I came across this wonderful passage in Milan Kundera’s ‘Immortality’ written over fifteen years before the publication of Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ and an elegant argument for a God created universe and an absent Creator:

‘As a little girl, Agnes used to go for walks with her father and once she asked him whether she believed in God. Father answered: ‘I believe in the Creator’s computer.’ The answer was so peculiar that the child remembered it. The word computer was peculiar, and so was the word Creator, for Father would never ever say God but always Creator as if he wanted to limit God’s significance to his engineering activity. The Creator’s computer: but how could a person communicate with a computer? So she asked her father whether he prayed. He said: ‘That would be like praying to Edison when a light bulb burns out.’

Agnes thought to herself: the Creator loaded a detailed program into the computer and went away. That God created the world and then left it to a forsaken humanity trying to address him in an echoless void – this idea isn’t new. Yet it is one thing to be abandoned by the God of our forefathers and another to be abandoned by God the inventor of a cosmic computer. In his place, there is a program which is ceaselessly running in his absence, without anyone being able to change anything whatsoever. To load a program into a computer: this does not mean that the future has been planned down to the last detail, that everything is written ‘up above.’ For example, the program did not specify that in 1815 a battle would be fought near Waterloo and that the French would be defeated, but only that man is aggressive by nature, that he is condemned to wage war and that technical progress would make war more and more terrible. Everything else is without importance from the Creator’s point of view and is only a play of permutations and combinations within a general program which is not a prophetic anticipation of the future but merely sets the limits of possibilities within which all power of decision has been left to chance.

That was the same with the program we call mankind. The computer did not plan an Agnes or a Paul, but only a prototype known as a human being, giving large to a rise number of specimens which are based on the original model and haven’t any individual essence. Just like a Renault car. Its essence is deposited outside, in the archives of the central engineering office. Individual cars differ only in their serial numbers. The serial number of the human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.’

Kundera posits the novelist as God of his own fictional universe which once the ink dries takes on a life of its own in the mind of his readers.

I like the idea of Creation being driven behind the scenes by a vast and complex computer which no one knows how to run, though I also love Douglas Adams’ caveat at the end of ‘So Long And Thanks For All the Fish.’that its actually operated by a team of super intelligent white mice and that dolphins are the most enlightened creatures on the planet.

It was so sad to hear of the death last week of my friend the actor, writer and bookseller David Wilding. I first met him when I took over as manager of Ottakar’s Bookshop at the Exchange Centre in Putney in 2002. David had the perfect bass voice that begged to be overheard at any distance and an infectious fruity laugh. He loved talking to customers about books and helped create that wonderful ambience in a bookshop that draws people back and makes them feel part of a community of book lovers, combined of literary enthusiasm, gossip and good humour. David was often working on a novel that he hoped would ‘smash the YA market’, the story often featuring a supernatural element, nubile women and more sex than the average Game of Thrones episode. If it wasn’t banned in half the bookshops in Britain I’m sure it would have been a book teenagers would have loved to read under the covers.

David was a stalwart at our Marlinspike Hall Writing Group (pictured above) and his mellow tones would often be put to good use in dramatically rendering the work of others, especially if the narrative contained lots of rude bits. After I left Ottakar’s, David was a regular at supporting book events my next shop, the Calder Bookshop and Theatre in the Cut. One time, I invited one of my favourite poets to come and give a reading from her new book and knowing that she had a significant following, thought that she advertise it on her website and encourage her fans to attend. On the night she turned up with a gaggle of PR people from her publisher armed with a camcorder and several bottles of wine, only to discover that David and I were the only audience. Despite our pleading, they swept off in a huff to wine bar next door but they left us the wine which we finished off and toasted another great evening for British poetry. David will be sorely missed and helped make for me and for many others a visit to his book counter one worth remembering.

Since I left the House of Commons Bookshop in 2009, I have become increasingly mesmerised by the rise of online bookselling and the hegemony of Amazon in particular to the extent that I’ve been temporarily blinded to the joys of real bookselling which was always my lifeblood and soul. Like Denethor in The Lord of the Rings who gazed into his palantir and was awed by the vast armies of Sauron, so too I became too easily convinced of the inevitable dominance of Amazon and the world of e-books and felt the only way to survive was to join with it.

Amazon offer us a compelling vision; their site is addictive and simple to use. Once you join they never leave you alone with their recommendations, offers and invitations. Titles that once tooks months and years to locate, that you had to travel to obscure bookshops halfway across the country, are one-click away, next-day delivered and often reasonably priced. Who could demur? Amazon offer us a tanatalising range of services, streaming films and music, Audible, Abe Books, Goodreads, Kindle Unlimited, next day delivery—one hour delivery in London. They tell us repeatedly there are the most customer-centric company in the world.

The birth of Amazon, charmingly recounted in James Marcus’ Amazonia, began with crates of books in a garage with literature graduates employed to post book reviews and descriptions on the internet. It was all passion and enthusiasm and the drive to break boundaries and do something new. Twenty years down the line it’s a global behemoth with a $261 billion turnover with sales in the UK alone estimated at £53billion. And still it makes a loss on paper with capital channelled back into investment.

