Opinion

Don't Believe Everything You Read

Steven Poole imagines an alternative reality in which literature is demonised by the mainstream press.

Yesterday the publisher Random House announced that it had sacked Lee Child, author of the enormously successful Jack Reacher series of ultraviolent detective thrillers. In an act of what a Random House SEC filing has described as ‘gross insubordination’, Child was planning that the next in the series would be an erotic space opera. The job of composing the official Jack Reacher texts will now be delegated to a group of scriveners more sensitive to the publisher’s desires. “We own the Jack Reacher IP,” said a Random House manager, “and we think you will be very excited about the ways we plan to extend it. There will be Jack Reacher ringtones, Jack Reacher eggcups, and a Jack Reacher musica on rollerskates.” Lee Child is countersuing the publisher on the basis that its staff are spittle-flecked idiots. He refused to confirm or deny that he was also working on a new novel, starring a former military policeman named Zack Feature.
 
In other news, travel restrictions did not prevent three major publishing houses showing off their new motion-control systems at the London Book Fair. The chief technology officer of Bloomsbury sneered: “Readers are bored with simply turning a page to find out what happens next. With our new Get Off™ peripheral, they will have to execute a flying crescent-kick wearing kung-fu slippers, or mime a wooden puppet whose strings have just been cut.” Next door, rival Fourth Estate was pushing its own 3D display technology. “We think readers are bored with the same old flat words,” whispered its bug-eyed spokesman. “Lettering that is truly three-dimensional will empower a new level of immersion. Your favourite words – like, maybe, ‘plinth’ or ‘flange’ – will quite literally jump off the page.”
 
These publishers are all hoping to surf the recent wave of unusual mainstream media attention for their medium after a book entitled Chevy Brayne was hailed as the closest literature has yet come to fulfilling its promise as a fusion of 1980s hair-metal with edgy contemporary dance. A 15-year-old reviewer for the Guardian wrote: “Arguments have raged for centuries over whether books can really be art. But with its hypnotic elbow jerking and heavily chorused guitar solos, Chevy Brayne puts that issue definitively to rest.” Among the hardcore reading fraternity, on the other hand, some notes of scepticism were sounded. “The writer of this book promised us for years that it wouldn’t be what it looked like in demos, which is essentially just one word after another in a linear order,” fumed one enraged nerd. “And yet, for all the body-popping in baggy Y-fronts and squealing pinched harmonics, that’s exactly what it is. I might as well be reading Nicholas sodding Nickleby.”
 
The debate continued to simmer in the serious press, however, as to whether books retard children’s development. The author of a new government-commissioned report, Kanye Mould, announced this morning: “It’s obvious that videogames like Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth teach our children the critical life skills of logic and deduction, and offer them valuable preparation for careers in academic philosophy as argumentation theorists. On the other hand, parents are rightly worried that too many children are spending hours a day slack-jawed on the sofa, passively consuming books that brainwash them into thinking that it is possible to have sexual intercourse with vampires, or that there exist schools for wizards.”
 
Among Mould’s recommendations were that the cover of every book sold should feature enormous colour icons warning parents of false (a big red X) or immoral (a giant blue cock) information contained therein, as well as icons (to be determined) for clumsy prose, improper use of statistics, or poor paragraphing. “Parents need to know that their children’s vulnerable young minds are not being twisted by books,” said one parent, waving a crudely whittled stick in the camera’s face. “Every copy of Romeo And Juliet should totally be forced to display a big red X and a giant blue cock on the cover.”
 
Finally, readers worldwide were flummoxed by technical issues bedevilling the latest episode of downloadable content released for Don DeLillo’s celebrated novel Underworld, which added a new epilogue chapter in which Lady Gaga tortures George Osborne to death on the boiling slopes of an Icelandic volcano. Book lovers desperate to see exactly what hi-def outrages Gaga would perpetrate upon the Tory’s pasty flesh under cover of the putrid ash cloud were frustrated by a bug that not only rendered the existing novel unreadable but caused customers to be unable to read anything at all for 24 hours, including restaurant menus and the destinations on the front of buses. During this time, DeLillo’s publisher posted a semi-apologetic message, ending in the word “LOL”, on an official internet forum, but no one was able to read it.