Overland lecture | Malcolm Knox

PUSHING AGAINST THE REAL WORLD
THE CASE FOR ‘ORIGINAL’ AUSTRALIAN FICTION

I USED TO THINK that if you were a writer of fiction the worst thing you could do would be to read book reviews. I don’t necessarily mean reviews of your own books, which is bad enough. In Keith Richards’s words, reviewers are either at your throat or at your fly. Reviews turn your head by dismissing your work or, worse still, inflating it so that you cannot possibly recognise yourself in the genius author.
    Reading reviews in general has a corrosive effect. An eloquent review praising a well-written book will convince you that there is no point competing. A gushing review praising a poorly written book will convince you there is no point laying down your pearls before the philistine swine of the reviewing community. A hatchet job on a fine book will anger you. Cumulatively, reading too many reviews will eat away at you until you believe every story has been told, every theme explored, and the last word has been written; your only dignified response is to retire into silence.
    I’ve since discovered that there is one thing worse for the writer than to read a lot of reviews, and that is to edit a lot of reviews. All the above corruption bears down on you, but as an editor there is so much more.
    The writer’s most precious illusion – the belief in his singularity, the wild notion that his is a story that must be told and only by him – the illusion that what he is doing is important – is under unrelenting, daily assault.
    This assault arrives in my office in padded envelopes and boxes at the rate of some sixty or seventy books a week. Every week of the year. Without remit. This is not even the total number of books published each week, but the tip of the iceberg: books that somebody thinks may appeal to the literary editor of a newspaper for review. That is, sixty or seventy books a week lay some claim to ‘literary merit’ or other compelling public interest. A new novel by Peter Carey or Roger McDonald, a work of history by Inga Clendinnen, the sweat of Helen Garner’s brow, a self-published hash of a bush memoir with potential readership of one, if that. Major and minor alike, each book is just one of the sixty or seventy that come in those padded envelopes, encased in felt or bubble-wrap – a device protecting books thrashing about inside with the force of their madness. Some arrive in the straitjacket of extra wrapping, just in case they do themselves harm.
    These books are either reviewed at length, reviewed in short, or not reviewed at all. The author may be interviewed, given a public free kick for her book. The book is variously sold or not sold in bookshops, and read or not read by readers. It comes and, invariably, it goes. Though the writer, as a class, is of course essential to the publishing industry, each individual writer is a wraith, of whom a great fuss is made for a short time, before he or she vanishes back to the garret or farmhouse from whence she came. The author is at once the star of the show and the puniest extra, less important than the scene-builders, less permanent, certainly, than the producers and the money men.

