A heartbreaking work of staggering (evil) genius
June 2nd, 2009 by Becky
We had a visit from our lovely HarperCollins rep the other day; Vanessa and Gill were upstairs perusing and I was downstairs helping a customer. I heard a horrified shriek and was summoned with a ‘Beckyyyy!’. I thought Vanessa had static-shocked herself on the filing cabinet again, but no, I was confronted with this:
Yes, it’s a new edition of Wuthering Heights obviously designed to appeal to Twilight fans.
‘It’s horrible,‘ Vanessa whispered.
‘It’s genius,’ I replied. There were a few seconds of silence whilst we both contemplated swathes of Twilight readers substituting Bella and Edward for Cathy and Heathcliff. On the one hand, it’s great that new readers would pick up Emily Brontë, but on the other, the idea that Edward and Bella are being directly posited as Cathy and Heathcliff’s literary descendents is part hilarious, part mind-boggling and part horrifying.
And, whilst I thoroughly enjoyed Wuthering Heights at school, uni and even subsequently (no mean feat after ploughing through Terry Eagleton’s essay on how Heathcliff was a frustrated capitalist- I kid you not) I’m not entirely sure Stephanie Meyer or anyone else should be holding Cathy/Heathcliff up as an example of a beautiful and happy relationship. I may be committing literary heresy here, but I heartily disagree with the Guardian’s quote for the earlier Penguin edition that it’s ‘passion and romance written as they ought to be’. Cathy and Heathcliff may love each other, but to my mind, it’s a love interspersed with petulance, anger, cruelty and disappointment. Which doesn’t make the book any the less good, but simplifying it into Dangerous Moody Man = Ultimate Romance as Twilight does makes me a little queasy.
And going back to the cover specifically: why a crocus? They may have existed in mid nineteenth-century Yorkshire – and maybe a reader will know for sure – but Vanessa and I are a little doubtful. The ‘Love Never Dies’ strapline is unbearably cheesy and the ’Ye Olde Worlde!!’ font reminds me of the cover of the Addams Family film.
Breathe. Getting off the soap box. We’re not very keen, I think is the conclusion, but feel free to offer an opinion in the comments…
Urk – reminds me of that set of tween horror books you used to get in the mid 1990s, usually involved someone turning out to be a vampire, or a monster really was living in the haunted house, but adults never believed the kids things were happening to, ohhh what *were* those books called?!?
Either way – looks like it’s aimed at very young kids! Or very dim adults. Strange target market combination!
Sacrilege!
Oh Lordy, my eyes….
It makes you wonder whether the people who did this have actually read Wuthering Heights. I doubt it.
Well, it’s marketing people doing what they do, like the scorpion in the story. They’re completely soulless, so I’m not surprised, though still saddened, to see a further cheapening of bookdom.
In a few years this edition will be completely forgotten, along with the whole Twilight series. Nevertheless, I can think of two more serious points which it indicates.
The first is the way in which it’s now common to identify what ‘type’ a book is from halfway across the shop floor just by glancing at the cover. Once upon a time book covers emphasized their contents’ originality – now they denote a category.
Secondly, using the cover-style of a simplistic novel to sell a complex one is redolent of the Richard and Judy phenomenon: the high-brow kneecapped by the middlebrow. It’s not just what you read – it’s the way you read, and putting this cover on that book is not simply disrespectful but encourages a significant pre-judgement. (Of course, it might pay off if a die-hard Twilight fan get halfway through Wuthering Heights and realises that s/he’s been seriously missing out.)
Thank you for cheering me up Becky. I’m chortling, yes, chortling. There’s no other word for it.
Helen- always glad to provide a giggle!
silver eel- I guess quite a lot of cover design comes down to the fact that buyers in big chains and supermarkets have to make a decision very quickly purely based on the cover. See Vanessa’s headless women post…
Goosebumps, that’s the ones I was thinking of! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goosebumps
Lol Jennie, I can tell that was annoying you! I never read them, although I *did* read Point Horror books, which in retrospect are…not good.
Sorry Becky, I don’t, ahem, buy it. In my experience, covers punt the book to the public, not to buyers. I have bought from reps many, many times and while one may be swayed a tad by the cover, it’s the sales pitch and subsequent discussion (as well as pricing and previous sales figures) which convince (or otherwise) and that is based on content. Granted, I’ve never been a central buyer for a chain or supermarket, so who knows? – in that world things may work differently. I stand by this: generic covers encourage generic perception and books should stand foursquare against that.
