The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (18 page)

‘I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!

I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!

I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!'

And I shall.

‘The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.'

George Orwell, ‘Riding Down from Bangor'

‘We tried but we didn't have long.'

Hot Chip, ‘And I Was A Boy From School'

It is a Thursday morning in May, a few days before my thirty-ninth birthday. I am on a train to Bournemouth where I shall be attending a conference. I am reading a book:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez. I feel like I am going out of my mind.

It is four months since I staggered to the end of
Of Human Bondage
. Since then, I have finished off a dozen more great books of varying lengths and difficulty. Seated in this train carriage on a May morning is someone who has read not only
The Master and Margarita
,
Middlemarch
,
Post Office
,
The Communist Manifesto
,
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
,
The Sea
,
The Sea
,
A Confederacy of Dunces
,
The Unnamable
,
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
,
Moby-Dick
,
Anna Karenina
,
Pride and Prejudice
and
Of Human Bondage
, but also
Catch-22
,
Lord of the Flies
,
Frankenstein
,
The Odyssey
,
Crime and Punishment
,
The Unfortunates
,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
,
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
,
Vanity Fair
,
Jane Eyre
,
Everyman
and
Absolute Beginners
. When I shut my eyes, this list scrolls across the inside of my eyelids like the Times Square news ticker. I shut my eyes a lot. I am exhausted.

For this and other reasons, I am finding it hard to concentrate on
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. I resent having to spend a night away from home on a junket. I am listening to
The Warning
by Hot Chip and while it is a really good record, it is also distracting me from Márquez. I have not been to Bournemouth since I was a teenager, on a short family holiday, and I am apprehensive about the feelings that might be dredged up by returning there. The train does not smell like my train. Also, the book is terrible.

A week ago, I re-read
Absolute Beginners
by Colin MacInnes. For many years, this was my favourite book; it was disconcerting, in the midst of Betterment, to realise it still might be. It spoke to me when I was sixteen, seventeen, twenty-five. Somehow, it speaks to me now, urgently and without apology. This cannot be right.

Anyway, it has been a heavy anti-climax to turn back to Literature. I am finding it tough to establish common ground with
One Hundred Years
. . . When it first appeared in English, thirty years ago, this novel was hailed as revolutionary, romantic, a firework display of the imagination – but this is not how it strikes me. To me it seems like one initially amusing trick repeated again and again, a chimp in a small room riding a tricycle, puffing on the stub of a cigar, going round and round in circles. I don't want to feel like this about
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, which I know is special to readers around the world – I am trying not to have these unworthy, chimpish thoughts – but I cannot help it. The trouble with magical realism for me, as I suggested earlier, is that it is neither realistic nor magical. I press on, uptight and bored.

The best track on Hot Chip's
The Warning
is called ‘And I Was A Boy From School'. It is an electronic lament, full of yearning for something just out of the singer's grasp. ‘
And I was a boy from school, helplessly helping all the rules
. . .' It seems to be a very nostalgic song, or maybe it is about nostalgia? Either way, with its bubbling analogue keyboards, it speaks to me. I especially like the song's gorgeous middle eight, where, to an accompaniment of celestial electric harps and Casiotones, Alexis and Joe, Hot Chip's two singers, absent-mindedly squabble with each other.

Joe (
mournfully
): I got, I got lost . . .

Alexis (
sweetly
): You said this was the way back . . .

The train pulls into Bournemouth station and I pick up a taxi to drive me to the hotel. From the back of the cab, parts of the town seem briefly familiar but then fall away. It has been twenty-five years. Mum and Dad and I stayed here for a week in successive Easter holidays, 1983 and 1984. Every single day I walked the length and breadth of the town, combing the shops for interesting paper and vinyl: a tie-in novelisation of The Beatles' film
Help!
by someone called Al Hine,
¹
two early issues of
The Face
magazine,
(Keep Feeling) Fascination
by the Human League. I still think about those two weeks often, on my own at childhood's end. I have probably never been happier.

After checking in at the hotel, I am supposed to make my way to the conference centre and attend a keynote speech or breakout working party or some piece of nonsense, but instead I skive off. I lie on the bed and finish reading
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. I watch the chimp ride the trike round the room until the chimp and I have both had enough. And then the chimp grows magical wings and flies away, like his father, and his father's father before him. Meanwhile, I make a cup of tea and eat a shortbread finger and think: that's that. At this moment, I cannot conceive of picking up another book. Betterment is over.

It is four o'clock, too late to join my fellow delegates, but not too late for a melancholy stroll. So I leave my room and go down into the streets and sure enough break my heart, as I always knew I would, trying and failing to find the boy from school who came here with his mum and dad, a lifetime ago.

(Let's pretend that I left
One Hundred Years of Solitude
lying open on the bedside table, and that you, like a camera, have panned from the closing door to the table, and that, as my retreating footsteps echo down the stairs, you focus on these words . . . )

‘Aureliano did not understand until then how much he loved his friends, how much he missed them, and how much he would have given to be with them at that moment . . . [He] wandered aimlessly through the town, searching for an entrance that went back to the past.'

One evening at bedtime, Alex and I were reading
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
.

‘Hey!' I said, surprised. ‘That's where I grew up!'

