I went to a wonderful prom at the Albert Hall on Tuesday featuring Benjamin Britten’s Sea Interludes from the opera Peter Grimes. It is the most beautiful and beguiling music. For me it has a strange hallucinatory quality and as I sat listening to it I was transported to a small boat in the middle of the sea, with land visible in the distance, but all around a great expanse of silvery water and an invigorating iodine whiff of the ocean. I sat in the boat marvelling at the beauty of it all.

Magical.

My good friends in Kirriemuir are putting on a cricket match on Sunday, September 5 at what must be one of the most beautiful and unusual cricket grounds anywhere in the world — on Cemetery Hill in Kirrie, where J. M. Barrie himself is buried.

Beautiful, because of the tremendous views (on a clear day) up to the southernmost part of the Cairngorm massif — Glen Clova and Glen Prosen — where there was still snow on the highest tops when I visited in May this year for the celebrations of Barrie’s birth 150 years ago.

Unusual, because it is the only cricket ground I know of with a pavilion which contains a camera obscura — a device used to look at the amazing view through a full 360 degrees — which is maintained by the National Trust for Scotland. Barrie paid for the pavilion and the camera obscura, perhaps in part because this is where he learnt to play cricket in his early youth, using the cemetery gates as make-believe stumps.

So there is no better place to stage this cricket match: Peter Pan’s Second XI v. The Wayward Gentlemen, which is a commemoration of a number of things: Barrie’s birth 150 years ago, the final outing of a team called the Allahakbarries 80 years ago in 1930, and the anniversary of the pavilion and camera obscura, which were inaugarated the same day as the cricket match in 1930. Barrie was twelfth man that day, aged 70, but did not play. Instead he tossed the coin and made a speech. Two Australian test players — Macartney and Mailey — both friends of Barrie, were there though and they helped the Allahakbarries to easily overcome a West of Scotland team no doubt slightly in awe of the two Australians’ talents.

I  cannot, unfortunately, make it to this fixture as I am away in France, but I hope that you can. A visit to the ground is worth it alone. I hope that the sun shines and that all is set fair for a great contest that will do justice to the ground and the historical associations the game is commemorating.

It seems that this question is on the lips (and fingertips) of everyone with any kind of connection with books, as well as an increasing number of  digital entrepreneurs sensing commercial opportunities from the possibly imminent breakdown of traditional publishing.

According to a Guardian editorial last weekend, ‘An exciting new world for readers beckons, but the future for publishers is as tense as any Agatha Christie.’

As a published author this is clearly a question I’m taking a keen interest in so I’ve been chatting to as many people as I can about it and attending some events such as those held by Future Book and Future Human.

The fascinating thing I’ve found from reading blogs and articles and having conversations with journalists, editors, publishers, agents, digital entrepreneurs, web designers and planners is that there is no conviction from anyone as to the answer to this question. One of the reasons for this, I think, is that the issue is actually far more complicated than it at first seems. And it’s certainly more than just physical books being transformed into e-books. This is clearly the most dramatic ‘disruptive technology’ at the moment — portable handheld e-book readers such as the Kindle and the iPad — but the digital landscape is also having a more general and arguably more comprehensive impact on the relationships between readers, writers, publishers, agents and retailers. It is also changing the way that readers read and writers write.

Books do not comprise a single genre – they are a diverse collection of non-fiction, novels, children’s books, cookbooks, manuals and so on. Some tell stories, some give instructions. Some consist mainly of pictures, some exclusively of words. So, and here I’m going to get a little bit philosophical, what makes a book a book? Well, a book is a physical object containing words and/or text, and, in the words of my Collins dictionary is ‘bound together along one edge and usually protected by covers.’

Were it not for this physical definition, the answer to the question of what makes a book a book is rather similar to the question what makes a game a game – such wildly diverse activities as tennis, chess, solitaire and football are all games, for example. And as Wittgenstein would agree there is no essence but a complex set of similarities and differences that means we can only talk about books – and games – sharing ‘family characteristics with each other.’ So the answer of when is a book not a book might be ‘when it is an e-book’ (sounds like a bad joke for publishers, which is exactly what it probably is).

The book as an entity in itself is changing. For one thing, having an electronic text rather than ink on a page creates an enormous range of other possibilities such as the ability to include music, hyperlinks, video, images and real-time interaction (with characters and/or the author) through social media tools. At the moment e-books are merely electronic versions of their physically bound counterparts. But this will change and it seems reasonable to expect that e-books will develop and ultimately transform into something rather different from what a book is now. But why even bother writing something called a book when you can blog or create other forms of narrative through digital tools, including games and interactive dramas?