Regarding R&J, I know one shouldn’t get too uppity. An aquaintance of mine who is no dummy has read two R&J summer titles and thought they were knockouts; the sales are very impressive; midlist or unknown authors can get the boost they deserve; people who might not otherwise read are encouraged to do so. I know all this. And then R or J opens her or his mouth and within five seconds I have gone absolutely bugf___…
Oh I don’t think we’re disagreeing – there do need to be more covers which are actually interesting and not just a pigeon-holing instrument. But, during my MA we had a head office buyer from a major chain come in, and she said for debut novels she would ‘choose purely based on the cover 99% of the time, and when I look at the cover I have to be able to see the market’. And for long-standing authors she looks at past sales figure and the cover. That’s because a lot of her job is looking at what’s most effective per square metre. Scary but true…
Vanessa and Gill and of course a lot of buyers have a more complex approach, but this particular lady had a lot of power to buy books and that was her approach.
As for R+J, they make me twitch, but actually I’ve read a few R+J books and enjoyed most of them.
No, I mean yeah, I mean no…it was the, y’know, chain buying thing, not the cover thing. I mean, of /course/ with the covers…
My ego is perfectly happy to stand corrected, but my sense of right and wrong in the universe is, once again, outraged. Just when you think they can’t get any lower they kick out the bottom of the barrel and bring in a JCB.
The R&J books themselves may well be fine, and I’ve sometimes been tempted to try a couple of ‘em, based on similar recommendations to your own. Unfortunately it feels like duty rather than necessity, which will o’ the wisp is taking me into Joyce and Central Asia at the moment. (I’ve read books for a book club and while I rarely felt I was wasting my time, nothing felt essential.)
I struggle to articulate exactly what it is about R&J – I /think/ it’s the quality of advocacy. We’re perfectly happy to have David Attenborough, Michael Wood, Simon Schama, Bettany Hughes and many others who are experts in their field present popular programmes which often do an excellent job, but for some reason when it comes to poetry and books we get an ex-comedian and two daytime TV presenters. Is this down to the same anti-intellectualism which won’t allow perfectly articulate and entertaining authors on chat shows? Or is TV as a medium intrinsically hostile to the written word?
hi Becky, I laughed my head off when i saw this in Waterstones and then realised that the person at Harpercollins who thought of this should be given an award. i can only imagine that someone at Penguin is kicking themself very hard with steel toe capped boots for a missed marketing opportunity. reports from the chains are that is flying off the shelves and i say that is no bad thing. better to have folk reading than not reading at all and better to have them reading Bronte than Meyer (or is it i thought they were hilarious and a welcome escape from the crap in daily life)
Hi Sarah,
As I said in the post, yes, part of me thinks at least people are reading Bronte, but also part of me looks at it and whimpers. (Can you tell I’m a history graduate, I’m a chronic fence-sitter!)
Have to say though, as a side point, the ‘at least people are reading’ argument isn’t necessarily a good one (esp in children’s books) when you take it to its logical conclusion: it’s not as if people would approve of children reading ‘The Story of O’, or something, so why shouldn’t some discernment be a good thing?
Silver eel, I don’t all the programmes on TV are intrinsically hostile to books, but I did read on interesting study on how children in particular have much less time nowadays, with TV, gaming, homework and extra-curriclar school stuff. It’s funny you mention advocacy, because this morning I was reading a TV critic’s article asking why Meera Syal was a good person for a mental illness programme.
There are fundamental weaknesses in the ‘at least they’re reading’ argument, which is superficially and initially persuasive – what, as you say, Becky, and how – which is of course closely connected. Like seeing kids in McDonald’s: ‘At least they’re eating.’
Yeah, I have seen a few programmes recently which were very good, (all belonging to the poetry season, though, so not run-of-the-mill) – Michael Wood on Beowulf, one on George Mackay Brown and ‘Hamnavoe’ and an Arena on T.S. Eliot. And yes, one can apply Sturgeon’s Law (which states that 94% of any given category is crud) to the product of any medium.
Nevertheless, on average the coverage given to literature seems to me pretty poor in both time and quality, and I believe that is linked to the fact that TV as a medium does not require literacy of its audience. Neil Postman put this case at length in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (9780413404404) which is impassioned to the point of being cranky but still makes a strong argument and is well worth reading (or re-reading in my case, since I can now remember very little of the detail).
Can I say that this has been marketed over in France for ages now as part of buying any of SM books? And I have heard a rumour that clever retailers in the UK approached publishers with the idea of rejacketing Wuthering Heights in this way. In theory, it is purely to sell Wuthering Heights to a new audience and has genuinely nothing to do with the BellaEdward/CathyHeathcliff thing, at all.