Badge Books Blog

Why the royal parks' short story plan might backfire

Writers are notoriously unpredictable - and the parks should brace themselves for the results
Will Self
Maverick ... Will Self. Photograph: Martin Godwin

The idea of commissioning eight writers to write a 3,000-word short story on one of the eight royal parks has, on the face of it, nothing wrong with it. What is there not to love? You get a £2 booklet dealing with the relevant park sold at the gates or in the tea-rooms, written by Ali Smith or Will Self or Adam Thorpe or another top-notcher, you sit down in the park, you read the story, you look around, experience a frisson, and hey presto: the world is a slightly more cultured place.

Of course, there are one or two matters that might give us pause for thought. The first is that writers can be unpredictable; give them a brief and you can never quite tell what they're going to do with it. I remember the last time Will Self set a story in a park (in, I believe, Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe) and it was bloody depressing. Presumably the royal parks want us to come out of the experience with a generally positive attitude, and that is something writers cannot guarantee to deliver. (Samuel Beckett spent a lot of time mooching about in parks, and every so often put the experience down on paper; but would the relevant authorities have been happy with, say, the portrayal of the park and its irascible keeper in Mercier and Camier?

I have been picking my own and various literary friends' brains about this, and we can find precious few examples of good literature being written to order. Marvell might have done it; Milton did it with Comus; Fay Weldon did it with that jewellery company Bulgari; Nicholas Royle has done it a few times with his themed anthologies of short stories. I was going to supply a link to my own contribution to his collection of football stories, A Book of Two Halves, but decided against it on the grounds that I want to preserve my credibility.

And this is the nub of the matter: as opposed to specially commissioned music or art, specially commissioned literature, particularly in modern times, tends to fall flat. This is quite consoling: it shows that writing is the most naturally maverick of the arts, the one least likely to be plausibly co-opted to another's service. I do hope this royal parks scheme comes off - it is, as I said, a wholly benign idea. But the people behind it should brace themselves for the occasional deviation from joyous celebration. An anthology like this should contain at least one story that gives you the willies every time you step into a public green space.

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