David J Black

Unlike her risque predecessors Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope, Ms Rooney enjoys the honorific sobriquet “the voice of a generation”, in which office she has seemingly replaced Zadie Smith, who herself succeeded J.D Salinger, one gathers. Some will recall her savaging of Edinburgh-based investment management firm and the world’s top book festival sponsor, Baillie Gifford, for its somewhat tenuous, and visibly diminishing, links with the fossil fuel business.

Your scrivener has covered this topic in How to Burn Down a Book Festival and won’t repeat himself, except to say that in this scaling of the barricades Sally, the drawing room rebel, was joined by such wealthy literary giants as songstress Charlotte Church and London comic turn Nish Kumar. Hypocrisy is most assuredly in point in the latter case – his 2024 Edinburgh Festival spectacular Don’t Kill my Vibe was staged at a Fringe venue supported by, believe it or not, Baillie Gifford.

Putting aside the fact that many of us agree that the world must transition away from oil, Ms Rooney’s stance, from her ivory tower of fame, wealth, and privilege, had a slightly jarring echo of Marie Antoinette about it. In laying waste to UK book festivals which depend for much of their revenue on the direct generosity of Baillie Gifford, she was not so much launching a bold attack on a Scottish investment partnership noted for its support of renewables, as making a supercilious ‘get lost’ gesture to those writers and publishers who rely on book festivals to provide them with both a living and a platform, and who in many cases are pursuing noble causes of their own.

The 2004 Edinburgh Book Festival, for example, featured the Ukrainian authors Andrey Kurkov and Olesya Khromeychuk making a plea for the survival of their native land, as well as the Shetland-born writer and broadcaster Jen Stout, who risked her life to report on events in battered cities like Kharkiv and Odesa while Putin’s drones and missiles rained down from the skies.

Compared to the commitment of people of that calibre, or the incisive knowledge of the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, who also appeared in the Edinburgh book festival, Ms Rooney’s rite-of-passage wallpaper Marxism and token nods to sexual diversity (her characters often fashionably identify as bisexual, I’m reliably informed, but her sex scenes are strictly of the thin and deeply gorgeous boy-girl variety). The American author and critic Malavika Kanaan has also noticed that “Rooney writes exclusively about white, pointedly thin, elite-educated women with miraculously attractive lovers”.

So, not pointedly sexist and racist, perhaps, yet somehow not terribly inclusive. TV series director Lenny Abrahamson did, however contrive to cast declared bisexual Sasha Lane, who is of mixed African-American and Maori descent, as sassy black New Yorker Bobbi in his 2021 series of Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, thus providing cover for the book in which the character was Irish and white. The parallel with Netflix’s British Asian Ambika Mod replacing her movie precursor, tinseltown’s Anne Hathaway, in a similar slush-mush indulgence, One Day, is worth a glance. 

Rooney’s Marxism is less than evident when it comes to a daily grind which includes such onerous duties as posing for Vogue (Inside the Beautiful World of Sally Rooney) or appearing at ticketed events at Waterstones in Piccadilly, consideration of which will later take us down a strange road.

The deeper significance of the Piccadilly fixture has been altogether lost on the ranks of credulous Rooneyphiles who flock to her gigs. Whatever misgivings any of us may have about Baillie Gifford and its slim to vanishing links with big oil, they should be as nothing compared to those we should be entertaining about Waterstones, in the London flagship store of which Ms Rooney staged a weird and wonderful rally only last September, as we’ll discover. The bookshop events team gushed:

The evening’s format was not so much sitting in rows while the oracle read from a lectern, as in Dickens’ day; rather the plan was that Sally would begin reading in a perfunctory manner at 7.30 pm from a low plinth while the lucky ticket holders with their blue wrist bands stood as instructed in the queue before validating themselves and sweeping up copies of Intermezzo. She signed a maximum of two per head, only one being dedicated to the smitten buyer.

