Prolific blogger/commentaor Mark Hubbard has a shambling rant on literary matters

3,500: being the total book sales in New Zealand of Eleanor Catton’s first novel The Rehearsal, despite this novel was written to critical acclaim, and her second novel, The Luminaries, has just made the Man Booker long-list.

What? As in disgraceful, especially as that figure is thought 'respectable'. I read tax all week so I'm not reading statistics in the weekend, but assuming three and a half million reading age adults, including young adults, then only one adult in one thousand bought this book. Don't more people fall off ladders?
 

I have no idea how the book royalty system works, but I suspect that represents an income to  Eleanor, by all accounts one of the best writers this country has produced, that I can make in only months of filing tax returns. That fact explains an awful lot about the surveillance state we all find ourselves in. If you don't immediately get the connection, let me explain, albeit a qualification before I do: I have read Eleanor’s superb short story, Two Tides, but have read neither of her novels, yet, so this first name basis I’ve assumed is taking a liberty. However, this post is also about liberty, so that cancels out algebraically. Before reading her, for the purposes of this post, I will note only that people I respect hold Eleanor in high regard, and you don’t make the Booker long-list by any sort of fluke. So as another Tweeter pointed out over the weekend, hoping all the articles about Eleanor's Man Booker long-listing weren't going to merely be about the door-stopper size of The Luminaries, 800 pages - that's value for money by the way, because she doesn't get paid by word count - and the fact that at 27 years old she is the youngest person on the Booker list ...

 
Sorry, that ellipsis doesn't connote blind middle aged envy and jealousy, only a little heart burn I think.
 
I'm not going to mention size nor age, albeit as I've not read The Luminaries, yet, there's not a lot of additional angles into it, other than musing and concluding from the alarmingly small sales of her first novel, that we are not a nation of readers. The sound of this knowledge was that of a penny dropping. Finally so much of what is wrong around me - read this blog - makes sense.

My family was brought up on books, and I couldn’t, can't, imagine a life without books. People who don’t read are a mischief to themselves and everybody around them. Mrs H and I once made the poor choice to go on holiday with another couple neither of whom read books: worst holiday we ever had because they had to be entertained the whole ruddy time, and they both had the attention spans of goldfish, or readers of ... no, let's not go there. We will never do such a holiday again, it was hard work, but I reckon I've just figured out those attention deficit types who aspire to that black art of bullying me; politics. 

Am I too far off the mark to suggest we could start the fix for everything wrong with this kindy of a country by asking every MP in Parliament who can’t off the cuff name their top ten New Zealand novels to stand down please? They're certainly not representing me. And it’s surely not reading too much out of context to say with Eleanor having sold only 3,500 copies in New Zealand of The Rehearsal, it is no wonder middle aged Mr Dunne finds himself in this mess of his own making, which would be hilarious if not so serious for showing the true nature of the state that owns us. Surely no one who has read all Maurice Gee’s body of adult work would be silly and irresponsible enough to think it was prudent, their eight children lined up beside them, ninth on the way, and with Sky decoder in hand, to be complaining about the size of their state house. No one who has been gifted or bought and read Patrick Evans would think it acceptable to ask for the emails of a total stranger in order they could wander through them like a feudal lord, reading another's intimate thoughts, uninvited. No one who has read Elizabeth Knox would think it acceptable that animals be tested – that’s a euphemism for tortured – for the cause of recreational drug taking: and on that score Minister McClay, I’m still awaiting your further answers please. No one who has read that good old stick CK Stead would think a fat tax was anything other than a tax on choice, thus a tax on our basic freedoms. No, I've cracked it; we need to re-find a love of reading. Which will entail finding out why we lost it in the first place. (Though on that score, I’ve a pretty good idea: read my blog).

I urge our MP's to get themselves to bookshelves and buy New Zealand books, not for nationalistic reasons, that causes wars and is stupid: no, buy New Zealand books because they’re books explaining where and how we live, our identity, and they provide the foundation of a civilised society by educating and entertaining the liberal mind. I hope with that word, liberal, a good deal of my readership aren’t now reaching for pitchforks. Remember I’m a liberal: read my byline; a classical liberal. It is a great shame the Left politick whom would force via the Fortress of Legislation, by statute and taxation, the welfare state on us, with its dreadful disincentives, have falsely appropriated that word, liberal, and attempted to obfuscate the whole notion even further with the invention of the diabolical inversion, neo-liberal. Liberal cannot be conflated with use of state force for that destroys it. ‘Liberal’ is about voluntarism, the individual sensibility and creativity, and forms the basis of that paradise lost, the free, charitable society. My own journey seems to continue away from the word libertarian to some form of anarcho-capitalism, but the words classical liberal and intellectual property will always, I suspect, allow me to keep the village camp fires in view, even as I move further out to the fringe. Well, hopefully that’s all I’m doing: of late I’ve been starting to feel like that character in Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, who was going through the inhabitants of the universe, alphabetically, trying to anger every entity by calling them names.

 

 Sorry, this shambles is becoming shambolic.

 
MP’s should buy books, and I don't mean Dan Brown, Tau: indeed, I want you to start with George Orwell's novel 1984, please, before voting the GCSB Bill into law. But so should society at large; buy books. If everyone who has fallen off a ladder latterly, and so with time to read, bought a book, we might increase total book sales markedly. Just go buy books, literary fiction: if enough of us read, it we can get a love of reading back into the kids, then we might all escape having to spend our retirements in gated communities protected from the kids of our kids by high walls and razor wire; and Eleanor might have a decent income so she can keep writing books.
 
Seriously. This is not satire.

 Moreover, if Eleanor can take out the Booker, then that’s bigger than the All Blacks winning the World Cup. It will be interesting, if she does, to compare the volume of congratulatory tweets from our politicians in the Fortress, as against even the Chiefs versus Brumbies this last Saturday night.

 

Read Mark Hubbard's full rant here.