An ebook arrives! The future of publishing on my hard-drive. All the big profits are in cyber-publishing these days, as I discovered last month when I downloaded an ebook for three quid and found it contained just 85 pages. This one, by Alwyn W. Turner, has only 72 pages, but it’s a penny cheaper at £2.99. I read it in less time than it takes to bake a potato.
Turner’s theme is the agony of the British left. In 1992, Labour’s shock defeat at the polls plunged the party into despair and gave the modernisers a mandate to do whatever was necessary to win power. Turner’s plan is to revive our memories of that ignoble turning-point and to enshrine 1992 as the must-have date of 2012.
He faces stiff competition from Dickens, Captain Scott and the Titanic, among others, so he calls on the finest talents he can muster: Jeremy Hardy and Gordon Brown. ‘Voting Labour is like wiping your bottom,’ Hardy mused in 1992, ‘I can’t say I like doing it, but you’ve got to because you’re in a worse mess if you don’t.’ As the polls closed on 9 April, Brown, then shadow trade secretary, announced that the Tories had ‘lost their mandate to govern’. Whoops! A few hours later a Conservative majority of 21 had been confirmed.
Turner’s book unfolds like an essay plan. There’s a chapter on comedy, a chapter on music, a chapter on rave culture, a chapter on football. It’s a pity he can’t write terribly well, although it helps to explain the book’s extreme brevity. (If I don’t put many words into it, no one’ll notice I can’t use them.) When he employs metaphor, as he does constantly, he’s like a man wrestling with a bag of snakes. They keep jumping out and biting him:
The week of Diana’s funeral saw the traditional establishment miss a heartbeat before being reinvigorated under the tender care of Tony Blair, the people’s prime minister.
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