The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (17 page)

Similarly, when, several years later, I became an editor and got the chance to publish books myself, I soon learned the value of the judicious fib. Most publishers receive their books from literary agents, either as finished manuscripts or sketched-out proposals with sample chapters attached. In the majority of cases, the editor will not like the manuscript or proposal and not wish to publish it. It then falls to the editor to telephone or email the agent and reject the book. However, when rejecting these non-starters, it can be necessary to invent excuses: not right for the list at this time, cannot see where such a book would fit into the market, and so on. An editor will rarely have the daring to say simply ‘I didn't like it' for fear of appearing unprofessional or uninformed or, in due course, when the book becomes a bestseller and wins a prize or two, wrong. And when a manuscript or proposal is terrible, the same line of defence is usually followed. No one wants to be unkind; and besides, next week the same agent might have something far more prize-worthy or commercial to offer, perhaps both. To a good editor, the white lie is every bit as important as the blue pencil.

When I was a junior editor, one of my new colleagues was offered the first novel of an up-and-coming broadsheet journalist and reviewer, whom we shall call ‘J'. ‘J' was under thirty; his agent was highly regarded; and the novel was eye-wateringly atrocious. It was a lame, penile dog of a book. To complicate matters, my colleague was on drinking terms with the journalist and we had been offered the novel exclusively: it was ours to refuse. How might she reject it without causing offence to the agent, spoiling a friendship and jeopardising future positive reviews ‘J' might pen for her books? ‘I
think someone younger needs to have a look at it,' she said. ‘Maybe I'm not getting it. Would you mind . . . ?' In my naivety, I was thrilled to help. I wrote an email in which I methodically detailed the novel's many glaring faults. ‘Crikey,' she said. ‘Look, I think you ought to let them know we don't want the book. I've told them I've passed it on to you.' So I copied and pasted much of my email into a letter and sent the manuscript back to the agent. ‘Thank you for your candour,' said the agent, and never submitted anything to me again. Subsequently, the novel was picked up by another publisher and became a modest success, receiving positive notices in all those papers and magazines to which ‘J' contributed, though noticeably less so elsewhere. It was an early lesson in literary
Realpolitik
.

So when, years later, I informed my wife
Of Human Bondage
was rubbish, it was the plain truth as I saw it; and when I decided to stop reading, it was freedom in action. So why did I feel guilty about it?

I had previous. When Tina and I were in the first flush of our courtship, we did as many young booklovers do and swapped favourite novels. She read mine,
Absolute Beginners
, from cover to cover. I only read the first three chapters of hers. Then, in a questionnaire in
The Bookseller
magazine, I went into print with a premature review of it. ‘
It is a truth universally acknowledged
,' I wrote, ‘
that if anyone in Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice
said what they thought, the whole novel would be over in an instant. I hated it
.' Looking at this now, I cannot believe she married me, not because I disliked
Pride and Prejudice
– I mean, she was lukewarm on
Absolute Beginners
– or because I was poking fun at it, but because I did not even do her or Jane Austen the courtesy of
finishing the book
.

Returning to
Pride and Prejudice
after a break of fifteen years, I felt a little warmer towards it. For a start, it was not
Of Human Bondage
. Compared with some of the huge books I had read recently, it was promisingly slender. And thanks to the TV and film adaptations, it was a known quantity. I was not leaping into the dark; all I had to do was put one foot in front of the other for a few more days. Besides, fifteen years was a long time ago. I was older, wiser. I had just read
Moby-Dick
and
The Sea, The Sea
. I had learned my lesson.

How strange to discover then that after only a few pages, my response to
Pride and Prejudice
was the same as ever: exasperation and impatience. It was as though I had put the book aside in annoyance and popped out of the room for fifteen years. God, it was irritating. Get on with it! I had expected to come back to Austen with a fresh sensitivity and understanding – a renewed sense and sensibility – but nothing had changed; it seemed like my reaction was almost an allergic one. If you don't like macaroni cheese, you don't like macaroni cheese. If eating peanut butter makes you feel sick and wheezy, eating more peanut butter will only make you sicker and wheezier. Regrettably, Austen seemed to act on me like macaroni-cheese-flavoured peanut butter and no amount of persuasion – or indeed,
Persuasion
– was going to alter that, no matter how delicious, organic or smooth the recipe was supposed to be.

You cannot like everything. These are the wise words of the critic Dominic Maxwell. However widely-read you may be, however educated and open-minded, you will probably always have intolerances or blind spots – and this is ok. Without them, you have no taste to call your own. This meant I might never get along with Jane Austen – I could accept that. It was not as if she needed my support. Unfortunately, having succumbed to the temptation of leaving
Of Human Bondage
unfinished, I was now looking at
Pride and Prejudice
and thinking: why should I finish this one? I knew what was going to happen in it; I knew what I thought about it; and what I said about it publicly would remain the same whether I plodded on to the bitter end or not. What, in other words, would be the difference between saying I had read
Pride and Prejudice
and actually reading it? Perhaps it would be more honest
not
to finish it; perhaps there was something noble in running the race and, at the last minute, refusing to cross the line, like Tom Courtenay in
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
.
⁷

But I completed the race and this is why. While such thoughts buzzed distractingly round my brain, I stumbled on. Momentum carried me forward. Beneath the veneer of
Pride and Prejudice
– the clockwork plot, the rapier wit, sharp to many but dull to me – lay a cold, hard fact of life: it was better to be married than to be poor. Poverty, and the fear of it, shaped the choices faced by Elizabeth Bennet and her sisters. The fate of the entire family was dependent on one or more girl making a ‘good marriage'. Fear of poverty was the engine of the novel because, for millions in the era in which
Austen was writing, it was the engine of their precarious lives. This was a truth universally acknowledged by the books I had read in the last few weeks and months –
Middlemarch
,
The Communist Manifesto
, even
Anna Karenina
. And moving into the twentieth century, it was the dread at the heart of
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
and
Of Human Bondage
: the ruin and degradation of poverty.