I wrote a fictional interactive drama — 1940 Chronicle — through blogs and social media this summer. It would have been a small step to also have included video footage, music and more detailed photography as well. This is a new genre of storytelling, but one which evidently horrifies many people. This was one reader’s comment from the online version of the Guardian editorial I mentioned above:

‘Argh. I’m not against ebooks as such, but the quickest way to destroy the novel as an art form will be to turn it into some sort of multimedia, interactive ‘experience.’ Not everything improves from being plugged into a bunch of other stuff.’

No doubt books in their present form or similar will continue to survive but will occupy a more marginal place than they inhabit at the moment. I imagine there might be more luxury editions that are beautiful objects and collectables in their own right, for example, as more and more mass-market ‘books’ are consumed digitally, more manuals and cookbooks become apps and more children’s books become digital games and immersive dramas. But there is also the wider issue, I think, about how people read and the amount they want to read. The internet encourages skim reading, constant hyperlinking, and short attention spans. There is also a variety of content — textual, video, audio — to engage with. Readers are changing; writers will also need to change.

When I began writing this blog post I wanted to touch on what I consider to be all the major issues surrounding the future of books. But I realise now that this was an unrealistic aim in less than 1000 words. This complex and fascinating question needs a whole series of investigations and blog posts to look at the many issues and examine them as they evolve over time. I haven’t looked at all, for example, at the rise of self-publishing via the internet which allows authors, in theory at least, to take their books directly to market, bypassing the so-called gatekeepers: agents and publishers. I haven’t examined the potential consequences for intellectual property and royalties. I haven’t suggested what the consequences will be for writers, agents and publishers.

Will Amazon and Apple inherit the book world or will there be a more varied and diverse electronic future for writing, benefitting writers and readers more than the big commercial players? I plan to do more digging over the next weeks and months to find out more on this subject, starting with a visit to The Piracy Panacea on August 11.

Ordinarily, I might think this was a tourist trap. Here they all are, ambling into the newly-restored church (yes, I did write church) with that complacent and vacant two-week-holiday-smile, all long shorts, cameras-round-necks, baseball caps and rucksacks. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ jibe about tourists wandering around aimlessly:’Why don’t you look around and start enjoying the life you’ve chosen for yourself… instead of calling the travel agent and buying the budget deal to T-shirt Nirvana?’

So why am I here too?

Well, I’m in the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square, right in the heart of London’s summer season square mile of tourist-ville, but where there is also a regular programme of classical music as well as religious worship (and a variety of other activities, including care for homeless people). I’ve come, with my wife, to listen to Mozart’s Requiem.

I’m a dabbler in classical music. I love much of what I hear, but it has to compete with a variety of other interests (and writing time) and so I only end up going to concerts perhaps six or seven times a year if I’m in the country, often as the guest of greater enthusiasts than I.

This summer’s classical music programme has so far consisted of Verdi’s Macbeth at Glyndebourne, a mixed programme including part of Carmina Burana at the Barbican and Mozart’s Requiem and Verdi’s Gloria in D minor at St Martin in the Fields Church in London. Still to come are a couple of proms at the Royal Albert Hall: Part and Britten in the first and Beethoven in the second.

I really wanted to hear Mozart’s Requiem being performed because I think it is such a uniquely awe-inspiring work. Unlike most of the rest of Mozart’s work that I’ve come across, it is extraordinarily dark at times, providing beautiful, vivid, haunting, and at times tempestuous musical portraits of the concepts of heaven, hell and the act of divine judgement. This is hardly surprising as Mozart was ill for most of the time that he was writing the piece and, indeed, he died before he was able to fully complete it. The work to me suggests a brilliantly creative mind struggling, though fruitfully so, with the idea of death.

I wanted to be blown away by a combination of beautiful music, baroque passion, existential despair and the sheer volume of orchestra and choir combined drowning my pathetic little brain in the glory of Mozart’s music. Perhaps it was an unrealistic expectation. I did love the music and technically it seemed faultless but — and here I’m sure I reveal my shortcomings as a musical critic — it simply wasn’t LOUD enough. I want to listen to this piece being performed by five orchestras and a choir of 200. That Dies Irae (see below) should make my ears bleed. Instead, the choir of about 25 seemed to struggle to fill the small church with the volume needed to convey the full drama of the piece.

I realise that this reveals me as a philistine of sorts; a classical music lover in the same sense that the majority of people who turn up to performances of Hamlet are lovers of literature, or in a similar way to Laurence admiring his bound set of the The Complete Works of Shakespeare in Abigail’s Party (shortly before his heart attack). The type of lover of classical music who admires Beethoven’s Ninth and Verdi’s Requiem but who lacks a delicate ear and the patience required to enjoy more subtle works of the orchestral art. Should I wear a t-shirt with the announcement: ‘I like my Mozart LOUD’?

