The ‘Comforting' Read
Reflections on the International Bestseller
What do you think when you see on the jacket of book that you’ve just picked up the phrase “international bestseller”? Will it make you more likely to read it? Will it put you off? Or will it make you wonder what the criteria are for judging a book a best seller internationally (as opposed to selling well in one country for example)? Clearly in the minds of the publishing and bookselling industry the potential of a book to sell in great numbers has to be the major consideration. They are in the book business and they want to sell as many books as possible and make the maximum amount of profit from them. Their shareholders would expect nothing less.
Readers, on the other hand, don’t give a fig about profitability. They are interested in the book in their hand. Clearly some readers like to feel they are in good company and if lots of people are reading a book then this is good. Others, without necessarily being snooty about a book being popular, may not find the fact that it is read by millions a significant fact. A book that sells 10,000 copies is not ten times as good as one that sells 1,000.
Looking along my own shelves I can’t see very many international best-sellers flagged as such – though The Trial, Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov must have sold the odd copy world-wide. Not at first, mind you, as the publishing history of Kafka and Joyce shows. Does this mean I am insufferable highbrow, reading only the sort of book that that doesn’t sell in numbers? I can’t answer that question. Let’s just say that the number of copies sold doesn’t strike me as a factor in my enjoyment and I never think about it, but it’s obvious that some people do.
These reflections come after having finished The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008) by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, published in paperback in 2010 by Bloomsbury with the International Bestseller flag but also with a string of plaudits from the Daily Mail to the Guardian as well as from random celebrities like Helen Mirren and Joanna Lumley. Unlike the latest title from, say, CB Editions or Fitzcarraldo it quotes reviews from Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire and Elle. I found the book entertaining enough and my intention here is not to rubbish it but I felt that it was book written to be an international bestseller and that its desire to be so was at times a little too evident.
What do I mean? Well, before you get to the opening words, there’s a page telling you about its author Mary Ann Shaffer and her niece, Annie Barrows, who finished it off when Shaffer became too ill to complete it. Born in West Virginia in 1934, Mary Ann Shaffer became interested in Guernsey after a visit in 1980 where she picked up a book about the German occupation of the Channel Islands called Jersey under the Jackboot. Then we are told: “Many years later, when goaded by her own book club to write a novel, Mary Ann naturally thought of Guernsey.” Have you, gentle reader, ever been goaded by your book club to write a novel? Speaking for myself no one has ever goaded me into writing anything but I immediately realised that this was exactly the sort of book that a book club would take to its heart. In spite of some surprisingly elevated literary references scattered through the book, it is not that pesky beast: a ‘literary novel’. It is an international bestseller which would not provoke any resistance from most book groups. I don’t belong to a book group myself but I hear that selections can be a source of contention. Also, in this case we were being invited to share in the process of the book being written and the publishers continue: “When Mary Ann’s book was nearing completion it was sold to enthusiastic publishers around the world”. By the time she died in 2008 “She knew that this, her only novel, was to be published in thirteen countries.” Most writers of fiction would be happy for a novel even to be looked at by one publisher, never mind thirteen, and then only when it was completed. How much of the novel did those thirteen need before offering a contract? Definitely, it was international bestseller material!
The book is structured as a series of letters mostly to and from Juliet Ashton, a novelist who is casting about for ideas for her next book and finds it under her nose when someone from the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (by the way, an international bestseller must have a catchy title and this one certainly does) writes to her out of the blue. So we have a book about a novelist and her publisher and about the writing of fiction. And you thought that these metafictional elements belonged to the literary novel not the world of the international bestseller.
At the back of the book are two pages of Acknowledgements, a growing trend in the world of books (cf. some recent slim volumes of poetry where long lists of people are seen being thanked). Here the author says that her book required “years of research and writing”. Although it has some serious elements about the German occupation, the slave workers, the hardships endured by the islanders, which give it much needed ballast, I should have thought that the research would have been quite readily to hand. In addition to her family (“this small cluster of supporters at home”) there was “a much larger group out in the world” all of whom are duly thanked. including an “amazing” editor and agents who “turned it into a worldwide phenomenon”. As I put the book down I felt I had had an elegant sufficiency of all this background.
It’s a charming book (unless you find Juliet just a little too charmingly waspish for her own good) and deserves its success. And I now have an unequivocally international bestseller on my shelf. Hurrah!