The bus and rail operator Stagecoach yesterday pointed to strong passenger and revenue growth at South

The bus and rail operator Stagecoach yesterday pointed to strong passenger and revenue growth at South West Trains for a stellar performance from its rail division in the first half of the year. Shares in the company closed up 1.25p at 83.75p.South West Trains traded particularly well, benefiting from both passenger and revenue growth – estimated to be up 3 per cent and 5 per cent respectively. As a result, it said, operating profits from its rail division for the year to 30 April was expected to be ahead of expectations.It also said it expected its Virgin Rail Group joint venture with Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group to produce a break-even position for the year as a whole. Who knows why Patron has followers? There’s nothing to tell us.Known for his starkly autobiographical works, Oe has said that Somersault breaks away from his past; like Patron, he is looking for a new voice in old age. We’re given no pearls of spiritual wisdom, no road to salvation. By the end, we know no more about Patron’s message than at the beginning.

Furthermore, most of Patron’s inner circle aren’t even believers; they are simply drawn to help him.That suggests that Patron, like the leaders of many new religious movements, is a charismatic figure who attracts by the sheer magnetism of his personality. Except that Patron is drawn as a weak, sick, tired and muddled old man. For a new religion to take off, you must have either a message or a man, preferably both. These four characters and Patron don’t have conversations; they make speeches, often for pages at a time, telling each other things both they and we already know. As well as taking repetition to a ludicrous extreme, the novel is full of irrelevant detail. If it were a sparkling work of art, this might be acceptable – but whether the fault of author or translator, the prose is as flat as the content.Part of the problem is that Patron’s message has adorned sandwich boards for decades: “The End of the World is Nigh Repent!” That’s it. For most of the next 270, the group are settling into their new home.Patron’s inner circle consists of a young female dancer (called Dancer) whom we never see dancing, two dull young men, and a retired professor of art who has returned from to Japan from America to die of cancer.

With Japan’s Kenzaburo Oe, a Nobel prize winner, expectations are high for this novel But those expectations are dashed, page by weary page The summary takes more than 300 pages. Ten years ago, so this novel suggests, the two leaders of a Japanese religious movement appeared on television to denounce their sect and renounce their beliefs, in what became known as the Somersault Their message was that the end of the world was near. A radical group planned to hasten it by taking over a nuclear power plant and turning it into a bomb. Their leaders informed the authorities and abandoned their movement. With Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin attack on the Tokyo underground fresh in the public mind there’s bound to be suspicion, especially when the inner circle and many old and radical members move into a new community.This sounds like a fascinating story.

If they had tested the book on children the way I am doing, they would have known what they had instead of being surprised when it was a hit You may say that it doesn’t matter Harry Potter was eventually a great success. But I reckon these publishers miss plenty of possible best-sellers I don’t want mine to be one of them.”. Also, although all this pre-marketing is helpful, it does not really do much to reduce the costs of publishing if you are still going to distribute it through the usual channels.”Maybe David Little is going to find out whether he is better at direct marketing or at writing. Certainly, I think most authors would be better off working on their prose style than on marketing their own book.”Little remains undeterred. “The trouble with the present system is that publishers don’t know they have a best-seller until they have got one,” he retorts “Take Harry Potter as an example They only printed a few hundred hardback copies initially.

“I like the democracy of it and it might work for one or two books. The models of publishing are changing and there are bound to be more innovations like this as the costs of self-publishing and publishing on the internet go down. However, I don’t see how it is going to change the process by which an editor will decide whether this book is right, whether it fits his list and will meet his sales targets. His semi-autobiographical work, for example, takes its main character through alcoholism, psychotherapy, bankruptcy, diabetes, cancer and eventual redemption. Totting up his potential readership, Little quotes John Sutherland, author of Last Drink to LA, relishing that Alcoholics Anonymous, with its 10 million members “is bigger than the Freemasons, the Rotarians, the TUC, the White Aryan Resistance, the Samaritans, the KKK, the Women’s Institute and – in terms of weekly attendance – the Church of England.”So is this new way of marketing novels before they are ever published likely to catch on? The publisher, John Mitchinson, a director of the Hay Literary Festival, admires the energy of the experiment, though he doubts its long-term impact.”It is an ingenious idea,” he says.