Sometime Never by Roald Dahl: Author's First Novel, British First Edition (Collins, 1949), Stephen Russ Cover Design

Here's a glimpse into how the mind of the hopelessly addicted, borderline unhinged book collector behind Existential Ennui works – as if you didn't already know.

Just under a week ago I posted a guest essay by my friend and former colleague Adam Newell on Roald Dahl's little-known debut novel, a 1948 work of adult fiction entitled Some Time Never – or to give it its 1949 British title, Sometime Never. It's a great post, and I urge you to go read it if you haven't already, but it had a (probably) unintended consequence in that shortly after it went up on Existential Ennui, Adam noticed that a couple of copies of the British edition of the novel – which is notoriously scarce in any edition, having only ever had one printing each in the US and the UK – had popped up on AbeBooks. Furthermore, both of those copies still had their dustjackets, and while one of the copies was listed for sale at £800 – admittedly it did bear Dahl's signature – the other was rather more reasonably priced.

You can see where this is going, can't you? Yes, I bought the reasonably – but still not exactly cheaply – priced copy of the British first – and only – edition:

which was published by Collins in 1949. And for its age, it's in pretty good condition. The dustwrapper has a few chips and minor tears, as well as a darkened spine and some loss at the head and tail of the spine, but it's otherwise bright and complete, and also unclipped – no doubt because it's unpriced anyway. That wrapper, by the way, was designed by Stephen Russ, a much-admired book cover designer who trained under painters Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious – the latter of whose work I particularly love, especially the pictures painted around the South Downs area in which I live and work – at the Royal College of Art, and who designed a lot of covers for Penguin, among other publishers.

Judging by Adam's review of Sometime Never – and indeed the jacket flap blurb – the novel could have fitted quite snugly into last year's lengthy run of post-apocalyptic fiction posts: in other words, definitely my kind of thing. So it wasn't purely avariciousness which motivated me to buy this copy... although its scarcity – the three copies of the Collins first on AbeBooks appear to be the only ones for sale online – did, it almost goes without saying, play a major part. Even so, I like to think there's an element of altruism involved here too, on account of, heretofore, there have been scant few images of either edition of Some Time Never/Sometime Never available online, and now there are all of the ones in this post. No, no – no need to thank me: I live to serve.

Like a good many 20th century literary figures, Roald Dahl had a hand in intelligence during the Second World War, in Dahl's case supplying information to Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, who was instrumental in the establishment of the OSS, which would eventually become the CIA. And oddly enough, the author of the next book I'll be blogging about also worked with Stephenson... although this particular author's ultimate aim was rather different to his fellow Allied operatives. Before that, though, I'll be plugging another guest post, this time one I'll be posting on The Violent World of Parker blog rather than Existential Ennui...

Guest Post: Roald Dahl's First Novel, Some Time Never (Sometime Never), by Adam Newell

Right then. Time for another guest post. And having played host previously to Paul Simpson and Michael Barber, for this latest guest post I'm turning Existential Ennui over to Adam Newell, a friend and former colleague of mine from Titan Books. Adam has been a book collector a lot longer than I have, and has probably forgotten more about bibliophiliacal matters than I'll ever learn. He's turned up something very interesting indeed for this essay, so without further ado, take it away, Adam...

Some Time Never: a Novel You’ve Never Heard of, by an Author You Most Certainly Have

by Adam Newell

This author is perhaps not an obvious fit for the usual preoccupations of this esteemed blog – though he wrote the screenplay to a Bond movie (You Only Live Twice), so he counts as a spy/thriller writer, and his short stories certainly feature the odd crime, perhaps most memorably murder with a frozen leg of lamb – but this post is about a SF novel (well, kind of) and will, I hope, interest book collectors, so here goes…