WHILE MY ILLUSIONS as an author undergo this daily mortification, as a literary editor I enjoy the opposite illusion, that of power and centrality. Publishers want me to notice their books so that I will confer some publicity on them. To do so, they rely on a weird kind of circularity. Back at the beginning of the process of acquiring a book, they will discuss the author’s promotability – does he or she have a story, or some distinguishing characteristic, that will attract attention outside of the merits of the book itself? Is she a ‘brand-name’ author? Does he have what Americans call a ‘platform’ of ready-made attributes elevating him above the competition? When the publisher acquires and decides to publish the book, it may well be on the basis that yes, the author does have a platform. But when the book comes out, they don’t know if the platform will be sturdy. They call me and say here’s an author who famously survived a murder attempt. Now she’s written a novel. Here’s an author who starved himself, literally, to write this book. Here’s an author who is reinventing herself – you’d know her as a TV newsreader, or a chef. Here’s an author who got a million-dollar advance from Disney Studios. My attention aroused, I will commission an interview and a review of this author’s work. Or at least, that’s the idea. And this is, to me, the strangest thing about it. A book is being published on the basis of a hunch someone has about second-guessing my interest. Not only do I have the power to grant this book notice in a mass-media publication, but my tastes have the power to get the book published in the first place.
    Of course, my sense of power is an illusion. It is an illusion in many obvious ways – a good review or prominent interview actually guarantees the book no success in the bookshops; my decisions are as transient as the newsprint on which their outcomes appear – but it is also an illusion in a deeper and more worrying way.
    I would like to refer to Mark Davis’s paper of 2005, ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing’, in which he argued that the ‘Australian literary novel’ was a cultural artefact of a specific era relying on government support and various national and cultural assumptions that are no longer valid. It was part of the Australian literature project, which seemed so imperative thirty years ago in establishing our cultural identity. But today the literary novel’s audience, Davis says, is a small and diminishing coterie, and the novel’s future, if it has any, is as a niche product with over-designed hard cover and nostalgically deckled edges. This was Mark Davis’s version of the ‘death of the novel’ lament.
    There is much sense in Davis’s paper, and it is backed by the empirical evidence that the audience for the Australian literary novel is indeed shrinking. This shrinkage, as I also wrote in an article for The Monthly magazine in May 2005, is hastened by the advent of Nielsen BookScan in Australia, which provides more or less accurate, more or less speedy data on book sales. Since publishers have begun to use and analyse BookScan, they have realised that Australian literary novels do not sell as well as had been thought. Therefore they are less likely to publish them. My argument was not against BookScan – you might as well blame the First World War on the machine gun – but against impatience. Authors take time to develop. Even Dan Brown had only sold seven hundred copies in Australia before The Da Vinci Code – seven hundred copies of his three previous novels that have now sold hundreds of thousands each.
    And of course, there are many better examples than Dan Brown, authors who became ‘overnight successes’ with their sixth or seventh novels. In The Monthly I urged publishers not to deprive themselves, their authors and their readers of great books, because they have looked at an author’s past BookScan figures and ‘marked the author’s card’, ‘worked out’ that that author’s audience has plateaued on some grassy knoll. BookScan can help publishers in a great many ways, particularly with control of inventory, but it can also be used as a stick to punish authors with. And BookScan describes last year’s success stories, not those two or five or ten years in the future.
    Perhaps the most damaging influence of BookScan, which I didn’t really cover in that article, was in the self-fulfilling feedback loop it creates in bookshops who receive their BookScan numbers each week and press the order button according to what is already selling. Thus popularity engenders more popularity, and conversely a book that starts slowly has little chance of recovering, building up word of mouth sales, because the bookshops are not re-ordering it. Authors have all seen this, all had their hearts broken by it, and now, the process of dual-streaming – rich books and poor books, a ruling class and an invisible underclass – is accelerated. A book like John Birmingham’s He Died With A Felafel in his Hand, which built a large audience purely on word of mouth, would have less chance and arguably no chance of doing so now, because after its first few months at number 5001 on BookScan, booksellers would quite simply not stock it anymore.
