A Week in Books: Publishers strike a blow against diversity

Most of the time, readers have little cause to worry about the publishers' names on the spines of their favourite books. Occasionally, an imprint will help to fix a period or catch a mood: in the heroic post-war age of Penguin, or the heyday of Virago and Picador. Otherwise, the quality should detain us more than the label. Except, perhaps, when two of the finest brands within British literary fiction are killed off as separate entities by their corporate parents within a couple of weeks. That has just occurred.

As we reported recently, HarperCollins has destroyed its Flamingo imprint, the publisher of giant figures from Lessing and Ballard to Arundhati Roy and Douglas Coupland. Its universally esteemed editor, Philip Gwyn Jones, lost his job in a re-organisation that saw Flamingo folded into Fourth Estate - the imprint that HarperCollins CEO Victoria Barnsley founded in her pre-corporate life, and thus a sacred cow for the Murdoch-owned firm.

Any independent observer will tell you that Flamingo has meant much more, for much longer, in fiction than Fourth Estate. The latter can boast a posse of splendid North Americans (Annie Proulx, Joyce Carol Oates, the late Carol Shields), but also goes in for some modish, laddish duds. It has a marked transatlantic bias. In contrast, Gwyn Jones covered almost every waterfront. It's virtually impossible to imagine a Flamingo novel such as Trespassing, by the excellent young Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan, coming from Fourth Estate.

Then, last week, Random House decided to amalgamate the Harvill Press - Britain's leading publisher of modern fiction in translation - with Secker & Warburg. The resulting hybrid, Secker Harvill, sadly expels the name of George Orwell's intrepid publisher Fred Warburg from the literary scene. But this bit of news, at least, looks merely blurred rather than purely bad. Harvill's remit will continue, with its maestro Christopher MacLehose as a "publisher at large".

All the same, the legendary imprint that imported the cream of post-war global literature - from Solzhenitsyn and Lampedusa to Sebald and Mankell - to these all-too-often-introspective shores will no longer exist in its own right. Harvill's erosion comes when another extraordinary novel from this stable has begun to show its paces: Götz and Meyer by David Albahari, described in these pages by Julia Pascal as a "Serbian Kafka". Will such wonderfully unclassifiable books (and in translation, too) still find a place at the shared table when the Secker half of the couple is looking for more high-profile contenders to compete for major British prizes?

The death of Flamingo and the merger of Harvill may strike a double blow against diversity. Not inevitably - it all depends on the ability of dedicated editors to nurture distinctive books, albeit under fresh flags. The general tide in corporate houses, however, flows unstoppably in one direction: against adventure, breadth and singularity; towards the fast sell, the hype-vehicle and the sure-fire performer.

To some extent, it was ever thus. What's relatively new is the argument big publishers cite in favour of their timidity. They plead that booksellers now call the tune, squeezing the producers dry with discount demands while bothering to promote, or even stock, only the most obvious of starry names. Start anyone in books on the blame game, and the trail will lead back to a shadowy cabal of buyers.

There's a measure of truth in these moans, but an element of buck-passing too. Essentially, both the retail and publishing sides now crave safe bets and swift sales. Too much individuality frightens them (except when allied to cast-iron celebrity). So go out and buy a Harvill or Flamingo title. It may not always be a masterpiece, but it will have a voice and style of its own - both the author's and the publisher's. It will not come from that bleak, well-audited place that bosses prefer: Fiction Central, the terminus of risk, and the terminus of hope.