Added Up on a Balance

Sheet Among the most celebrated fictional retrospectives on the changes wrought in British society in the 1980s is Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up! (1994). Its protagonist is the stalled author Michael Owen, who in September 1990 visits his former publishing house for the first time since 1982. In the early 1980s, ‘Long years ago’, Michael was considered ‘one of their most promising young writers’ by this ‘small but well-respected imprint which had run its business, for most of the century, from a Georgian terrace in Camden’. But Coe's fictional press has had to face new realities: ‘recently it had been swallowed up by an American conglomerate and relocated to the seventh floor of a tower block near Victoria. Something like half of the personnel had survived the change’, among them Patrick Mills, the editor who had handled Michael's fiction (Coe 1994: 94).

Coe registers some of the changes in the book business that we have just surveyed: mergers, acquisitions, the rationalisation of publishing along more strictly commercial lines. When we meet Patrick Mills, Coe describes a straitened situation for the fiction editor: ‘even more depressed than I remembered him’, in ‘a tiny office, done out in an impersonal beige, with a smoked-glass window offering a partial view of a car park and a brick wall’ (Coe 1994: 99).