What the bloggers are saying

My third novel, The Book of Air, has been out for three weeks. The blog tour is complete. Fourteen literary blogs featured the book. Six reviewed it. Here are some of the things they wrote:

The Book of air is a compelling, character driven tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic future.  Beautifully paced, it weaves between Jason’s life in a society imploding in on itself when a deadly virus kills millions and Agnes’s in a community regenerating from the ruins of mankind’s near destruction. (BooksAreMyCwtches) 

A gripping dystopian fantasy… that puts a new twist on post-apocalyptic themes explored in different ways by both Margaret Attwood and John Wyndham. Treasure writes with fluency and pace and his characters are flawed and believable. (BookLovers’BookList) 

For me, the Gold Standard for any dystopian novel revolves around 2 things: originality and possibility. My two absolute favorites are The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Giver quartet by Lois Lowery. The Book of Air will be added to this prestigious list. This story is so clever and original that I started recommending it to friends 3% into it! Simply put, The Book of Air is original, compelling and hopeful. A must-read for all dystopian fans. (I’dSoRatherBeReading) 

Written wonderfully, like a musical composition… this would be a fabulous book for a book group! (Utopia-State-of-Mind)

The Book of Air can be bought on online in the US or in the UK or ordered from your local independent bookstore.

Air time

It’s exactly ten years since my first novel, The Male Gaze, came out. The world of publishing and reviewing has changed radically since then. For my third novel the publishers have sent me on a virtual tour. The book will feature over the course of a couple of weeks on a dozen different blogs, where citizen reviewers, driven by an undimmed love of fiction, are free to communicate directly with like-minded readers. 

The Book of Air follows the fortunes of Jason, a London property developer who lives through a virus that devastates the human population and has to work out a new way of living with a group of fellow survivors, and Agnes, a teenager in the far future, who has grown up in a community dominated by reverence for Jane Eyre.

Because of its themes, many of the blogs have a special interest in post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction. I’ve been reviewed five times so far. A couple of the reviews are lukewarm and give three stars. The rest are hugely enthusiastic. Both the lukewarm reviewers mention that they find the book confusing and hard to get into at first. One concedes that “It was very clever how Treasure put it all together.” The other, a Texan author of Young Adult fiction writes, “I was drawn to Jason’s story as I enjoy post-apocalyptic literature and the virus aspect was really interesting, even if the supporting characters got on my nerves a bit.” She also notes that “there is some strong language throughout as well as several implied sex scenes, however nothing is really graphic”, which makes me wonder if she was reviewing with young adult readers in mind. I notice also that this blog lists among its interests Amish, Christian and End Times Fiction.

All reviews are a two-way street. The reader assesses the reviewer as well as the reviewed. But in this free-market online world, I’m struck by how openly the reviewers identify their particular interests and preferences. One of the positive reviews begins like this:

For me, the Gold Standard for any dystopian novel revolves around 2 things: originality and possibility. My two absolute favorites are The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood and The Giver quartet by Lois Lowery. The Book of Air will be added to this prestigious list. This story is so clever and original that I started recommending it to friends 3% into it! (I‘dSoRatherBeReading)

Of course I’m delighted that this reviewer rates my book so highly. But it’s a particular thrill to get this response from a fellow Atwood fan.

A reviewer from Wales likes that the book champions “the power of the individual to fight against cruelty and oppression” (BooksAreMyCwtches).  And one says of Agnes that she “only wants to be free to think her own thoughts and make her own choices…Jane Eyre would have been proud of her” (BookLoversBookList). The impulse to cheer on sympathetic characters in their struggle against adversity seems to me like a basic element in what makes stories enjoyable. That this book is capable of having that effect on some readers feels like a real achievement.

There’s no claim to analytic detachment in these reviews. They speak about the qualities that make you want to turn the page, or not. Being confused is bad, being intrigued is good. There’s a preference for characters you can care about, plots that draw you in. On the whole the readers would rather be uplifted than depressed. Pleasure is a high value. The style of the reviews is generally conversational, sometimes dynamically engaging.

  

When I figured out what The Book of Air actually was, my level of excitement skyrocketed. I don't want to spoil anything. I just can't. Seriously, such a clever twist on what humanity will deem important. The anticipation of trying to figure out the link between Jason and Agnes was torture (but in a fun emoji face kind of way) (I‘dSoRatherBeReading)  

I wouldn’t swap the freshness and authenticity of this, with the feeling it gives me of the impact the book has had on this single reader, for any amount of judicious praise from professional reviewers.

In defence of blogging

Over the past few months, as I’ve let people know about this blog, a few of my older friends have expressed unease – they don’t get what blogging is for. One wonders why I don’t just write a journal and keep it to myself. Another struggles with a sense of disapproval that he can’t quite put his finger on.

When I moved to Los Angeles 12 years ago, I started writing an annual letter home, which I’d photocopy and mail to friends and family. A quaint process it seems now, but not so obviously antiquated back then at the turn of the century. Not everybody liked it. Rumours reached me of two separate recipients refusing to read it. One, I was informed (whether reliably or not, I couldn’t say), used to toss it in the bin unread. The other annually rejected his wife’s offers to read bits of it aloud (I like to imagine him sticking his fingers in his ears and humming). I half understood these reactions. I assumed they were rooted in a feeling that a duplicated letter is somehow fraudulent. What friends write to each other should be personal and spontaneous.

In an essay on the wonderful letters of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, Tom Paulin writes about this expectation: “Are letters not written… as throwaway, disposable, flimsy unique holographs which aim to flower once and once only in the recipient’s reading and then disappear immediately? The merest suspicion that the writer is aiming beyond the addressee… freezes a letter’s immediacy and destroys its spirit” (Tom Paulin, Writing to the Moment, Faber 1996, p. 216).

Perhaps the discomfort with blogging is related to this. Perhaps it’s an expression of the more general sense that the proper barriers between the private and the public spheres have been eroded. In Malcolm Bradbury’s 1972 novel The History Man, the radical sociologist Howard Kirk is writing a book called The Defeat of Privacy which anticipates this trend. He says, “It’s about the fact that there are no more private selves, no more private corners in society… There are no concealments any longer, no mysterious dark places of the soul. We’re all there in front of the entire audience of the universe in a state of exposure.” What seemed radical thinking in the 1970s – utopian or nightmarish according to your point of view – now sounds like an ordinary day in the world of Facebook and Twitter.

In fact, with lots of people updating their status hourly, the weekly composing of a blog post seems, in comparison, positively sedate, even old-fashioned. The technology would have been unimaginable to an Elizabethan pamphleteer or an eighteenth century essayist, but the impulse to develop a thought in public would surely have been recognised. I grew up, before the invention of the internet, with people who were forever firing off letters to the local newspaper, or the town council, or haranguing whoever would listen on whatever seemed important to them at the time.  

I’m not unsympathetic to the anti-blog arguments, starting with the fact that there are probably more people writing them than reading them. On the other hand, here are five things a blog won’t do:

Create litter.

Trap you in a corner at a party.

Interrupt your evening with a loud ringing noise.

Stop you from sleeping on the train.

Drive you from the dinner table in tears.