    Everything Mark Davis said about the declining coterie of literary novel readers is also applicable to the books pages of a newspaper. To understand publishing of any kind, we must understand the characteristics of the organisations that own the publishers. Most of our main book publishers are owned by Pearson, Bertelsmann, Viacom, Holtzbrink, News Corp. Our newspapers are likewise owned by diversified ‘media’ corporations. The governing management principles of such organisations include segmentation and internal competition. If you are the shareholder of such a company, you don’t say, ah, our movie and new media sections are doing well this year, they can cross-subsidise our book or newspaper division, where the return on investment is on par with cash. What you do is, you pit these divisions against each other. You reward your more successful divisions with more resources, and punish the less successful by taking resources away.
    Segmentation and internal markets are replicated down the line, increasingly, so that within a book publisher, if you used to say, well, our Bryce Courtenay and our CSIRO Diet Book have done so well for us, we can use the profits to maintain our poetry list, now you say, each of these books is a discrete unit and is at war with each other unit, and if the CSIRO Diet Book does well, we will reward the diet books section with the money to repeat that success. And if the poets continue to languish, we’ll have no more poetry.
    Each publisher is now comprised of separate parts in internal competition. And of course, those which are set up with commercial aims will defeat those set up with artistic or otherwise intangible ambitions. The result is predetermined, rigged – if commerce is the measuring stick, of course the commercial will win. If there’s a general downwards trend in the population for valuing ‘cultural prestige’ through the literary novel, then this trend will be accelerated by the management structures of the publishing organisation.
    The result is that the Australian literary novel is being slowly abandoned by those publishers who operate according to this model. Our biggest publishers will not publish a book which they don’t think can sell 4000 copies. And BookScan has told them that most Australian literary novels simply do not sell that many. Heaven help the first-time novelist. It is harder than it has been in generations for a first-time literary novelist to be published in this country. Heaven help the second- or third-time novelist. Who can promise 4000 sales, unless they’re already some kind of celebrity? Where is a risk-free novel, if not one sewn to a pattern laid out by Alexander McCall Smith or Di Morrissey?
    The idea of segmentation, of internal competition, is perfectly suited to an environment where this quarter’s, this year’s returns are paramount. But even corporations that are more developed along these lines, more mature in the ruthless arts, know that you still need your sales division to cross-subsidise your research and development. Like many late adopters, it seems that publishers are falling over themselves to throw out babies with the bathwater, in the race for a better return to feed the giant maw of their global parent this quarter, this half, this year. I would liken a literary novelist’s first three or four books to the R & D phase. Publishers disagree.NEWSPAPERS– and this is the point I am trying to reach – are no different. Where I work, at John Fairfax, the idea used to be that the classifieds would cross-subsidise the opinion page. The big-selling Saturday paper, with its car and house ads, would cross-subsidise the lower-selling Friday and Monday papers. The purpose of a new lifestyle section, a magnet for advertisers even if its content was light in substance, was to keep afloat the parts of the paper that people actually read, such as news and, yes, book reviews.
    But this has changed. Now, every day and every section must fend for itself. This is fine for the Saturday motoring section. Not so good for the books pages. HarperCollins and Readings Bookshop aren’t as big advertisers as Ford and Toyota, believe it or not. And if you’re part of the advertising sales staff who really run the newspaper, what would you rather sell? A $10,000 glossy ad to Holden, which you can do in five minutes, or a $250 ad to a second-hand bookstore, which might take you a week in cajolery and coercion, if not outright begging?
    It used to be understood that the Holden ad in the magazine would pay for the book review pages – but no more. And this is why we at the Sydney Morning Herald now have our book reviews wrapped inside a section promoting new theatre shows, new movies, new restaurants, new homewares. Because the advertisers rule, and books must seek homewares display ads for shelter and succour.
    So the illusion of the literary editor’s power is undermined by the declining prestige of books pages within the modern newspaper. I think it’s fair to say that if thirty years ago the wives of our board members showed off their knowledge of Patrick White, now they show off their knowledge of Paris Hilton. Don’t think the occupants of the boardrooms are any less dazzled by celebrity culture than their children are. At Fairfax, our top management don’t want to know what books are out this week; they want to know what celebs are in town. With the best of motives, of course – they are only trying to keep up with the ‘new readers’, the 18 to 30s whom they must capture before the last of their old readers drop off their perches.
