An e-book dips back 100 years to a time of familiar concerns

Bedford Park in West London was the world's first garden suburb.

It was started in 1875 when a fellow named Jonathan Carr, inspired by the Aesthetic Movement and the ideas of John Ruskin and William Morris, bought 24 acres of land just north of Turnham Green Station, a mere 30 minutes by train from the City of London.

At one time or another, poet William Butler Yeats, playwright Arthur Wing Pinero, and the French painter Camille Pissarro lived there. It figures as Saffron Park in G.K. Chesterton's novel The Man Who Was Thursday and as Biggleswick in John Buchan's Mr. Standfast. In Bedford Park, British author Bryan Appleyard's new novel, it makes yet another literary appearance, this time under its own name.

But you probably haven't heard much about Appleyard's book, because it's available only as an e-book (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $6.89 via Amazon), and not many publications review such.

Appleyard, a special feature writer for London's Sunday Times, certainly wouldn't have had any trouble getting it published the conventional way. It's his 10th book and second novel. Only last year he published The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don't Work in a Complex World. In an e-mail exchange, he explained why he chose the electronic route this time around.

"I like the cheapness of e-books, the much higher royalty," he wrote. "Also buying is much more casual. I assumed I could be read by far more people."

He has found the result enlightening: "I underestimated the difficulty of promoting [e-books]. Most outlets make no effort to review them, and they are still seen as somewhat less than respectable. Also I didn't realize how many people never used readers and how many were strongly antipathetic to the idea."

He adds, "I think also certain genres do better as e-books - notably crime - and I'm not sure Bedford Park fits."

According to a USA Today article in May, e-books remain the fastest-growing segment of the book market, though the rate of growth has slowed from three years of triple-digit increases to a mere 43 percent increase last year. At present, they account for 20 percent of all book sales.

The accounting and professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted in June that sales of e-books would surpass sales of print books by 2017.

Appleyard himself has little cause for complaint: "I did get coverage and . . . sales are holding up on the whole."

(Victoria Moore, writing in the Daily Mail, called it "a book of ideas" that "demands that we question who we are in life." Novelist Timothy Mo praised it in the Spectator for "its deft characterisations, its virtuoso dialogue, its dry and economical wit.")

Bedford Park is intriguing, principally because, while set more than a century ago in a world so ostensibly different from our own, it is, in fact, our own world that it repeatedly brings to mind.

The narrator, Calhoun Kidd, an American from Chicago, has lived his entire life under the thumb of his father, the Colonel, who has amassed a fortune in the meatpacking business. We meet Cal as he makes his way back to America on the Titanic after 24 years in London, most of the time in Bedford Park. His traveling companion is W.T. Stead, perhaps the most famous journalist of his day, a pioneer of investigative journalism and the inventor of the interview as we now know it.

Cal is also the friend of another famous journalist of the time. As a young man in Chicago he had come to know a night clerk at the Fremont Hotel, who turned out to be a displaced Irishman named Frank Harris, best-remembered today for his exercise in sexual braggadocio, My Life and Loves.

Over the years, in fact, Cal has gotten to know quite a few noteworthy figures: Yeats and his muse, Maud Gonne; Joseph Conrad; the theosophists Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant. He's been punched out by Ezra Pound and has made friends with "Fordie" (still Ford Hermann Hueffer, not yet Ford Madox Ford).

All this by itself would make for racy historical fiction. But Appleyard is right: Bedford Park doesn't quite fit the genre, if only because it is a good deal more than Masterpiece Theater-style costume drama.

 The inhabitants of Bedford Park believed in an odd mix of progress, science, and spiritualism.

"It is like today's world. Bedford Park was what Hampstead was in London in the '60s and '70s and, perhaps, Brooklyn is to New York today, all havens of fashionable, left-wing believers who believe they think alike," Appleyard says. "I do think that period created our world, and that we still occupy the same imaginative space."

The concerns of people were the same then as now, according to Appleyard: "the strangeness and slightly alarming nature of the science, the polarized political attitudes, terrorism (anarchists were the big perpetrators then), an aspiration towards the arts which becomes arty, an obsession with the future, novel spiritualities."

And over all of it, Appleyard says, loomed "the unimaginable violence of the First World War," which he describes as "a kind of statement about fragility. All their big ideas were about to die in the trenches. . . . We don't know what the future holds either, but we still pretend we do."

As it happens, Appleyard himself is pretty sure about one future development. The mixed results of his venture into electronic publishing notwithstanding: "I assume e-books will account for most of the [book] market in five years or so."