These days Roald Dahl is known by all as a children’s author, and remembered by many for his ‘adult’ fiction, the dark, twisted short stories published in various collections over the years, many of which were famously adapted for TV as the Tales of the Unexpected. Particular fans of the latter will perhaps have tracked down what its current synopsis on Amazon describes as ‘Dahl’s first-ever novel’: My Uncle Oswald, a ribald romp from 1979, which acts as a feature-length prequel for the titular character, dubbed ‘the greatest fornicator of all time’, introduced in two previous short stories (‘The Visitor’ and ‘Bitch’ from the collection Switch Bitch). It’s great fun, but doesn’t read like Dahl was making a serious attempt to write ‘a novel’; it comes across more like a short story that outgrew its wordcount, as indeed it was: he later admitted that his original commission, a request from Playboy for a new Oswald tale, “refused to stop” and grew into a book.

The thing is (and now we’re finally getting to the point of this post), My Uncle Oswald is not Dahl’s ‘first-ever novel’. That distinction belongs to a book called Some Time Never, published by Scribners in the US in 1948, with a UK edition (confusingly titled Sometime Never) from Collins the following year. It has never been reprinted. You’ll search in vain for a mention of it on roalddahl.com. Its Wikipedia entry doesn’t tell you much. Copies are hard to come by: of the mere dozen or so examples on ABE at present, you’ll have to pay well into three figures for one with a decent dustjacket, and the UK edition appears to be really scarce, with only two copies currently for sale (it’s entirely possible that the print run for that edition was only in the hundreds). Even a reading copy will cost you a few notes, and that’s what I finally managed to snap up a while back: a jacketless ex-library copy of the UK edition, for £20, which I bought the day it was listed on ABE, thanks to my wants list alert. I’d been wanting to read this apparently ‘suppressed’ work by one of my favourite writers for years!

So what’s it all about? I’ll let the flap copy from the US edition sum it up, as it actually tells pretty much the whole plot in précis:

Some Time Never is a blend of superbly written realism and outrageous fantasy, with an almost Swiftian quality in its savage wit and subtle humor.

It is the story of the hitherto little-known Gremlins. It is moreover a piercing commentary on Man and the qualities in Man which are leading him to his destruction.

The Gremlins were the original rulers of the earth in ages past, but with the advent of Man and the spread of his obnoxious activities to every part of the globe, the Gremlins were forced underground to a subterranean network of tunnels. Out for revenge and for the restoration of their former dominant position in the world’s affairs, the Gremlins bent every effort to plotting Man’s annihilation.

During the Battle of Britain these odd and menacing creatures began an offensive against pilots in an effort to hasten the eradication of the human race. From the experiences of three Royal Air Force pilots, Stuffy, Peternip and Progboot, we get an appalling picture of Gremlin activities, and through the eyes of the Gremlins themselves we get a portrait of Man that is far from flattering.

After the Battle of Britain the Gremlins became convinced that Man would effect his own self-destruction without any help from them – so they ceased their ingenious offensive and retired underground to wait. The atom bomb appeared, more devastating weapons followed, World War III took a terrible toll the world over and finally World War IV finished the job. The Gremlins emerged from their underground tunnels and took over world in which all human life and all works of Man had been destroyed.

The theme of this book is a serious one. Mr Dahl’s implications are the most serious a writer could suggest. Ironic and witty, Some Time Never will amuse you, even give you you a few hearty laughs – but it will also make you think.

As someone who’s written a few blurbs myself (it’s part of the day job), I can tell you that the above is a valiant attempt to summarize/’sell to a general readership’ a book that vehemently resists such things. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad book – far from it.

By 1948 Dahl had already had two books published: 1943 saw The Gremlins, an illustrated children’s story, and his first collection of adult short stories, Over to You: 10 stories of flyers and flying came out in 1946. Some Time Never is in some ways a combined offshoot of both: taking the whimsical characters of the former and putting them into the adult style of the latter. (The story of The Gremlins book, and the ultimately abandoned Walt Disney movie version of it, need not detain us here, but thanks to the scene-setting Introduction in Dark Horse’s still in print 2006 edition of that previously impossible-to-find-for-less-than-$300 book, it is now easily accessible.)

