: the little trophy of a silver lady holding a bowl would go to ‘the best full-length novel in the opinion of the judges’. Early on, Maschler later said, ‘It seemed to me most desirable that there should be as much speculation as possible prior to the final announcement’, and they tweaked the rules to this end, publishing the shortlist separately a few weeks before the winner was announced, and arranging for the prize to be awarded in the autumn when the public buys most of its books – in fact, to be eligible in 1971, a book had to be published between 1st September and 15th November, though they later changed the rules to include books published across the year. From the start, the publisher would be obliged to advertise the winner to the tune of £500, which would have the effect of boosting the prize as well as the book. They also tried to introduce a ‘personality’ and a ‘book trade person’ into the judging panel, at a time when literature was still seen as the antithesis of popularity. Terence Kilmartin of the Observer strongly disapproved: ‘I have a feeling that these two categories of person are included in order to ensure that the book selected for the prize is a good commercial proposition. In the past this would certainly have excluded a large number of writers who have made a serious contribution to English Literature.’ A.W. Parsons, Literary Editor of the Daily Mail, wrote, ‘I cannot quite see the logic of including a “personality” in the panel. What about a librarian?’ Anthony Thwaite of the New Statesman went further, writing that ‘a serious literary panel should be made up of serious literary people, so that I can’t see the wisdom of having a “personality” and a “book-trade person”. Wouldn’t it be better to have four or five well-read people, whose judgement one respects?’

From the start, it seemed that the prize would be dogged by controversy. The 1971 judge Malcolm Muggeridge resigned from the jury, writing that the books ‘seem to me to be mere pornography in the worst sense of the word, and to lack any literary qualities or distinction which could possibly compensate for the unsavouriness of their contents,’ and after his departure a dispute broke out between judge John Fowles and the chair, John Gross, over the eligibility of V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State, compounded by the fact that both Gross and fellow judge Antonia Fraser were friends with Naipaul, and also by an unofficial phone call from Tom Maschler to chip in with his own opinion on the matter. In the end they had a blind postal vote, and the book was voted eligible by three votes to two (Saul Bellow also thought Naipaul ineligible and, of the rest, said that only ‘five percent were interesting’). Thankfully the dispute didn’t make the news, though there was real controversy in 1972, when the winner John Berger denounced Booker Brothers as a ‘colonialist enterprise built on the backs of black plantation workers’, to angry heckles from the assembled guests in the Café Royal, and announced that he was giving half his prize money to the Black Panthers. The press turned up quickly, having been tipped off by Berger’s publisher, and the speech was widely reported. Maschler later wondered ‘why Berger did not either decline the prize altogether or give all the money to the Black Panthers’.But what might have seemed a disaster for the prize turned out to be an unexpected windfall: there were fifty press clippings about the prize in 1971, and two hundred in 1972.

Maschler writes that ‘the turning point for the Booker came in 1980. That year two heavyweights [William Golding and Anthony Burgess] were in competition and this resulted in a great deal of speculation’. Indeed, that was the decade that confirmed the Booker as the publishing event of the year. At its inception the prize had been worth £5,000; by 1989 it was worth £20,000 (partly to fight off an enormous bequest for a new prize from the reclusive novelist Betty Trask).Ron Pollard of Ladbrokes opened a book on the shortlist in 1984. The prize even began to be televised, to numerous complaints. Fay Weldon, who had beenchair of judges in 1983, wrote to organiser Martyn Goff after the event:‘My concern remains for the writer’s (and indeed Booker’s) rather rapidly diminishing dignity in the face of the TV cameras… If the moral base of the Prize is corrected, everything will fall gracefully into place. Though the winner can sensibly be announced at the Dinner, the short-listed authors and publishers must know who it is beforehand and accept or refuse the invitation in that awareness. Salman Rushtie [sic] said to me with some passion last Wednesday, “If I haven’t won it, what am I doing here? Tell me!” and I couldn’t. Because he is quite right: the whole accumulated frisson of the Prize seems to depend upon the humiliation of those who fail to win it, rather than on the satisfaction of those who do.’ But the press clippings were up 50 percent on the year before, and the TV cameras stayed.

