Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (5 page)

The first, as we said, is enchantment, the business of succumbing to the way someone else constructs the world, in words, to the rhythm of his sentences, the sound patterns of his language, and the relationship of these rhythms and patterns to the things being said, the things happening in the book. It’s a wonderful thing to let go of your own way of telling yourself the world and allow someone else to do it for you.

But the second pleasure is awareness, wakefulness: the capacity to see, feel and consciously register all that is going on around you and inside you. Actually, the inside and outside awarenesses are pretty difficult to separate, since your perception of what’s going on outside you is something that you are always assembling inside your head. It’s true the world is out there, and not in your head, but equally true that your idea of it, how it looks and feels, is a constant process of creation on your part, and that is very definitely in your head. So when I say awareness of a book, a writer, his sentences, his stories, I also mean awareness of how I am engaging with
the
writer and responding to him. Because, for me, his book only exists in relation to me and in my response to it. It is not an absolute.

What I’m talking about then is a pleasure that combines relaxation and effort, immersion and detachment, letting go and being vigilant – consciously savouring, if you like, the experience of letting go; or again, understanding what it means to be a person who lets go when reading this kind of book.

I fear this will sound mysterious. We need examples.

Let’s say I love reading detective stories, or sentimental romances, or chick-lit. Some genre fix. I know what I’m after, I choose the right cover and blurb. The book begins the way these books always begin. I accept an enchantment I’ve accepted a thousand times before. I kill a few hours pleasantly enough. Maybe I relax. Maybe I read really fast because I’m already a bit irritated that I’m wasting so much damn time reading a book like a million others I’ve already read. Still, I know I’ll do it again. Much the way I know I’ll always go back to chocolate even when I tell myself not to. I love eating chocolate and, even while I’m loving it, I worry that I’m eating chocolate again. Etc. Etc.

This is one kind of reading experience. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing special either.

Now let’s imagine we pick up a
Harry Potter
or, for a different age group, a Murakami, or a Salman Rushdie. Or even a classic:
Vanity Fair, Tess of the D’Urbevilles
. We know it’s successful stuff. We know it’s safe to say we like it. We allow the rhythms to take over at once. We sink immediately and totally into its spell. We have a wonderful experience. But at the end, as the spell wears off, we begin to realise that we don’t actually agree with a lot of the lines the book was selling. We’re not entirely happy about some of the feelings that were aroused. Or a friend points out some massive flaw in the plot. Now we begin to wonder whether we would have surrendered to the book so completely if it hadn’t been so famous. We feel a little concerned that maybe we have no point of view of our own and just let ourselves get pushed around by the flavour of the day. Am I too ingenuous? The fact is that because novels engage with the way we construct our identities, it’s important to feel you’re not just a dupe for every new trick. Self-esteem has to be an issue in the way we engage with writing. To keep enjoying a book after we’ve finished reading it, we have to feel we were critically alert when we read it.

A little chastened by this experience, especially after it’s been repeated dozens of times, we begin to be a bit more cautious of blurb and hype and peer pressure. We read with a new awareness, watching how the spell is being cast, thinking of it in relation to the way other books work, other spells are cast, succumbing maybe, a bit at a time, but also observing our succumbing, understanding ourselves better in our reaction to what we’re reading, understanding our friends better who love or hate this book, taking pleasure in the story, yes, but perhaps even greater pleasure in the mystery of how we take this pleasure and how we stand in relation to this story and others. At this point even a book we don’t love can be an immensely exciting experience.

Most of all, this approach sets us up for the most wonderful and life-changing reading experience of all: I mean when we come to a book with immense suspicion, perhaps saying to ourselves: This isn’t what I was looking for at all, why am I bothering with this stuff? Who is this guy? Who does he think he’s trying to kid? Only to discover that the writer has hooked us. He’s seduced us. Damn! How did that happen? These rhythms we thought were ugly are beautiful, even
breathtaking
; this story we thought was boring is fascinating – no, it’s essential!