So why is Some Time Never out print? Why has it seemingly been airbrushed from the Dahl timeline? Does it hang together as a novel? No, in all honesty, it doesn’t. This is a young writer writing his ‘important first novel’ and he’s trying really hard, but it doesn’t entirely work. Mind you, his chosen theme is about as big as you can get: the destruction of mankind in a nuclear holocaust. Dahl started writing the book in 1946, and even in 1948 it was still one of the first (possibly the first?) novels published post-Hiroshima to address that looming possibility. There is some very powerful writing though, especially in the chapter after the bomb has hit London. Stuffy survives the initial blast, and emerges from a tube station to wander the ruined streets in a daze:

He walked around a double-decker bus which was standing upright in the middle of the road, and as he went past it he saw through the open glassless windows that the bus was full of people, all sitting in their places, silent, immobile, as though they were waiting for the bus to start again. But their faces were scorched and seared and half-melted and all of them had had their hats blown off their heads so that they sat there bald-headed, scorch-skinned, grotesque, but very upright in their seats. Up in front, the black-faced driver was still sitting with his hands resting on the wheel, looking straight in front of him though the empty sockets of his eyes.

It’s a long way from the BFG doing a whizzpopper in front of the Queen, isn’t it?

And yet, the book also deals in fascinated detail with the green bowler hat-wearing Gremlins and their love of snozzberries (a fruit later revived for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), so it’s still very much proto-Dahl.

At the risk of making this already long post stupidly long, I won’t attempt more lit crit here, though I will agree with Donald Sturrock (whose excellent authorised biography of Dahl, Storyteller, covers the novel in commendable detail) that Some Time Never is “extraordinary, undervalued and visionary”.

Its author evidently thought otherwise. Writing the “bastard book” was a long and wearing process, and though Dahl had high hopes for it, Scribner’s respected editor Maxwell Perkins (who had discovered Hemingway and Fitzgerald) died before he’d had a chance to read it, it didn’t get any illustrations (Dahl had wanted Mervyn Peake), the reviews were lukewarm and the sales were negligible. Sturrock recounts how Dahl refused a publisher’s request to print a paperback edition after his later success: “Why in God’s world anybody should want to paperback that ghastly book I don’t know.” He later told a fan who’d written asking where she could get a copy that “It’s not worth reading.”

I’d have to disagree with Mr Dahl: it’s well worth tracking down. It’s a shame that it will probably never be reprinted, but then why would the massive Dahl industry machine bother with bringing back a flawed, untypical and adult novel just to potentially sell a few thousand copies, and get a few eyebrow-raised reviews in the broadsheets, especially if Dahl himself had ended up being embarrassed by it? Better to protect the brand. That’s perfectly understandable, but still a shame. What’s more, Sturrock’s biography reveals the existence of several unpublished short stories in the author’s files, and indeed the manuscript of something called Fifty Thousand Frogskins, a novel that Dahl wrote directly after Some Time Never, which never got properly published at all…

(UPDATE 5/3/11: As a direct consequence of Adam's guest post, I ended up buying a copy of the Collins first of Sometime Never, and you can read about – and see – that copy right here.)

Rat Trap Island by P. M. Hubbard (Cassell, 1964); John Strickland Goodall Cover Art

Next in this short run of posts on British suspense novelist P. M. Hubbard, the second of his two works for children:

Rat Trap Island was first published in hardback the UK by Cassell & Company in 1964, the same year as Hubbard's second novel for adults, Picture of Millie (Michael Joseph). I blogged about Hubbard's debut kids' book – and possibly his debut novel – Anna Highbury during my initial run of posts on the author in May, and Rat Trap Island similarly documents the adventures of three children, in this case the Liddell brood – Carola, the oldest, and twins Jennie and Richard – who, following the hospitalisation of their mother, are taken by their father to their Aunt Maggie's for the summer, just outside the (fictional) village of Silbourne. The children find Aunt Maggie's garden leads down to a river, and begin exploring the stretch of water in a rowing-boat, soon discovering the heavily-wooded Rat Trap Island...

