The joy of reading

“The death of the novel” is a staple feature; every six months or so some pundit predicts it. No doubt in early 17th-century Spain, critics were bemoaning the decline of traditional ballads and chivalric romances; then along came Cervantes with the first great modern (and instantly postmodern) novel. A ragbag of a book that aims to satirise tales of derring-do, yet has been read by children for generations as just such an epic. When children and adults find separate satisfactions in a book, it must have a claim on greatness.

Radio, cinema, television, the internet. Each was supposed to undermine the book. Yet books have never been more popular: more titles published than ever before; the triumphs of J K Rowling and Philip Pullman; bigger and better bookshops; ever-increasing numbers of literary prizes (sometimes there seem to be more awards than books published); the BBC in pursuit of the country’s favourite “read” (books turning the tables on television!); the boom in reading groups; the superstar status now accorded to narrative historians such as Simon Schama and David Starkey, and a growing cultishness attached to creative writers.

In times of war, we turn to writers for their opinions, treating them as sages and shamen; there is a thirst for new writers and, if the cupboard is bare, it is taken as a comment on the bankruptcy of the culture. Much of this is foolish, but it reflects a continuing belief in the book, in the importance of storytellers in our lives. There is no reason why producers of fictions should be arbiters of facts, but such is our reverence for writers that we worship at their shrines.

There was a delightful story a couple of years ago about a woman who used to go into the huge branch of Waterstone’s in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, and take a book down from the fiction shelf. She would spend her lunchtime reading it, then place it back on the shelf and put a bookmark in it to indicate the point she had reached. The next day she would return and resume reading. No doubt this says something about the slow stockturn at Waterstone’s in those days (something the present management has, in the face of much criticism, attempted to rectify); but it also says something about the nature of reading. (It may also say something about the character of Scots and the limitations of Glasgow’s cultural attractions, but that’s another story.) Readers are obsessives: they inhabit imaginary worlds; those worlds are as important to them as “the real world”, whatever that is. Each day, this woman in Sauchiehall Street would escape from mundane reality into the limitless possibilities of the bookshop.

You can never read enough; the more you read, the more you want to read. The more you read; the better you want to read. Read War and Peace and when you reach the end, with Tolstoy’s sweeping conclusions about the mainsprings of history, you want to begin again, spend a little more time with the ponderous Pierre, inevitably outshone by the romantic Prince Andrei on first reading. No truly great book is ever exhausted: each re-reading adds a fresh layer of understanding. You could spend every day of your life reading, and never read everything you wanted to read. That woman in Sauchiehall Street will need to take very long lunch hours even to begin to scratch the surface of what is on offer.

One feels pity for the person who has never read Middlemarch, but one also feels a certain envy: because once you have read that astonishing novel, you will feel that you must read the rest of George Eliot – and that is no small undertaking. Finding an author that you love can be dangerous, because a chunk of your life is about to be lost; these relationships can be all-consuming. Proust may take two years to finish, and then you will wish to begin again or even learn French to attempt it in the original. Once you have skipped delightedly through Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing, you will have to read the other 11 volumes of A Dance to the Music of Time. Jane Austen’s oeuvre is relatively small, but her books repay endless re-reading. Once a Jane-ite, always a Jane-ite: Emma must make her annual visit.

Re-reading, though, can sometimes seem a luxury when there are so many authorial Everests to climb. It is possible to start to resent the fact that Balzac published more than 90 novels; that Trollope produced almost 50; that Dickens would rarely be satisfied with a novel of less than 800 pages. Mr Todd, in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, loves Dickens so much that it has driven him mad; he is a Kurtz among bibliophiles. Reading addicts will recognise the symptoms; this is dangerous territory. Perhaps books should come with a health warning – consume only in small doses or they may start to take over your life.

Francis Spufford, in The Child That Books Built, owns up to his obsession. “I need fiction. I’m an addict. This is not a figure of speech. I don’t quite read a novel a day, but I certainly read some of a novel every day, and usually some of several. There is always a heap of opened paperbacks face down near the bed, always something current on the kitchen table to reach for over coffee when I wake up.”

Spufford had a lonely childhood – his sister was extremely ill and needed constant parental attention – and he found, in books, his friends, companions and mentors. It is a common story among writers. The playwright David Mamet has written wonderfully about how the treasures of Chicago’s central library took him away from the battle zone that was his parents’ marriage. Books do not, as the cynics say, furnish a room; they furnish a mind, enlarge the soul, fertilise the imagination.

Harold Bloom, the American critic, catches reading’s spiritual dimension, its “sublime” possibilities: “Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness … Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.”