So this novel, which was definitely not what you were looking for, now turns out to be
exactly
what you needed. It has allowed you to discover something new about yourself, because you were watching your reaction as you read it.

Still, we’re all different and perhaps all I’m doing now is telling you who I am and how I read: with a pen in my hand, ready to write
BRILLIANT!
, ready to write
BOLLOCKS
!, fully aware that I may come back to the book a year hence and reverse those judgements. Because the excitement of reading is the precarious one of being alive now, intensely mentally silently alive, and reacting from moment to moment, in the most liquid and intimate sphere of the mind, to someone else’s elusive construction of the precarious business of being alive now.

AT HOME I
still have the boxed set of six Puffin books given to me as a prize when I was a twelve-year-old pupil at Duston Eldean Junior School.
I am David
by Anne Holm,
The Dolphin Crossing
by Jill Paton Walsh,
The Silver Sword
by Ian Serraillier … And I would love to say it all started there, that my eyes were opened to the wonders of literature by a gift of children’s classics, but I can’t remember a single detail from any of the stories. I’m not even sure I read them, not least because I read very little fiction at that age. On the contrary, the book I remember reading most avidly around that time was Erich von Däniken’s
Chariot of the Gods?
, a piece of thrillingly bonkers pseudoscience that explained how aliens visited the earth, destroyed Sodom by means of a nuclear explosion and gave our distant
ancestors
the technology to build Stonehenge – the very same aliens who are described in the Book of Ezekiel as coming out of the North in a whirlwind of cloud and amber flames in the likeness of men. I can still recall turning the pages, spellbound in a deckchair on Brighton beach in 1975. Crazy golf and 99s and the Ark of the Covenant.

When I was finally forced to admit that these things might not be true, my grief was softened by a growing obsession with books about man’s fossil ancestors.
Australopithecus, Pithecanthropus, Homo habilis
. Who were, it now occurs to me, another kind of alien in the likeness of men who once walked upon the surface of the Earth, though in this case they really did give our distant ancestors the technology to build Stonehenge.

It also now occurs to me that whilst I read different books these days, my reasons for reading have changed very little. It’s the thrill of being transported to another world. ‘Once upon a time …’, ‘Beyond the thrice ninth kingdom …’, ‘London, Michaelmas term lately over …’. Like all travel, part of the enjoyment comes from learning about new customs, new languages, new landscapes, but an equal part comes from learning new things about myself
and
about the home I’ve left behind, which I can see so much more clearly from this distance.

The point being, as I sometimes say to people who write to me asking me for advice about Becoming A Writer, it doesn’t matter where you start, or when. What matters is a passion for arranging and consuming words.

For me it began at fourteen when I was given two collections of verse to read for my English O-level, the
Selected Poems of R. S. Thomas
and the anthology
Conflict and Compassion
edited by John Skull. Peter Porter’s ‘Your Attention Please’ from the latter is still lodged uncomfortably in my mind:

Do not

Take well-loved pets (including birds) Into your shelter – they will consume Fresh air. Leave the old and bed-Ridden, you can do nothing for them.

It was not simply the way these writers lit up the inside my head, but the fact that they did so by selecting and rearranging words you could hear at the bus stop. Thirty-four years later I keep having to remind myself how extraordinary this is. No rabbit, no hat, no camera, no canvas.
Select
the right words and put them in the right order and you can run a cable into the hearts of strangers. Strangers in China, strangers not yet born.

It was when I decided to start reading proper adult novels that things started to go wrong. I borrowed Camus’
The Plague
from the school library and singularly failed either to enjoy it or to understand why so many older and more intelligent people had clearly enjoyed it. A struggle with Sartre’s
The Age of Reason
only compounded the problem. The words remained inky shapes on the paper. I could read them in the literal sense, but they refused to dissolve and let me pass through. Worse, this feeling of exclusion remained with me when I returned to the books that had once transported me so effortlessly. And if this sense of exclusion was one of the things that inspired me to become a writer, to understand and replicate the magic that once held me spellbound, it was profoundly dispiriting at the time.

