George Monbiot recently asked why no British newspapers - indeed hardly any papers anywhere in the world - had reviewed a new book criticising Rupert Murdoch. His surprise was shared by the UK publisher of Bruce Dover's Rupert's Adventures in China, who told Monbiot that he had originally thought the book "a natural for serialisation. We had the author primed and prepared to come over here. But we had to cancel as we could not raise enough interest. We've hit brick walls and we don't understand why."
This apparent parable of media cowardice was picked up in the most recent issue of Private Eye which berrated the cowardly lions of the British book pages rather less ferociously (or wittily) than our own Comment is Free bloggers. "You mean, other than your comment, the Guardian isn't going to review it? How Now Kow Tow?" said raphaelg. Touche!
Except there is another narrative going on here, if you're looking at it from where I'm sitting. Every year there is at least one deluge of synchronicity, which may or may not be tied up with current affairs. The last few years have inevitably seen an outpouring of polemics about Iraq, but they've also, less inevitably, produced a spate of books about happiness (the most recent, Robert Mighall's Sunshine: One Man's Search for Happiness is actually a riff on modern sun worship, but it's a feature of this sort of literary fashion that the books get more and more tangential until they eventually morph into something completely different).
This year's flood has been of books about China, and it has been so torrential that our own correspondent in the region remarked earlier this year that he appeared to be the only East Asia correspondent who had yet to write one (a situation he is now busily remedying). Some, like Jonathan Fenby, have managed more than one. (The Dragon Throne, published by Quercus in January, and The Penguin History of Modern China: The Fall and Rise of a Great Power, 1850-2008, out later this month from Allen Lane).
When this sort of glut appears, literary editors have to abandon all hope of getting every single book reviewed and come up with a curatorial strategy that will honour the phenomenon without boring non-Sinologists out of their subscriptions. In the 17 editions of the Guardian's Review so far this year, we have reviewed no fewer than 15 books about China (12 in hardback and three in paperback). On the hardback side we have done so in three "hits", of which my pride and joy was 2,000-word review of eight books all featuring the word Dragon in the title. This wasn't just a jolly wheeze, but offered a reflection of the clichéd way that Western publishers - and writers - still regard the country.
I'm sure that before the year is out we will have reviewed lots more China books, and Bruce Dover's may well be among them. But perhaps the most unintentionally significant aspect of the whole episode is that as a literary section, rather than a news one, we categorised Rupert's Adventures In China as a book about a country rather than one about a press baron. Which perhaps goes to show that there are still a few places on the planet where China is more important than Rupert Murdoch.