Much like Anna Highbury, the tone of Rat Trap Island is necessarily light – it is, after all, a children's book – but there are hints of Hubbard's obsession with a dark and dangerous rurality, reflecting the disturbed psyches of his protagonists (in his adult fiction; less so here). Take this passage, describing the children's first row-boat encounter with the island: 

The trees grew thick on either side, and here there were no houses or gardens on the left-hand bank, only a wild willow-bank with the bigger trees towering above it. To their right, along the shore of the island, the screen was also dense, but this was hedges and bamboo clumps deliberately planted, and outside them, staked deep into the river bed, the poles of the barbed-wire fence. At intervals, white, forbidding and legible even from this distance, the notices said: PRIVATE. NO LANDING. KEEP OUT.

Note there the "dense", "deliberately planted" bamboo and hedges, the "forbidding" notices: typical of Hubbard's evocation of the countryside as a frequently hostile place – which is, of course, quite at odds with his own biographical background living peacefully in Guernsey, rural Dorset and Scotland.

The dustjacket painting on the Cassell edition of Rat Trap Island is credited to J. S. Goodall, who is, in fact, John Strickland Goodall, a painter and illustrator much admired and highly sought-after by collectors. Fans of Dora Jessie Saint's Miss Read novels will be very familiar with his work, which graced the covers and interiors of thirty-plus Miss Read books over a forty year period from 1955. Goodall's Victorian and Edwardian paintings are held in collections all around the world, and he also produced his own series of wordless children's books from the late 1960s onwards.

As with Anna Highbury, there was no American edition of Rat Trap Island, and the four copies of the Cassell first currently on AbeBooks are all in the UK or New Zealand. However, there was also a Children's Book Club edition, issued in the same year as the Cassell one and sporting the same dustjacket illustration; at present there are nine of those listed on AbeBooks, a couple from American sellers, so all is not lost if you're in the States and you want to get hold of a copy.

Let's move on to the third and final P. M. Hubbard post. And for that one I've got an edition of a Hubbard novel which not only boasts a personalised aspect that, to my knowledge, makes it pretty much unique among Hubbard publications, but also includes two related pieces of paraphernalia, one of which offers a fleeting but nevertheless instructive glimpse into Hubbard's life and work...

P. M. Hubbard's First Novel? Anna Highbury (Cassell First Edition, 1963); Illustrations by Graham Byfield

Continuing this week's worth of posts on crime/suspense novelist P. M. Hubbard – during which I've been looking at books from either end of his sixteen-year career – we move on from his final novel, 1979's Kill Claudio, to his first. Now, if you know your Hubbard – and if you read that previous post on Kill Claudio, with its sly pun at the end – you might have been thinking this post would be on 1963's Flush as May, which is widely regarded as the author's debut novel. But Hubbard actually had two novels published that year – and I have reason to believe this might in fact be his true debut:

Anna Highbury was published in hardback in the UK in 1963 by Cassell, and it's the first of Hubbard's two novels for younger readers (the second being 1964's Rat Trap Island). It's the story of the eponymous heroine, the oldest of three children, all of whom live with their parents in the small southern English town of Moulton. Anna's father is a local solicitor whose clients include the owner of Spillikins, a deserted old house just outside the village. One day Mr. Highbury's offices are burgled, and papers related to Spillikins are stolen. Soon after, a mysterious visitor from New Zealand arrives, and a tale of missing rubies, believed buried somewhere in the grounds of Spillikins, begins to unfold...

