Love, Lies, and Facebook at the Book Festival: Val McDermid Re-Writes Northanger Abbey

Performer on the Royal Mile by Tom Brogan is CC BY-ND 2.0

I haven't yet gotten around to reading Joanna Trollope's version of Sense and Sensibility, but I rushed right out and got a copy of Val McDermid's Northanger Abbey as soon as I read Jo Baker's review in the New York Times. McDermid's Northanger Abbey is the second installment in Harper Collins's Austen Project, and it is soon to be followed by Curtis Sittenfeld's Pride and Prejudice and Alexander McCall Smith's Emma. (Full disclosure: I'm not a big Alexander McCall Smith fan, so I'm not in a big rush for that one to come out.)

There has been no shortage of reimaginings of Austen's works in recent years, and Harper Collins's series is up against the brilliant Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Emma Approved by Pemberley Digital, as well as Jo Baker's Longbourn (which I reviewed in an earlier post). In the rush to remake all things Austen, Northanger Abbey is the novel that has gotten relatively little attention, however. As Val McDermid explains in the Huffington Post, updating Northanger Abbey is complicated because its satire on Gothic fiction requires more decoding for modern readers than the love plots of her other novels. I'm not sure that I agree about that, but it is certainly true that Northanger Abbey hasn't been re-made as relentlessly as the other novels. For that reason alone, McDermid's novel is particularly welcome.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of McDermid's version. Her decision to move Catherine's (or Cat's) trip from Bath to the Edinburgh Book Festival is an excellent one, and the venue aptly evokes the atmosphere of Austen's crowded scenes of pleasure seekers hoping to see and be seen. Even apart from the connection to Austen's novel, the sequences in Edinburgh work in McDermid's Northanger Abbey as Cat comes under the sway of Isabella Thorpe, barely conceals her disgust at the obnoxious Johnny Thorpe, and becomes enamored of Henry Tilney - facebooking, texting, selfie-taking, and tweeting along the way. Edinburgh in August is the perfect destination for Cat's trip with the Allens, and it's easy to understand why she gets swept up in the excitement.

When the action moves to Northanger Abbey itself, however, it slows down and becomes somewhat less engrossing. There are two reasons for this: 1) often seen from afar in the crowds of Edinburgh, Henry Tilney is understandable as a distant figure. However, once they're staying the same house, Tilney remains friendly, but there doesn't seem to be any actual chemistry between the two of them. 2) The Gothic storyline doesn't work as well as the fast-paced excitement of the sequences in Edinburgh.

Superficially, drawing a Gothic parallel to the Twilight series should work perfectly because of its overwrought romance and the evolving conventions of the vampire myth. In McDermid's novel, however, the Gothic elements somehow aren't believable and feel tacked on. Whenever Cat looks at General Tilney or Henry and wonders if they're vampires, it doesn't feel credible. It doesn't help that the fictive horror series that she's addicted to - the Hebridean Harpies - reminds me of the campy grade-school series American Chillers that my son used to really like.

I know, I know. Cat's belief in General Tilney as Gothic villain is supposed to be absurd. In Austen's novel, Catherine's determination to find horror is the object of satire, and the entire point is that she has no actual basis for her fantasies about the General.

The difference, though, is that Austen is able to sell Catherine's fantasy to us so that we both laugh at her silliness and understand its appeal. If you don't believe me, re-read the scene where Catherine investigates the black cabinet in the middle of a rainstorm (chapter 21). Catherine's anxiety is palpable, and Austen's prose evokes just the right atmoshere, even while she makes sure that we don't forget just how much Catherine longs to find a mystery just like this one. McDermid's novel, while enjoyable, doesn't work quite the same magic.

Nevertheless, McDermid's Northanger Abbey is worth reading - especially for the first half.

What To Do with All These Books?: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

If I had a time machine and could travel forward 150 years, I would find someone studying literary history and insist that she should read Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore if she wants to understand the complicated relationship between books and computers in 2014.

Yes, I know, that probably sounds sort of strange as a fantasy. However, as someone who studies literature, it makes sense. There is much debate about how representative any set of texts might be, whether we're talking about the canon, forgotten works that have been recently recovered, or the abundance of novels that we now have the technology to study without actually reading. The most significant realization to come out of distant reading is that we can no longer pretend that the narrow swath of books that we've traditionally studied is anything but a tiny fraction of what was read in a particular period.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, on the other hand, is beautifully representative because it absolutely captures our relation to technology in the current moment. A similar example is Sophie Kinsella's I've Got Your Number, which weaves our dependence on smart phones into its narrative structure.

Let me back up: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is a novel about seeing books - books as data, books as holding mystical secrets, books as narratives. The narrator dabbles in data visualization, and the book's central quest begins with him visualizing the "reading" (decoding, actually) patterns of the strange patrons who frequent the bookstore where he works.

