There was an article in the Sunday Times today (it made the front page) titled: Booker winners need not apply. In a nutshell, a reporter had sent material from two books, both of which had, in the Seventies, taken the Booker home - Naipaul’s In A Free State, and Stanley Middleton’s Holiday - changing only the author’s and some characters’ names, to twenty agents and publishers, with all but one rejecting them straight away.

I can’t believe this is the first time this experiment’s been tried, and it does make agents, despite the mass of material they receive, seem a bit dumb. I’ve read the Naipaul one a few years ago and a couple of his others and I doubt you could find a better prose writer around today.

Anyway, despite being exasperated, disheartened, alarmed and amused, I found the article oddly encouraging. It’s quite nice, even if in some immaterial, inconsequential way, to share some common ground with a Nobel Laureate.

I can't believe nobody has tried this before actually, and yes, doesn't it make editors seem like idiots, but the good thing is, maybe there's hope for all of us yet.

I really dont think it's anything to do with editors being able to spot talent, but more to do with your story being in the right place at the right time, and just being picked up by someone in a good mood who thinks it's worth a second glance.

Kat

unless the person submitting the material wrote a shit synopsis

Doris Lessing wrote a novel called The Diary of a Good Neighbour and with her agent's help, sent it out as being by a new writer, Jane Somers, to publishers and also to reviewers who'd hated her Canopus series. None recognised her.

She says she wanted to escape from the 'cage of associations and labels' all established writers acquire, and be judged on merit. She also wanted to 'cheer up young writers, who often have such a hard time of it, by illustrating that certain attitudes and processes they have to submit to are mechanical, and have nothing to do with them personally, or with their kind or degree of talent.'

Her current and other publishers turned it down, though some recognised the influence on 'Jane Somers' of Doris Lessing's writing! 'I saw the readers' reports and was reminded how patronized and put-down new writers are'.

Mind you, perhaps her work not being recognised is not so suprising, as she found the pseudonym strangely and surprisingly liberating: 'As Jane Somers I wrote in ways that Doris Lessing cannot. It was more than a question of using the odd turn of phrase or an adjetive... Jane Somers knew nothing about a kind of dryness, like a conscience, that monitors Doris Lessing whatever she writes and in whatever style.'

Re: JB's thread on what to do about there being another James W. Bennett writing, Lessing meditates interestingly on her relationship with her various names (her father's and two husbands' and the fact that even 'Doris' was chosen by the doctor who delivered her, as her mother had been convinced she would be a boy and had no girl's name ready!

Emma

I think experiments like this are encouraging. I don't think they make editors/agents look bad, but it at least shows they're human - some people seem to blow them up to be these Godlike creatures. It also shows that getting an agent/publisher or whatever is down to one person's opinion on a particular day and that it is down to luck in being read by the right person at the right time as much as it is down to talent.

Cath

Yes, Cath's right.

Plus it ought to remind us that not only are agents and publishers human, but that there's nothing God-given or infallible about a Booker win either. It really doesn't say more than that on that day, that set of judges, with their knowledge and experience but also their prejudices and ingnorance, decided that it was the best of the books that were were offered to them for judging from all the literary novels published that year.

Emma

This just shows the subjectivity of agents. OK, they need to have confidence in the writers they represent, but doesn’t it strike anyone else as somewhat unprofessional that they can’t recognise quality writing when they see it, just because it’s not to their own personal taste? Or that we’re expected to meekly accept that our two years of work is rejected because someone doesn’t happen to be in the right mood?

Dee

Both Wax and I have recently had agents turn us down saying they thought it was quality writing, but not enough to their personal taste. Agents generally seem to want something they feel passionate about to sell to publishers.

Cath

I suppose we've all tried reading books that we know are very good, but just don't really grab us, personally. Given the sheer number of submissions that land on an agent's desk, I guess it's not enough to recognise the quality of the writing: they probably get 10 a week where the quality's recognisable despite the flaws, among 490 others. For one thing, it's not fair to their existing authors to take on more new ones than they can handle properly. And above all they need to feel a passionate conviction about a book's merits before they can promote it to publishers, and that passion can't be anything other than a personal and subjective thing. They'd all admit that.

About half the agents I submitted The Mathematics of Love to turned it down on those sort of grounds - that it didn't quite grab them. I don't know what the figures were for publishers when it went to them, but I know not all were as excited about it as Headline Review and Morrow are.

I always remember, having just been struggling with the UCCA (now UCAS) process, asking the admissions tutor of my first degree course why they only saw applicants who put them first, as it made silly tactical worries confuse my efforts to think about where I really wanted to go. And didn't he worry about missing a potential star who'd happened to put Manchester first instead of Birmingham? 'I know,' he said, 'but we have 400 applications for 16 places, and only the time to run the whole-day interview and audition process for 100 people. What else can I do to eliminate 300 people immediately?'

Agents say similar things, and the nicer ones know how tough it is for aspiring writers, and how deeply frustrating. We want what feels like a professional qualification, and we're used to knowing that if we've worked hard, covered the syllabus and can reproduce what we've learnt in the exam, we will get it. But with publishing, the examiner is an individual with a million other things to do, and with their own tastes, blind spots, concerns, distractions, judgment of the market and so on. The fact that we spent two years or two decades on the thing doesn't make any difference. For them it's not enough to be good enough, it has to be absolutely irresistible.

Emma

It's not the first time it's been tried - when Piers Morgan was editor of The Mirror he did exactly the same with a past Booker winner (name escapes me) and it was turned down by all, including the people who had published it

Andrea

<Added>

I suppose we've all tried reading books that we know are very good, but just don't really grab us, personally.

I agree, I know I've often discarded a book because I thought it was boring tosh, but there have been times I've wanted to finish a book because I could see the writing really is quality and the book probably does have a great story to tell (eg Barbara Kingsolver, the Poisonwood Bible) ... but just not one it turned out I was not personally all that interested in reading. Perhaps that's how agents feel.

I could see the writing really is quality and the book probably does have a great story to tell... just not one it turned out I was personally all that interested in reading

Yes, that's the point I'm making; that we all have books like that. I loved The Poisonwood Bible, but felt just that way about Michael Frayn's Headlong, which was a Booker winner.

It costs us nothing more to buy a book and then find it's one of those than the price of the book and the waste of time. But an agent has to spend time and overhead on it, and not on something else, so they have to be sure. And, just as important, with each book that they offer to publishers, the agent is putting their own reputation on the line: publishers know which agents are good judges of a good book and the right editor for it, and which agents aren't, and look at their submissions with that in mind.

If Piers Morgan submitted the book to its own editor, it is very deplorable that they didn't recognise it, but the reality is that most of the people who work on a book in a publishers won't read it, or not more than a few pages. They don't have time.

Emma

Emma (firstly, I don’t think Headlong did bag the Booker, but more importantly…), if, as you say, books are mainly rejected because of an agent’s personal taste and some ‘irresistibility’ factor then I fear the situation may be far worse than I thought. I could understand it if a single agent had decided against, say, Naipaul’s book, but twenty? Twenty agents, who, I’m willing to bet if sat around some dinner table and asked to comment of his work, at least half would be complimentary, decided someone who won the Nobel, and of whom critics like Robert McCrum have called the greatest living prose writer in English, was a writer they didn’t feel comfortable risking their reputation on and putting to a publisher, or was not to their personal taste. What does this say about the general level of taste in literature of UK-based agents?

It seems to my still-reasonably-optimistic eye that agents exclusively focus on those books that they can be reasonably certain will secure a certain return; and that these tend to be the - perhaps enlightening, but I doubt it - musings of the latest non-celebrity, or a new writer recommended to them by someone they know (which can’t do an agent’s ability to discriminate any good whatsoever).

