My new novel

I have a new novel coming out in September. It's called Rough Music and I'm worried about its reception.

Of course, this is a little previous. There might not be any reception. Still, how challenging – how dissonant – can you be these days? If it's not a risk, Annie Ernaux says, then it's not worth doing. But what constitutes a risk? I say this because the novel starts on VE Day. The narrator is what used to be called a roué. Or, more accurately, a would-be roué. He is unashamedly lecherous: a man who, in the middle of what's essentially a knees-up, goes in search of "something subterranean"; who looks at himself in a shop window and thinks: "I would". And, no, I don't remember 1945 but I do remember 1985 and the men of my father's generation all seemed to me to be terribly predatory even then. In other words, I think that my portrayal's accurate when it comes to a certain type of unreconstructed male. You have to travel with him. He improves. He is (perhaps he only thinks he is) redeemed. That, for me, is the novel's essence: Anthony's redemption. But it's about much more than that. Here's my publisher's description:

London, 1945. The war is over, the future is waiting and a generation is preparing to remake Britain.

Anthony is young, ambitious and determined to find his place in a country still rebuilding itself. Around him gathers a circle of friends, lovers, dreamers, and rivals—people who believe that politics can change lives, that journalism can shape the national conversation and that history is something they might help write.

As the decades unfold, their lives become entangled with the story of modern Britain itself. Governments rise and fall. Old certainties disappear. Friendships deepen, fracture and endure. Marriages are tested. Ambitions are fulfilled, abandoned or betrayed. And beneath the public events that dominate the headlines lies a more intimate question: how should we love?

Spanning more than sixty years, Rough Music is a rich, witty,and deeply humane novel about friendship, politics, family and the complicated relationship between private lives and public history. Through the fortunes of one generation, Alan Humm offers a panoramic portrait of post-war Britain and the people who helped shape it.

All of this is also accurate but there's yet another angle: the desire to make a map of England's history and culture that had, as its co-ordinates, all of the liberal high spots. All the good stuff: VE Day and Aneurin Bevan and George Orwell and the NHS and John Lennon and The Goons. They all appear, more or less as I think they would have done. I'm proud of it but I'm too close to it; I can't describe it properly. According to my publisher, my initial description of the book made it sound too much like non-fiction. (I suppose that, after spending so many years on it, part of me thought it was) And I'm grateful to them. Their description is sufficiently tempting – it's sufficiently distant from whatever I thought was thrumming away internally – that I think: I'd read it.

*****

Meanwhile, the cover's great. The final proof is nearly done. And then?

Well, then I have to take a couple of deep breaths. Two years ago, when I published my first novel, The Sparkler, I thought that pretty much all you needed to get the right sort of attention was Will. Drive, too, and Work. (I'm sure they were all capitalised in my head.) I approached, I think, every festival in the country; I wrote to every reviewer on every paper I could think of; I pestered The One Show (I hang my head) and The Richard and Judy Book Club – book clubs too; something like fifty of them. And almost nothing happened. Festivals? There were two. One was in Repton (in Christopher Isherwood's old school, which was a thrill) and I was on a panel of four authors, all of us, of course, jostling – in the nicest possible way – for as much attention as we could grab. I sold, I think, two books. In Blandford Forum I sold none. It was a five-hour round trip, there were four people in the audience (one of whom was the organiser) and even my very patient and supportive wife felt that it was a trip too far. Don't get me wrong: it's a lovely little town. It's in Far From the Madding Crowd, I think. I met a man, in the local bookshop, whose grandparents had once known Rudyard Kipling. But still. Reviews in the "proper" papers? None. (Although I very much liked the woman on Goodreads who described the main character, Charles Dickens, as "a dirty little man".) Waterstones won't stock me. I've asked, and I keep asking. You can feel, if you're not careful, like one of those boats in The Great Gatsby, "beating ceaselessly against the tide". But in Portsmouth Library there were 20 people. In The Yehudi Menuhin School something like 40. And then there was the spot on The Robert Elms Show on BBC Radio London; the talk hosted by The Dickens Museum, in which I was interviewed by Professor Robert Douglas-Fairhurst; a talk given to the members of The Dickens Society which led to a review in The Dickensian.

I suppose the question that I'm asking is: what does attention mean? Does it do anything, really, apart from bring people to your book? Is your book invalidated if you don't get enough? Does a good book attract reviews in the way that a good suit attracts admiring glances? And, if you're not reviewed – not seriously reviewed – does it mean the opposite? That, essentially, you're not reviewable? That you've written a bad book? I used to think that the answer might be yes. Now, though, of course, I fiercely resist this. Even the super-civilised Primo Levi betrays his irritation when he talks about correspondents who have "manuscripts in their drawer". They're "irksome", he says, the inference being that he's been asked to read more than a few. But surely that's almost every writer. Rough Music was in the drawer for years. It was turned down by agent after agent, each of whose response was essentially the same: you can write but we don't know what to do with this. (Go figure. Neither could I.) One agent read the first two chapters, detested Anthony and then proceeded to conflate the two of us. In the end, I gave up but my wife and a friend of mine, a poet, both said that I should give it another go and here we are. (I'm extremely grateful, as ever, to Vine Leaves Press.) I'm proud of it. I may not be able to summarise it but I'm pretty sure it swings. I owe it to myself, and to my publisher, to take those breaths and to do it all over again. Wish me luck, if you're so inclined, and I'll try to keep you posted.

Alan Humm is the editor of One Hand Clapping. You can find his novel, The Sparkler, here and his books of poems here and here. His second novel, Rough Music, is coming out in September.