Weldon’s second letter,to Michael Harris Caine, the chairman of Booker McConnell, makes for interesting reading:

‘In literature, as in any other field, if people can leave the making of decisions to anyone else, they’ll leap at the chance. I would hate to see a situation arising in say, five or ten years’ time, when if a writer happened not to win a prize, he or she was not taken seriously… Writing is increasingly a profession, not a surplus of literary animation taken publishable form. Novelists, even good ones, see themselves as having careers. “Let’s set out to win the Whitbread with this one!” Can’t you hear some editor saying it, steering theme, character and plot prizewards?’

Ten years later, Weldon attended a Booker Prize dinner as a guest. The honourable chairman of Booker came up to her and told her, ‘It is not by any wish of mine that you are here tonight.’

That would have been the year that Roddy Doyle won for Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which sold just over 200,000 hardbacks by end of 1993. The next year, the paperback sold 355,000, grossing £2.1m in sales. If it had once seemed that literary quality had nothing to do with sales potential, some people were now beginning to wonder whether they need be mutually exclusive. Indeed, publishing was becoming big business. A 1993 Virago edition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando sold 17,000 copies, exceeding the book’s world sales for the four years after its original publication. By that time, Cape and Chatto had been bought out by the American conglomerate Random House, which itself would be eaten by the Bertelsmann Group, which would later merge with Penguin. Maschler considered this conglomeration a ‘betrayal’.

The Booker Prize also found its centre of gravity drifting somewhere into the sea after shifting sponsorship in 2002 to the Man Group, a company founded 235 years ago as a sugar broker (what else) and which, despite still covering 16 percent of cross-border sugar trade in 1997, now describes its business as ‘technology-empowered active investment management focused on delivering performance and client portfolio solutions’. The Financial Times describes it as ‘the world’s largest publicly traded active management group’, and it has significant business in America. (Booker, meanwhile, has been eaten by Tesco for £4bn.) It was perhaps inevitable that the prize would be opened up to American writers, given how little else the sponsors demand of their prize – in fact, it is amazing that they didn’t do it sooner: Martyn Goff was saying back in the mid-eighties that ‘we have always wanted more interest in America’. It is too early to tell whether this rule change will hamper British or Commonwealth authors, but after fifty years we have enough historical biases to be getting on with.

Since 1969, 33 men and 16 women have won the prize – won at literature, in a world where those who don’t win prizes aren’t taken seriously. Jonathan Cape is the publisher with the highest number of winning titles (8), and the most shortlistings (31), all the more impressive if you count Chatto’s 3 wins and 18 shortlistings. By my count, imprints under the Penguin Random House group have won 19 of the previous 49 prizes, and have been shortlisted 103 times. Since 2014, when the prize opened to American writers, two have won the prize; four of the other winners hail from Australia, three from India, three from Canada, two from South Africa, two from New Zealand. If anyone is looking for a trend, a far greater number of authors – Kingsley Amis, Anita Brookner, Nadine Gordimer, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Storey, Salman Rushdie – were published by Tom Maschler. The shortlist for 2018 makes it a one-in-three chance that the winner will be American, a one-in-three chance that the winner will be a Cape author, and a one-in-six chance of being a current Jonathan Cape editor.

In the late sixties, there had been two pressing concerns for Jonathan Cape. The first was to avoid falling into close orbit with big business, particularly of the kind that was already taking hold in America. The second was to boost the sales of the high quality writing that Cape itself published by founding a high profile prize. But despite succeeding spectacularly in the latter, they had no way of avoiding the former, for Cape found that those authors on their list who didn’t win The Prize struggled to sell much as they ever had. Now, Jonathan Cape has become the model for a literary list nested in a larger conglomerate, whose first duty is to win the prizes, and the Booker Prize above all. Which, since the values of the prize were first articulated by the director of Jonathan Cape, should not be so very hard to do.

This essay was first published in Issue 3 of the Brixton Review of Books in September 2018. You can subscribe to the next four issues of the Brixton Review of Books for £10.

The Cable Guy: a swansong for privacy

Imagine it’s 1996. The Iraq War is a thing of the distant past and you’ll never have to hear the name George Bush again. Leonardo DiCaprio is still twenty years away from his Oscar. Will Smith is still the name of a character played by Will Smith in the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Tom Cruise is yet to star in Magnolia as the charismatic leader of a cult convinced by his own meaningless affirmations, let alone become that man in real life.

