Introduction
for ebook version of China Dreams
Writing a book means having your nose rubbed in your
limitations – every day, every day. However, your struggle necessarily ends
with publication. Or it used to.
‘A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.’
There’s some dispute over who penned this line, but it’s certain that – however
much the author might have hesitated over ‘art’ versus ‘DIY’, or worried that
he was sounding like a pompous ass – sooner or later the parchment was snatched
from under his dithering goosefeather and passed into other hands. His airy
speculations became a matter of matter, of paper and stitching, and the
printer’s aching back, and an inky rag in the bookbinder’s pocket, and the
bookseller’s apprentice snoring under the counter in a nest of off-cuts,
blotches and misprints, his head on an unsellable collection of sermons by an
unfrocked monk, much concerned with righteous chastisement. Finally, his words
made their dismal progress from the reader’s lap, to his elbow and at last to a
forgotten shelf.
And did that dusty book ever stir among the
mouse-droppings? Did it utter an insistent ‘Ping’? Did an irritating
light-emitting-diode show that an update was available? Of course not. But
ebooks are as insubstantial as minds, and as easily changed.
Hence this edited version of China Dreams. The book is supposed to celebrate plot – the hardest
bit of fiction writing, and the bit that most fiction therefore leaves out. How
good, though, if you could think up a top plot like Dracula, or Jekyll and
Hyde, or Little Red Riding Hood. China
Dreams makes dozens of attempts. For its paper publication, though, I left
a few radical bits out: the book already seemed too near the raggedy edge. But
nobody’s complained, so this ebook version has added oddites – including more
about Jack the Ripper.
The best attitude for writing a book is to feel that
you’re capable of good work but you’re not sure if you’ve managed it yet. And
surely ebooks are the best of all worlds for pursuing that ever-postponed
perfection: the work is being sold, reviewed, read, yet can still be tinkered
with.
But how to crack on with the next piece when you can
still change the old one? Will authors spend a lifetime on the same work? Will
it become an obsession with the ideal, in the same way that people get addicted
to plastic surgery? Will our ebook publisher eventually refuse any more
alterations? (Obviously they’ll never give us the passwords.)
The only advantage of paper books is portability, but that
won’t last. Ebook readers will soon weigh nothing and cost nothing and be a
camera, phone, music centre and (through their internet function) a gateway to
all the world’s knowledge, and they’ll fold up and fit in your pocket and be
forgotten until you need them.
As for the pious types who declare that nothing will
replace ink on paper: well, millions of us stare at computer screens all day;
millions of us read nothing that's not on
screen. The argument that screens hurt the eyes is equally unconvincing: if,
like mine, your eyes have been ruined by reading, you’re glad of words that are
backlit and as big as you like. And if we’re daft enough to want the
grey-on-beige of paper and not the crisp black-and-white of a computer display,
then the technology will happily oblige. Besides, we’re living through the most
important development in learning since Gutenberg – and the internet happens on
screen.
Writing is depressing (see ‘nose’) and publication
used to be a blessed release. You may be mauled by the critics – they are
horribly accurate, always finding the bits that you also doubted – but you
couldn’t do much about their comments. No longer.
We still can’t tinker indefinitely. In time we may run
out of inclination or talent: in time we’ll certainly run out of time. But,
thanks to ebooks, a work of art need never be abandoned.
Oh god.