What I didn’t yet understand was the importance of taste and timing. Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and
stay
friends for life. Some change in our absence – or perhaps it’s we who change in theirs – and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more, an experience that I had when I returned to both
Gravity’s Rainbow
and Armistead Maupin’s
Tales of the City
. Unlike people, one can at least dump them or hand them to a friend without causing offence or feeling guilt. Indeed, we forget sometimes that a vital part of loving literature is hating certain books and certain writers, just as hating Spurs is an important part of supporting Arsenal; and the embarrassing truth is that I have probably got far more satisfaction out of trying to persuade friends that
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
is a tawdry piece of misogynistic torture porn than I have out of discussing the reasons why
Wolf Hall
is a masterpiece.

For me, specifically, the pleasure is rarely about plot, which is probably why I can’t remember what happens even in some of my favourite novels. Ten or so years ago, I finally got around to reading Proust in the Penguin Terence Kilmartin translation. Halfway through the third volume I started to notice marginal scribbles in my own unmistakable hand. I had read it before and forgotten everything.

For me, the pleasure is often about finding writers and books who push boundaries, not just the outright experimental zaniness of, say,
Tristram Shandy
, or B. S. Johnson’s
The Unfortunates
, which came in a box of separately bound chapters to be shuffled before reading, but books that make the house of fiction seem suddenly larger and brighter. It could be Paul Auster’s
City of Glass
, in which Daniel Quinn, a writer of detective fiction, receives a misdirected phone call intended for the private detective Paul Auster and decides to take on both the case and Auster’s identity. It could be Nicholson Baker’s
The Mezzanine
, a love-poem to the million details of one office lunch hour. Or it could be Francis Spufford’s
Red Plenty
, which is sitting on my bedside table right now, and which weaves real people and real events into a series of stories bound together by the economics of Soviet central planning during the Khrushchev era and makes of this unpromising premise something deep and warm and moving.

This is sounding like a list of recommendations, which is, perhaps, ultimately all you can do when singing the pleasures of reading. ‘Try this … Try that …’ It’s hard enough to explain your own passion, let alone why someone else might share it.

But pushing boundaries means nothing if a writer doesn’t love the language itself. A novel in which the words are used merely to convey a story seems to me a waste of words. I want to hear the instrument cherished and played exquisitely. I want to read sentences and phrases that sing on the page. And my favourite novels are often obscured by a shower of underlining and highlights:

However dark the habitation of the mole to our eyes yet the animal itself finds the apartment sufficiently lightsome.

(Oliver Goldsmith,
The Vicar of Wakefield
)

I was a Prisoner lock’d up with the Eternal Bars and Bolts of the Ocean.

(Daniel Defoe,
Robinson Crusoe
)

Consequently – and sadly – I find it hard to fall utterly in love with novels in translation, which was, perhaps, one of the problems with my early, doomed flirtation with the French Existentialists. I can enjoy the work of a writer like Haruki Murakami, for example, whose clean, clear
style
seems, to me at least, relatively independent of its original Japanese, but I can’t read Chekhov or Flaubert in English without feeling that I’m missing something of vital importance, rather as if I were listening to a symphony rescored for piano. I can hear the melody, I can hear the harmony and the rhythm, but where are the violas? Where are the woodwind?

Which is one of the reasons why I belatedly taught myself Greek at thirty-six, and found myself taking my A-level in a gym full of teenage girls at Lady Eleanor Holles School in Middlesex, so that I could get some small sense of Homer and Euripides in the original; and why I resurrected my long-dormant Latin in order to translate some of Horace’s
Odes
. But whilst these things gave me some of my most intense reading experiences – I don’t think you ever read with as much appreciation or attention as when you are translating – they also made me acutely conscious of what I was missing elsewhere.

