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Literary Review
In the big league
HASAN SUROOR
AP
IT is a seasonal buzz which the publishing industry needs to keep itself in the headlines, and without which book columnists might never make it to the front page.
Welcome to the world of unimaginably huge publishers' advances. And this time it is India's own Vikram Seth who has hit the big league with a £1.3 million advance for his next book, Two Lives, apparently simply on the strength of a proposal. He is only the second Indian novelist to win the "lottery" since Arundhati Roy sent the tills ringing with what was then an unprecedented advance for an Indian novel, for God of Small Things.
Uniquely, Seth has bagged it for a work of non-fiction, a memoir built around the lives of his great uncle Shanti and a Jewish girl Henny with whose family he stayed as a medical student in Berlin in the 1930s. It is claimed to be the biggest "haul" for non-fiction though his literary agents Curtis Brown, who pulled off the deal, were not able to confirm.
As many as 10 publishers bid in a hotly-contested auction and, ironically, the closest loser was Penguin, who published Seth's two previous novels, A Suitable Boy and An Equal Music. For Time Warner Books, it was a sweet revenge for losing to Penguin in the bid for A Suitable Boy a decade ago. And they were not concealing their glee.
Indeed, Richard Beswick, publishing director of Little Brown, an imprint of Time Warner, did the equivalent of shouting from the rooftops when in a formal statement he said: "I have wanted the company to publish Vikram Seth ever since bidding for — and losing — his masterpiece A Suitable Boy 11 years ago. Vikram is a unique writer. He brings warmth, vitality and a profound enriching humanity to all his writing. These are rare qualities. I believe he is someone about whom one can genuinely use the word genius. I have never known a publishing team so deeply affected as we were by our meeting with Vikram."
High praise that, and for once — despite a hint of hyperbole — truly deserved. A pity that A Suitable Boy was so long that it has been more talked about than actually read in its entirety; but the fact remains that he is still remembered for that book rather than his far more exquisite second novel, An Equal Music.
So, what's Two Lives about? The synopsis put out by Time Warner says it tells the "remarkable" story of two people who, on the face of it, were completely different — an Indian medical doctor-turned-soldier who lost an arm on the battlefield, and a German Jewish girl who couldn't stand him when she first set eyes on him telling her mother "not to take the blackie". But as both escaped to Britain as the Nazis rose to power in Germany, their destinies came together — the two eventually becoming man and wife in war-scarred London. Seth lived with them as a young boy in their north London home and, as the synopsis puts it, his is "the third life in the story of Two Lives".
The book, expected to be published in the autumn of 2005, promises a glimpse of some of the most significant themes and events of 20th Century — "from the Raj and the Indian freedom movement to the Third Reich, the Holocaust and British post-war society." Clearly, there are high expectations at Time Warner. And why not? A book for which they have paid a million quids had better be good enough to justify the advance. But history tells us that books riding on bloated advances have also tended to perish at the "box office". Remember Martin Amis's Information?
in London
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