    If we’re trying to find the killer of literary culture, there is no shortage of suspects. It’s a little like the Murder on the Orient Express: count the knives. Big publishers have given up on all Australian literary fiction, except for the big proven names, because they can’t guarantee four or five thousand sales. Chain booksellers have given up because they don’t have time to read everything, and thus handsell good books, and find it easier to just blindly hit the re-order button based on last week’s BookScan figures. Bookstores fill up with frontlist – there’s only so much room, and it makes so much more sense for the bookseller to order in one hundred Matthew Reillys than one or two of everything. It is de rigueur to blame the author, too – we hear how Australian literary writing is too much like homework, with too much pretty phrasing, too little story, too many themes, not enough rattling good yarns. This is the self-congratulatory philistine position, where the busy middlebrow reader decides that if a book is challenging her concentration then that’s the author’s fault. And while we’re at it, why not blame the reader? If as Mark Davis says the readership of literary fiction is a diminishing coterie with values shaped by the Whitlam era, and later generations would rather play their Xbox or go whitewater rafting than read a book, then the grave is dug, and the casket is just waiting to be lowered in and covered over. WHY, WITH ALL THIS in mind, would anyone be so insane as to write a novel and hope to have it published? As a writer, consider the cost. I am placing strain on my marriage, I am depriving my children of time with their father, I am not providing as well as I could be for their future, I am jeopardising the friendships I have by modelling my characters on people I know, and I am risking my parents’ shame with my explicit and confronting images, not to mention my children’s embarrassment when they are old enough to read my diseased outpourings. And I am doing all of this for a dying form, with ever fewer readers, pouring my energies into an anachronistic black hole. And it’s not even fun anymore, because I know that when I’m published, all I will face is momentary anxiety over reviews and the slowly-ebbing expectation of selling enough books so that my next novel might be published as well. Why the hell would anyone bother?
    In answering this question, I want to go back to something I said earlier about being a literary editor. Mandy Sayer has written that the most harmful state for a writer is not too much isolation but its opposite – too much connectedness. Your attention span, your grip on the things that endure, is loosened by knowing too many people, hearing of too many new things.
She is right. The most corrosive effect, I find, is that being too connected can destroy your kinaesthetic sense of where the centre is.
    I would like to start questioning some of the things I said earlier. A literary editor may fancy himself at the centre of the action, for all the reasons I mentioned. Essentially, publishers flatter you, and like you to believe you are in a position of power. Yet really, you’re not. You don’t determine a book’s future, and you have no active input into what is published. You are more like a bird circling above a feast – you can see it all, people throw you scraps, but really your sense of importance is inflated by your altitude. You don’t actually cause change; you watch it go by.
    As a writer, I know this much: the centre of the world is someone sitting at a desk on their own, thinking, laying down their thoughts. There are centres of activity whirring away behind closed doors, behind doors that won’t even close properly, in rooms that don’t even have doors. As a writer, I cannot help but believe that for all the anxiety over publishing and bookselling and literary editing, the people involved in the books industry are on the whirring peripheries and those isolated individuals, separated from each other, living with their ghosts, are in fact in the centre.
    But publishers are not peripheral, you might argue, if they will not publish the writer’s work. By saying no, the publisher asserts her importance. And nor is the bookseller or the audience an incidental player if they are not selling and buying the writer’s books. We are in symbiosis, writers and readers, and it is not good enough for either of us to throw up our hands in despair or disgust.
    If writers have an opponent, that opponent is not the publisher, the bookseller or the reader. The writer’s enemy is the person telling the writer, ‘You are a cultural elite, you are a wanker, you are irrelevant, your day is past. Give up. Bend. Write thrillers – sing for your supper.’ The opponent – the great destroyer in Canberra, his spies in your neighbourhood, his allies in your family – the opponent is telling the writer that the last word has been written. Give up.
    Which is the first answer to my question: Why bother? I will not give up, because this is what the enemies of my spirit want me to do.
    But there has to be more than this. As a literary editor, what frustrates me most of all is the decline of a common vocabulary with which we speak about what we call Australian literary fiction. As I’ve said, publicists and publishers expect either a name to carry its full loading – ‘a Peter Carey novel’ says all you need to know – or that the author’s biographical details will provide an interesting enough diversion from the work so that somebody may be curious enough to read it. Or, they speak about fiction as if it is nonfiction – ‘this is a book about the early settlers’. ‘This is a book about General Custer.’ ‘This is a book about shearing.’
    That is no way to speak of a novel. That is subject matter, not writing. What we lack, it seems to me, is a way of talking about the work itself in a way that expresses what gives us the most pleasure. How do we talk about writing? I think if we answer this question, we have a way forward.