Pushing boundaries. A love of language. I also want novels to be humane and generous. Indeed, I think all good novels
have
to be humane and generous. I want to read novels which not only understand and care deeply about their flawed and wayward characters, but which also, miraculously,
seem
to understand
me
, whether they are
The Wind in the Willows
or
Middlemarch
.

More specifically still, I am always in search of novels that understand and articulate precisely what it feels like to be a human being. Not so much getting characters
right
, which is the entry requirement, surely, but capturing the texture of life itself. I don’t think any writer has ever done this better than Virginia Woolf, and I think the way in which she does it clearly illustrates something essential that can be done in the novel and in no other medium.

She is peculiarly good at describing what happens second by second in the mind, so that the reader says, repeatedly,
Yes, yes, that is precisely what it is like to think and feel
, that roller-coaster swoop from plans for supper to the fear of dying, between childhood memories and the scent of the flowers in the hallway:

How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning to a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of Asphodel to have composed that face. Yes, he would catch the 10.30 at Euston.

(
To the Lighthouse
)

She is equally good at capturing those moments when the membrane between us and the world stretches almost to transparency and everything seems suddenly bright and clear and true:

And the audience turning saw the flaming windows, each daubed with a golden sun; and murmured: ‘Home, gentlemen; sweet …’ yet delayed a moment, seeing perhaps through the golden glory perhaps a crack in the boiler; perhaps a hole in the carpet; and hearing, perhaps, the daily drop of the daily bill.

(
Between the Acts
)

More deeply still, she understands how the human self is not something constant and contained, but how we exist sometimes within our bodies and sometimes outside, how we can be utterly divorced from everything, then unexpectedly find ourselves melting into objects and rooms and landscapes, how a part of ourselves is always contained in other people:

Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.

(
The Waves
)

No other medium can articulate this, the experience all of us have of being a single human mind with all our prejudices and blind spots and distortions, yet this being the only point of view from which we can observe the universe.

Lay the novel alongside film and its special-ness becomes obvious. Film promises everything. Ancient Rome, dinosaurs, talking dogs, car chases, sex, Mars, vampires … Such a boundless cornucopia that we forget what it can’t do. It can’t do smell or taste or texture. It can’t tell us what it is like to inhabit a human body. Its eyes are always open. It fails to understand the importance of the things we don’t notice. It can’t show those long stretches of time when we are
seeing
nothing at all, just drifting in our own minds. Film can’t show how you and I look at the same face and see two different people.

Stop reading right now. Look around you. It doesn’t matter if you’re lying in bed or sitting in a crowded Tube carriage. This is what film can’t do. The sense of being
inside
looking
out
, of seeing a world that belongs to everyone, but is nevertheless yours alone. It is this uncrossable gulf between me and not-me, between my private experience and yours, which lies at the heart of being human and which no other medium can touch, and this border is where the novel lives and moves and has its being.

Which is why the novel will endure, much as it has endured in the face of film, television, censorship, political persecution, second-hand bookshops, online selling, the demise of the small bookshop and the rise of Amazon … not just because it offers refuge, companionship, excitement and edification, for there are other ways in which we can get these things, but because it does a unique and extraordinary thing that nothing else can do, a unique and extraordinary thing that lies very close to the mystery of what it means to be human.

It’s tempting to say more. It’s tempting to
move
seamlessly from recommending to proselytising, to turn the cheerleading into a mission with a moral dimension. Writers, teachers, librarians, publishers … books changed our lives. And because the passion we feel about reading is so strong, and because we are good people, we sometimes fall into the trap of believing that books made us into good people and that they can do the same thing for others. This, I think, does a disservice both to readers and to the books themselves. Partly because of the snobbery implicit in the phrase ‘good books’ – meaning, of course, the ones that you and I enjoy reading. Partly because there are so many things that can change lives: boxing, learning to play the piano, tending an allotment … And partly because it’s not true. Visit a prison library and you’ll meet good people whose lives have been saved by potboilers, and psychopaths reading Jane Austen.