In such a world, books mattered. They were valuable and unique objects, a means of education or consolation or escape. In
Pride and Prejudice
, Austen shows what books mean to different characters. Elizabeth, as we might expect, loves to read nearly as much as she loves to tramp across fields and make quips. Her father, Mr Bennet, rarely ventures forth from his library; he hides in it to escape from his wife, who seems never to have read a book in her life. The unctuous parson Mr Collins never reads novels, preferring tedious volumes of sermons. Their well-to-do new neighbour Mr Bingley has few books (‘
I am an idle fellow, and though I have not many, I have more than I ever look into
') and his shallow sister Caroline only reads because Mr Darcy does: ‘
At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading
!”'

It is Darcy, inevitably, who Austen presents as a perfect lover of books. His attitude is one of profound respect; the possession of them is a privilege. Darcy is always buying books and adding to the library at Pemberley, which he describes as ‘the work of many generations': ‘
I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these
.' And when we are shown Darcy in the act of reading, he even does this correctly, never allowing himself to be diverted from the task in hand by a Bennet or a Bingley. Nor does he lie about books. Austen leaves us in little doubt that in reading, as in so much else, Mr Darcy has purpose and integrity; he always finishes what he starts.

I was still mulling this over when, without meaning to, I came to the end of
Pride and Prejudice
and, I suppose, the List of Betterment. I had successfully distracted myself into completing both.

I had read thirteen books – well, twelve and a half. It had been like a holiday to take one after another and do little more than appreciate them, to silently answer the questions ‘Have you read this? Is it any good?' with an easy and wholehearted ‘yes' – because it was the truth. I had rediscovered, or maybe discovered for the first time, the pleasure of sharing enthusiasm for a novel gratuitously, not as an exercise in social standing or a bid to feel part of
contemporary opinion
. It occurred to me that I had been extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up in a prosperous country in an era when, for pretty much the first time in its history, I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. And what had I done with this freedom? I had slowly, though unintentionally, abused it. My reading life had become an accumulation of bad habits, short cuts and lies. I bought books I did not read. I started books I never finished. I expressed strong views I had not earned. And this had all become clear to me through the simple process of turning one page after another, faithfully, properly, for a few short weeks. If I kept going, perhaps I could change. But first I had to go back.

Of Human Bondage
was waiting for me under a pile of socks.

‘I thought you'd decided to give up on that,' said Tina.

‘It's my penance,' I said.

You cannot like everything. But you owe it to yourself, and Mr Darcy, to try.

In
Of Human Bondage
, the young Philip Carey picks up what Maugham calls ‘
the most delightful habit in the world
':

‘He could think of nothing else. He forgot the life about him. He had to be called two or three times before he would come to his dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.'

What a miserable sod; a pity he is entirely correct.

Last night, as usual, my son Alex went up to bed early so he could read. His love of books is uncomplicated and all-consuming. Should we tell him that, after
Captain Underpants
, the rest of his life may well prove a bitter
disappointment? Should we warn him off reading altogether, or push him outdoors and get him kicking a football about before it's too late? Or perhaps we should give him his own List of Betterment, the better to prepare him for the awfulness of what awaits him. Ten pages of
The Unnamable
, son, and then lights out.

When I was a boy, I loved reading in just the way Alex does now. But life had separated me from that boy; books had got in the way. Because if I had learned one thing from the List of Betterment, it was that a love of reading and a love of books are not necessarily the same thing.

A few weeks after finally completing
Of Human Bondage
, I was caught late one night in London. Locking up the office at about nine, I grabbed a couple of manuscripts and my copy of Homer's
Odyssey
. In the glow of victory, I had resolved to extend the List from a dozen great books to fifty – to keep moving forward. Betterment was continuing.

It was raining as I set off for the station. When I arrived at Victoria I discovered that all train services to the coast had been cancelled. Great. I was standing on the concourse, dripping and wondering what to do next when I heard someone calling my name.

‘Andy Miller! How are you? Come for a drink!'

It was an old colleague of mine called Patric. Raincoat, attaché case, rolled-up
Sporting Life
. Patric seemed rather drunk. I kept him company for an hour, matching his drinks, then caught the last train home. It was several years since we had worked together. A few months earlier, he told me, his partner had died suddenly. Days at the office were bearable but he did not know what to do with the evenings. The prospect of retirement, for which they had both prepared so diligently, now filled him with dread.

‘I ought to be angry,' Patric said. ‘I am angry. But you'll understand that.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You always struck me as a very angry person,' he said, as we propped up the station bar. ‘I don't know why. Sooo angry. I think you are one of the angriest men I have ever met.'

I put him on his train and then, reeling a little from the drink, went to find mine. As we pulled through the usual stops, I could not concentrate on
The Odyssey
. I was too tired and fuzzy, and Patric's words kept coming back to me. Angry? Really? I did not think of myself as especially angry, no more than anyone else on the threshold of middle-age. And yet, in recent weeks, whenever I thought about my life and the path it had taken so far, along avenues lined with books, one image kept pushing itself to the front of my mind: John Goodman, rampaging along the hotel corridor in
Barton Fink
, fire exploding at his back, his face transfigured with outrage, roaring in fury: