Anyone who works in the book trade understands the logic of the “It Sells” book. This could technically apply to any genre, though self-help, chick lit and ephemeral pulp fiction tend to dominate.
It refers to the kind of book that all self-respecting editors know shouldn’t really be published, except for the inconvenient fact that, as Marketing will point out, It Sells, and that’s where those fat author advances will come from.
In recent times, the classic ‘It Sells’ book has come out of the growing market for sequels —usually a sequel written to a series penned by an author now dead. So while Sebastian Faulks’ follow-up to Ian Fleming’s James Bond series was received with only weak hallelujahs by critics and Bond fans, It Sold, therefore it exists.
The most recent It Sells book to be commissioned is Eoin Colfer’s follow-up to the late Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. It’s the kind of idea that appears to be brilliant. The original H2G2 series was wild, whacky, well-plotted and irresistibly funny. Colfer is a wild, whacky writer with a flair for plot who can be irresistibly funny. This should be a marriage made in heaven, yes?
Or maybe not. Colfer plans, sensibly enough, not to try to imitate Adams’ voice, but instead to use his cast of characters to create a one-off book. I’ll use three examples to explain why this might not work, but first, a slight digression.
Back in the 1990s, a favourite literary game played by ink-stained wretches was Eekquel. An “Eekquel” was a hypothetical sequel, so obviously bad that all players understood immediately why it would never be written.
Also Read
The perfect eekquel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice would be Mr Darcy’s Divorce, for instance. The perfect eekquel to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was a baroque, Jungle Gothic tome which began with the lines: “Mistah Kurtz — he dead. Or so they say. Deep in the heart of the forests of the Congo, the tree spirit Wusha-ggrah knows better.” As for the eekquel to Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, its title, Modest Hopes, speaks for itself.
The reasons why Colfer will find his task difficult is easily summarised. The first is the Tolkien argument. The reason why there’s been no attempt at a sequel to the Lord of the Rings saga is that the landscape is too complex. In order to create Middle-Earth, Tolkien put his considerable expertise in linguistics and in the study of epics and the world of sagas to use over the course of decades.
He created entire languages, back-stories and complex histories for Middle-Earth. Any inheritor would first have to spend years understanding his universe before s/he could attempt to emulate it. H2G2 is less complex, but like any good fictional universe, obeyed laws that Adams wrote about — and laws that he didn’t, but that he held in his head as most good writers do. It’s hard for any writer to fully inhabit a world created by another writer — they just wouldn’t have the same approach.
The second is the Gregory Maguire argument. Maguire made his bones with Wicked, an inspired spin on the Wizard of Oz story. But then Maguire did a sequel to Cinderella called Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. In his quest to provide the ugly stepsister with a plausible real-world background, Maguire strays too far from the fairy tale. His Ugly Sister, Iris, is a plain, bright woman with a talent for painting, battling poverty in 17th-century Holland. It’s a fascinating tale — but it’s not the Ugly Sister’s story so much as it is the story of an unattractive woman struggling to find her way in an alien land. It goes too far from the tale’s roots, which is one of the problems Colfer might face.
The third is the George MacDonald Fraser argument. When Fraser embarked on his Flashman series — the adventures of a bully, braggart and liar swashbuckling his way across the world, from the Crimea to Afghanistan — he relied on the fact that his original inspiration was little-read in his time. Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the original, featured Flashman as the school bully; Fraser’s Flashman attracted no flak from Tom Brown enthusiasts, because there were so few of them left. But Colfer is up against legions of fans who loved and know the H2G2 series backwards, and who have their own very definite ideas of how the characters should develop.
Having said all of this, will I buy the Colfer book when it comes out? Yes. Curiosity is a strong motive — as the publishing industry well knows. Colfer’s book may be unsatisfying or unusual, it may spark controversy or be well-received. Either way, as the mavens in marketing know, It Will Sell. Sigh.
The author is chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar. The views expressed here are personal.