Ithaca (2 page)

After all, it was after his previous visit to Bhutan that he had published a novel by an unknown Sicilian writer called Massimo Seppi. It was the first book he had ever bought, and it was more thrilling than he could have ever imagined – watching, awestruck, as characters that he had worked on for months rose up from the page like latter-day Lazaruses and made their way into the hearts and minds of readers. There were other things that he was excited by, of course. He was still just a glorified assistant when he acquired the book, no matter that his designation was associate editor, and the Seppi acquisition marked his passage to bigger things – an office, and the authority to acquire a few books entirely on his own – but there was nothing that compared with the elation he had felt when the production director personally handed him the newly published novel and said, “It’s all downhill from here, mate. Cheers!”

The book, about the rise and abrupt fall of a Palermo crime lord, was not a success. A translation from the Italian that had come to him unagented (Seppi’s translator had sent it to Litmus, where it had landed on the slush pile that was his responsibility to oversee), it sold less than five hundred copies, and received only two reviews at a time when reviews still meant something to readers and publishers. But he had believed in Seppi’s talent and had somehow managed to persuade his publisher to allow him to publish Seppi’s second novel. It hadn’t been a hit either, and he knew that was the
end so far as the connection between Litmus and Seppi was concerned. It was one thing to persist with homegrown writers who might just come up with a winner, but a foreign author in translation who flatlined at the very beginning of his career – well, there was no way he was going to get his boss, Gabrijela, to sign off on yet another Seppi.

In all this time, he had met the writer only once, at the 2001 London Book Fair, where Seppi had been part of a delegation of writers sponsored by the Italian government. He had taken to him at once, this author whose manner was much like his writing style – spare and unadorned. They spoke about
The Leopard
, a novel they were both passionate fans of, and which he had always longed to read in the original Italian. To his chagrin, Seppi told him Lampedusa’s great novel truly shone only in its language of creation, no matter how well made its various translations were. Seppi added that he was lucky with his own translator because her versions of his novels were supple enough to work well in English while remaining true to the style in which he had written them. Seppi, who was a schoolteacher in Palermo, spoke passable English, and told Zach that he might not hear from him for a while as he was moving to Canada, where he hoped to make a better life for himself – a cousin had offered him a position as a manager at his restaurant in Little Italy in Toronto. Zach didn’t have the heart to tell him that it really did not matter whether he stayed in touch or not, because he wasn’t going to be able to publish Seppi anymore.

A year later, without warning, Seppi’s new novel had appeared in his inbox – and its size and content were as
surprising as its unexpected arrival. It was 840 pages long, twice the length of both his previous novels combined, and it was an epic fantasy quite unlike his earlier work.
Angels Rising
was the first book in a planned quartet, each featuring one of the great archangels – Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel. In his cover letter Seppi explained that several religious traditions put the number of archangels at seven, but that he had decided that he would stick with just the best-known or, more pertinently, the least contentious.

A thin mist softens the lines of Thimphu’s buildings; the semaphoring arms of the traffic policeman grow indistinct. Zach remembers ruefully that he was actually glad that Seppi was intending to stop at four; even that many would be a tough sell given the track record of his previous novels. He had the second book in the new series almost finished, Seppi wrote, and the other two closely plotted, and he was willing to give Zach world rights in all four books if he paid enough. His Italian publisher hadn’t seen the manuscript, and he was willing to throw in Italian rights for an extra consideration. The restaurant job hadn’t worked out, his translator hadn’t been paid, and he needed the money urgently.

Even if he had wanted to keep publishing Seppi,
Angels Rising
didn’t seem his kind of book. The last time he had read overtly commercial novels with any kind of excitement was when he was a teenager, inhaling westerns and thrillers and sci-fi novels indiscriminately until his passion for literary fiction had swept all that away. But Seppi’s circumstances seemed to be genuinely dire, and he thought the least he could do for his very first writer was read and comment on
the novel, so he had printed out the manuscript and taken it home with him. He wasn’t looking forward to the task he had taken on, angels weren’t exactly his thing. Sure, he liked the work of Bernini, Botticelli and Michelangelo and thought the way they had been represented by Brueghel, Blake, and Doré, especially Doré, was extraordinary. He counted the Mitchell translation of Rilke’s
Duino Elegies
among his favourite poems, but that was the extent to which the angelic hosts had penetrated his consciousness. Seven hours later, at three in the morning, when he finished the manuscript, he finally understood exactly what Rilke meant when he wrote “Every angel is terrifying.” The darkness beyond the small circle of light cast by his bedside lamp seemed to pulse with tremendous unseen presences, not threatening exactly but untamed, awe-inspiring, powerful beyond imagining. When a book could do that, lift you out of yourself into a world that you had not known existed, you knew that you held in your hands the sort of treasure every publisher dreams about.

What Seppi had done was take the fantasy novel out of the restrictions of its genre and invest it with the style, depth, startling insights, and characterization of literary fiction. Most of all, though,
Angels Rising
was storytelling at its very best. It had cracking narrative speed, intricate plotting, and a host of compelling characters – foremost among them the Archangel Michael anchoring the story of the expulsion of Satan and the rebel angels from heaven. Unlike
Paradise Lost
, Zach thought (mentally rehearsing his pitch to his editorial board), Seppi’s book did not get bogged down in the theological and religious elements of the story but concentrated
on the enormous scope for drama and action that the Fall represented. Later books in the series would cover cataclysmic events that had been set in motion through time by the fallen angels and their monstrous spawn, the Nephilim. In each volume one of the great archangels would be dispatched by God to manage the latest threat to humankind.

The idea behind the series was excellent and, based on the evidence of
Angels Rising
, Seppi was a powerful storyteller, but that didn’t mean Gabrijela was going to go for it. She had expressly prohibited the acquisition of any more fiction from Seppi, and even if Zach could somehow get her to read the manuscript and hope she was as blown away by it as he was, they would still have to get retailers and reviewers to take
Angels Rising
seriously. The world had changed irrevocably since retailers had gained access to accurate sales data, and unless they could prove that the author had done something dramatically different with his new work the initial orders of every important retailer were going to be based on Seppi’s indifferent sales record. Everyone knew an exceptional fantasy series could set the trade on fire, but Zach wasn’t known as an editor of bestselling commercial fiction – why were they going to take his word for it?

A couple of stories that were now firmly part of publishing lore had floated into his mind as he sat up in bed thinking about how he was going to tackle the situation – the ten-year-old son of the founder of Allen & Unwin recommending that Tolkien be published; the enthusiasm of the eight-year-old daughter of the chairman of Bloomsbury getting J.K. Rowling a publishing deal after twelve publishers
had turned her down. Unfortunately
Angels Rising
was not for kids, and it was not a debut novel. However, it had supernatural beings and perhaps he could convince his boss that angels were going to be the next big thing after wizards and vampires.

Gabrijela Kostic was a true publisher in a profession now awash in suits. At the age of thirty she had thrown up a secure job as the youngest editorial director of one of London’s storied publishing houses to take up an offer from a Serbian compatriot to start a firm specializing in the writers of Eastern Europe. Her benefactor was jailed for fraud two years after she set up Litmus, and it looked as though she would have to fold her company, but Gabrijela was as stubborn as she was brilliant. Through the careful management of capital and her personal friendships with some of Europe’s finest writers, she kept the firm going. After one of her writers won the Nobel, her finances improved somewhat and she promptly parlayed that slight advantage into raising more funds and giving the company heft with agents and authors. By the time Zach arrived at Litmus it was among the top twelve publishing firms in London, but the trouble the industry found itself in had begun to have an effect; unless they scored a big one the Arts Council grants and occasional hits would not be enough to pull them out of trouble year after year. Litmus did not have the war chest or the backlist that the bigger and older players
had, so it had to make at least half of the books it published every year count, and that was a near impossibility, despite Gabrijela’s exceptional eye for talent. They weren’t giving up, their few recognizable names kept them going, but every Litmus staffer knew that they needed a
Life of Pi
. Soon.

Celebrated editors are superstars at the companies they work for. They are feted for their taste, their ability to make the work of the finest writers even better, and the role they play in launching the careers of authors who go on to become household names. The world is aware of one of the most important skills any editor worth her salt
must
have: the ability to nurture all the writers she publishes, for the editor is the only person with whom the writer works continuously throughout his association with his publishing company. But another equally important skill is almost never spoken about outside the profession: the ability to sell. In an industry that is entirely speculative, where decisions at every stage of the publishing process are subjective, where any mistake can wipe out the company’s tiny profit, every great editor needs to be a brilliant persuader. Each time an editor is seeking to acquire a book for her company she needs simultaneously to fall under its spell and remain detached from it, so that she is able cannily and passionately to sell it, to herself, her publisher, her sales colleagues, her marketing colleagues, and everyone in the company with a stake in the success of the book. Flogging an unsuccessful author to your skeptical colleagues is akin to raising the dead. More so, if the publisher you need to convince is someone like Gabrijela Kostic.

When she was eight Gabrijela’s parents had fled Yugoslavia, a few years before the Prague Spring had marked the beginning of the end of the fragile peace the region had enjoyed. They came to Leeds, where her mother had family. But although the Serbian community welcomed them to the city, there was not enough to go around. Her father, who had worked for Tito’s government, could find only low-paying daily-wage jobs, and spent his time bemoaning his fate with other exiles from his homeland, while her mother, a schoolteacher, cleaned homes, took in washing, scrimped and saved. There was nothing unusual about the Kostics’ story – the standard immigrant experience, more or less – but it did invest their daughter with a very low level of tolerance for inefficiency, lack of ambition, indecisiveness, laziness, and dolts.

She ran her editorial meetings like a sergeant major – quick, efficient, with not a lot of room for sloppy thinking or ill-prepared pitches. In a profession where long, rambling discussions are the norm, Gabrijela expected her firm’s acquisitions editors to be clear thinking and concise in their pitches. As soon as they started to waffle on pointlessly they would feel her eyes, grey as a submarine’s hull, boring into them; if they ignored that warning signal, they could expect to be shut down with very little ceremony. If Zach was going to get Seppi past her he would need a plan.

This was easier said than done. The mystery at the heart of the publishing business, the unsolvable conundrum that every single publishing professional worries about, and the one question to which no one has the answer, is this: no one knows what books are actually going to succeed in the marketplace.
Editors will use taste and skill to acquire and edit authors of quality, marketers will slavishly follow the trends du jour to package them, salesmen will brandish sales data to persuade retailers to stock them, accountants will come up with excruciatingly detailed P&Ls to show how they will turn a profit, but in the end all this masks a simple truth: unless the author has a proven track record, and has written an even better book than the one she published last year, no one in the business really knows how her book will be received. And for unknown authors or those with a less than stellar sales history the mystery deepens, threatens to be practically insoluble.