Today I (oh the shame! oh the horror!) succumbed to a truly remarkable amount of hype and bought a copy of
The Gone-Away World.
It has prominent front-table displays at every bookshop I've been in, an Underground ad campaign (with the slogan "love, pirates, mimes, greed, and...ninjas?"*), apparently involved an enormous advance for an unknown author (£300,000 or so), and had a lot of money poured into the book production: the jacket, rather curiously, has a trompe l'oeil depiction of a book facing the other way (i.e. with page ends shown on the spine) and is both glossified and embossed. The flaps are generous, and show snippets of Bosch embellished with chaotic red overprinting, a design that matches the decorated boards and the glossy endpapers. They even went to all the trouble of fitting fake headbands on the spine ends, although the book is of course cased and not sewn. My own copy is signed, although I suspect that this has been done by the same method used for the newest Bond novel (which Faulks allegedly refused to sign in person and so at least one in-store signing instead featured a Bond girl), that is, a group of copies had the title page excised, signed in bulk by the author, then tipped back in.
All this made me curious - I figured someone must have really liked the book. Once I'd brought it home and thought to google it, however, the truth was immediately apparent. "Nick Harkaway" is a pseudonym for Nicholas Cornwell, see? No? Well, Nicholas Cornwell is the son of David Cornwell, see? No? Well, David Cornwell is better known by his own pseudonym, John le Carré, see? Ah, yes.
Now, Cornwell
père adopted his pseudonym because, as an actual member of MI6, it wouldn't do for him to be publishing spy "novels" under his own name, especially after he was outed by a double agent. Cornwell
fils, having previously been nothing more state-secretive than a script-writer, has presumably adopted his pseudonym in order to avoid (accusations of) trading on the name of his famous father...even though no one knows the name with which his famous father gifted him. (The dedication reads "For my parents. You know who you are", which would be coyish except everyone else knows who they are too, once the publicity machine has geared up.) Furthermore, one can only wonder if his book, which is clearly expected to become a top bestseller given the sheer expense put into it by the publisher, would have attracted such expense if he had begun by submitting the manuscript under his assumed name so that his authorial inheritance was actually concealed, instead of being a completely open secret. What gives?
As I've gone and bought a copy of the damn thing, we shall see.
-----
*I didn't write down the actual ad slogan, so that's come from other marketing materials. It does make me wonder why ninjas are implied to be so unexpected. Surely once pirates are there ninjas are simply an occupational hazard? Really it's the mimes that nobody expects, mimes having run the Spanish Inquisition. Or something. Certainly they are evil
On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.
Onward for more...
