For these reasons you may think it appropriate that its next administrator is a man who has made his name selling the stuff, who makes no claims to be well read and who is known for a talent for mischief. But there is much more to Ion Trewin than that, and this is what makes him interesting. He’s a skilled editor, good with people, a great organiser, those who know him tell you. The word he comes up with when he contemplates his career is gambler. It is not that he follows the horses; he is talking about his jump from journalism to publishing 25 years ago, about his hesitation, about how his wife chivvied him to seize the opportunity.
“I hadn’t thought it through. What fascinated me was the realisation that every time an editor takes on a book it’s a gamble, but if it works it really has an effect on a publisher’s figures. One book can change your life.
“It made me realise that I was a gambler. And also the idea that art — a book — and commerce are in many senses oil and water, and sometimes you can centrifuge these two and you’ve got an emulsion and it is the most wonderful experience. You’ve got to somehow engage with an audience — not every Booker winner does — and that bit of chemistry fascinates me. What is it in something that might engage you but not someone else? Thank goodness that’s what art is about. Does it get to the senses of individuals?”
A man who loves his job, then, and can communicate his enthusiasms. Sitting in his office at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, where he is editor-in-chief, he is immediately affable, easy company. He isn’t grand — he could be, he used to be managing director — but he answers his own phone and serves coffee without status-enhancing assistance. What you also realise quickly is that his shrewd commercial eye is instinctive. I don’t think he could turn it off if he tried.
Recently he published Julian Fellowes’s novel Snobs. Just a happy coincidence, he says. Having enjoyed the film Gosford Park he wrote to the writer, Fellowes, to ask if he was interested in writing a novel. Fellowes had already begun Snobs, Trewin discovered. “That was luck,” he says. Sharp lateral thinking too, I suggest.
And now Trewin is to move into a new stage of his career as, over the next couple of years, he shadows Martyn Goff, the Man Booker’s widely respected administrator. When Trewin retires from Weidenfeld & Nicolson he will take a more active role, choosing the judges and the chairman for the annual fiction prize and the new international award, attending their meetings and supervising their sparring. Trewin chaired the judging panel in 1974 (when Nadine Gordimer and Stanley Middleton shared the prize) and has been an advisory committee member since 1989.
Consequently he is mindful of the need to manage the judges, though not necessarily to control their excesses because he recognises that the Man Booker would be a less substantial thing without the controversies it creates. The brickbat most commonly hurled in its direction is that it is elitist, recognises the pretentious and unreadable, and succeeds only in selling large numbers of books which remain pristine on middle class bookshelves. It has been called a “lottery” (Antonia Byatt, former judge and winner, in 1990, for Possession), a “beauty contest” (J. M. Coetzee), and “posh bingo” (Julian Barnes).
In 2002 the chairman, Lisa Jardine, criticised publishers for sending them “pretentious, portentous and pompous” novels. David Baddiel, a judge, then criticised the publishers’ selection as heavyweight and humourless.
“It’s very difficult and I understand where they’re coming from,” says Trewin. “I suspect that what often happens is that when publishers can submit only two titles you’re going to go for the heavyweight. I think it’s important that the lists are properly discussed and analysed and books are properly called in, otherwise I could find myself ending up in agreement with them. I think Lisa Jardine, whom I admire enormously, was conscious of making a point in order to get a debate going, which we need. I am less certain of what David Baddiel was up to. The Booker rarely goes a year without causing a debate, a discussion or a row, but dammit, book prizes are there to create debate and dicussion.”
Trewin, 60, is the son of the late theatre critic J. C. Trewin and Wendy Trewin, also a journalist, and grew up in Highgate, North London, in a house stuffed with books. As a teenager he read thrillers for pleasure and discovered that he was a fast and voracious reader. “To me books are just part of life.”
His management style was honed during his years of journalism, on The Times where he was the diarist and then literary editor, but first on local papers in Devon where he discovered the value of contacts. Before he visited the police station he would have a drink at a pub run by a former policeman, who would tell him what was really going on. “I built up a range of contacts and I realised this was important, and that I enjoyed it. That’s what I still do in a bigger way, I suppose.”
When he was interviewed for the administrator’s job Julia Neuberger (a Booker Prize trustee) asked whether he was devious, a characteristic she considered essential. Trewin replied that he was (well, he had read the names of the other candidates upside down on his interrogators’ desk). He is also not averse to feeding the press, though he is far too skilled merely to ring journalists and pass on a titbit which looks like a puff for his authors. Instead he has been known to drop the idea in an appropriate ear among his contacts, he confesses. Does he always tell the truth to the press? “I try not to lie, let’s put it that way,” he says with a smile. Am I right in thinking that his presence in gossip columns suggests that he is not averse to lobbing in suggestions he knows will have ripples? “Very true. I do enjoy it. Having been on the other side I know how processes work and I can often detect a good story.”
Although best known as an editor of non-fiction (he edited Alan Clark’s diaries and is about to start work on Clark’s official biography) he edits some fiction (including Thomas Keneally’s Booker-winning Schindler’s Ark) and this is what he reads for pleasure, especially “high quality thrillers”. At the moment he is reading last year’s winner, D. B. C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little, which received mixed reviews. Does he like it? He pauses and then says: “Mixed feelings. I like the style. He’s got a voice that you can hear. But I keep wanting him to move a bit faster. It’s the editor in me. I feel if I’d got hold of that I might have persuaded him to do this, that and the other.
“I read Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and wolfed it down and thought it was absolutely marvellous,” he continues. “I’m with John Carey (chairman of the judges last year) that I’m surprised it didn’t get at least on to the shortlist for the Booker.”
Isn’t this just the kind of literary yet readable book that the Man Booker should champion? “I’m not sure I feel too concerned because I don’t think there are many great works that have missed out completely, because they will always get recognition. I’m not surprised he’s won prizes since.”
When Trewin was a judge he tried to persuade John le Carré to enter but Le Carré declined on the ground that the role of the prize was to highlight books which needed recognition rather than authors who were already popular. As we discuss this Trewin pulls out a list of winners and shortlisted books and argues that many of the authors are accessible: Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, Beryl Bainbridge. Popular fiction is written by authors who produce more of the same, he suggests, while literary authors often change direction.
“The real delight of the literary novel is the unexpectedness of what it does for you, what it sets in train in your own mind. What one hopes is that the Booker will very occasionally, and it can’t be more often than that, throw up something quite remarkable because by drawing attention to it in this way you can share it with a larger audience.” He cites Midnight’s Children and Possession as being in this league.
These days his children are grown up and Trewin and his wife Sue live in a flat in Surrey Quays and a house in Norfolk, which he knows will soon bulge with all the titles received by the administrator. “I’m not good at culling books.” Clearly he enjoys being involved in the thick of publishing, yet he says he feels strangely exposed by the attention that has accompanied his new appointment.
“Editors are people who don’t put their heads above the parapet,” he says. “If it can be seen what you’re doing, it’s jarring.”
