Why boring modern novels are driving me back to the classics

Welcome to today’s literary fiction, where nothing much happens to characters you don’t care about.

What has gone so wrong with the publishing industry that their marketing people would lie to potential readers in order to manufacture an unworthy bestseller?

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If memory serves me well (just joking; at this age the only parts of my mind or body that still work properly are the pain receptors, which grow more numerous and sensitive by the day), I was recently whingeing about the scant pleasures to be derived from modern film.

Fancying a self-indulgent trip to Andalusia might comfort me, I packed my flamenco shoes, bullfighter’s cape and my good castanets, and set off with a selection of holiday reading I had surreptitiously liberated from the copies that land daily on the Review editor’s desk.

I was lured by their beautiful covers (hey, how else can anyone judge a book?) then further seduced by the siren call of the blurbs festooned across them – “A tour de force”, “Magical”, “A brilliant new voice” – the generous community of writers spiralling like sea eagles to outpraise each other.

(I tell my friend and former colleague, crime novelist Matt Spencer, that if I were myself a famous author I would write a blurb for his next cover saying “I could not put this book down … quickly enough.” He laughs, mostly because it’s a hilarious joke, but partly because he knows I’ll never be famous for anything except sarcasm – “and sulking like a toddler”, my wife Sally points out, always eager to help.)

But the daisy-chain of backslapping presages only bewilderment and disappointment: did award-winning novelist X__, queen of the book clubs and regional festivals, really find her rival’s latest work “Bold, riveting, breathtaking”? To my jaundiced eye, they have each produced insight-free, onanistic, meandering, pseudo-intellectual “literary fiction” – neatly summed up as novels where nothing interesting happens to characters you don’t care about.

Scattering a trail of discarded books, as though Hansel and Gretel were hoping to retrace their drunken steps from the back-alley bars of Seville, I wondered what has gone so wrong with the publishing industry that their marketing people would lie to potential readers in order to manufacture an unworthy bestseller.

Too many books pour off the production line, insiders say, with minimal quality control after deleting too many editors. The shortage of reviewers in the mainstream media means novice writers must bring their own endorsements, and the bigger the name the better: connections trump merit, unless your publishing house wishes to gamble the whispered fees that can buy you a window display in a prominent bookshop.

What makes my disillusionment so bitter is that I have always treasured books, because – cue melancholy solo from tiny violin – they were absent from my early childhood. As a kid who grew up around the Liverpool docks a couple of decades after WWII, my first years were spent in a shattered landscape of terraced houses interspersed with bombsites, an urban mouthful of broken teeth.

Without wishing to sound like one of Monty Python’s road-licking Yorkshiremen, it was a blighted cultural wasteland as well, and I was, despite my formidable street-fighting abilities, a sensitive boy. But the only piece of literature in my house – and sadly there’s no one left who might explain this mystery – was a scuffed copy of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Happily, our street was visited every fortnight by the mobile library, the size of a furniture van and deeply precious to me until it departed one day and I looked in the gutter – “Oh,” I thought, “so that’s where Tommy the tortoise was hiding” – but that’s not literature’s fault.

So until I can shake off the feeling of being duped by cynical manipulators (pardon me, that’s my job), it’s back to the classics for me. Some rudimentary research a couple of nights ago revealed there’s a huge number of celebrated works I’ve never read. I was forlorn. A sadder and a wiser man I rose the morrow morn.