This thing of reversioning other people’s books is so complex and varied, it’s hard to have a consistent opinion on it. If it was down to me I wouldn’t want a rule barring all books of this kind but for each work to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. If it had genuine merit in its own right, let it pass; if not, then not. Only, who would decide?
Once upon a time, good taste or a good editor took care of this sort of thing and saved the rest of us from exposure to it. Now, where is either when you want them? That just isn’t how it works any more. Self publishing and web publishing leave the decision in the hands of the punters, who vote with their cash or their cursors.
But if JD Salinger cared enough to sue over ‘Sixty years later: Coming through the rye’*, the recent unauthorised “sequel” to his classic ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, then part of me is glad he won. And part of me wonders, would it have sunk without trace had he not bothered? The supposed sequel features as central characters one Mr Caulfield and one Mr Salinger, and its writer, perhaps as a marketing aid, took as his pseudonym the name JD California. It may be unfashionable to stand up for copyright just at the moment, but without wading around in the mire of side-taking I can say this – what is so wrong with originating your own creative work and taking your chances on whether it sells?
This applies as much to music as to fiction. So much ‘new’ music consciously emulates sounds that are 15, 20, or 30 years old (mostly between 27 and 32 years old just at the moment, but it all depends on what is selling). The trouble is, it can be hard to know if you’re listening to a recent remix or to the original. It is one thing to ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’, another to lazily piggyback-ride them to death.
Death is of course an important consideration. It is a very fine thing for publishers if the author whose work is being revisited [or remixed, or mashed up, or perhaps as some might say, ripped off] is dead. Ideally they will be very dead, so dead in fact that copyright is no longer a concern; this reduces the risk of a court case somewhat. So, Quirk books will follow up the literary mash-up ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ with ‘Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters’ — ‘60% Austen and 40% tentacled chaos’. Other publishers have joined the goldrush and plan to release titles such as ‘Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter’ (subtitled ‘She Loved Her Country; She Hated Demons’) and ‘I am Scrooge: A Zombie Story for Christmas’. See the Guardian for more.
The Salinger case proves that when borrowing heavily from another writer’s work, it’s not enough for the author concerned to be merely old and reclusive. They really do have to be dead. And preferably, they should not have a powerful estate taking care of how posterity perceives their work.
What would reduce the risk further, I’d suggest, both to publishers and perhaps to readers, is for the writer to bring enough new material to the project for it to genuinely “belong” to them as author. For example reviewers who decribed the 2007 Booker shortlisted novel Mr Pip as “Lloyd Jones’ imaginative riff on a classic Dickens novel”, did so safe in the knowledge that Great Expectations was just one of the many flavours running through the novel. Lloyd Jones did not rely upon it so heavily that his readers needed to have read Great Expectations in order for Mr Pip to make sense.
Rendered as a percentage? Hard to say, but not more than 2 or 3%.
Personally I’m not sure a 60:40 ratio of old to new is fair, even if on the face of it, it’s legal. The author (or publisher) doing the borrowing ought to bring more collateral to the equation than that.
When I said what came next might be something Jane Austen would hate, I didn’t mean the video in that last post — which I have a feeling she wouldn’t really object to. No, I meant Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which people may have noticed in their bookshops recently. It is anyone’s guess how Jane Austen would react were she brought back to life to comment (the most annoying aspect, from her point of view, might be that the writer responsible has probably minted more than she ever made from the sale of her own books). But I suppose I’m slightly concerned that if this is a hit, we’ll be treated to a ‘literary’ diet of zombies with everything (which here means, everything classic with expired copyright). Like chips with everything, that could be a little dull. The one person I know who has a copy of this book is saving it for when she goes on holiday, so if you’ve read it or have strong views, do get in touch.
Two hundred years ago, in July 1809, Jane Austen moved to Chawton village in Hampshire, where her brother had inherited the local manor house from a cousin. Jane lived with her mother in a cottage on the estate, now the Jane Austen House Museum. Here, she revised the manuscripts of ‘Sense and Sensibility’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Northanger Abbey’, and wrote ‘Mansfield Park’, ‘Emma’ and ‘Persuasion’.
I am not sure whether to be surprised it is as much as two centuries since Jane Austen’s work began to be published, or surprised that it is only two centuries. Her work has had a massive influence on literature and on attitudes to life in these parts. And she is big in Bollywood too. What next? Well, it may be something she’d hate… but if she was around today, who knows?
Just as we got used to writing and saying the word ‘Noughties’ in unembarrassed fashion, the decade is about to be over. And what a nothing of a decade it was. A decade in which the art, music and writing of other decades was endlessly recycled, a decade in which an attack on two buildings became the justification for a so-called ‘War on Terror’ in which many thousands were murdered and others went hungry, while in countries geographically (but not otherwise) far removed from all this, we became overly interested in food and ate far too much of it, then dieted or went to the gym or the doctor to remove the resulting fat, and spent our time watching celebrities do the same thing. Technology allows us to connect with people anywhere on the planet, but those who have advertising money to spend keep trying to herd us into mass market spaces where we will endlessly watch and listen to just those same few people that we are all on first name terms with and about whom we already know far too much.
Narrating a tale in six words is a tall order, but 100 words is a great length to work with.
The hundred-word story been popular among science fiction writers since the 1980s, and is sometimes referred to as a drabble — no, not after Margaret Drabble, but after a usage coined in Monty Python’s 1971 Big Red Book.
The success of Dan Rhodes’ Anthropology, which contains 101 101-word stories, testifies to the fact that it is a length that can be popular with readers as well as writers.
Here are a couple of sample 100-worders:
Mould by Dan Rhodes
I’m hopelessly in love with a bland girl. She has never said or done anything interesting. I spend hours trying to work out why I’m so deeply attached to her. I can’t find the answer. Her hair is boring, her face is boring and her body is boring. Every time I come home from work to find her slumped on the sofa, surrounded by used yoghurt pots, my heart explodes and I feel giddy, like I’m walking on air. I take her lifeless hand, kiss her pale cheek and say, ‘they broke the mould when they made you’. She rarely responds. —From ‘Anthropology and other stories’ by Dan Rhodes, (Canongate, 2000).
Roaring Water Bay by Lane Ashfeldt
Auntie Rose was the vintage of the oldest penny buried in the garden: 1892. She wore her hair in a white bun. She made bread and scones, she planted hyacinths and forsythia, she scolded and comforted, clucked and sweetened. In her late nineties she went ‘home’ on a visit. Within weeks she was dead and buried in the cramped family grave, as if the very land itself had killed her. Only then did I learn of her lost child, the ‘sin’ that made her leave, and understand why she would say to me, defiant, “they can scatter my ashes over Roaring Water Bay”. —Published in www.the-phone-book-com
[this post was adapted from a longer article by Lane which was previously published by Arts Council England].
Ooops, meant to add a link earlier for this event tomorrow – at Respect Festival, Willesden, where I’m reading along with several writers who contributed to the heftily titled anthology What We Were Thinking Just Before The End (aka ’WWWTJBTE’ — and no, I don’t know how to pronounce that either. Maybe I am not East European enough.) Anyway, all that is happening 6pm-7ish, at the Shh tent, Respect Festival, Roundwood Park. Entry is free, and there will be music and other entertainments in the afternoon and into the early evening, and hopefully some more sunny weather, too. How to get there.