This is a slight overstatement of my true position but it’s clear that despite my slightly rude description above of tourists ambling in to the concert, I am no better — and quite likely more poorly — qualified, than they are to appreciate and criticise this music. Perhaps many of them play in orchestras and have voluminous record collections of Berlioz, Stravinsky, Handel, Bach and Poulenc which they listen to regularly. Perhaps if we had a conversation I would run out of things to say in less than a minute while they could talk for hours about the merits of Mozart’s trombone parts. I, on the other hand, would probably be limited to: ‘I enjoyed it . . . I just wish it had been a little louder. Enjoy the rest of your holiday. Bye now.’

The new cycle hire scheme in London will officially begin next Friday, July 30. I think it’s great to encourage cycling as it is a wonderful form of inner-city transport: environmentally friendly, healthy, convenient, quick and cheap. But unless there is investment in the necessary infrastructure for bikes in London, this city will not radically transform itself into a cycle-friendly city straight away.

The car (and other 4-wheeled motorised transport) remains king in London while bicycles and pedestrians have to tought it out in the margins of the roads, leading to countless daily confrontations between members of these two groups and risk of injury to both from motorised vehicles.

Surely a good integrated transport planning regime would protect cyclists from cars and pedestrians from cars and bicycles. However, even the new so-called ‘Cycling Superhighways‘ provide only very limited protection — there is a painted lane but no physical barrier between bikes and cars. I have always felt that a more radical solution is necessary to separate the two types of traffic and so prevent more people from being killed on the road.

Cycling has become more and more popular in the last decade and with the new cycle hire scheme I anticipate that numbers will rise at an even greater rate. I hope that this increase in the numbers of cyclists will create more pressure to radically and imaginatively overhaul London’s road system (e.g. ‘cycle lanes in the sky — see pic below) to at last make it more friendly for non-motorised transport and less friendly for cars.

J M Barrie was an occasional amateur film-maker. One of his films, shot in 1923, is called The Yellow Week at Stanway, and an excerpt from it (featuring cricket) has now been posted on the Amazon page for my book Peter Pan’s First XI.

The footage shows a team of Nico Llewelyn Davies’s friends playing cricket at the Stanway ground in Gloucestershire. Barrie spent much of his summer at Stanway House throughout the 1920s and it was only a few miles away from Broadway (across the border in Worcestershire) where the Allahakbarries challenged a team of artists for three summers between 1897 and 1899.

As far as I know this is the only place on the internet where it is possible to watch any of this film. It is possible to watch the whole thing by physically going to the BFI on London’s South Bank and there is more information on the film on the BFI’s own website, including a full synopsis.

There is a great review of the 1940 Chronicle project in Campaign magazine this week.

Here are the choice bits:

By Leon Jaume, executive creative director, WCRS:

‘In an otherwise ordinary week, we are lucky enough to end with a real star. It is 70 summers since the Battle of Britain raged above and the RAF Benevolent Fund is marking the occasion by trying to put us in the shoes of the people who live and fought through the war. It does this in two ways. One is an online version of a newspaper reporting real events each day as if we were in 1940. The other, bolder, strand to the campaign is inventing characters with specific roles in the Battle of Britain (plane mechanic, flying officer, nurse and so on, who Tweet daily as the battle unfolds and with whom you can engage. It’s one of the most powerful and least expected uses of social media I’ve yet seen. It’s also brave, ambitious and moving, and I love them for doing it.’

And by Tony Quinn, head of planning, JWT:

‘I’ve left the best until last. RAF Benevolent Fund. Loved it. Well planned, well thought out, a mine (oops) of rich and highly emotive content. I felt both moved and uplifted. I shed a tear and raised a smile all at once. It was like reading Sebastian Faulks but without the guff.’

I have been keeping a low profile for the past 12 weeks as I have been writing all the content for the project I referred to in my last post: www.1940chronicle.com. It’s one of the biggest and most demanding projects I’ve ever worked on: 90,000 words of historically accurate content in a very short research-and-write period. But of course the very fact it’s so demanding is part of what has made it so brilliant to do. Here is the ‘teaser trailer’ for the story:

This is a storytelling project which follows ‘in real time’ five fictional characters living through the Battle of Britain from June 21 to September 17. At the heart of it all is the Chronicle newspaper which breaks real news stories every day as though they were happening now: in effect June to September 2010 has become June to September 1940.

Each of the characters tell their own story through diary entries (blogs) once a week and via tweets every day. It is somewhere between a digital soap opera and a history lesson, a meeting of a social media novel and an historical re-enactment.

Let me introduce you to the characters. They are George, a Hurricane pilot, Jane, his wife who is also an RDF (radar) operator in the WAAF, Frank, an engineer, Alexander Rhodes, chief war correspondent for the Chronicle, and Mary, who is a nurse at East Grinstead Hospital assisting a remarkable plastic surgeon treating burns victims.

