It’s that time of year when the local librairie-papeterie in your French holiday village is full of signs for la rentrée and English newspapers carry ads for gel pens and shoes with Velcro fastenings. I used to love this season as a schoolboy – discovering if I’d made the under-13 football training squad. For the past 40 years, though, September has been for me a different season: the time of the publishers’ launch party. These used to be lavish affairs, held in a hotel or gallery with themed drinks and food, the whole thing fizzing with romantic possibilities. In 2001 we had a memorable do for my American novel On Green Dolphin Street with a jazz quartet, cheeseburgers and bottomless dry Martinis. (What happened afterwards in Vauxhall Bridge Road has stayed in VBR.)
Nowadays publishers won’t pay for parties, so authors have to do what they can at the local bookshop, bringing their own plonk and peanuts. It can still be worthwhile, though. Last week I went to the bookshop launch of Three Rivers, Robert Winder’s account of how the Po, the Rhone and the Rhine, rising from the same Alpine source, helped shape Europe, both physically and culturally. There is a lovely moment in the book when Winder picnics above the Rhone at Côte-Rôtie, drinking the sublime local wine straight from the bottle, and reflects that the valley below was the route by which France received the three things without which it would not be France: Roman civilisation, Christianity and Côtes du Rhone.
Almost 40 years ago, Robert and I worked together on the books pages of the newborn Independent newspaper. By coincidence I am also publishing a book this week – Fires Which Burned Brightly. I had long resisted the idea of writing a memoir, on the grounds that it looked self-important and that writers’ lives are in any case uneventful. But I changed my mind. One reason was that I felt a sort of watershed had been reached after Covid and that we had entered a new world. This meant that the universe I had more or less happily inhabited for half a century had begun to look like a museum. I’m intrigued to see what a generation that came after mine will make of it. Some old publishing hands tell me there is no such thing as the ‘younger reader’, since people below a certain age can’t concentrate long enough to get through a whole book. But perhaps they can dip in and have a laugh at the old certainties.
When I take the dog round the block or go to the shops, about half the people I walk past are having conversations with disembodied voices. Some are clutching mobile phones, some aren’t; all have white plugs in their ears. They don’t speak discreetly: they talk at full volume, with stagey laughter and exaggerated gestures, like ham actors determined to be noticed at the back. Sometimes I envy their self-absorption and indifference to the existence of others. Occasionally, though, I feel as if I’ve been on duty in the airing court of a Victorian county asylum.
It’s more important than ever, I remind myself, not to be a grouch, but instead to count the blessings of the modern world. A banking app that really works, for instance. A friendly watch-repair shop in Hatton Garden. Then there’s the England cricket team. Zak Crawley’s cover drive, Harry Brook’s eye, Joe Root’s perennial glory. What a summer that was. To say nothing of Mohammed Siraj, the Laughing Policeman. And have you tried Bookshop.org, which delivers the next day while supporting local independent bookshops and pays its taxes?
Then on Saturday we went to the Barbican to see Good Night, Oscar, a play about the American pianist, wit and entertainer Oscar Levant. It is far from perfect and I would have liked more of the great Rosalie Craig as Mrs L, but it does, thanks to Sean Hayes in the title role, end with the greatest coup de théatre I have ever seen.
Once the book-launch party season is over, the next marker of autumn is the arrival of the first Bafta film ‘for your consideration’ in the upcoming awards. This used to be a DVD dropped through the letter box. Some distributors sent half a dozen in a special fold-out case, like an early Christmas present. It was great. Then Bafta decided that DVDs were bad for the environment, so now you have to stream everything. This involves buying a gadget from Amazon (sadly Bookshop.org doesn’t do tech) and numerous password obstacles. It also means another remote control, whose functions are cross-multiplied with the existing three and impossible to countermand. One year we had to watch the entire Bafta offering with Hebrew subtitles. It added a certain je ne sais quoi.
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