There is something scary about a corporation this size and unnerving stories began to escape from behind the scenes, of the draconian work schedules and encroachment of civil liberties in offices and warehouses. The biggest scandal until recently was the company’s avoidance of any significant UK corporation tax, which at least has been partially remedied this year. But as Abbott and Achbar’s The Corporation showed us, once companies get to this size there is really no stopping them from behaving like raging, destructive psychopaths.

The biggest shock I received was when I actually started working with Amazon as a marketplace seller. I had surplus copies of book which had a specialist audience and once I posted it on marketplace and gained an international customer based, sales increased by 1000%. This spurred me to load more and more of my inventory until after a year sales via Amazon constituted 60% of my turnover. But due to having to deal with intense competition from other sellers on the site, being at the mercy of a few unscrupulous customers who knew how to exploit Amazon’s chargeback and A-Z guarantees, also Amazon’s own crippling fees and commissions, their stranglehold on postal charges, It became virtually impossible to make any money with them and the main beneficiary of the arrangement was Amazon themselves. They began to exert a stranglehold on my operation and to determine its direction—until the day I decided to stop.

My lesson has been learned the hard way and I return much chastened to
back to the bookshop counter, where there is soul and spirit, human warmth and connection, where you need to work hard to connect and engage and not rely on mere technology, but where the benefits are something that can never be quantified by a statistic or predicted by an algorithm. Profit is obviously key but not king. This year has been a good one for bookshops; Waterstones and Foyles have shown a resurgence; customers are returning to print; and the enthusiasm for bookshops like Go Set A Watchmen, show that bookshops are far from dead. I think it’s time for me to climb down from the pyre of Denethor and return to high street bookselling where my heart has always belonged.

Two books have been sitting on my shelves for quite some time, promising may be more than they could deliver, but whose titles and ethos gave me a little fillip of optimism: Reading to Heal by Jacqueline Stanley (ISBN: 97818622043609) and The Novel Cure by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin (ISBN: 9780857864215). Both books promote the power of reading to feel better and change your life, the former suggesting that any kind of focussed reading is good for you; the latter specifically suggesting all manner of novels that might help to deal with specific ailments.

Bibliotherapy is basically book medicine and I have been self medicating –and regularly overdosing — all my life. Books obviously can and do change how you feel as long as you can open yourself to them; its not a therapy that works for everyone and you have to know how to engage with what you read for it to work. Book are doorways, connectors from one state to another, and there is magic to them; I’m not sure a prescription of ‘healthy reading’ would work for many people. As a bookseller I’ve always tried to point people in the right direct and then discreetly back away to let them make their own choices. ‘Must Reads’ create a sense of obligation and potential disappointments whereas ‘Maybe Reads’ open up an index of possibilities.

I recently read Robinson Crusoe, a book which was often foisted on my as a child and which I found unbearably dull, completely lacking in any imagination or excitement, a dull materialist fable and I could never get beyond Crusoe’s early mercantile dealings in the slave trade before he got anywhere near the island. A few weeks ago I started to read it again, on a whim in the middle of a sleepless night, and once started I couldn’t put it down as if the book had something important to share with me.

And it did. Robinson’s shipwreck may have been an Act of God, but if so if was the beneficent intervention of a higher power. Crusoe goes to see despite a very strong warning from his father of its dangers and the result of this choice leads him build a profitable slave plantation in South America. It is on a voyage to capture new slaves that his ship is destroyed and he becomes a castaway on a desert island the only survivor.

From the first fate works always in Crusoe’s favour, from the was with which he is able to salvage quite a lot of useful stores and implements from the wreck, to the fact that his island has fresh water, a steady population of animals that can be tamed and bred and soil that can be cultivated, places to shelter and its geographical position being sufficiently remote that visits from hostile tribes, native on the continent, are rare.

The narrative could actually be a parable for God’s grace, and early on in novel Crusoe realises that he has been ‘saved’ and adopts an attitude of regular prayer and acts of gratitude. His natural aptitude for working with his hands and for farming and basic manufacture are a tribute to the seventeenth century Protestant work ethic while also suggesting that his natural potential was simply waiting to unfold.

However, its is not until Crusoe self-consciously makes the decision to reconnect to the human race (by rescuing Friday from a cannibal tribe who were planning to sacrifice him) does Crusoe’s salvation become manifest, and a series of complex deus ex machina he is able to overcome a mutiny and commandeer a ship back to England.

On one level, Robinson Crusoe is retelling of the Book of Job; Crusoe is tested and found worthy. His early travails on the island after many decades work in his favour and facilitate his escape. Its a wonderfully optimistic novel and the positive energies of the last third are such that Defoe has to tell us that there will be a sequel because Crusoe’s adventures, despite his advanced age, are far from over.

