Stuart Campbell's Blog
blogmare
I’ve been dreaming about the forthcoming launch of RLS in Love, but not as a pleasing fantasy in which the waves of rapturous applause part to let through the latest bright young thing to lighten up the literary firmament. Apart from anything else I’m sixty. Not even a twilight dream of fame coming late to one bathed in the aura of hard won wisdom. It was a nightmare. For years I have woken in cold sweats after the same recurrent dream in which I find myself in an examination hall for an exam I had forgotten about. Or turning over the paper and realising that I had studied the completely wrong syllabus. The panic, recounted in the cold light of appreciating that I have faced my last test, save one, is difficult to imagine. At the time it is paralysing. But now a new nightmare has nudged its weary way into the pantheon
The book launch nightmare in which the wrong books have been delivered to the venue. They were standing on a symmetrical pallet wrapped in white paper which was ripped off to reveal books much larger than I had anticipated. I picked one up and noticed that it had two dust wrappers, the outer one made of an unpleasant latex, condom type material. A fetishists dream perhaps and arguably not totally inappropriate to the content of the book but not what I had discussed with Sandstone. It rippled and wrinkled unpleasantly to the touch. The inner dust wrapper was again white with a black band. The print inside was huge and more suited for the library shelf for the visually impaired. I remember thinking it was a way of making an insignificant book seem more important than it was
Even in my dream I remember challenging this thought, oddly mindful that my waking self had been told quite firmly by one of the editorial team that I must not indulge in self-deprecating observations either about the book or myself. I tried again; the decision to use a large print was literally eye catching and would be a talking, if not necessarily, a selling point. As I looked the print did an Alice and slipped back to its normal size. I started reading and was transfixed by the sumptuous quality of the prose. Bloody good. Only I had not written a word. I thought that perhaps Bob Davidson had been over zealous in his editorial duties, and certainly there could be no denying that it read well. As for the illustrations, page after page of haunting landscapes cut through with sepia images of ancient armies about to go over the top
Appreciation of the book, although it was not the one I had written, was cut short by a growing panic, and an awareness of a restless crowd behind me. As the restlessness grew into anger I tried desperately to wake up, and only succeeded by concentrating on the returning physical pain and unbearable itch caused by a malicious army of midges that had laid siege to me the day before. I then heard a voice in my head unpalatably like Michael Winner in that wretched advertisement saying with nauseatingly condescending reassurance, ‘It’s only a dream dear.’ Or a premonition. Come along on the 14th July and find out.