“Oh, I don’t think we’re done for yet. Do you know the word docent?”
“Yes, I do, I teach literature,” the professor says. He sounds irritated. Good. Zach is tired of these Cassandras who harangue publishers at every turn as though they were incapable of thinking for themselves.
“Readers will continue to look to publishers for authors they would like to read,” he says to the professor. “Formats might change, delivery systems might change, pricing models might change, but I doubt our essential role will change all that much. And despite all the talk, it’s not as if the world of publishing has already changed beyond all recognition.”
“You hope.”
“We know – if statistics about our industry are anything to go by. The vast majority of books are still being made, marketed, printed, and sold as they have always been. The industry is flat in the UK and other mature markets, but there is no worrying decline in sales.”
The woman in the flame-coloured sari has wandered off with Apoorva. Is he to be stuck with this pedantic bore?
“Maybe so, but if the readers of tomorrow decide they want to buy their content direct from creators what role do middlemen like you have to play?”
“Selection, packaging, marketing, the protection of copyright –”
“Which online companies can do just as well as you can. Amazon Books. Apple Books. Why not? They pay better royalties than you guys, and when the majority of readers begin to read digitally –”
“There is no reason why we can’t add newer skills to the ones we possess. We already produce digital versions of our print editions, we’re beginning to figure out how to repurpose content in new and exciting ways, we’re learning how to market direct to consumers, we will just need to keep pace with the changes in the way people buy, read. And to answer your question about Amazon starting to publish, as you know they already do so, as do some of the other big retailers, but that’s not what is encoded in their DNA at the moment. That might change, the world of business is not static and companies will slide up and down the value chain depending on changes in the environment and their own strategic imperatives, but at the end of the day in the book business, just as in every other business, each link in the chain will need a specific focus. The brand names might change, certain companies will disappear, others will replace them, but publishing will not die.”
“Or maybe, two decades from now, no middlemen like publishers or agents will be required,” the professor responds. “Authors will sell work directly to their fans, just like in India and elsewhere in the civilized world a thousand years ago, when wandering storytellers and bards and minstrels communicated directly with their audiences. Nobody taking a slice off the top.”
“I think that’s a simplistic view. You forget that publishers support writers with advances –”
“– and make off with the lion’s share of the profit,” the professor cuts in querulously.
“A common misconception. Most books don’t make their money back. And, contrary to what people think, the majority of publishers feel that they have had a successful year if they have made a profit of ten per cent, which is less than what successful authors make.”
“That may be so but in the digital age it will be possible for authors to go direct to their readers and keep most of the value that has been attached to their work.”
“Sure and there will be a few authors who will do that, especially those who have made a name for themselves, but don’t forget that most authors only become famous because publishers have taken a gamble on them, and nurtured them through the years when they weren’t as well known. For the few who decide to take the self-publishing option there will be hundreds of thousands of others who will want to do nothing but continue with what they are best at, which is to write and create. All these writers will be happy to leave the editing, marketing, selling, and safeguarding of their work to publishers. I doubt that that is going to change any time soon.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. There must be a reason why even writers who have uploaded their work to popular online publishing sites like Wattpad rejoice when their work is picked up by a regular publisher.”
The conversation is beginning to exhaust him; he can’t wait for the event to start. He reaches for a refill from a passing waiter.
Screeching noises from the microphone. A young woman in a green sari, a PR lady from the hotel, waits for the static to die down, asks everyone to take his or her seat as the event is about to begin. Nobody pays the slightest attention; the laughter and the conversation continue to rise up to the ceiling. Various other people take their turn at the mike, the publisher, an important hotel functionary, the harassed publicist, the PR lady again. While the concerted effort manages to shake loose a few people at the fringes of the gathering who drift towards the chairs, everyone else is too busy eating and drinking and having a good time to budge. Finally a chunky-looking man, who may or not be connected to the organizers but who has the air of someone who must be listened to, strides up to the microphone and roars at the audience to sit down. Unhurriedly people begin looking for seats.
“Zach, Professor Malik, this way please, I’ve reserved seats for you,” Apoorva beckons. The professor leads the way and she whispers to Zach, “I’m trying to get Professor Malik to give us his next book, a novel.” Despite himself, he says, “The professor doesn’t seem to think publishers are necessary.” She grimaces and shrugs; it is obvious she has heard the man’s rant before.
They have seats near the front. It takes another blast from the tubby man before the rest of the audience is seated.
“How on earth can publishers afford all this?” Zach asks Apoorva.
“They can’t,” she replies. “The hotels comp all the expenses, they have a cultural budget for these things, publishing events are hot, get them tons of free publicity. And I hear for this party the author provided a few crates of Black Label.”
There are three people on the dais, the author who is talking to the junior minister who will launch the book, and the publisher who is going through his notes. The PR lady at the microphone announces the publisher and leaves the stage.