This is not a book I would have picked up consciously or read on the recommendation of others and yet, it seems to me, this was exactly the book I needed to read to help progress to the next stage in my life. Maybe we all know at a deep level the patterns of our next unfolding and we just have to be open to the possibility of the best next thing, however strange and unlikely it may seem.

I was delighted to receive in the post this week a copy of the limited edition cd Against Nature, a project I was pleased to help fund via Kickstarter, an album of fifteen songs inspired by Huysmans 1884 novel A Rebours, the project a collaboration between three great talents—music by Orthon, lyrics by Jeremy Reed and vocals by Marc Almond. It is the convergence of four unique creative energies, the fourth being the novel’s author Joris-Karl Huysmans.

A Rebours or Against Nature (a literal translation is ‘against the grain’) was considered a very shocking novel in its time, it is the story of the retreat from society of the aristocratic Jean des Esseintes to a house in the countryside where he devotes his life to aesthetic contemplation, conducting a series of intellectual experiments (a bit like Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet) while recalling his debauched life in Paris. It is often remembered as the book which contains the tortoise whose shell is encrusted with jewels.

Colin Wilson mentions this striking novel in The Outsider, acknowledging the book’s compelling power which draws the reader into the world of a bored, rich loner and, sometimes much to our discomfort, we vicariously start to enjoy his hedonistic experiments in much the same way that today despite ourselves we may root for Hannibal Lecter, Dexter Morgan or Walter White.

Oscar Wilde read the book on his honeymoon and it changed his life. It was the inspiration for his book The Portrait of Dorian Gray and in that novel A Rebours itself appears in disguise as the book Dorian reads and which leaves him mesmerised: ‘The hero, the wonderful young Parisien . . . became to him a kind of pre-figuring type of himself. And indeed the whole book seemed to contain the story of his whole life, written before he had lived it.’ Wilde’s biographer, Richard Ellman tells us that he knew it was a ‘poisonous book’, nevertheless Wilde drank it as a chaser with the love potions of matrimony.’

It is not hard to see why the trio cultural mavericks, Orthon, Almond and Reed were drawn to this material and were determined to make the album ‘no matter what.’ They have produced a powerful suite of songs not easily forgotten and containing a bravura performance by Marc Almond, surely one of the highpoints of his career. Almond is one of the greatest vocalists of his generation, a performer who has taken a singular path through mainstream pop and decadent fringe, torch song and cabaret, and whose dark chocolate voice conjures up a strange combination of beauty, heartbreak and sleaze. Against Nature is the perfect vehicle for his talent and many times in these songs he pushes his voice triumphantly to its limits, alternately swooning, soaring and whispering, and in songs like ‘The Slice’ performs some outstanding verbal gymnastics, the speed and delicacy of his phrasing being quite astounding.

Jeremy Reed is equally at home in this world which seems a natural haven for him, a place where the hero lives for kicks, where the thrill of the experience is the important thing, a world of rich scents and colours, of sexual androgyny, glamour and grand style, experience which often turns hallucinatory and where the protagonist is sometimes led to acts of cruelty and sadism, and who has learnt to live on the edge. Against Nature contains some of his best lyrics and the power of artistic vision is compelling rendered in songs like ‘The Green Fairy’, a song about the effects of drinking absinthe.

Orthon’s settings are masterly and artfully conjure up the decadent nineties and the piano is beautifully nuanced, and it is the music which gives the songs a special poignancy and saves them from become too histrionic. The music is lush and colourful, a river of dark treacle from which it is impossible to escape. In his soundscapes, Orthon has captured the compelling nature of the material which has a Faustian pull toward damnation.

Pursuing a visionary credo is a dangerous vocation and according to their autobiographies the lives of Reed and Almond have contained a great deal of pain, breakdown and suffering and they have been pushed to fringes of the mainstream, supported for the most part by a core of dedicated fans. In his tribute to Marc Almond, Segmenting the Black Orange, Reed writes: ‘Giving one’s life to one’s art is an isolating and often disparaging experience.’ Genius, however, can turn suffering to great art and this seems to be the impetus behind Against Nature. For this is no mere Baudelairean celebration of decadence, but a self-conscious vindication of the artistic vision.

This is confirmed for me in the magnificent final song, Liturgy, which features a choir, the most beautiful track on the album. It is prayer of renunciation, humility and transformation and I found listening to it deeply cathartic. It is a plea of forgiveness and acceptance of the human and the limited as well as an affirmation of the artistic vision, pursued no matter what. I found the words and music to have an unexpected spiritual undertone. The final verse is performed by Almond with great transcendent power:

I can’t renounce or regret
what I would like to forget
Lord I’ve sunk so low
but I see a violent rainbow
liberate me to humility

Against Nature will be released into the public domain early in 2016 and I’m not holding my breath waiting to hear it toasted in the mainstream media. I want to live with this album a lot longer before I attempted a more detailed critique, but for those who can take it, this is a work of genius, a glorious testament to the power of art, and if you can open your heart to it, it will leave you transformed.