The Bookshop Blogger #19

Friday, 23 July 2010, 10:46 AM

It started with Potter. JK Rowling’s boy wizard began life as a kids’ book but by the time Chamber of Secrets had come out it had done the impossible: it had crossed over to the adult mainstream.

Here we had a character that promised a run of several books with at least two imprints – for children and adults – which would both sell in their hundreds of millions. And they did. I’ll be honest, I’m not the biggest Harry Potter fan. I read the first three with my godchildren and then found myself unable to care about the adventures of Harry et al. I wasn’t even bothered about the ‘unfortunate incident’ in The Half Blood Prince.

But, they – and I’m never really sure who ‘they’ are – say that Harry Potter saved the book industry. It also made JK richer than God.

Since then, it seems that the Holy Grail of publishing is to find the next crossover classic. We’ve had a few one-offs that have done it - The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-time by Mark Haddon, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne - but what everyone is looking for is the series.

Well, this week saw the latest instalment of one attempt and what could turn out to be the debut of another. The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: an Eclipse Novella (Twilight Saga) certainly takes the biscuit for the longest title of a book that I have seen in ages, but I don’t think that it’s got quite the universal appeal the boy wizard has. It seems to appeal almost entirely to pre-pubescent girls and lonely single women. So, close but no cigar - and quite right too. In my opinion, the Twilight sagas are dull and retroactive in their portrayal of relationships, and the central female character, Bella, is not a bright independent post feminist icon but a whiney brat whose every feeling is informed by the moods and attentions of her equally whiney and brattish boyfriend(s). Sorry but, well, she’s not exactly Rebecca or Jane Eyre is she? She’s even more annoying than Miss Julie, and Strindberg was the most rampant of misogynists. Stephanie Meyer should go and read some proper books with some proper heroines and try again.

It’s probably that attitude that stops me from writing a string of multi-million selling novels!

And so to the debutant Theodore Boone or indeed Theodore Boone: Young Lawyer. One book, two titles, two covers, two audiences. It came out last Thursday and I haven’t had a chance to do more than scan a few pages, but if John Grisham has managed to create a character who us old folk can look at wistfully and make believe we can see a bit of ourselves in and who can inspire children to become… um… lawyers, then he might just have found that elusive pot of gold, to mix my metaphors.

But will either of these new releases have the legs to knock The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest off the top spot?  Now there’s a thought: if they cut out all the sex and violence, maybe the Millennium Trilogy could be the next crossover sensation – mind you, they would be three of the shortest books ever written.