Daniel Davies' Isle of Dogs is, for my money, the best British novel of 2008 so far. Dealing with a status-obsessed magazine editor, it follows him as he moves "post-ambition" and back to the suburbs, his parents and his childhood bedroom. Once there, he takes on a footling office job, reads Richard Dawkins and Abraham Maslow and passes his spare time vigorously dogging.
The book is a near-flawless analysis of British society; the time-wasting in offices, the simmering boredom of provincial life and the petty desires that drive both our relationships and the economy. It combines the conversational tone of American Psycho with Michel Houellebecq's nihilistic comedy. And at the time of writing it's garnered just two reviews and no publicity whatsoever. John Niven's excellent Kill Your Friends performed slightly better, but as books which connect with the supposedly non-reading constituency of young(ish) men and dissect modern Britain they should both have been noisy, celebrated successes.
How does book publishing manage to consistently balls things up so badly? At a time when the industry is crying out for readable literary fiction a novel like Davies' is a gift. Admittedly he's with a small publisher - Serpent's Tail - but they were originally responsible for Houellebecq and David Peace, so it's not exactly vanity publishing (11 other publishers passed on the manuscript). ST's press officer Rebecca Gray says her hunch is that most reviewers were worried about the sexual content offending their readers. "To anyone who hasn't read it, it's perhaps an embarrassing prospect," she suggests (having pitched a book about pornography, I can vouch for how astonishingly prudish book people can be).
My own guess is that something else is at play here besides the delicate sensibilities of some reviewers. Publishing is in a well documented state of economic and structural chaos and worried about whether its physical end-product will even exist in the future. In short, it's now dealing with the problems that my own industry - magazines - faced seven years ago. Sadly, the book industry seems to be responding in the same way - by retreating into safe, middle of the road ideas and a particularly stubborn intransigence.
It didn't work for magazines - dumbing down content and aiming for the lowest common denominator didn't boost any existing title's ABC - and it won't work for books either. The good titles that do get published are too often lost in an attempt to make them look unthreateningly "mainstream".
The most poisonous thing about this retreat into conservatism is that it's rooted in a fundamental contempt for the audience; the assumption that the public are idiots who only respond to slop and are somehow just "not getting it" when they don't buy something. This is a toxic mentality and becomes an excuse for bad work. Books can learn from magazines' mistakes; surviving the internet doesn't mean paper replicating an online experience, or vice versa, and people will happily pay a lot more money for a slightly better product (see Monocle's success). Reviewers, commissioners and retailers should have more faith in the public; as long as it's presented in an interesting, inclusive way, their tastes are surprisingly broad.
