It has been a week of editing and contracts – not two things that sit entirely happily together. On the one hand I’ve been filling out contract forms for the wonderful Italian book we’ve just acquired, Fabio Geda’s In the Sea There Are Crocodiles (the true story of ten-year-old Enaiatollah’s traumatic but remarkable journey from Afghanistan to northern Italy); on the other, I’ve been working through a big group of editing projects, cutting between them all at top speed. First novelist Alice Albinia is hard at work revising the first draft of her brilliant novel, a delightfully dark social comedy set in contemporary Delhi which is also a provocative novel of ideas. Every day new, reworked chapters from Alice ping into my inbox, and I have the excitement of seeing the novel getting better and better. As well as this, I’ve been talking to other writers about projects in various states of development: a non-fiction writer who has drafted the plot of a novel, a novelist who has ideas for a non-fiction book, and a friend who needs help with redrafting her introduction. At the Orange Prize I met up with historical novelist Clare Clark, whose Savage Lands we published earlier this year. She generously talked me through her next novel, which is currently half written.

It’s not always easy to switch quickly from thinking about royalty structures to narrative structures and I’m glad that I’m a more confident editor than I used to be. But one can also be too confident an editor. There’s a fine line between having the courage to tell an author you think they’ve got something wrong and being overly dogmatic: imposing your idea of how a book should work without having sufficient empathy with what the writer is trying to do. Similarly, an editor has to ward against asking an author to conform to cliched patterns of narrative or character because they might somehow be more ‘accessible’ to the reader, whilst at the same time having the editorial judgement to recognise when those aspects of a book that are more ‘way-out’ are not revolutionary but simply confusing.

I’m still haunted by a dilemma I mentioned in a previous blog about whether the length and meticulous detail of Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma are a flaw rather than a strength, and whether I should have suggested a further tightening of the novel. But just because a shorter book might have been more readable, would it have been better? The demands Ma Jian’s novel make on the reader are intrinsic to its themes. To change that would have been to make it an different novel. The other text I’ve been working on this week is Jean-Claude Carriere and Umberto Eco’s Is This The End of The Book? – a hugely engaging conversation between two great men about the digital revolution, which we’ll publish in May next year. At one point in the conversation, Carriere talks about film editing and says: ‘We have reached such a fast pace that we simply cannot go any faster. Any faster and you wouldn’t be able to see a thing. I give this example to show how, in this case, technology has given birth to its own form of communication, and how that particular cinematic language has in turn forced the technology to evolve, and so on in an ever more hasty and hurried cycle. In today’s Hollywood “action” films, no shot lasts more than three seconds.’ 

I recently watched E.T. on DVD with my children – a film I hadn’t seen since I was a child myself. I was astounded by the slowness of the cutting and the langorous way in which the story unfolded, since I remembered it from my childhood as being excitingly fast-paced. I’m usually okay with slowness, but I found myself sharing my children’s impatience with E.T.. Tastes have changed, and we have become used to flicking between ideas at top speed. Not so long after I first watched E.T. as a child, I was taken to see Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia. I remember my agony of impatience during the opening shot, a bicycle cycling unbearably slowly towards the camera, and then my realisation, some years later, that slowness guided the whole film, and made it the masterpiece it was. Maybe I’ll watch Nostalgia again this weekend and see how I feel about it now. In this world of high-speed cutting and zipping between ideas at the click of a mouse, we editors need to be wary of trying to excise slowness from texts. Okay, if something is boring … But boredom can also serve an artistic purpose. But enough of this now, I need to zip back to the editing …