Over the past few years articles proclaiming the decline of serious literary journalism and its finest product, the essay, have been appearing with monotonous regularity. It's dispiriting to be confronted with so many laments about the way papers all over America have been cutting their book sections for years, predictions of the demise of the TLS and stories of how Granta is haemorrhaging editorial staff.
So it's a relief to have the opportunity to write a more positive piece. The London Review of Books this week celebrates its 30th birthday – and does so with a fortnightly circulation still steadily rising towards the 50,000 mark. A fact that at once gives hope for the future of criticism and, in its curious anomaly, seems entirely suited to a magazine that has always made a virtue of exceptionalism.
Oblivious to fashion as it is, the LRB would probably be out of time in any era. Yet, its publisher Nicholas Spice (whom I had the pleasure of speaking to last week) says it might "have been comfortable 100 or 200 years ago". Certainly there's something old-fashioned about its austere, text-heavy format and long, discursive pieces aimed at the "general intelligent readership" that most modern media companies do their damnedest to avoid. But old-fashioned doesn't mean moribund. "You might have thought this is stuff that nobody would be interested in any more. But actually this particular style of long form essay is still very much loved by the reading public," says Spice. "The reasons for success and the reasons for failure are often not as straightforward as they might appear."
His theory is that newspapers cut back their literary coverage as much because of their internal economics as lack of demand. And just as the demise of high street CD retailers doesn't indicate no one likes music any more, so the disappearance of literary essays is really a question of the difficulty of making them profitable. "Or, to turn the thing upside down, people might say that the LRB's circulation of getting on for 50k means the essay is alive and kicking. It might mean that – or it might just mean we've been in a position to pursue a direct marketing policy that's allowed us to develop our subscription circulation." Which is a pretty convincing argument – although, naturally, Spice is too discreet to mention that the LRB also has the advantage of private money behind it, and too modest to point out the other, far more significant reason for its continuing success: it's bloody good.
The magazine's fortnightly appearance promises hours of reading pleasure: of amusement, enlightenment, entertainment and provocation. You can get some idea of the nature of the magazine from the roster of names that have adorned those often pretty but peculiarly irrelevant covers (which, Spice cheerfully acknowledges, "wouldn't mean anything to someone buying it on a station platform") including Colm Tóibín, Hilary Mantel, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Bruce Chatwin, Salman Rushdie (pre-Midnight's Children), Alan Bennett (often and wonderfully), Paul Foot (ditto, during his lifetime), Oliver Sacks (writing the article that led to the publication of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For His Hat) and Thomas Jones (more obscurely but no less impressively).
But as an institution, it's stronger than the sum of these impressive parts – and far more diffuse. Its bias is probably leftward, but neo-cons thunder in its pages just as loud as Tariq Ali, if not quite as often or effectively. Otherwise the only limitations appear to be an insistence on excellence and what Spice calls "a horror of the explicit". Reviews are there for their own sake, as art and interest, more than to provide a qualitative assessment of the books they discuss. "That's why you rarely find quotes from the LRB on the back of books – because they're not liftable. Because they're so graduated and indirect."
Famously, there is another reason you rarely find LRB quotes on the back of the book – the reviews are generally published far too late to make them relevant to the marketers. The latest issue as I write contains a review of Amitav Ghosh's The Sea Of Poppies a full two years after it was first published, for instance. Such tardiness would be suicide for most papers, but in the LRB it's a strength. The serious time-consuming scholarship behind David Simpson's piece, investigating the inventive and highly political way Ghosh uses language, opens up new dimensions and depths to the novel that will seem all the more striking to those that read it a while ago. His understanding of the text puts other reviewers to shame – and I should know because I reviewed the book myself (within days of reading it) and dismissed the dialogue as "baffling".
It's not entirely pleasant to be so embarrassed, but I bring up this rather personal example because it encapsulates the LRB's greatest single strength: at any time you pick it up you are likely to find writing good enough to both challenge and change your assumptions; writing that has the potential to alter the way you look at the world. Which is reason enough to celebrate the LRB's last 30 years – and to hope that someone else will be able to say something similar about it again, 30 years from now.
And in the spirit of that celebration, please do add your own birthday wishes - and recollections of what makes the magazine seem worth cherishing to you.
