A Busy Week

Reading and Writing, feat: Listicles, Tucker's Luck, Orban's Tram Ticket, Joe Sacco and more

So, as they say, a bit of personal news. I’m on the judging panel for this year’s Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. Our chair will be Kirsty Lang, and my fellow judges are Tiffany Jenkins, Bea Carvalho, Elif Shafak and Ravi Mattu. I’m excited to work with these guys, and I hope that what happened last time I sat on the panel back in 2011, when it was still the Samuel Johnson prize, doesn’t happen again. I found myself at one point with what looked to be the casting vote in the final meeting.

It was between Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles and Frank Dikotter’s Mao’s Great Famine and, as our chair Ben Macintyre said at the time, we were a hair from splitting the prize because both were such good and important books. But I have strong feelings about splitting prizes — I wrote a piece bashing Booker when they split it in 2019 — and I wasn’t alone. After much groaning and wringing of hands we went for Dikotter, IIRC as being the book with a wider appeal outside the academy. I have felt like I owe Jasanoff an apologetic drink ever since. Mind you, she’s an established superstar so I don’t think the disappointment exactly ruined her career.

Coda to the story was that Frank immediately swapped agents and renegotiated his next book deal, and his editor — who was also the editor of my novel¹ — was not a little chewed up about it. So, kids: play nice.

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Here’s a picture of Samuel Johnson. Maybe that will replace the default orange blob. Maybe not. Faites vos jeux.

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The ranking of books, though. It’s a ludicrous task, isn’t it? Intellectually speaking, even the most august of prizes is making the posh equivalent of a Buzzfeed listicle: “The twelve best books of this year. You won’t BELIEVE what’s at number seven!” Still, this is the way it’s done, and prizes are good for the promotion of books and the publishing ecosystem in general: they’re just another, sometimes crude, way to say: “Look! Here’s something really good!”. Canons and curricula and even review sections do the same thing, and saying “here’s something really good” is the game we’re all in — sorting signal from noise.

No single critic, prize or outlet can do that sorting perfectly. When I wrote my book The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading I knew from the get-go that failure was baked into the project: there would be Shaming Omissions, and I have a Word Document of those omissions on the desktop of my computer². It expands every time a fan of X or Y who comes to an event, or a Goodreads reviewer, upbraids me for the absence of X or Y from the text.

Still, I’m a sucker for punishment, so when the Guardian asked me to produce a list of 25 books everyone should have read by the time they are 25 (one for each year) I jumped straight in — though I enlisted Kate Rundell, Frank Cottrell-Boyce and others as human shields. It came out on Saturday and you can read it here.

If you embrace the essential ridiculousness of the project, and accept that the main point of listicles is that lots of people can and will angrily disagree — and that in the disagreement we’ll all learn something — it’s all good. So: feel free to vent that disagreement in the comments.

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It might be a bit fish-in-a-barrel to go after Tucker Carlson’s new publishing venture -- the cashiered Fox News demagogue is launching an imprint with the “anti-woke” publisher Skyhorse — but FFS. Tucker says that he’s “looking for books that nobody else will publish”. which seems unwisely to ignore the fact that while there can be lots of reasons nobody else will publish a book the most popular one is usually “the author is an arsehole and it’s crap and nobody will buy it”.

His flagship titles are going to be by Russell Brand and Milo Yiannopoulos. Russell Brand at the end of last year pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of rape and sexual assault. He maintained when the allegations first came out that he was being smeared and silenced by a co-ordinated campaign from the mainstream media because he was getting Too Close To The Truth (I wrote about the response here, and stand by every word), and promptly converted to Christianity. His new book is called How To Become A Christian In Seven Days. Insert undignified snorting noise here.

And Milo — who after being exiled from Trumpworld now pursues a living as a sort of horsefly on the American body politic — does have form with book-writing; form which the reports on Carlson’s new imprint didn’t seem to have room for. One of the funniest publishing stories in recent years was when the copy-editor’s notes on his first book leaked. Chapter and verse here and here. “Unclear, unfunny, delete”, “Careful that the egotistical boasting… doesn’t make you seem juvenile”, and “DELETE UGH” were just a sample of the comments from someone ostensibly in Milo’s corner. Good luck, Tuck!