Now imagine it’s not just 1996, but you’re Jim Carrey. Everybody loves you. You are dumb, and dumber. You shot to fame as Ace Ventura by literally talking out of your arse. Your troubled birth from a prosthetic rhino’s vagina has already made an indelible impression on a nine year old British kid called Alex Christofi. You have just been offered Hollywood’s first ever $20 million paycheque.

The character is not a detective, nor a cop, nor a lawyer, nor a salaryman in possession of a cursed Viking demon mask. He is the ’90s equivalent of a broadband installation professional. He is clingy and enthusiastic about karaoke.

This year in history, you are the most wanted man in Hollywood. You can pick any part in any film you want. And of all the films you are offered, you choose The Cable Guy.

But you say yes on two conditions:

1. We turn this screwball comedy into a parable of the slide of consumer capitalism into basic privacy violations, which the public will come to tolerate as a kind of devil’s handjob in return for the promise of free content, little realising that content itself will soon be devalued and we will acclimatise and come to require less and less reimbursement for the exact same privacy violations.

2. I get to speak with a lisp.

Ben Stiller directed the film, and has a cameo as a guy who murdered his identical twin (also played by Ben Stiller). Matthew Broderick plays the straight man so well you could almost forget he is in it, even though he is technically the main character. It’s like watching the word ‘normcore’ assume human form – he doesn’t quite seem like a real person, more like a set of pillows and clothes arranged in a bed to trick your parents when you run away from home. The supporting cast includes a recycled extra from Waterworld called Jack Black and the smuggest film debut ever from an actor calling himself Owen Wilson, who is later quasi-sexually abused with a hand dryer.

Despite the cast, the film scores exactly 6.0/10 on IMDB, making it one of the few films in the history of cinema that is, by popular vote, neither good enough nor bad enough to be worth watching. On its release, the New York Times said The Cable Guy ‘offers the shocking sight of a volatile comic talent in free fall.’ It went further, to say that ‘there’s no fun in watching Carrey covering his face with chicken skin.’ However, Newsweek hit the nail on the head, if only accidentally, when it called Carrey’s character ‘a demonic and omnipotent Dennis the Menace.’

Because we have a word for what Carrey’s character is now. He either wants to be your best friend or your worst enemy. He hides behind pseudonyms. He quotes people without attribution, he thinks women are something you buy and, crucially, he is obsessed with what people in the 90s quaintly called ‘the information superhighway’. The cable guy is the world’s first troll.

Here’s what Carrey says when he’s standing on a giant satellite dish for those who prefer their visual metaphors to hurt: ‘Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone and computer. You’ll be able to visit the Louvre on one channel, or watch female mud wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend from Vietnam. There’s no end to the possibilities!’ Here is a man clinging to a utopian ideal of keeping multiple tabs open so that he can convince himself he’s not really watching porn because he’s also, simultaneously, looking up museum opening times. It’s that sort of insight that makes this film a pre-Matrix Oracle. He even points out that ‘free cable is the ultimate aphrodisiac,’ or as we would put it nowadays, Netflix and chill.

But let’s say it all gets a bit much and you want out. Well, that’s not really how this whole thing works. The cable guy insinuates himself with your girlfriend and your family home; he makes secret recordings of you; he hacks your office network and gets you fired; he makes every car alarm in the car park go off; he holds compromising pictures of you in flagrante delicto; he has you arrested for receiving stolen goods that he put in your flat. And you know what? He doesn’t even work for the cable company.

What did you do to deserve this? You’re just Matthew Broderick the pillow boy. But you let the free content cross your threshold, and now a troll is fucking all your shit up.

This is the gift they have given us, a swansong from the last days of privacy, Judd Apatow, Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick, some of the finest political commentators of their generation. Their message is this: any technology is only as trustworthy as the creepiest person who knows how to use it. As the troll himself points out, ‘The trouble with real life is, there’s no danger music.’

This piece was originally read at The Wrong Quarterly‘s event, ‘Remarks on Unremarkable Films of the 90s’, alongside Will Eaves, Heidi O’Loughlan, Nell Frizzell, May-Lan Tan and Ned Beauman.