Have you been following the plagiarism row, the one about the use Ian McEwan made of the wartime memoirs of a fellow novelist, Lucilla Andrews, when he wrote Atonement? What should have been a minor literary spat, common enough in the writer's trade, has been turned into a cause célèbre. You'd think McEwan had been accused of murdering Ms Andrews, who happened to die in October - aged 86 - just before the controversy broke.
What's going on here? The loyalty which other distinguished novelists have shown towards McEwan is admirable. Even the secretive Thomas Pynchon ("Recluse Speaks Out to Defend McEwan" ran a page one headline in the Telegraph this week) joined in. We all admire solidarity, whether between friends, families, professions or trade unions.
On the other hand, the past fortnight's outcry, loyally joined by the books editors of the posh papers, strikes me - as an outsider - as closer to bullying, its tone aggressive and dismissive of a lesser but serious talent. I'm happy to accept the McEwan camp's assurance that he played within the rules and that all writers do it (hacks like me certainly lift material), but they've made such a fuss that you wonder what they've got to hide.
Let me recap. Andrews had been a wartime nurse who pioneered a popular form of hospital fiction, though her obituarist in the Independent (among others) called her "far above the lowly hack who cranks out endlessly'' doctor-meets-nurse stuff. In the acknowledgements on the back page of Atonement, published to acclaim in 2001, McEwan names Andrews and her memoir, No Time for Romance, published in 1977, as one of three writers of the period to whom he owed gratitude, along with archives and friends.
Andrews and her family knew nothing of the connection until recently when it was drawn to her attention by Natasha Alden, then completing a doctoral thesis on "second generation" wartime writers (ie those like Pat Barker who write of wars their parents knew) at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Alden concluded not only that several passages, including names and dialogue, were strikingly similar in both books, but that Briony, McEwan's protagonist, is similar in her wartime circumstances (a nurse) and ambition (to write) to Andrews' account of her own life.
Apparently Andrews, a tough old lady, replied "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn," when told all this. Whether or not she took care to attribute the line to Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind is not clear. But at one level it rankled because she planned to use her acceptance speech at a lifetime achievement award from the Romantic Novelists Association to register her point.
In the event she was too ill to attend and it is her agent, Vanessa Holt, who has gone public with the complaint that McEwan's acknowledgement has been insufficient. Inevitably the word "plagiarism" cropped up. When the row went public in a lengthy Mail on Sunday article by the freelance journalist and writer Julia Langdon, Ian McEwan defended himself and the writer's craft forcefully on the front page of the Guardian.
However, the London literary establishment, famous for kindly reviewing and recommending each other's books, as Private Eye loves pointing out, didn't leave it there. Books editors piled in with stern admonition to malicious and envious (why envious?) hacks, cunning publicists for the film of Atonement which is coming out shortly, and casual dismissal of Andrews as "a nurse" and "a queen of hospital romance".
Even the Observer's saintly Robert McCrum joined in. In the past week the Telegraph has drummed up a whole page of indignant support from the likes of Zadie Smith, Rose Tremain, Margaret Attwood, Thomas Keneally (he popped up on Radio 4 too) and Kazuo Ishiguro. Recluse Pynchon was lured from his cave, or wherever exactly he hides. UCL's Professor John Sutherland went on the radio to defend his friend, though he talked about the wrong world war.
With two caveats I don't have a dog in this fight. I have met Ian McEwan once and enjoy his work. I write mostly about politics and politicians, who are also capable of solidarity when a colleague is beaten up by Fleet St, though it usually takes the limited form of refraining from joining the attack.
But I think I can spot bullying and a casual imputation of unworthy motive of the kind that would make the average New Labour spin doctor blush. My first caveat is that journalists have to make the kind of decision McEwan made about the appropriate level of attribution every day. We can be pretty naughty, as Alastair Campbell demonstrated with that dodgy Iraq dossier. I spot lifted stuff in many articles. Also sometimes in novels. How much one acknowledges material or ideas is sometimes a matter of honesty, prudence - or just plain courtesy.
My second caveat is that Julia Langdon, who wrote the offending MoS article, is a friend of mine. She used to be a political correspondent on the Guardian and was later political editor of both the Mirror and Sunday Telegraph. A widow with two teenage children to feed, she is, like the late Ms Andrews, a tough cookie. So I have heard a little about the background.
Thus Langdon heard about the similarity between the two books, not because some film publicist was seeking to promote Atonement - the movie (she didn't know one was being made), but because of two coincidences.
Natasha Alden, the Oxford D Phil student, is her goddaughter.
Langdon also met Andrews (once) because the novelist's only child, Veronica Crichton, who died of cancer at 54, was once a Labour press officer. I knew her myself. Langdon wrote the story because it was interesting (it still is) and she has a living to make.
Biographers who deconstruct the artist, not the art, are surely engaged in the same process. But I'm still puzzled by the scale of the fuss. It looks like the big beasts of the literary jungle and their parasites are hunting down small, furry creatures like Andrews, Alden and Langdon because they've scratched them. Or, to deploy a cliché beloved by us cliché-mongers, "has someone touched a raw nerve?"