If all of that sounds like your typical period children's story, then that's because, essentially, it is. There's little in the novel along the lines of Hubbard's more unnerving and psychologically tortured suspense works, although in the kids' adventures in and around the overgrown grounds of Spillikins there are hints of the author's abiding concern with environment, and in the search-for-an-elusive-treasure plot there are parallels with others of Hubbard's storylines. But Hubbard displays a sureness of touch with the characters, especially the kids, who come across well as individuals (especially the youngest, James, forever getting distracted by shiny things), and though the tone is light, there are moments of tension, as Anna and Bill Maynard, the owner of Spillikins (and the visiting New Zealander) attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The dustjacket and interior illustrations – some of which you can see throughout this post – are by Graham Byfield, who, like Barbara Lofthouse, the painter responsible for the cover of yesterday's first edition of Kill Claudio, is represented by illustration agency Artist Partners (about whom I've blogged before, in relation to photographer Adrian Flowers in this post on Len Deighton). Byfield is probably best known for his various Sketchbook titles – Oxford Sketchbook, London Sketchbook, etc. – but his distinctive and delightfully scratchy and scruffy illustrations have also appeared on some classic Penguin editions of famous novels, including Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.

Anna Highbury is a real rarity, quite possibly P. M. Hubbard's scarcest novel – in any edition. At time of writing there are only two copies available on AbeBooks worldwide, and none on Amazon Marketplace UK. (The cheaper of those AbeBooks listings is repeated on Amazon Marketplace US, so for any American readers, if you're quick, you can nab one of the two copies for sale online at a bargain price.) Seemingly – and unlike Hubbard's other kids' title, Rat Trap Island – there was only ever this one Cassell edition. But the question I posed at the start of this post still remains – namely: is Anna Highbury, rather than Flush as May, Hubbard's debut novel?

There's a clue inside the book which suggests it might be. Copyright pages in books – which can usually be found just after the title page – vary from publisher to publisher, but some publishers include codes in their indicia which denote which month a book was published in addition to the more prominent year. Around the time Anna Highbury was published Cassell were apparently one of those publishers, and right at the bottom of the copyright page there's a code: "F.763". That stands for "first published July 1963". I don't have a first edition of Flush as May to check against, but it's reasonable to suppose that Anna Highbury was published, if not before, then at least concurrently with Flush as May – publishers tending to plump for latter-half of the year/autumn release dates (for that all-important sales run-up to Christmas).

My guess is that Anna Highbury sneaked in just ahead of Flush as May, but if anyone reading this happens to own a first edition of the latter, perhaps they can check their copy and see if it has a similar code anywhere in the indicia...

Anyway, on to the final post in this series on P. M. Hubbard (although there will be much more on him down the line, don't you worry). And we're staying in 1963, for a look at another of Hubbard's stories from that year – an unnerving little tale of a boat trip that takes a turn for the horrific...

Doctor Who and the Target Novelisations, by Nicholas Jones

In many ways, Doctor Who is to blame for the existence of this blog.

When I was a kid, I loved Doctor Who. Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, was my Doctor. I literally cowered behind the sofa at his adventures. Stories like Revenge of the Cybermen (1975; cybermats!), Terror of the Zygons (also 1975; the Loch Ness Monster!) and The Brain of Morbius (1976; what the fuck is that thing?!) scared the living shit out of me. I vividly recall peeping out (very occasionally) from behind the settee at all of those serials, completely and utterly terrified out of my tiny mind.

Or at least, I think I recall that. Because I also vividly recall watching Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor serial The Green Death, wherein luminous pollutants from a chemical plant mutate insects to monstrous sizes. Even now I can still clearly visualize that glowing green ooze in the Welsh mine; those awful, disgusting, slick, pale, outsize maggots; and finally that huge, terrifying fly, attacking the Doctor... Except The Green Death was broadcast in 1973, when I was just three years old. There were no video recorders around then and I've certainly never bought and watched it on video or DVD since, or caught a repeat of it on telly. So how can I possibly remember it so distinctly...?

I followed Doctor Who throughout the Tom Baker years and into the Peter Davison ones, and then I did what a lot of young fans of the show did: I grew up and drifted away. I didn't watch many of the Sixth or Seventh Doctors' adventures, and though I did catch the 1996 Eighth Doctor TV movie, I didn't think much of it (and neither, for that matter, did anyone else). And the rest of the time, I pretty much forgot about Doctor Who.