At this point, he switches off – he knows the drill, and he has no interest in the author (Apoorva has told him she has heard rumours that he intends to buy back five thousand copies from the publisher). The publisher introduces the book, the author, and the minister, and disappears, whereupon the minister, a lean, wolfish-looking man, begins to make a speech that can be barely heard above the background noise. Zach’s mind begins to wander. Small wonder, he thinks, that some of the world’s greatest novels have featured social gatherings like this one. Hundreds of beautiful, famous, successful people gathered together in one place, all apparently having a good time, but at what cost? For the novelist what is fascinating is the price of admission to events like this, and he is not thinking here of the fancy pieces of cardboard that are nominally the means to get in; no, what is of interest is the tough journey that every one of these people, whether high born or low, has had to make through life to get here. The youthful ambition and self-regard, the early successes and defeats, the constant struggle and effort, the disappointments and the wrong turns, moments of brilliance and moments of compromise, acts of selfishness and sensitivity, incidents of duplicity and honour, the courage and the pathos of their endeavour, the ruthlessness and the betrayals they have had to take in their stride … Told by someone with the requisite skill, the stories of many of those present here today would make compelling reading.
The minister’s speech begins to wind down. When at long last he finishes to polite applause, the author’s speech seems more like an afterthought. After it is over, the minister unwraps a copy of the book, which the author and he hold up to the cameras, and the formal part of the evening comes to an end. At least a quarter of the audience has paid no attention whatsoever to the proceedings.
Apoorva, the woman in the flame-coloured sari whose name
turns out to be Mandira (and who, he gathers, lives in Berne – do none of these people live in Delhi?), and the professor decide to repair to the bar upstairs for a drink. He is conscious that Apoorva would like to publish both of them, so he resolves to be as helpful as he can, although he hopes never to see Professor Malik again.
Fortunately for Zach, the professor, who has been throwing back large glasses of rum all evening, seems to have lost all interest in him. He speaks earnestly and drunkenly to Apoorva, and Zach is left to amuse himself with Mandira (he still does not know whether she is a novelist or poet or celebrity chef). She is witty and coolly intelligent, and he is beginning to thoroughly enjoy her company when Apoorva cuts in to say that he should probably be thinking of getting back to the hotel if he is going to make his flight early in the morning.
The professor beams at him drunkenly. “The crash will come, buddy, never fear, it will come.”
“Not for a long, long time,” he says. He smiles insincerely. “Apoorva tells me you are writing a novel, which I can’t wait to read. And when it’s ready you must give it to us. We’ll do a great job of publishing it.”
“Oh, it will be a few years before it’s done. By then who knows whether or not you guys will be around?” The professor aims a wink at him but doesn’t quite pull it off, ends up blinking like a mole in the harsh light of the lobby where they are gathered as they wait for their cars.
“As long as people tell stories and people consume stories there will be a role for all of us,” Zach says quietly. “I think it was Forster who said that we would only need to worry when human beings no longer had any need for stories and had begun to regard themselves in ways that were new and quite inconceivable from our present vantage point. It was true when he said it, it is true now, and I hope for everyone’s sake it will be true for some time to come.”
4.
TORONTO
There are as many theories about how to deal with jet lag as the Inuit supposedly have names for snow and Zach knows all of them, and believes not a single one. He doesn’t know if it is worse outward bound or returning home, melatonin has never worked for him, sleeping at the same time you would at home in whichever new time zone you are in doesn’t help in the least – all he knows is that it is one of the things that irks him most about long-distance travel. Morosely he watches the brightening horizon from his hotel room, the CN Tower like a weirdly shaped pipette presiding over the downtown high-rises, and thinks about his meeting in the evening with Seppi’s translator. When he had called Caryn Bianchi from London to set up the appointment she seemed pleasant enough, which was a relief, but she was noncommittal about what she might have for him when he explained the purpose of the visit.
He still believes he is wasting his time but Gabrijela thought differently and so here he is, the excitement of the visit to Delhi already receding. What if anything might Caryn have in her possession? He racks his brain to think if Seppi had ever mentioned to him that he wrote short stories, but he doesn’t think so; perhaps an unpublished first novel, surely every novelist has one of those, or maybe an unfinished draft of something that he had been working on at the time of his death. Zach has gone over all the possibilities a hundred times, a thousand, and he knows nothing, will know nothing until he meets Caryn.
Perhaps he will have a marlin moment. When he had spoken to Julia from Delhi, intending to quarrel with her over the blandness of her e-mail, she had disarmed him by hoping he would have a “marlin moment” in Toronto, her way of describing a welcome surprise that came out of nowhere, which had its origins in the only other real holiday besides Bhutan that they had taken together. Over his usual reluctance she had booked a trip to Cuba. Their first week on the island, which they had spent at a beach resort, had been awful. He wasn’t a beach person and the combination of salt, sand, mugginess, mosquitoes, and unattractive bodies in string bikinis and Speedos had driven him crazy. His constant complaining had upset Julia, but fortunately before they had begun flinging mojitos at each other they had moved on to Havana, which Zach had loved – the ruined old city, its walls washed with the colours of the summer sky, the music and dance that greeted them at every turn, the ghosts of its past, and the astonishing beauty of its young: the men with the liquid grace of boxers or matadors and the women with eyes of mystery and fire. The enthusiasm and zest with which the Cubans went about their daily lives, especially when they had to make do with so little and deal constantly with the heavy hand of the state, had at first intrigued him and then caught him up in its optimism and energy. He had stopped grumbling and their last few days in Castro’s socialist paradise had drifted by in a haze of cigar smoke, Cuba libres, mojitos, snatches of “Chan Chan” sung and played with various degrees of competence and enthusiasm, and dancing in a variety of styles, with the only constant being the hip-swinging sexuality that the locals managed to infuse into every performance whether staged or impromptu. The day before they were due to return they had hired a boat and decided to try their luck at deep sea fishing, which neither of them had ever attempted before.