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My old pal Tibor Fischer has been getting a lot of stick for calling the results of the Hungarian elections a bit wrong. Well, his new book is about crypto — the excellent Spectator review is here — so making dodgy bets on the future is kind of his thing these days. Anyway, the whole hoo-hah has reminded me of a wonderful Orban story in Tibor’s 2014 ebook The Hungarian Tiger.

In the autumn, Orbán decides to visit his in-laws in Szolnok. I’d never been to Szolnok, so I tag along with him to have a look and to have a chat about politics. Orbán is now in such demand from journalists, groupies and well-wishers it’s hard to get him alone.

We travel by train. It’s a glorious sunny, day. At Szolnok station, I hop on the bus to the town centre and sit down, but I notice Orbán isn’t with me. He’s standing on the kerb. “We have to get tickets,” he says. I have to emphasize that even in Budapest, where there was some chance of meeting a ticket inspector, no one, certainly not a dangerous young intellectual would dream of paying for public transport. It wasn’t an act of rebellion. You just didn’t do it. You didn’t even think about it.

We’re in Szolnok. I doubt there’s a ticket inspector within sixty kilometres of us. It’s a glorious, sunny day. No one cares about tickets today, not even ticket inspectors. There’s no one in sight. We’re like the last men on earth. With all respect to Szolnok, it’s a small provincial town, so quiet I could set myself on fire and no one would notice, and we’re way out on the outskirts. It’s flat and bare, a ticket inspector crawling on all fours can’t even sneak up on us. We could spot one half a kilometre away.

“We have to get tickets,” Orbán is adamant. “If I’m caught without one, they will use it against Fidesz.” You can’t buy a ticket from the driver, you have to get one elsewhere. Naturally, there is a ticket machine next to the bus. Naturally, it doesn’t work, probably because no one ever uses it.

The bus driver turns up, gives us a strange look and drives off. In small, provincial towns you know it’s going to be a long time before you’ll see another bus. I’m getting annoyed with Orbán now. It’s lunchtime and my inner hussar wants to be in a restaurant enjoying a csongrádi marhapörkölt sztrapacskával. I’m indifferent on the gypsies.

We’re in a deserted railway station. It takes twenty minutes and a long walk before we purchase bus tickets.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Viktor Orbán runs Hungary. I can categorically assure you no one else in Fidesz, no one else in the D, would have bothered to get a ticket. I doubt any of them would have even thought about it.

But Orbán will never give a millimetre. The adjective intransigent doesn’t cover him as far as his knees. He is the fulcrum on which Archimedes could move the universe. No time off. No carelessness. He’s probably averaged four hours sleep a night since 1988.

I think this story is very funny. I’m not sure how its aggressive probity squares with the rampant corruption that Orban went on to preside over — perhaps he, er, mellowed; or perhaps he just realised that until you own the media it’s pragmatic to keep your nose clean — but it’s a nice little close-up view of the man. Anyway, perhaps he’ll get some sleep now.

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My Spectator column this week was on the lavishly ridiculous internet trend for claiming that London has been wholly taken over by murderous Islamists. Naturally, most of the BTL comments told me that I’m quite wrong, and a useful idiot of the globalists. Something fun I noticed is that a tweet linking to my piece has been viewed around a third of a million times on Twitter; but website traffic shows that only a couple of tens of thousands of people actually read it. That’s the internet all over, isn’t it?

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This week’s Book Club podcast was with Joe Sacco, the world’s best and practically only³ reporter/cartoonist, talking about his book The Once and Future Riot. He has really interesting things to say about why and how he does what he does, what attracts him to a given story — in this case intercommunal violence in western Uttar Pradesh; a hard sell, as he admits, to a US audience — and why he draws himself in a different style from his surroundings.

1. I should say here that sharing a publisher had no bearing on my judgment, and I had no idea we also shared an editor. I was genuinely surprised to see them in the audience at the press conference.

2. I absolutely will not share it here, because it is Too Shaming. However, if enough people buy my book — millions, preferably — perhaps I will be able to persuade Oneworld to let me produce a revised and expanded edition, and the Joan Aiken fan club will get off my back. Go!

3. Not literally only. Molly Crabapple springs to mind, and I’m sure there are more, but it’s a pretty unusual vocation.