The Book Tower

Browsing in a second hand bookshop, I overhead a customer making an unusual enquiry. She was looking for a set of encyclopedias – the old fashioned sort – because she’d seen such a set in a neighbour’s house and thought they looked very decorative. The assistant was sorry, but because they’d had a lot of people come in with similar enquiries they were out of sets of old fashioned books. She agreed that they could be highly decorative.

Perhaps I am a book snob. I have an oldish set of encyclopedias – probably early 1930s – but it’s boxed away safely somewhere because it’s so hideously out of date. The lady in the second hand bookshop put me in mind of a friend of a friend – and this is probably an urban myth – who walked into a shop and ordered a yard of books. She’d just had a new shelf put up, and a yard of books would fill it handsomely. Although I have seen similar yards in other people’s homes, pristine sets of Booker winners and the like – never opened. Each to their own.

Comments [4]

4/5

At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess.
Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black

Hilary Mantel’s highly original and very odd novel received much praise when it was published in 2005. Somehow it has managed to escape my attention until now, following a lucky find in my favourite second hand bookshop. The novel follows the life of Alison, a medium, as she tours provincial towns with her psychic stage act. As she reconnects her audience with those lost to the spirit world she fights her own personal battle in keeping her private fiends at bay. Beyond Black has some very unsettling moments, but it’s a sinister story that manages to inject moments of comedy. Mantel is a very good writer, and even though this novel is a touch overlong at 450 pages, it is well worth reading.

Probably what surprised me most is that Beyond Black is far from what my paperback edition attempts to sell it as:

One of the greatest ghost stories in the language.
Philip Pullman

I’m not sure how many ghost stories Mr Pullman has read, but this simply isn’t true. M.R. James it isn’t, and the blurb is misleading as Hilary Mantel probably wouldn’t appeal to fans of the traditional ghost story (or even fans of Philip Pullman). The ghosts in Beyond Black are only visible to Alison, and as the novel progresses we delve further into her disturbing childhood. Her fiends represent very real monsters, and Mantel skilfully explores how horrors in the real world can easily surpass any in the supernatural. In the book, a minor character claims that, wherever you are, a rat is only six feet away from you. Similarly, Hilary Mantel suggests that something evil and unsettling is always lurking just below the surface. But that’s not necessarily anything supernatural.

Nastiness aside, this novel has some brilliantly subtle characterisations. Colette, Alison’s assistant, is very well drawn, as are Colette’s foolish husband Gavin and Alison’s pitiful mother. Even Morris, the ghost who personifies all of Alison’s woes, is strangely compelling. And true to the best ghost stories, if you really want to label it with a genre, this novel is wonderfully suggestive, and Mantel keeps the truth just beyond your grasp. You have to work to unravel this, which makes it all the more satisfying.

Comments [4]

From Booking Through Thursday:

While acknowledging that we can’t judge books by their covers, how much does the design of a book affect your reading enjoyment? Hardcover vs. softcover? Trade paperback vs. mass market paperback? Font? Illustrations? Etc.?

I’m often too swayed by a book design. I’ve bought bad books because they look good, and avoided good books because they look bad. I never read Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh because the cover looked awful. An awful choice in itself, but I couldn’t help it. I’m also tempted – or put off – by too much misleading blurb, which appears to have crept onto the cover of paperbacks in recent years. Even new releases in hardback have blurb these days and sing the praises of an author’s previous work.

So because I am easily tempted by eye-catching design, I like a book cover to catch the essence of a book, without telling me too much about it or misleading me. A good recent example is The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Its cover picturing a row of dying trees told me what to expect and suited the mood of the book perfectly. Both hardback and paperback versions of the book used the same design, so it obviously worked in the eyes of the publisher. Another recent design I found effective was the creepy cover for Darkmans by Nicola Barker, although the subsequent paperback noticeably went for something much lighter. And even though I’d read about the book and wanted to read it I suspect that the paperback would have made my decision harder, presenting me with what looked more comic than sinister.

Bad covers are ones that perplex and only make sense with some knowledge of the book’s content. I’m currently reading Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. The cover is an illustration of a lady in colourful garb with a vacuum cleaner. This begins to make sense when you discover that the lead character in the novel is a medium. The colourful garb is a reference to tarot cards. The vacuum cleaner is a reference to a passage very early in the novel, which suggests to me that the designer only read a couple of chapters in before sketching out the cover. Am I being hard on the designer?

Probably the best thing about cover design is that it can serve to nicely date a book. Films and tv set in the fifties and sixties ask their props departments to line the bookshelves of their set with the iconic orange covered Penguins of the period. Since book design has become less uniform in later years it’s probably still possible to tell from which decade a book belongs to, whether the cover shows art, typography or actors in ridiculous poses (I’m thinking of mass market horror, romance and detective fiction over the years).

Sometimes though it’s just the quality and packaging of a book that impresses. The hardbacks of Susanna Clarke’s two recent books Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and The Ladies of Grace Adieu, are just beautiful. Quality design, printing and illustration. The writing’s good too. And let’s not forget that this is the most important thing.

Comments [8]