There is something magical about reading. How can this inanimate object teem with life? The writer is an alchemist; but the reader, too, plays his part: by giving time and mental effort to the book and by allowing that “willing suspension of disbelief” that is the key to entering the gateway to an imaginatively conceived world. The sceptical and the mean-spirited make bad readers: all the time they will be telling themselves this is a mere entertainment, a dumbshow.

Children are the best readers because they give themselves whole to books; they have not yet been convinced of life’s limitations. They want to believe. Books read in childhood or as a teenager – Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye – will resonate through the lives of those who read them. In Spufford’s case, it was C S Lewis’s Narnia stories. “The books I loved best of all,” he writes, “took me away through a wardrobe, and a shallow pool in the grass of a sleepy orchard, and a picture in a frame, and a door in a garden wall on a rainy day at boarding school, and always to Narnia. Other imaginary countries interested me, beguiled me, made rich suggestions to me. Narnia made me feel like I’d taken hold of a live wire. The book in my hand sent jolts and shimmers through my nerves. It affected me bodily.”

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (the first of the Narnia sequence to be written, though not chronologically the first in the eventual seven-book cycle) was, like so many great children’s books, written for a particular child – Lewis’s god-daughter, Lucy Barfield. He appended an affectionate note to the first edition: “My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result, you are already too old for fairy tales … But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.” This is a lovely idea: that children and older people can appreciate fairy tales and those in the middle – locked inside their workaday world – can’t.

Treasure Island, too, was written for a specific child – Robert Louis Stevenson’s 12-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. As an adult, he recalled the exact moment (appropriately it was a wet morning – just the time for a story) when this classic for all ages was born. “I happened to be tinting the map of an island I had drawn. Stevenson came in as I was finishing it, and with an affectionate interest in everything I was doing, leaned over my shoulder, and was soon elaborating the map and naming it. I shall never forget the thrill of Skeleton Island, Spy-Glass Hill, nor the heart-stirring climax of the three red crosses! And the greater climax still when he wrote the words ‘Treasure Island’ at the top right-hand corner! And he seemed to know so much about it too – the pirates, the buried treasure, the man who had been marooned on the island. ‘Oh, for a story about it,’ I exclaimed, in a heaven of enchantment, and somehow conscious of his own enthusiasm in the idea.”

Nothing can ever replace childhood reading. Everything is fresh and believable; there is so much time to read; the bed so warm and protecting. As a child, you identify completely with the young adventurers in the books – entering the wardrobe with Lucy, overcoming seemingly impossible dangers with Jim. As C S Lewis suspected, older readers lose some of that delight, that physical identification with the characters, Spufford’s bodily response. You begin to read because you have to – for a literature course, perhaps – or because you feel that you should. This can kill books: people who at school were forced to live in the sprawling town of Middlemarch invariably hate it and are desperate to escape for ever, yet it is the easiest, wisest and most captivating of books to read.

Bloom attacks the overintellectualisation of texts: “The sorrow of professional reading is that you recapture only rarely the pleasure of reading you knew in youth, when books were a Hazlittian gusto. The way we read now partly depends upon our distance, inner or outer, from the universities, where reading is scarcely taught as a pleasure, in any of the deeper senses of the aesthetics of pleasure.”

It is significant – and sad – that many A-level students differentiate reading for study from reading for pleasure: why should Donne or Wordsworth not be read for pleasure? Once raised (or is it reduced?) to the status of “set texts”, the life seems to be sucked from them, but they are not difficult or elusive; they are thrillingly direct and human. All they ask is to be read with care and love; not to be swamped in footnotes and formulas. Read for joy, not for exams – and read with the heart as well as the head.

There are dangers in an over-reliance on books. Addiction can be taken too far. “A book cannot take the place of the world,” said Franz Kafka. “That is impossible. In life, everything has its own meaning and its own purpose, for which there cannot be any permanent substitute … One tries to imprison life in a book, like a songbird in a cage, but it’s no good.”

Kafka is right. Books cannot take the place of life – or we will all end up like Mr Todd, preferring Dickens’s world to our own. The child “built” by books will eventually have to make his way in the world outside, but what a comfort books are and what a source of nourishment, intellectual and spiritual. You can, imaginatively, live a thousand other lives – and thus perhaps live your own life better, or at least understand it a little more. Reading allows us to feel the largeness of life, the range of possibility and connects us to the heart of great writers.

“Man can embody the truth, but he cannot know it,” said W B Yeats. Great books can do the same. Only a bad book would set out to be a vade mecum, an easy-to-understand set of rules by which to lead your life. That would be a very dull (and probably bogus) prescription. Good books will embody truths which will slowly reveal themselves to the discriminating reader. Books have survived the birth of other media because reading is uniquely revelatory: the meaning (or meanings – why should a book have only one meaning?) only gradually comes into the light; and we, as readers, are carrying the torch. We are seeking to make that connection with the (perhaps long-dead) writer; we are making the text live. We matter.