The project has been commissioned by the RAF Benevolent Fund (RAFBF) who are keen to raise awareness of their work and to get younger audiences involved in what they do. Digital agency Reading Room have worked closely with RAFBF and me to achieve what so far has been a very successful result. Soon after the campaign was launched, Stephen Fry sent out a tweet about it, which created a massive spike in the viewing audience:

stephenfry Fabulous real time blogging of Battle of Britain. You can relive 1940 day by day. A must. http://1940chronicle.com

The numbers, I believe, have continued to hold up well. This in part is due to some good press coverage in the Independent, Media Week, the Daily Mail and others. I hope that more and more people catch up on the story and follow it to its dramatic conclusion in September, just after Battle of Britain day on September 15.

Working on the project has made me think very hard about other possibilities for digital storytelling. I’m attending a Future Book event tomorrow evening to chat with some fellow practitioners of how stories can be told through digital media. I plan to post a report on that event, assuming there’s something interesting to report.

In the meantime: visit www.1940chronicle.com.

I am currently spending most of my waking life in 1940. I dream in black & white. I am working on a fascinating writing project for the RAFBF, conceived and designed by digital agency Reading Room.

I am so busy with this all-consuming project at the moment that I haven’t time to blog or do anything else much except write — more than 40,000 words in the last month, in fact.

I hope to finish at the beginning of July, when I will begin to resume, I hope, a more normal life, with a far more modest daily word count.

But for the time being, I am flying in Hurricanes, avoiding barrage balloons, smoking woodbines, buying food with my ration book and growing potatoes in the garden, and writing about all of it.

I will return to the present only when my own summer Battle of Britain is over.

One of J. M. Barrie’s ‘hints to his team from their captain’ was that: ‘No batsman is allowed to choose his own bowler. You needn’t think it.’ The same applies to authors and critics.

My book Peter Pan’s First XI has been reviewed three times in the past week in the Irish Times, the Guardian and the Financial Times. It’s been a mixed bag. The Irish Times review, by John S Doyle, was exceptionally positive. Doyle concluded by writing that:

‘This engaging book scrutinises its many subjects well, but with a kind eye. The author is obviously himself passionate about cricket, and explains enough of the pleasures of the game to pass on some of that passion to the reader . . . ’

The reviews in the Financial Times and the Guardian were a combination of the good and the not-so-good. Stephen Moss in the Guardian wrote that ‘the book is deeply suggestive, without ever exhausting any of its numerous themes.’ And that it is ‘a chancy cameo, then, rather than a dutifully compiled double-hundred; an innings more suited to village cricket than a Test match. Which, in its way, is not inappropriate for a book about this most unlikely of cricket teams.’

Unfortunately Moss makes a careless mistake when he reports J. M. Barrie writing of Jerome K. Jerome, that ‘he was a great cricketer, at heart.’ The description is actually Jerome writing about Barrie which is a little bit embarrassing when Moss uses it as an example of ‘Barrie’s wonderfully dry observations’ though it does rather sound like something that Barrie might write, it’s true.

And I believe he is both mistaken and also rather disingenuous in his review when he accuses me of using a ‘kitchen sink approach to history’. He lists what he sees as the offending examples here:

‘Thus, towards the end of the book, we get Milne joining the team in 1910 as the “last member” of the Allahakbarries (cue six pages on his literary career), a politician member of the team being beaten up by Suffragettes, a sensational innings in a first-class match in 1911 by a Nottinghamshire player who has nothing to do with the Allahakbarries, the death of Scott on his expedition to the South Pole in 1912, and the almost contemporaneous sinking of the Titanic (perhaps included because one of those killed was an artist who had played against the Allahakbarries).’

Moss implies that these examples have been plucked from the annals of history as some kind of ‘pre-war best hits’ selection but in fact they are all directly connected with J. M. Barrie and his cricket team, the subject of my book after all, with the sole exception of the 1911 innings (one of the most remarkable knocks in cricketing history about which an entire book was written by John Arlott). He fails to mention in the review that Scott was one of Barrie’s greatest friends or that Frank Millet, the artist who went down in the Titanic, was a key member of the Broadway side that the Allahakbarries played against between 1897 and 1899. It is these remarkable connections which make this such a compelling story; without them it would indeed be a kitchen sink approach to history, with them ‘Barrie’s haphazard team [becomes] a prism through which to view the wider pre-war period’ according to The Sunday Times’ literary editor Andrew Holgate, whose review of my book really seems to ‘get it’.

Stephen Moss, it seems, did not, but of course he is entitled to his view, however much I might disagree with it. If authors could choose their critics after all, we’d be hitting metaphorical boundaries all day long. And where’s the fun in that?

Oh, hang on a minute . . .