I don't want to give too much away, but the tensions in the narrative come from competing ideas about what books are for. Google, and all of its computational power, is pitted against traditional and mystical ways of interacting with books. On one level, this is a narrative about whether books are information to be processed or narratives to be savored. Ultimately, what's at stake is what we want from books in the context of both large-scale digitization and the labor-intensive study that we often devote to books that are deemed worthy of unpacking. I won't tell you who wins.

The Costs of Amazon's War with Hachette

Recent publishing news has been dominated by the fight between Amazon and Hachette  over e-book pricing. Although details of the negotiations are not public, we do know that Amazon has already taken retributive action against Hachette by removing the pre-order option for Hachette titles, not offering the usual discount on Hachette hardcover titles, and keeping their stock of Hachette titles low enough to slow down shipments. As many observers have pointed out, Amazon's tactics have hurt their customers as much as publishers and authors because the online retailer isn't stocking merchandise that their customers want. For many shoppers who have come to rely on the convenience of Amazon - and for those whose local brick and mortar bookstores have closed down - this severely limits their access to Hachette titles. Amazon recently posted a statement explaining this tactic as business as usual and part of negotiations on behalf of its customers.

Why does this matter?

1) It reduces options for shoppers: Gumming up access to Hachette titles means that shoppers lose access to A LOT of books. Hachette owns Little, Brown, which publishes a lot of mainstream fiction, including JK Rowling's new Cormoran Strike book, The Silkworm. For shoppers whose local brick and mortar bookstores have closed down, options are limited.

2) It is going to determine the terms for other publishers: As Jeremy Greenfield explains in the Atlantic, Amazon controls much of the book - and most especially the e-book market - and this is the first big fight over e-book pricing following the court ruling against Apple for supposedly colluding with publishers to fix prices in the e-book market (a charge that Apple disputes). Hachette is not only the first publisher to come up for contract negotiations with Amazon since the ruling's two-year embargo on negotiations, but it is also one of the biggest. The outcome of this fight is likely to dictate terms for other publishers.

3) If Hachette loses, it's going to hurt publishers: Most people are angry about Amazon's tactics for numerous reasons, not least of which is the perception that Amazon is trying to put publishers out of business. Authors and (unsurprisingly) independent booksellers have condemned Amazon for its actions. As Brad Stone asserts in The Everything Store, Amazon views publishers as "sickly" gazelles and itself as a cheetah. 

Now, most people would agree that publishers are not entire innocents: they are businesses, after all, and they are not always operating in their authors' best interests in terms of profit sharing. Their emphasis on profits leads them to reject a lot of books that they don't anticipate being able to sell, which means that there is potentially less experimentation in the book market and more emphasis on commercial viability. Many authors have been drawn to self-publishing on Amazon because they can get their work out there, which gives them a platform to market their work and, perhaps most importantly, make more per title than they ever would through traditional publishers. This has led many to assert that publishers and, indeed editors, are not necessary in the book world.

I disagree. Not with the proposition that there is, perhaps, too much gatekeeping in the commercial publishing world. A good friend of mine who also happens to be a talented writer recently recounted her experiences talking to agents about her latest novel in process. It was a comedy of second-guessing marketability.

However, I do think that publishers and editors add significant value to the books that they produce. They select works with promise and usher them through the editorial process. A book rarely arrives on an editor's desk ready to publish, and a good editor has a sharp eye for a work that can be shaped into something better. I don't want to see editors and publishers driven out of business through Amazon's aggressive business model.

4) It gives Amazon even greater control over the self-publishing market: I am excited about the surge in indie-published work that we're experiencing. And, while Amazon has done quite a bit to foster that surge, the indie revolution is another reason that I want to see Amazon facing more robust competition.

Let me explain: I have written elsewhere about the problem with Kindle publishing from a long-term perspective. I know that not all authors are thinking about the long-term preservation of their books, but, as a librarian, it's my job to think about it. The library where I work is currently unable to purchase Kindle titles for the collection because we cannot loan them out. 

Further, there is no way for us to archive Kindle titles even if we could buy them to loan to our patrons. That means that we can't be certain that these titles will be available for future readers or for future researchers to study. That's what concerns me the most, and I am hoping to find a some sort of a solution. Regardless of the quality of any individual self-published title, we'll be faced with a huge gap in the literary record if we don't find some way to preserve a portion of the self-published titles that make up a substantial slice of the current publishing world. Imagine, for example, if no one had saved zines or eighteenth-century pamphlets.

I know that the Hachette Amazon dispute is not going to resolve the archiving question. However, I feel confident that we're not going to see any answers if one corporation has an e-book monopoly.