“Read in order to live,” instructed Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary is perhaps the most perfect of all novels. Flaubert is one of those sensitive, mother-dominated young men for whom books did sometimes seem more congenial than life. But in his case, the artistic advantages of this obsessionalism were considerable: he does not merely tell stories but create worlds, in infinite detail: to the reader, it is entirely coherent, believable, achieved. We may take such an effect for granted, yet it took Flaubert five painstaking years to write Madame Bovary, each passage read aloud and polished, layer added to layer to build a world in words. (James Joyce once met a friend in the street who asked him how his work was going. Very well, Joyce replied, I’ve written three sentences today.)

Creative writing of that order is a form of compulsive behaviour. Bad books start with a contract or a TV tie-in or the hope that Hollywood might take an interest. Good books start with a “throb”, a “voice”, or an image that the writer has to make sense of. It is something tangible; something that has a life of its own to be explored. Always be suspicious of the writer who produces a book every year or two: this is factory farming rather than organic production. Flaubert wrote few novels and died a little each time.

Not all books are so effortful. Flaubert took infinite pains to make his books seem effortlessly fluent – sometimes there is great art in apparent artlessness. Other writers seem possessed of something beyond art – the overwhelming fever of creativity that characterised the early Dickens. Some novelists like to say that they did not write a given book; the book wrote them. Stevenson, who wrote Treasure Island in two intense bursts separated by a period when he was blocked, described how he suddenly felt able to complete the work: “Down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale, and behold! It flowed from me like small talk.”

Sometimes a single book takes hold and almost assumes a life of its own. Thackeray’s first and greatest novel, Vanity Fair, was written rapidly and with little planning: he freewheeled according to the dictates of serial publication and produced an unexpected masterpiece. Disraeli was a no-more-than-adequate novelist and started Coningsby as a political tract, but it developed a momentum of its own and became a work of art than far outlasted its role as a piece of Tory propaganda. Great writing, like great music, is sometimes irreducible, almost God-given. We don’t need to analyse it; only to give thanks.

Freud likened creative writing to children’s play and thought it amusing that while day-dreamers were seen as weak and foolish, professional day-dreamers (aka fiction writers) were admired. “The day-dreamer carefully conceals his fantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them,” says Freud. “Such fantasies, when we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure … How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret.”

So, great writers are obsessives and great readers are addicts, yet between them the two can make what sounds inherently unhealthy into something magical. While literature should not be a substitute for life, it is a central part of our attempt to make sense of it. Kafka was suspicious of the completed work of art (a common theme among artists) because he felt it a fraud: life was a mystery and no book could resolve it. We should accept that – and admire books that refuse a simple resolution – but surely we must allow ourselves to take pleasure in, and extend our creative sympathies through, books. “Ultimately we read,” says Harold Bloom, “in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.”

Print, writing, books, the transmission of information and thoughts from one generation to the next are at the heart of “civilisation”. Man has been around for hundreds of thousands of years; writing for only 6,000 or so years. The former period is pre-history; the latter history. Life, at least as far as we can interpret it, is the story of writers and readers.

Books enable us to connect with the minds and hearts of those who came before us. The great ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome are vivid to us through their vast literatures: if all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, perhaps all theatre is an extension of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles. Books allow us to escape the confines of time and place: they can take us to the dazzling ferment of Athens in the 4th century BC, to imperial Rome, to Machiavelli’s Florence, to the very different Englands of Austen, Dickens and Wilde, to the Russia of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Chekhov, to the modern America of DeLillo, Roth and Updike, to the modern Britain of Amis, McEwan and Welsh. We can travel anywhere we wish – and all we need are the will and the heart to read well.

Harold Bloom, in The Western Canon, helpfully offers a list of the books that are the foundation stones of western literature (even he, consummate reader, has to accept that life is too short to come to terms with China’s great literature). It runs to several thousand volumes, everything from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to Saul Bellow’s Herzog. The extent of the list is intimidating: the gaps an affront to the way one has spent one’s life to date. The devoted reader vows to mend his ways. It is criminal not to have read Dante’s Divine Comedy, Saint Augustine’s The City of God, Beowulf, Rabelais, Racine, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, a little reading is an exceedingly painful thing – because you are aware of all the treasures that lie close to hand if you are willing to spend the time panning for gold. Now, where is that copy of the The Brothers Karamazov?

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