We were looking at a double-page illustration of Mummy and Daddy and Sophie walking along the street in the early evening. ‘
So they went out in the dark
,' ran the text in the bottom left-hand corner, ‘
and all the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their lights on, and they walked down the road to a café
.' The street was somewhere in London; a 72 bus is pulling away in the background, its conductor perching on the rear platform, peering into the oncoming traffic. A blue car drives past – a Ford Escort? A Morris Marina? Across the road, an older woman is walking a white dog. Nearby, a couple seem to be turning into a restaurant called H. Pether. Other businesses line the street: Harding, a florist; Rudman, a fishmonger; TOY SHOP; a children's outfitters called Melinda. The shops are shut, but above several of them, lights in the flats are on and curtains pulled. The street lamps glow yellow in the dusk.

‘You grew up there?' asked Alex.

‘Sorry, I don't mean that,' I said. ‘I mean I was a boy there, or somewhere like it. It looks like the place I lived with Granny and with Granddad Mick when I was a little boy.' And it really did, in spirit as well as substance – a suburban English high street of the late 1960s or early 70s, rendered as a child of those years might like to remember it. I wanted to fall into the book.

In the foreground of the picture, Sophie and Daddy and Mummy walk arm-in-arm, laughing and chatting. They are dressed in raincoats and boots and Daddy is wearing a hat.
²
On the pavement behind them, they have just passed a smiling marmalade cat and another pedestrian. But something is not quite right. The cat is arching its back, its tail pointing straight in the air. Is it stretching? Yawning? Perhaps it is getting ready to leap at something or someone, hissing, claws extended – perhaps it has been disturbed by the other pedestrian. He is a curiously unsettling figure. We cannot see his face; his back is turned to us, his hat pulled down, his jacket wrapped around his shoulders as he leans into a biting wind
only he can feel
.

‘Who is that?' asked Alex, pointing at the hunched figure.

Fig. 10: Sausages and chips and ice cream.

(© Judith Kerr)

‘That is Death,' I replied. ‘Night night.'

I wonder what
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
is really about – is it a colourful metaphor for Mummy's marital
infidelity or addiction to shopping? Is it a critique of the fiscal underpinning of the traditional nuclear family, where there are three consumers but only one breadwinner? Or is it about the suppression of female desire, the Tiger a wish-fulfilment personification of the id, rampant, unleashed? Look again at the figures that walk arm-in-arm down the road. Mummy and Sophie are laughing and chatting but Daddy seems preoccupied, an impression reinforced by the tableau which follows: the family is in the café now, smiling and enjoying ‘
a lovely supper with sausages and chips and ice cream
' – paid for by Daddy – but none of them are looking at one another. Daddy holds a half-pint barrel-glass of beer but he is not drinking, and the look on his face is one of sadness, wistfulness, regret. Perhaps he blames himself for the Tiger that ran amok while he was out. Or perhaps he is daydreaming the story we have just read, and the Tiger is his fantasy, not Mummy's or Sophie's, an irrational explanation of the life his wife and only child lead when he is not there.
³

‘What do you think this book is about?' I asked Alex this morning, a few years later.

‘It's about a tiger,' he said.

That's the problem with tigers. What immortal hand or eye can frame their fearful summit tea? Yeah?

I think I must have read
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
at primary school, when it was still a new-ish book (it was published the year I was born). I have a memory of a hardback copy lying in the book box in the corner of the classroom. If it wasn't there, then it was at the library in the town. Actually, there were two libraries nearby, one a large red-brick building on the main shopping street, and another smaller lending library, octagonal or circular in shape, next door to my school in the old town. I know we didn't own a copy. My parents, though both dedicated readers, rarely bought books; but every Saturday morning they borrowed them, three tickets each, from the big library, and I went with them.

How I loved the municipal libraries of South Croydon.
⁴
They were not child-friendly places; in fact, they were not friendly at all, to anyone. They were large, dark, wood-panelled rooms full of books, in which visitors were expected to be silent, and the only sound was the clicking of school shoes on polished parquet floor. The larger building in the town had its own children's library, accessible at one end of the hall via an imposing door, but what lay behind that door was not a children's library as we might understand it today, full of scatter cushions and toys and strategies of appeasement; it revealed simply a smaller, replica wood-panelled room full of books. And this – the shared expectation of respect, the solemnity, the shelves crammed end-to-end with books, no face-outs or yawning gaps – is what I loved about these places and what I found inspiring. The balance of power lay with the books, not the public. This would never be permitted today.

The smaller, octagonal library on the hill was lighter and brighter – but it too was bursting with books, politely demanded silence, and had a polished parquet floor. Forty years later, that tang, the heady perfume of parquet, affects me like Proust's sacred madeleine. I am transported back to those rooms whose
raison d'être
, whose heart, was the books they housed. I have probably been trying to get back there ever since.

Of course, we had books at home but my parents were not bookish. They read for pleasure but I cannot recall them re-reading. There was little fiction and almost nothing in the way of classics, ancient or modern – no Eliot, no Dickens, definitely no French authors or Russians; no Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Robert Graves; nothing published by The Bodley Head. That kind of literature was another country; we definitely lived on the outskirts of Croydon. Instead, we had
Alistair Cooke's America
,
The Moon's a Balloon
by David Niven, two AA motoring atlases, a
Reader's Digest Guide to Home Maintenance
, and David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace's
The People's Almanac
, by some margin the most fascinating book in the house.
⁵