LONDON — The books are still in the window. The shelf where they used to be is now, in the language of the trade, “a moment.”
Sally Rooney, the Irish novelist behind Normal People and Intermezzo, announced this week that her novels will no longer be sold in the United Kingdom after her publisher, Faber, concluded it could not legally pay her royalties because she has pledged them to Palestine Action, an organization Britain has banned as a terrorist group. The arrangement is simple, and expensive: the books exist, the readers exist, the bookshops exist. The money has been legislated out of the room.
The reaction arrived in the order it always does. First, shock that anyone would do this. Second, shock that anyone is shocked. Third, a newspaper column by a man who has never sold a novel but has definitely lost money.
“I can no longer be paid in Britain,” Rooney told her publisher, in what her supporters described as a statement and her detractors described as a statement. The Guardian reported that the move amounts to the author removing her own income stream in order to keep it flowing somewhere else, a financial strategy bankers described as “brave.”
“She has found a way to lose money on purpose, in public, twice,” said one London literary agent, who asked not to be named because she represents Rooney’s ex-husband’s cousin. “That takes a kind of commitment the markets used to reward.”
Bookshop owners, being practical people, described the situation in practical terms.
“A customer comes in and asks for the book, and I say the book is fine, the book is everywhere, the book just can’t be sold here,” said Naveed Akhtar, who runs a shop in Manchester and has been explaining the legal position to customers for four days with the patience of a man who has explained Brexit twice. “They say, can I have it anyway. I say, you can have it from Ireland. They say, that’s the same language. I say, yes.”
Publishing types noted that the ban applies to the royalties, not the reading, which means Britain has produced the world’s first bestseller that can be read in a country where it cannot be bought — a format critics are calling the Irish solution.
Faber, for its part, said it had no choice — what publishers say when they have a choice and have made the other one. The company will continue to publish Rooney for the rest of the English-speaking world, a market of roughly 1.4 billion people who have been given permission to enjoy a book Britain has been forbidden from paying for.
A spokesman for the UK government said the law was “crystal clear,” a phrase governments use about laws immediately before lawyers begin charging by the hour.
The books, meanwhile, sit in the window. The shelf is empty. The point, which is the entire point, is that the shelf is empty.