And then in 2005 the series came back, revitalized by Russell T. Davies, and it was brilliant. My passion for the show was rekindled; I remembered how much I loved it as a kid, and fell in love with it all over again. Christopher Eccleston was great as the Ninth Doctor; David Tennant was even better as the Tenth. And now we have Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, about to begin his second series under the guiding hand of Steven Moffatt this very evening. (Which is both incredibly exciting and incredibly sad, coming, as it does, so soon after the deaths of both Lis Sladen – Sarah Jane Smith – and Nicholas Courtney – the Brigadier.)

The return of Doctor Who to television in 2005 prompted me to start buying Doctor Who Magazine – something I don't believe I'd done since its days as Doctor Who Weekly in the late-'70s – within the pages of which I caught up on what Who fandom had been up to over the past twenty or so years. And via its features on past episodes, I also began exploring the history of the show itself... except, here again, often I'd find I had a level of familiarity with serials I couldn't possibly have watched: First and Second Doctor adventures from the 1960s, with William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton up against Daleks and Cybermen and Ice Warriors and Yeti. I hadn't been born when these stories were transmitted – so how did I know some of them so well?

The answer came when I moved down from London to the Sussex town of Lewes in 2008. The move coincided with a rediscovery of novels and fiction – after years of only reading nonfiction – and a consequent and concurrent interest in collecting first editions. Serendipitously, Lewes was unusually blessed with secondhand bookshops, which further fuelled the flames. And it was whilst familiarizing myself with the town's various bookshops that I came across a selection of the Doctor Who novelisations published by Target in the 1970s. The recognition was instant. Their covers were like old friends I hadn't seen in ages: images of Tom Baker and giant robots, Zygons and other aliens I could place but not name; authors like Ian Marter, Malcolm Hulke and most of all Terrance Dicks. I knew these books, and by extension I knew the serials they had adapted, even if I hadn't necessarily watched them back in the '70s. I knew them because I'd read the Target novelisations.

I've always been a voracious reader. As a child I'd spend long hours in my local library, devouring anything science fictional or fantastical I could get my hands on: I didn't care who the author was – and can't remember now any of the writers of these books – so long as they had spaceships or time travel or monsters in them. But the books I loved above all others were the Doctor Who novelisations. Sometimes these would be the W.H. Allen hardbacks, but more often they'd be well-thumbed Target paperbacks, with their cover illustrations by Chris Achilleos and Mike Little and Jeff Cummins and others.

I read every single Doctor Who novelisation Beckenham Library had on its shelves, often repeatedly. Some of the adventures were familiar from television; most I'd never encountered before: it's clear to me now that my "memories" of the Pertwee serial The Green Death come entirely from the Malcolm Hulke Target adaptation. A few of them featured Doctors I barely recognised: a short, jester-like Doctor with a shock of black hair; a Doctor who was more akin to a grandfather than the dynamic swirling-scarfed incarnation I was accustomed to.

After a while I started noticing the names of the authors of these short novels, and then determining which of those authors I preferred (Terrance Dicks was by far my favourite). What I was doing, without really knowing it, was developing critical faculties. This was the first flowering of my sense of the worthwhile versus the worthless, of a recognition of excellence over excrement (although I hasten to add none of the Who novels fell too far into the latter categories) – faculties which would eventually lead to my becoming a music journalist and then take me into publishing; faculties which would result in the blog you're reading right now.

Because while for many fans of a certain age, the Target novelisations are important for the way they preserved the show in an era before video recorders and DVDs and the internet – and indeed preserved some Doctor Who serials that have otherwise been wiped from the BBC archives – or provided additional background elements or details lifted straight from the original scripts (character surnames, thought processes, etc.), for me they're important for different reasons. The Target Doctor Who books were what first got me hooked on novels all those years ago. But more than that, reading the Target novelisations back then, I learned to appreciate some of their authors' talents more than others, and followed the writers I liked the most, thus triggering a lifelong interest in serialised writing – fiction, nonfiction, novels, TV, comics, columns, diaries – and writers of serials.

