In the 2006 throwaway romantic comedy Failure to Launch, Matthew McConaughey plays a funny, handsome, promising man who, deep into his thirties, just can’t leave home. Eventually, it turns out that he had suffered a calamitous loss many years before when his fiancée died. He was doomed from the outset; after the bad start, his pecker and promise are all gone.
So it is with the Book Council of Australia (BCA), which was long dreamed of – since 2010 in fact – by a kabal of publisher, bookseller, agent, and author organisations, and eventually endorsed by Labor, and then announced by Tony Abbott at last year’s Prime Minister’s Literary Awards.
