Carole Hayman's Hard Choices has become the most reviewed unpublished novel in the history of English fiction. The critics adore it and give Hayman notices you couldn't buy for ready cash, not even from literary editors. Her detractors don't dispute that she is a fine comic author; Ladies of Letters, which she co-writes with Lou Wakefield, is a consistent crowd-puller for Radio 4. Hayman's fault in the eyes of the book conglomerates isn't her style, but an inappropriate determination to satirise New Labour when Tony Blair is doing so much for America.
As I can't spoil what you aren't allowed to read, I'll give away the plot. Hard Choices is set in 2010. Parliament has been moved to the Dome and MPs have become PRs who carry their pagers in titanium cases. The country's leader is Gideon, a born-again Christian whose slogan is 'Stability is Sexy'. His supporters worship him as a god. He orders 'bad dads' and the unemployed to be curfewed and confines legal protest to National Democracy Day.
If this sounds heavy-handed, I must add that Hayman saves herself from slapstick by spreading the description of her dystopia through the text, in much the same way as Robert Harris gradually uncovers a Nazi Germany which won the war in Fatherland . There are many nice touches. All public services, we learn incidentally, are owned by a Lord Ramsone who, for the times have moved on, blames train delays on a mysterious band of terrorist saboteurs rather than leaves on the line.
The heroine is Grace Fry, a New Labour Minister. Hayman's second strength is her ability to get women politicians' fears that their masters will use their private lives against them just right. In a scene which could have taken place in Downing Street yesterday, she describes how Gideon looked at Grace 'as though she was a much-loved but naughty child and said: "Got to get rid of those out-dated, dead-wood, anti-man ideas. Hostile. Non pro-active. New agenda. Instead of conflict, partnership." He grinned encouragingly, and Grace knew she was expected to respond.
'"I'm not..."
'"Anti-man? Course not, but we'd like to see you partnered, Grace. How long's it been since the divorce?"
'"Five years," Grace stammered.
'"Long enough. And no children?"
Grace shook her head and Gideon looked grave.
In my view, Hard Choices is as good as Julian Barnes's England, England and Alastair Beaton's Feelgood, but I won't pretend she is a new Orwell. I found the denouement hard to take because I can't quite bring myself to believe that the Government would drug the population to keep it obedient. But I've got an over-literal mind and am probably going soft. People who've seen New Labour close up were comfortable with Hayman's futurism. Stephen Bailey, the designer who was forced out of the Dome for trying to save it from vacuity, said she had 'brilliantly caught the absurd - even threatening - atmosphere of British politics'. Brian Sedgemore, a dissident Labour backbencher, called Hard Choices 'a gem'.
Fay Weldon loved her copy of the manuscript, while Rory Bremner said that all who found the 'self-righteousness and paranoia of Blair' sinister would rush to buy the book. The only problem with that is they can't buy the book however fast they run. No one will publish Hard Choices.
Rejected authors always ascribe the worst motives to publishers. They are cliquey, ignorant and only in the book trade to scratch the backs and massage the egos of their soft-skinned Oxbridge catamites.
Hayman would appear to have more solid grounds for grievance than most because her rejection slips read like fan letters. David Shelley of Alison & Busby said that Hayman was 'deliciously acid and very funny in places'. Other publishers said the novel had 'great commercial potential' and was 'terrifyingly good'. Martin Rynja of Duckworth said it was a 'very funny satire of our time'. He turned it down because 'it would appear to be far too early for people even to begin to have the same emotions towards Blair they had towards Margaret Thatcher.'
I must explain his peculiar logic to novices. Publishers are exempt from the VAT other businesses have to pay because they are meant to disseminate knowledge. Yet culture industry managers in publishing and elsewhere have little time for the old idea that a writer can change minds by the strength of her work. Readers, they believe, won't buy the original or unusual. They can be presented with an anti-Blair book only when trendspotters decide they are anti-Blair, and are ready to hear what they already know.
The determination to follow fashion rather than give talent its head is the reason why, from chick-lit to drama-doc, everyone does what everyone else is doing.
Undeterred, Hayman turned to Little Brown, which agreed - at last! - to release Hard Choices. The company is owned by the American Time-Warner corporation. On 12 September it had second thoughts and told Hayman there was no place for satire in a world which had changed forever.
Brian Sedgemore wrote in Tribune that Hayman is the victim of the 'cloying' Blairite cultural establishment and American control of the British media. Alan Sampson, an editor at Time-Warner, told me he was talking tosh. There was nothing menacing about the company's U-turn. The collapse of the twin towers made novels about British politics parochial and pointless. Like any other publisher, Time-Warner was free to react to changed circumstances.
His explanation seemed plausible until I checked the Time-Warner website. Its book of the month for April is Snakeskin by Courttia Newland - 'the story of a private investigator's hunt for the killer of a black MP's daughter'.
An American conservative once told me that his country needed ultra-liberal protections of free speech because the cultural pressure for conformity and consensus in the States would otherwise be irresistible. Anyone who winced at the failure of the brightest and best in the American intelligentsia to use their freedom to speak up for civil liberties and against the killing of civilians would have to agree with him. By contrast, my American friend continued, Britain's Official Secrecy and libel laws, were an affront to a free society. But draconian legislation was less important than the wider culture's toleration of diversity.
I thought he was either being polite to a foreigner or over-optimistic. I would be proved wrong if one British publishing house dared to be braver than Time-Warner's London branch office and release a novel which, in the words of those who have rejected it, is 'terrifyingly good', 'deliciously acid' and 'very funny'.
We owe a lot to America - £243 million, to be precise
Since 11 September we socialist faggots at The Observer have had two insults repeated in steaming emails from the US. After a homoerotic 'kiss my American ass', we are told we can't criticise Bush because 'if it wasn't for us you'd be speaking German'. The cheap riposte, 'if it wasn't for us you'd be speaking Dutch', won't do.
The furious Yanks are right: Britain remains in America's debt for WWII.
The last volume of Robert Skidelsky's life of J.M. Keynes has a brutal account of how America exploited Britain's wartime vulnerability. Keynes vainly tried to ensure 'we have enough assets to leave us capable of independent action'. The US made him accept that the US Empire would supplant its British rival. In return for loans, Britain had to cut exports, limit gold and dollar reserves and repay debt from 1950 onwards.
Ruth Kelly, the Treasury Minister, told Parliament the other day that Britain still owed £243 million. Rather than relieve the debt of Third World peasants, Britain, she said, intended to meet the bill in full by 31 December 2006. Ms Kelly is a revelation. Until her statement, Blair's sudden enthusiasm for a needless war against Iraq was a mystery; his failure to tell Bush that British troops can't be both peace-keepers and combatants in Afghanistan, a dereliction of duty; his inability to force a concession from Washington on any issue from Kyoto to steel tariffs, a national humiliation.
Now what was baffling is clear. Debtors are in no position to demand concessions from creditors. They must do as they're told. According to the Treasury, Britain will be free to have an independent foreign policy on 1 January 2007. I'll leave it to you to imagine how many wars Blair will have fought by then.