So it was entirely fitting that when I moved down to Lewes three years ago, and with my at-the-time newly rediscovered passion for books and book collecting gathering pace, the first novels I purchased in a Lewes secondhand bookshop were Target Doctor Who paperbacks. You can see some of them scattered about this very post. It was those books, and countless others like them, that first made me a confirmed book lover. It was those books that eventually turned me into a bibliophile. And so it was those books that were at least partly responsible for my finding a focus for Existential Ennui. Ultimately, then, if it wasn't for Doctor Who – or rather, if it wasn't for the Doctor Who novelisations – you wouldn't be reading this blog.

Of course, whether that's a good or bad thing is open to debate. Something to ponder, perhaps, as we all tune in tonight at 6pm for the new series... Incidentally, there is an entire book about the Target books – called, in fact, The Target Book, published by Telos in 2007. And all being well I'll be returning to that sometime down the line...

Martin Amis, Children's Fiction, and We Are All Guilty by Kingsley Amis (Reinhardt First Edition, 1991)

True to form, waiting for me at home when I got back last night was the book I originally intended to blog about when I wrote that post on Martin Amis's London Fields and the kerfuffle caused by Amis's comments about children's fiction, and which I was complaining still hadn't turned up by yesterday lunchtime, whining ingrate that I am. And it's this:

A UK hardback first edition of We Are All Guilty by Kingsley Amis, published by Reinhardt Books in 1991, with a front cover illustration by Derek Brazell. It's Amis Senior's one and only novel – or rather, novella; it's around 90 pages – aimed at younger readers – and as you've no doubt guessed by now, the half-arsed point I was going to make originally was that while Amis M. may never write a children's book, Amis K. most definitely did.  

We Are All Guilty is the story of seventeen-year-old London lad Clive Rayner, who breaks into a warehouse with his mate for a laugh and then has to deal with the consequences of a night watchman getting badly injured during the episode. It was written towards the end of Amis's life – he died in 1995 – and in Clive revisits a character Amis originally created for a 1970s television play (I don't know which one).

Trouble is, if I wanted to hold up a children's story as a refutation of Martin Amis's remarks, We Are All Guilty probably wouldn't be the best example. Indeed, as James Wolcott notes in this recent Vanity Fair post on the novella, it may even be the root of Amis Junior's problem (if he even has one) with kid lit. As an experiment it's intriguing, but it's not a great piece of fiction. The dialogue is clunky and outdated – Amis's take on how 1990s teenagers spoke is rather tin-eared – and the overall tone is more akin to a well-meaning 1970s TV drama – which, considering that's where it originated, shouldn't be so surprising. It's certainly conceivable, as Wolcott suggests, that Martin wasn't terribly impressed by it and that that reaction consequently coloured his view of children's fiction.

And yet... there's something about the story that's oddly compelling. Clive is beset on all sides by people trying to forgive him: his parents, the police, the local vicar, even the man whose life he nearly ended. But Clive isn't seeking forgiveness. He knows he done wrong, and he wants to pay for his crime, to be punished. Wolcott identifies this as evidence of Amis's indignation at what he perceived as Britain's liberal nanny state, noting the story's "satirical" nature. It's an interesting notion, and it hews to the received wisdom of Amis's right-leaning politics by this juncture, but I think he's barking up the wrong tree, chiefly because it conveniently ignores the fact that the book must have been written not long after Section 28 was enacted and around the time of the Poll Tax Riots, when Britain felt anything but liberal.

But Wolcott is also overlooking who the book was aimed at. Kids always prefer to read about characters who are older than they themselves are, so We Are All Guilty was – still is, for all I know – read by children younger than Clive, I guess from ages twelve to fifteen. As such, it possibly provided some food for thought. Clive may be a bit hackneyed as a character and sometimes speak as if written by an essentially middle class pensioner, but his confusion and unfocused anger come across quite well. I can see how a younger reader could connect with Clive. And there are no easy answers in the novel either, making it a good topic of discussion for students.