Ernest Hemingway had been a boyhood hero of Zach’s, especially during his shikari phase, but when his tastes grew more literary he had abandoned the maestro of two-fisted prose for authors who better fit his idea of the literary writer. However, just before they had taken off for Cuba he had suddenly been seized with a huge desire to reread Hemingway, and had bought himself a copy of The Old Man and the Sea. When he finished the book he understood the writer’s literary genius for the first time: the ability to bring a character alive with a phrase or two, the sentences of burnished steel, the extraordinary insight and, most of all, the power of his storytelling. An unexpected by-product of this new appreciation of the American novelist was a desire to experience for himself the thrill of bagging a great game fish; as a boy he’d tried to emulate him with a gun, now he would give it a go with a rod and a line.
Julia hadn’t been too interested in the idea but had given in with good grace when she had seen how keen Zach was; it helped that they hadn’t fought once in all the time they had hung out in Havana. On the morning of the fishing expedition they were both seriously hungover, and the prospect of spending five or six hours on a small boat in deep water hadn’t been appealing. They had almost decided to cancel when Zach, summoning up his last reserves of enthusiasm, had managed to get both of them into a taxi in time to catch the boat they had booked the previous day.
Propitiously enough the marina they set out from, into waters that seemed to have been plucked from the heart of a sapphire, was called the Marina Ernest Hemingway, but that seemed to be the only bit of luck they were going to have that day, for three hours later they hadn’t caught a single fish. Indeed the only sign of marine life they had seen was a barracuda swimming at great speed away from the four lines that trailed in the water behind the boat. It was hurricane season and though the island itself had been untouched, a vicious tropical storm offshore had left the ocean roily, and as the boat rose and fell on the choppy water their outlook towards their little expedition worsened. They felt too ill and too tired to quarrel about it, however, so had just sat quietly looking out at the distant shoreline of Havana and hoping their stomachs would not revolt. Just then one of the fishing lines on the port side had begun to flow out with great vehemence, and all their misgivings were shoved aside; the captain throttled back the engine, the first mate led Julia (who demurred but Zach had insisted) to the fighting chair in the stern, the rod was locked into place, the first mate gave her some tips on how to play a big game fish, when to let the line out and when to reel it in, and battle was joined.
Sleepless in his Toronto hotel room, he can see the events of that morning as clearly as if they were unfolding before him right now – Julia tiny against the vastness of the ocean but determined, gripping the rod tightly and grimly following the shouted commands of the first mate, while unseen below the blue water her quarry fought to escape. A little while later it was over. They saw the fish for th
e first time, about twenty metres astern, long and lean and astoundingly beautiful, its skin the colour of crushed emerald. All the fight had gone out of it. The first mate had sprung into action as Julia hauled the fish up to the boat; it was dispatched swiftly and stored away. “Mahi mahi. Good eating,” the first mate had said, a smile lifting his grizzled mustache. Zach had hugged Julia, he was delighted for her. For her part she seemed a little shaken; the thrill of the battle had been exhilarating but the death of the mahi mahi had disturbed her, he could see that. But he was excited now by the prospect of landing his own fish. The adrenalin pumping through his veins, he had scanned the heaving water alertly, almost as if he expected squadrons of tuna and sharks and sailfish and marlin to spring forth and impale themselves on the wicked hooks that bobbed in the wake of the boat.
Two hours later, with the sun directly overhead and their time up, their splendidly named captain, Alejandro Cordero Garcia, had come down the stairway from the upper deck and told him he was turning for home. Grumpily, Zach had agreed. The boat had described a wide circle in the water and begun to slam through the surging seas in the direction of the marina. Julia was dozing fitfully by now but Zach had remained awake, looking out through a cloudy porthole. In Hemingway’s great novel, the old fisherman had dreamed about lions in Africa, but Zach could think only of schools of marlin cavorting in the depths, laughing through their pointy noses at his fantasy of hooking one of them. Tiny flying fish skimmed above the surface of the water. Showoffs, he had thought, why couldn’t they swim through the water like regular fish! The first mate had been sympathetic; it was rare to get a marlin, he said, none of the boats in the marina had caught one for days, and he knew of groups who had spent weeks on the water only to come up empty-handed.
Zach’s despondency had grown as the shoreline had become more distinct. He had been hoping against hope that a fish would strike but knew that it would be unrealistic to hope anymore, best to roll up his fantasy and stow it away. He had uncapped a bottle of the local version of Coke, taken a long swig of the sickly sweet drink. He should get seriously drunk tonight, if he was hungover on the flight home he would just have to deal with it, no matter how unpleasant it might be.
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