Another day, another apparently meaningless Top 100. Waterstone's, your friendly neighbourhood coffee shop with an optional book-selling facility, has asked its staff to identify the best books of the last 25 years. As is always the case, the resulting list is at once predictable (for the most part, the sort of things that make the Booker long list, or get serialised on Radio 4) and at the same time has the potential to induce spontaneous aneurysms in literary journalists (wot, no Philip Roth? Etc, etc).
Of course, we should take such polls at face value. These are the books that people who work in bookshops like, nothing more, nothing less. Similarly, the Oscars represent the views of people who work in Hollywood. Any claim to objective "bestness" is just silly.
In any case, what are these people really being asked? The "best" books of the last quarter-century? Some equally elusive "greatest"? Or simply their favourites? Did all the people who voted for A Suitable Boy make it past the half-way point? How many Trainspotting votes were really for the movie? Were those who plumped for Dan Brown or Sophie Kinsella motivated by a sense of inclusive populism, or did they genuinely like them? Or was it just a terribly ironic joke?
We'll never know of course, any more than we know exactly why everyone votes in a general election. But a general election only picks a government; these polls set the parameters for a cultural agenda.
Inevitably, the cultural form most in thrall to these lists is popular music, a phenomenon documented in High Fidelity. (Which is also on the Waterstone's list, and one of my own favourite reads of the era, but I know full well it's not one of the best - you see the distinction?) In my new book, Welcome to the Machine (which I'm allowed to plug, following the precedent set here by Dave Hill a few months ago), I identify Radiohead's OK Computer as the last of the classic rock albums, partly because no other album in the last decade has made such a consistent showing in polls (of critics and punters alike) of greatness/bestness/favouriteness. After a certain point - maybe about 2001 - any such list that didn't list OK Computer alongside Revolver, Pet Sounds and the like would obviously be guilty of wilful perversity, like a film poll that left out Citizen Kane.
These lists do serve a clear cultural function, in that they provoke interest in the subject matter, steering water-cooler discussion to arguments over the respective merits of poets or sculptors or mezzo-sopranos. But at heart, most of them offer essentially the same thing as those polls that tell us the celebrity from whom most would like to receive mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (Angelina Jolie? Jessica Alba? Dot Cotton?) and it takes you three paragraphs to realise the whole thing is a clumsy press release for Zovirax or Listerine or the new series of Casualty. As conventional advertising loses its power over our minds, polls and lists just offer another, cheaper way for capitalists to hijack the media in order to promote their products.
Now, who'd do a rotten thing like that?
