Macmillan's Halfway House

SPEAKING VOLUMES

There is nothing to differentiate Suroopa Mukherjee's first novel for adults from the score or so of assorted fiction titles on my desk""and that is excellent news for Macmillan.

Mukherjee's novel, Across the Mystic Shore, is one of the six books that kicks off Macmillan's controversial New Writing imprint. In 2005, publisher Michael Barnard announced that Macmillan would "give a voice to talented new writers". Macmillan would accept submissions for original first fiction directly from authors, preferably in electronic form.

They would provide minimal editorial services, but decent cover design and printing. In return, the author received no advance and signed away most of his rights, but received a generous 20 per cent of any royalties earned.

Hari Kunzru famously called Macmillan's new imprint "the Ryan-Air of publishing: it's like having to pay for your own uniforms". The UK media and the publishing industry were dismissive, even critical: Macmillan was exploiting new authors, Macmillan was skating terribly close to the vanity publishing model. Writing in The Bookseller, Nicholas Clee provided a slightly different perspective: "One gets the impression that more people want to write fiction than want to read it." If you accept Clee's proposition, then Macmillan's New Writing venture becomes clear: this is Macmillan the service provider, not Macmillan the publisher, at work.

Reading the first six off the New Writing imprint when you're sitting in India is an oddly soothing exercise. Most of the debates that exercise authors and publishers elsewhere about Barnard's venture don't apply here. The market for fiction in English isn't large enough, yet, to support literary agents, though that could change in the next decade. Most manuscripts are commissioned, many arrive at the editor's desk through a loose network of contacts, and a few actually make it out of the slushpile into book form. It is still possible to approach an editor at a major publishing firm directly, make your pitch, and get your manuscript published. The size of the average advance for first fiction is negligible: it would barely cover the cost of three martinis, forget a classic three-martini publisher's lunch in London.

The relative novelty of the venture""a respectable publishing house offering a no-frills, get-published imprint for the masses""has operated in strange ways in the UK. Six first novels from unheralded newcomers without the hum of a well-oiled publicity machine behind them would normally have received less attention than a middle-ranking Whitehall bureaucrat's unpublished poems. But the controversy has meant that the first six, at any rate, have been read, reviewed and discussed; the next six might receive reasonable attention as well. This could be disconcerting for mainstream publishing: all that Macmillan's done is sift through about 3,000 manuscripts in order to come up with roughly 14 acceptable novels, without any of them requiring major editorial work.

Brian Martin's North, for instance, could have come off any major publisher's mid-list: it's about six people at an Oxford school entangled in complicated games of seduction and manipulation. I didn't take to Conor Corderoy's sci-fi thriller, Dark Rain, whose narrator sounds like an android caught in a Raymond Chandler parody, but I had to admit that it was acceptable SF""there's a lot worse coming off the mainstream imprints.

Suroopa Mukherjee's Across the Mystic Shore is a tale of lives dislocated, fractured and sent off on different tracks when a young orphan is brought into an ordinary household in India. I can't make huge claims for this novel, but it fits with a score or so of similar books that have crossed my desk in the past month: moderately satisfying, conventional but relatively cleanly written novels with an engaging storyline. And it fits with the bulk of Indian fiction in English""not the books that receive critical attention and public acclamation, but the footsoldiers, the hundreds of not-bad, not-great works that are published each year and sell perhaps a thousand copies apiece, if that.

In most Indian publishing houses, this book would have been on the borderline: there would have been good, but not pressing, reasons to publish Across the Mystic Shore, and there would have been valid, but not imperative, reasons to reject it. This, I suspect, is true of most of the novels in Macmillan's New Writing line-up. Most writers slot in between Faulkner and William McGonagall, but in a world where only the freak, the exotic, the genius and the prodigy are welcome, there's no place for the average. Macmillan offers a halfway house, knowing that while all writers dream of being read, they'll settle for just being published.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com