History on the Fly

Posted 7 August, 2007 in Publishing |

Item, from today’s Globe and Mail:

With the arrival of Quebec’s famed Vandoos on the ground in Kandahar, Canada’s fight in Afghanistan appears far from over.

At home, Canada’s publishers are facing a different battle: with each other.

A slew of books on the mission are coming to bookstores this fall, as publishers race to beat the clock.

Among the forthcoming books that the Globe article points to are The Long Walk Home: Paul Franklin’s Journey from Afghanistan (Brindle & Glass), by Edmonton Journal reporter Liane Faulder; Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery and Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army (Doubleday Canada), by the dependably mawkish Christie Blatchford; and The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (Penguin) by Eugene Lang and Janice Gross Stein.

The first two titles above are personal stories of soldiers at the front: Paul Franklin was the driver of the vehicle that was blown up by a roadside bomb in 2006, killing diplomat Glyn Berry and severing both of Franklin’s legs, and Blatchford’s book tells the personal stories of the soldiers she met on her two trips to Afghanistan as a correspondent for the Globe and Mail.

Lang and Gross Stein’s book, by contrast, “takes the reader into the backrooms of Canada’s politicking as decisions were being made about whether or not to go to war,” and this is where I start to get uneasy. Not about the book’s political agenda, which isn’t mentioned in the Globe article, but about the speed with which it’s being pumped out.

The same phenomenon occurred a few years ago in the States around the Iraq war. One single season (Fall 2004) saw the publication of Mark Crispin Miller’s Cruel and Unusual and Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, as well as the paperback editions of Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies, Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud, and Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty, among others.

The playwright Ben Hecht once quipped that trying to learn about the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by looking at the second hand on a clock. Now, it appears, book publishers, who have often in the past taken the long view, are starting to watch the second hand as well.

Call it “instant history”: no longer is the primary function of the historian to get it right, it’s now more important to get it first. The problem is that the gains in currency often come at the expense of authority. History requires thought and context; it’s not a subject that easily lends itself to rapid judgements or analysis on the fly.

Publishing, however, is a business and publishers feel the strain of the bottom line just like any other business. The result is the compulsion to ride whatever cultural wave is around at a given time, fearing that if they wait too long to produce something the wave will break and take the potential sales of a given title with it.

One of the overarching debates in Canada in 2007 has to do with the mission (notice that no one — politicians, journalists, soldiers — ever calls it a war: “mission” seems so much more neutral, more Canadian, somehow) in Afghanistan, so this is what publishers will glom onto as a subject for their books. There’s nothing wrong with this, but the almost breathless race to be the first out of the gate is disquieting to those of us who admire qualities such as introspection, context, and sober second thought.

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