Polkinghorne, the book, is looking like a bestseller and quacking like a bestseller. It’s been No 1 at Unity Books, No 1 at Time Out bookstore, but only as far as No 2 to date in the NielsenIQ BookScan national nonfiction charts. Damn Dame Jacinda Ardern and her memoir A Different Kind of Power for hogging the No 1 spot week after week.
I stand with the conspiracy theorists: she is ruining my life. She has placed my Polkinghorne book in a kind of lockdown. I would love it to get to No 1 but her book is parked in the way, and what’s so good about her book, anyway? So it tells the story of one of the world’s most remarkable and inspirational leaders. So it elevates the human spirit. But nothing much happens in it, whereas every page of my book is filled with incident, none of it uplifting.
Polkinghorne, the book, is on tour. I am giving an author talk in Parnell this evening, Christchurch at the end of the month, Queenstown in October. The world tour is set for 2026. All I need are the invitations. I can see London and Paris going the way of my recent author talk at the Devonport Library – standing room only, mobbed at the book-signing queue, a literary event to compare with other great nights in world writing, such as the famous poetry reading at The Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, when Allen Ginsberg gave his first public performance of Howl. My book, too, wrote of minds destroyed by madness.
Polkinghorne, the book, was launched with great fanfare – all book launches are exercises in blowing your own horn, and I duly honked long and loud to a select audience of 70 of my best friends. Actually, I don’t remember a word of my own speech. Possibly no one did, because CK Stead stole the show. His launch speech was an oration for the ages, elegant and imaginative, at one point claiming I had an immediacy in my writing that he compared to Katherine Mansfield and Keri Hulme. Incredibly enough, this was less far-fetched than the launch speech given by criminal defence lawyer Lorraine Smith for my previous book, when she compared my artistry with actress Juliette Binoche. Certainly, there is a strong resemblance.
Polkinghorne, the book, has enjoyed good reviews, apparently. Martin Amis said in an interview with Will Self: “Among my writer friends I’m known as a sort of tyrant of cool. That I don’t mind reviews. Some of my writer friends will assume the fetal position for eight hours after receiving a lukewarm review.” I go one step less: I don’t read reviews of my books, never have. One of the ways I earn my living is commissioning book reviews but what is good for the goose is intolerable for the anxious, fetally positioned gander. The last thing I would do is commission a review of my Polkinghorne book. It’s not as though I am some sort of publicity hound.
Polkinghorne, the book, is not fit company for the high-culture likes of Martin Amis, Will Self, Allen Ginsberg, Katherine Mansfield, Keri Hulme or even Juliette Binoche, and a reader emailed recently to remark on going to a bookstore and seeing my book next to Dame Jacinda Ardern’s book: “grace beside vulgarity”. I didn’t have to ask which was which.
But I am proud of the book, with its satire of tabloid journalism, its murder mystery, its sentences sometimes possessed by a demonic force – I would gladly make a deal with the devil to supplant A Different Kind of Power and take the No 1 position. Down with the Dame. Down with the Dame. Down with the Dame.
Update: It’s been more bad news for Polkinghorne, the book, which was bumped into fourth place on the NielsenIQ BookScan national nonfiction chart when The Unlikely Doctor, by Timoti Te Moke, took the top spot.