It’s probably no coincidence that this trend has led to the situation that we currently have no living British writer in the top rung, so to speak. As much I hate to descend into lists, McKewan, Amis, Barnes, Rushdie and even Hollinghurst and Ishiguro (both of which I think are great) all somewhat pale when compared to Updike, Roth, Marylinne Robinson, Alice Munro, Garcia Marquez, Vargos Lhosa, Kundera, Mistry; (the recently late) Saul Bellow and W G Sebald; Coetzee, Wole Soyinka, Gunter Grass and Nadine Gordimer. There’s perhaps some irony to be found in the fact that the person that tends to be regarded as the greatest living critic - James Wood - is British. So it seems that though we can tell everyone what’s wrong with it, we no longer have writers - or published writers at any rate - who can actually do it. From the land of Richardson, Austen, Bronte, Dickens and Forster, that’s a pretty sad state of affairs.

Pondering this, I'm wondering if these kinds of experiments are just by their nature flawed - you couldn't send a recent book, it would be too recognisable, so you have to send an older one; in sammy's example they were both from the 70s, the one I quoted was (I think it was a Bernice Rubens) too.

Thinking has changed so much since then ('the Seventies' - was this before or after the Equal Pay Act for instance?) and so have writing styles. We can still enjoy reading books from the past but we accommodate the fact they are from the past, don't get irate about the sexism, racism, classism in them because we bear in mind the context, don't slap our foreheads at all the adverbs. But we wouldn't expect them to be published nowadays.

I haven't read the books named and maybe they were completely modern in their style and thinking, but perhaps they just somehow seemed a little dated for the current market.

Andrea

Andrea, it's a very good point. There are books I enjoyed a lot in the 70s, but now find unreadable because of their attitudes, not their prose, and who can blame a publisher for turning them down? And when everyone's busy getting hot under the collar about the terrible state of Eng. Lit., they ought to remember that for each Austen there were dozens if not hundreds of others, of widely varying degrees of success and esteem in their day, which are now totally forgotten. Time sifts. We shan't know for sure which of any Booker list (say) is another Austen for a while yet. (Which was Tolkien's reason for stopping the Eng. Lit. syllabus at 1830, but I'm not sure it's a good enough one to exclude Dickens and James)

I tried to read The French Lieutenant's Woman recently, and found it painfully dated, which maybe excusable in a book that's designed to meditate on the relationship of history and literature, but didn't make it any easier to read.

It's a bit like those experiments where they make GCSE candidates do the old 11+ maths paper, and shock! horror!, they can't do it. Dumbing down! everybody cries. But if you took a bunch of 60 year olds most of them couldn't do GCSE maths because the syllabuses are different, the ways of thinking are different, and if they could it would probably be because of what they've learnt since then. (Measuring GCSEs against ten years ago, say, is different, and the exam boards and the government ought to be ashamed of themselves, but that's a different argument)

Sammy, you're right about Headlong and the Booker; it was shortlisted, but didn't win.

Emma

Emma/ Andrea

But what then of the timeless quality of great prose? I don’t think it matters if the book avows to a racist, classist, classicist, sexist or, for that matter, any other agenda - great prose is great prose, and the only thing that really changes is vernacular. (Which is probably why the reporters didn’t submit some forgotten piece by Dickens or whoever). And I don’t think vernacular has altered that much since the Seventies.

I don’t really understand how someone could change their opinion of a book simply because they no longer agree with the attitudes displayed by the author/book. This suggests that you either initially liked the book more for its sentiments rather than their prose, or, more likely, that the quality of the prose, as read today, isn’t enough to compensate for the attitudes you disagree with. The former implies, in my opinion, a kind of wrong-headed approach to reading, and the latter a change in your threshold when it comes to acceptable prose, not a change in your opinion of the author’s attitudes.

And anyway, if we’re going to start meriting books simply because they concur with society’s current sway of opinion, then not only is the novel going to be in trouble, it’s in danger of becoming redundant.

Emma - you’re right; posterity is her own judge.

Sam