Given the crowds anticipated, those queuing in the street were advised to dress weather-appropriately and keep themselves hydrated. In addition there were to be be strictly no selfies with Sally, who wandered in with a mug of tea to deliver her brief three page oration. One fan did record a few moments of her reading, however, receiving a response from a devoted pal “OMG – And you were so close to her! Dream.” Little wonder The Guardian’s Lisa Allardice has hailed her as “The book world’s Taylor Swift.”

This was far from the only outburst of Rooneymania. The following day Waterstones in Leeds was opening early to hold a special ‘Sally Rooney Day’ though it announced “Sally Rooney will sadly not actually be joining us for this event, it’s simply a celebration of her body of work!” It was also a great opportunity to buy some “fun-themed” merch such as a choice of tote bags and an Intermezzo chess set, as well as books (or “units”, as some at the commercial end of the book trade like to call them.) For Rooney, it was familiar territory – a similar hullabaloo had been staged for the launch of Beautiful World in 2021. Thus was celebrity cultism dressed up as literary exceptionalism.

We should consider the close relationship which Sally, scourge of the oil industry and destroyer of book festivals, has to Britain’s biggest book chain. In some ways it’s Britain’s only book chain in any meaningful sense. Let us count the ways. Opened in London’s Old Brompton Road in 1982 as an independent bookshop by Tim Waterstone, who had not long been made redundant by W.H Smith, in 1993 it was bought out by Smith’s, then five years later bought out again by a consortium which was taken over by the HMV group, along with rivals Dillon’s and Ottaker’s.

The latter merger was referred by the Office of Fair Trading to the Competition Commission but no action was taken. Meantime rival chains and established independents were struggling. Borders Books and its subsidiary Books Etc, which in 2007 had a total of 69 outlets, failed two years later, despite selling eight of its London shops to Waterstones. It closed on Christmas Eve 2009. Glasgow independent John Smith & Son, the English speaking world’s oldest bookshop (founded 1751) put up the shutters on its St Vincent Street store in 2000, shortly after Waterstones opened a mega-store nearby. In 2018 CEO Daunt came up with plans to open an “unbranded” outlet, Stockbridge Books, in Edinburgh’s Raeburn Place, in a brazen attempt to seize market share from local independents such as Golden Hare Books in St Stephen’s Street, which had been set up in 2012 by eminent museum director, Sir Mark Jones. A local campaign scuppered Daunt’s proposal.

The non-stop expansion of the Waterstones empire was a study in ruthless market capitalism. The Edinburgh independent James Thin’s Bookshop had its South Bridge flagship store and 12 academic offshoots taken over by Blackwell’s of Oxford in 2002. Eight other Thin outlets had already been scooped up by Ottaker’s. Both Blackwell’s and Ottaker’s would of course end up in the Waterstone’s stable. James Daunt’s small London book chain has avoided the hoovering up process so far. Or has it? The fact that Daunt was appointed CEO of Waterstone’s in the UK and Elliott’s major US acquisition, Barnes and Noble, tells another story.

In May 2011, when Waterstone’s alone had 283 shops, the conglomerate was sold to Russian-Israeli billionaire and Eton College donor Alexander Mamut for £53.5 million. Meantime Waterstones’ mopping up of rivals would continue apace with such acquisitions as Ireland’s oldest bookshop, Hodges Figgis, Hatchards of Piccadilly, and Foyles of Charing Cross Road. While the English language Baltic Times has connected Malmut with Putin’s inner circle, he quit Russia for England and France at the outbreak of the Ukraine war, and sought to maintain a sanctions-free a distance from the Kremlin, or so it would appear.

By 2018, with Waterstones valued at $250 million, Mamut’s company sold its stake to Elliott Advisers for an undisclosed sum, retaining a token minority portion. At this juncture we enter into a journey into the book trade equivalent of The Heart of Darkness, poking an investigative stick at a subject which would have truly deserved the attention of the great Robert Caro of The Power Broker fame, though given that the now aged Mr Caro is unlikely to be available, the next exciting instalment of your scrivener’s brief exegesis will have to do for now.

In part three we discover how brilliantly Ms Rooney manages to ride two bicycles at once as she navigates the horrors of the Israeli-Palestinian War from rural Castlebar, County Mayo.