The inevitable quandary of "Covid" books - But does anyone really want bookshops filled with dratted cash-in books?

 

"You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season" said Michael Londsdale's corpsing evil baddie Hugo Drax in the Bond movie "Moonraker". Sure enough, the publishing market is filling up with books about COVID-19. Some well-meaning (like the one to the left from Nosy Crow) and some just blatantly regurgitating things we've been fed by the news, by government missives, healthcare professionals and of course social media since the whole crisis took hold. 

It hasn't taken long for this to come about, and Twitter lit up with a conversation about COVID eventually finding its way into fiction (teen fiction in particular). 

It prompted a bit of a snotty reply from me, along the lines of stating that the very last thing I want to read right now is any book where COVID plays a major part in the plot. Not this year (while we're still in lockdown and still seeing the alarming rise in infection rates), not next year (because - hah - let's not delude ourselves, 2021 won't see the back of the virus even despite the claims that vaccination and so-called 'herd immunity' will eventually see the virus die out or lose its efficacy) and certainly not for some years to come. 

This from me, a person who spent most of their childhood wrapped up in the worlds of the "Three Johns" - John Wyndham, John Christopher and John Gordon - experts in writing gripping dystopian fiction that told us more about ourselves (even today) than it ever told you about the crisis these talented writers were describing. 

I loved dystopian fiction as a kid, and I still think that it's as viable a genre now, even in these difficult times, as it has always been. That said, at the moment I think the majority of folk would want to read something that takes them as far away from the current crisis as it's possible to get. Historical fiction (though let's avoid the 1920s flu epidemic shall we?) pure surreal fantasy, literally anything but some celebrity-penned twee novel about how difficult it was to get foie gras for a couple of weeks during lockdown and how hilarious all the panic buying / loo roll shortages were. ho ho. 

Yet that's what we're looking at now. Even with last year's fledgeling crop of children's books, and a few teen books weaving it into their storylines, the COVID crisis is still too real and too much a part of everyone's everyday lives to warrant being shoved in our faces in print, yet it's an unavoidable event that does have to be acknowledged. It's not an easy win to write a novel that can handle the whole thing sensitively. 

I spoke to my daughter about it and she rolled her eyes about the prospect of COVID novels too. "Too soon" she said, but also agreed that it would eventually worm its way into books. The idea came up that a book much like the "We Love the NHS" anthology of human stories about our amazing health service might at least be an idea, but again it would be better from the perspective of kids who had to live through the crisis. If someone sensitively curated a collection of stories from kids across the nation, regardless of their wealth or circumstances, that would actually make for an interesting read (sorry celebs, again I don't think I could stomach reading how tough life was because you couldn't visit your glorious holiday home in the Dordogne this year, or the annoyance of having to socially distance on interview shows or Strictly). 

There's a balance that could be achieved. Sadly, knowing the publishing industry all too well, it won't so much be a balance as the usual clusterfuck of titles published to cash in. "Bread and butter" books almost written to a formula. Non-fiction books that rehash the same information over and over again, basically if there's a buck to be made out of this, multinational publishers will be there and making that buck because - after all - that's what any other business would do given the chance, sadly.