    The worm in the apple, I think, is that word ‘literary’. What is literary fiction anyway? Usually it is posed as an antonym for ‘commercial’, and so commercial fiction is what sells in large numbers, and literary fiction is what doesn’t sell. But this ignores the fact that most fiction that is written to a formula, for a mass audience, does not sell any more than non-formula fiction. Your average Australian thriller or chick-lit novel sells no more than a work of literary fiction. And sometimes, as in the case of Tim Winton, fiction sells in large quantities while losing none of its literary qualities.
    But still, I am presupposing an understood definition of ‘literary’. Is it a matter of packaging? Do we identify literary as something small and precious, while commercial is big and fat and embossed? Well, this is obviously absurd, because some books are packaged both ways, while remaining the same book. Sometimes this is a matter of the publisher trying to have it both ways – appealing to the blockbuster audience and the ‘literary’ audience at once – and deliberately confusing the issue. But more often, I would submit, we are confused because we have no viable working definition for what is ‘literary’.LET ME PROPOSE, or adopt, such a definition. The American writer David Foster Wallace said popular culture is what tells us what we already know. Obversely, what we might call ‘original’ culture is what seeks to transform what we already know. To tell us what we don’t know. I think when we’re talking about fiction, ‘original’ is a much more useful word than ‘literary’.
    What’s original, then? This often depends on the reader’s experience. And from the outset, I want to stress that I don’t believe there is ‘original’ or ‘high’ culture in one box, and ‘popular’ or ‘low’ culture in another. Most novels will have some of both. When I read a Shane Maloney book, I see many of the status quo conservative hallmarks of popular culture: property developers are bad, politicians are craven, the dogged everyman is the hero, the villains get their come-uppance. But in the line-by-line reading, I find real literature with a transformative power. When Maloney writes something like, “My breath came in short pants, dressed for the weather,” I sit up and cheer. When he unleashes an epigram like, “Acquired with parenthood, the habit of compulsive deception is not easily shed”, I sit up and read it again. This is what the best fiction does for us. Raymond Chandler, remember, for all the weak plotting and the when in doubt, get Marlowe beaten up, was one of the great line-by-line prose writers of the last century.
    I feel a need to get specific here, and I want to give four examples in ascending order of what I would call ‘original’ or ‘artful’ writing. Of course anyone is free to disagree, and I confess that I am taking examples out of context. I want to compare specific phrases rather than entire books.
To compare like with like, I’ve chosen the depiction of birds, our feathered friends, in four different novels. The first is The White Earth, by Andrew McGahan, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award last year. McGahan writes at one point: “William saw crows take flight as the utility approached, heard their harsh croaks over the engine.” At another point he writes of: “The piping of birds, crystal in the high air.” The crows, I repeat, ‘take flight’ and their ‘croaks’ are ‘harsh’. Other birds ‘pipe’, with a sound ‘crystal in the high air’. This is prose that doesn’t want to get in the way of story. Note also that when things are black in The White Earth, they are “pitch black”. The air is “perfectly still”. The sky is “clear” and “blue”.
    This is all prose that we’ve heard before. You don’t need to go into the bush to imagine that a crow has a ‘harsh croak’. As writing, it confirms what we already know, or imagine we know. The White Earth is popular fiction. At micro level it uses stock phrases, in its characterisation it presents people we’ve already read about, and in its issues it dramatises an agreeable set of politically correct storylines. It is a well-executed work of popular fiction. This novel’s receipt of the Miles Franklin made it, I believe, the first popular commercial novel to do so. Remarkably, nobody commented on that. For all the disputes over the years about eligible books having to be ‘distinctly Australian’, there was no argument over our highest ‘literary’ award being won by a book with few ‘original’ qualities. It may well have been the best book the judges read – I don’t know, I haven’t read them – but it seems surprising that a work of popular fiction can win such an award without attracting comment. What this says is that fewer and fewer of us know what we’re talking about when we talk about fiction.
    As a footnote, I note that The White Earth has enjoyed and deserved commercial success. It’s not strong sales that make a book ‘popular’ rather than ‘original’. I think that for all its shortcomings, Nikki Gemmell’s The Bride Stripped Bare, which has sold more than 100,000 copies in Australia, is a bona fide work of ‘original’ fiction. It seeks to transform its readers’ knowledge of themselves and their world. It strives to avoid the stock phrase. Whether or not it does this well is beside the point. It remains ‘original literary fiction’ that happened to be very popular with readers.
    Back to birds. My second example is from The Secret River, by Kate Grenville:

The black bird watched him from its branch. He met its eye across the air that separated them. Caaar, it went, and waited as if he might answer. Caaar. He saw how cruel its curved beak was, with a hook at the end that could tear flesh. A pelican, serene with its broad wings and great beak, planed through the sky over the river.

This, I would contend, is better. Although it remains recognisable. The anthropomorphism – birds are ‘cruel’ and ‘serene’ and ‘wait as if he might answer’ – is a little old, but this is the bird seen through the eyes of a man two hundred years ago. The language does its job, it does it well, without cliché, yet, for me, these passages are effective rather than thrilling or transformative. (There is, by the way, plenty of thrilling and transformative original language elsewhere in The Secret River.)
    My third example is from The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, by Delia Falconer. I must emphasise that these are just books I read in the past year and have stuck in my memory, and the point I am making is quite specific.
    Birds. Two passages. In the first, the character Benteen is throwing bread into a duck pond:

Two crows as sleek as big black cats linger on the edges of the quacking, and take it in turns to hop in with pointed ease to steal a mouthful. He throws a crust to a drake that has lost a foot to a trapper or a fish.

The second refers to birds and other animals collected by the soldiers and the sounds they make around the camp at night: “Their sense, at night, of those small chests pulsing in the darkness as they slept; a soft moonlit telegraph of watchful hearts.”
    In the McGahan and Grenville examples, the birds are part of scene-setting. Both serve an incidental purpose in the narrative, dashes of colour to enhance story. In Falconer, I submit, the creatures are brought to life. They have histories. The drake has lost a foot to a trapper or a fish. They communicate – the ‘soft moonlit telegraph’. They have an existence independent of mankind, independent of the story. This is writing that regenerates the world, and makes me think differently of the sounds I hear at night. And, in my opinion, the phrasing is so original – not one tired or second-hand sequence of words – that I, as an experienced reader, derive real pleasure from it.
    When I speak of what I enjoy, I don’t just mean fine language; the so-called ‘pretty writing’ school doesn’t appeal to me unless it carries some content. And the last example I’ll give, of wonderfully original fiction, is not pretty at all. It’s from No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, in which the author makes a passing comment on redtail hawks. The character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, has just found a dead redtail and is picking it up off a desert road somewhere in Texas:

They would hunt the blacktop, sitting on the high powerpoles and watching the highway in both directions for miles. Any small thing that might venture to cross. Closing on their prey against the sun. Shadowless. Lost in the concentration of the hunter. He wouldn’t have the trucks run over it.

This is writing that really satisfies me, and it doesn’t have any ostentatious fineness or difficult words. It satisfies me because McCarthy has taken a dead bird and given it personality, given it strategy. It watches the highway. It positions itself relative to the sun so it won’t throw a shadow. It is lost in concentration on its hunt. After reading this passage, next time I’m driving on an isolated road and I see a bird sitting on top of a power pole, I shall look at that bird differently, with curiosity and some insight. My world is microscopically changed after reading that passage. And it’s all wrapped up in a device of characterisation to show the compassion of Sheriff Bell.
    It might be a pipe dream, but I long for the day when a publisher or their representative calls me up and instead of telling me ‘this is a novel about blah blah blah’, or ‘this writer is really interesting because she lived in blah blah blah’ – instead of that, talks to me about the writing. Not in a general or airy-fairy sense, but in such a way as I get an idea of what’s inside this book and how good it is. As a reader, that’s what I want to know. As a literary editor, that’s what I want to impart to our readers.
    I think the durable characteristic in the best writing, whether you call it literary or original, is that it’s drawn from life. I feel that McCarthy has gone out there and studied those hawks. I feel that Falconer has studied her birds and agonised over each word to renew and refresh the language.
    Original writing derives from real life, from the real world, from the concrete. And here, as I move towards a conclusion, I would like to situate what I’m saying in a small-p political context. The hostility to cultural elites that is ever present in our world and egged on by the current federal government is based on a supposition that the elites are detached from real life, that their art is only answering other art. Another of its precepts is that cultural elites have no standards, that for these elites – for us – everything is relative.
    I reject both suppositions. The best original writing, which I have tried to mount a case for, is grounded entirely in life. Cormac McCarthy bringing a dead hawk to life on the page, and raising it off the page, is a writer who has gone out and looked at it. Falconer and Grenville, likewise, are saying, ‘here is a crow, you may think you know what a crow looks like, what it does, but I am giving you that crow afresh’.
    Formulaic writing, on the other hand, is entirely grounded in other writing. This is what cliché is – writing that mimics other writing. I’ll give you another example. The most market-friendly writer in Australia is Matthew Reilly, who writes highly entertaining action thrillers. He is very good at it. This is writing that provides escape and entertainment and reiterates the world as our culture knows it. He’s out to divert, not subvert. His point of originality is not in his phrasing or characterisation or storylines or situations. Where Matthew Reilly is different from other action thriller writers is that he takes out the pauses. He has studied the form, and figured out that it can prosper if it takes no breathers, no breaks, if the action is sustained throughout. Now, this is not a response to life. It has nothing to do with life. It is writing responding to other writing. It is writing that the political Right, I imagine, would love, and most of all because it makes money. Yet it is writing that pushes against other writing, not against the real world.