Which is exactly what it has become for one university professor, although perhaps not in the way Amis envisaged. In January this year, We Are All Guilty was published in a translated Persian edition in Iran. The translator of the novella, Professor Ali Arabani Dan of Islamic Azad University, was quoted as saying: "We Are All Guilty is the story of a young man who undergoes decadence due to his economical and family problems, but finally find a new hopeful world in the light of religious instructions... I have been teaching this book for years in original English in my classes, but then I decided to translate it into Persian to make its universally religious content available for the use of our youth."

Which, considering Amis was a confirmed atheist who wrote a number of times about his antipathy towards God – see the essay "On Christ's Nature" in What Became of Jane Austen?, or the novels The Anti-Death League and The Green Man, both of which take issue with the Almighty – is rather ironic. Although, to return to my original point, I suppose it is proof that even a not particularly great piece of children's fiction can still possess a certain power.

Anyway. Onwards. And coming next, as I promised yesterday, it's Bleeck Week...

Lewes Book Bargain: London Fields by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape First Edition), and That Brain Injury Remark

You might have noticed there was a bit of a kerfuffle last week over remarks made by Martin Amis during the first episode of Sebastian Faulks's BBC2 programme Faulks on Fiction. In an aside, Amis said, "When people ask me if I've ever thought of writing a children's book, I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book, but otherwise...' The idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom, and any restraints on that are intolerable." He then added, back on the subject of his character John Self from Money: "I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write at."

Almost a week later – presumably the time it takes these days for reporters to catch up on telly programmes on BBC iPlayer and rouse themselves enough to go and canvas opinion and hopefully whip up a bit of controv, the idle bastards – The Guardian ran a story about the "anger and offence" Amis's remarks had caused, featuring rebuttals from a number of dissenting children's authors. Predictably, shortly after that the twittersphere and blogosphere threw a collective hissy fit and began loudly condemning Amis and all his works, and permutations of the 'story', such as it is, have been running ever since (google "Martin Amis brain injury" – stop sniggering at the back – and you'll see what I mean).

I mention all this not to add my own voice to the hysterical din – I actually watched the programme in question and the slight smile that plays around Amis's lips and eyes as he formulates the sentence tells you much of what you need to know; plus I can see what he was getting at (it's his opinion on his own writing, after all), and parts of the quote have been taken out of context anyway – but with the intention of showing a book today that could be seen as something of a riposte to his statement. Unfortunately, that book hasn't turned up in the post yet, which has scuppered my plan somewhat. So instead, here's a Lewes Book Bargain, a novel by Amis which I bought in the Lewes Oxfam shop recently:

A UK hardback first edition/first impression of London Fields, published by Jonathan Cape in 1989. It's in nice condition, and as you can see from the £2.99 price sticker on the back, it cost rather less than you'd ordinarily have to pay for a true first. The only problem is... I can't remember if I've read the bloody thing or not. I have read Amis's early novels – The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Success, Other People, Money – and flicking through London Fields, parts of it do seem familiar to me. But if I have read it, I can't for the life of me recall a damn thing about it. What's more, upon further reflection, I can't recall anything about any of the other Amis M. books I've read either, with the possible exception of Money, and even there it's only a vague and lingering impression of John Self.

I'm not sure what conclusions I should draw from this. Is it a case of failing memory? I don't think so, because I can vividly recall many of the other books I read around the same late-'80s/early-'90s period. Is it something to do with the relative strength of Amis's storytelling? Or maybe I merely imagined I read those Amis novels when in fact I did no such thing, a sort of retroactive literary-fying of my admittedly genre-centric reading past (a literary retcon, if you will)? Who the hell knows. I suppose I'll just have to start reading London Fields again and see if anything jogs my memory. And if the book I originally intended to write about today turns up, perhaps in the next post I can make the point I was originally intending to make. Although I'm uncertain now I had much of a point to begin with. Hurm.