In the autumn, Dame Margaret Drabble, the new chair of the Society of Authors, complained in an interview with her fellow novelist, Sarah Dunant, of her feeling that her publishers wished, for marketing purposes, to "rebrand" her work, rather than allowing the words on the page to speak for themselves.
If that is what her publisher wanted, the wish ran counter to an emerging tendency among readers - most clearly expressed in the phenomenon of the Richard and Judy Book Club, which has deep roots in the traditions of autodidacticism and is thus anathema to literary intellectuals - to disregard arbitrary distinctions between "literary", "middlebrow" and "popular" fiction. Instead, they prefer to categorise books across genres in terms of whether or not they are a "good read".
For every publisher who loves the club for its promotion of reading (and thus book sales), there is another that blames it for encouraging a bland, best-sellerish culture of homogeneity. "To be fair, the R & J book club has created a kind of energy within the book trade that has been lacking. But is has also resulted in booksellers getting even lazier. And I think that is a shame," said one editor, who preferred not to be named.
"Booksellers" in this context means the big chains, most of which now buy fiction centrally, sacrificing, it is claimed, quality to quantity and obliging publishers to do the same. "Publishers are like farmers," says Alison Samuel, editorial director of the Random House imprint Chatto & Windus, meaning that they have a tendency to low spirits, a characteristic reluctance ever to admit that things are going anything but badly. But as in farming, so in publishing, there is some evidence of a correction: a certain energy of smallness, of idiosyncracy, of a modest but gathering resistance to commercial monoculture.
Early in 2008, the Book Trust charity began an elegant (if unpublicised) internet campaign to promote literature in translation. Meanwhile, independent publishers, such as the Edinburgh-based Canongate and Birmingham's Tindal Street Press, have had sustained and remarkable success with "difficult", hard-to-categorise fiction. Canongate publishes distinctive, well-made literary novels, including Rebecca Miller's best-selling The Private Lives of Pippa Lee; Australian writer Helen Garner's first novel for 15 years, the ravishing Spare Room; and translations such as David Bellos's dazzling rendering into English of the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare's The Siege, one of the finest novels of the year. Tindal Street, which sprang 10 years ago from a writers' group, publishes regional literary fiction with Arts Council support, and has had 11 national prize listings from 42 publications, including this year's Booker longlisted Girl in a Blue Dress, by Gaynor Arnold.