AS FOR RELATIVISM, I have made a case for the superiority of the ‘original’. Does this make me an elitist? Well, yes. I respond to quality. Sometimes I demand quality, or I will put the book down. I am not saying I can only find quality in a book with deckled edges – I can find it in Shane Maloney too. But I am saying that I develop a sense for what is high quality and what is poor quality, there is a difference and it is an important difference. I am not relativistic. The relativists are those who say that the only measure of quality is found on the scoresheets of BookScan. The relativists, in other words, are those who say the market decides what is good and what isn’t.
    It would seem that the political Left has allowed the Right to steal the high ground of standards and connectedness to real life. How on earth can this happen? How can a government that helps set off the homicidal inferno of Iraq claim to be connected in any way with reality? How can a government that seeks to commodify workers claim any kind of moral or family values? It is to the Left’s discredit that it has allowed the political language to be so thoroughly inverted.
    Original writing is always going to threaten such inversions. Formulaic writing on the other hand is going to entrench them, and entertain us while entrenching, by repetition and cliché, what we think we already know. And this is the answer I find to the question I have been posing.
    Why bother? Because art – invention, original thinking – is the answer. Why write? Because the alternative – silence – is unbearable. Silence and compliance are what the opponent wants. For that reason alone, giving up is not conceivable.
    Is the novel dying, or its audience shrinking? You know, in a way I don’t care. Are new media taking over? Well, in a sense, yes. But when was I last moved in my guts by something I read on a website? When was my vision of the world transformed by an SMS? When did I feel a common purpose with another person from another age in another place, when did I last feel renewed, by something I read on my telephone?
    The point is that books are the greatest influence, outside my loved ones, on my world. Books have formed me and will go on forming me. I will write. Perhaps my multinational publisher won’t be able to sell enough of my books to keep publishing me. Okay. I’ll go to a smaller publisher, of whom there are many, to take up the slack. And if my audience keeps shrinking, I still won’t give up. Most of us are content to make a difference to a tiny handful of lives around us. If the writer influences an audience of one thousand, or five hundred, rather than ten thousand, then so be it. Striving to say something new is still worthwhile.
    And my bet is that the future is not so bleak. The world needs original thinkers. The ‘market’ needs originality. We have to take a long view. And if I started by chiding publishers for their impatience, I ought to say the same to writers. Your books don’t disappear after three months. They don’t vanish when they go out of print. You don’t know when you are going to shake the earth under your reader’s feet. It may be years after your last book has been sold. Someone will find your book in a holiday house, and start reading. You may never know when you have rung their bell. But if you’re serious about what you’re doing, you must hold faith and be prepared to wait.
    Australia, or the globe, whoever we are, will respond to invention, because people cannot be suppressed. Are we to be artists or content suppliers? I don’t care what they call us. Theirs is the dead language, the water off a duck’s back. Are we to write in books, or on the recycled fibre of the free zine, or on some kind of electronic page? That doesn’t matter. There’s no point privileging either traditional media or new media, because they both survive on the response they get from individuals, and the way those individuals talk to each other. Macro- or microscopic, all media that carry writing depend on word of mouth. And the place to start, with that word of mouth, is in thinking more about what we already know, in rephrasing our language, in questioning our own assumptions, and in assigning words their true value, rather than today’s market price.

Malcolm Knox is an author and has been literary editor at the Sydney Morning Herald since 2002. He has published five books, including the novels Summerland (Vintage, 2004) and A Private Man (Vintage, 2001). With Caroline Overington, in 2004 he won a Walkley Award for investigative journalism for their exposé of Norma Khouri, the author of the fabricated memoir Forbidden Love.

Overland 182–autumn 2006, pp.4–12.

© Malcolm Knox

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