The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (22 page)

While I sipped at my pewter tankard of foaming porter – all right then, half a cider – I considered two of the books which had preceded
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
in my reading. Hilary Mantel's
Beyond Black
, an idiosyncratic alliance of ghost story and black farce, was located in the middle England where most people live yet which is seldom written about sympathetically by the literary novelists, whose minds are on higher planes and more rarefied places:

‘Colette joined Alison in those days when the comet Hale-Bopp, like God's shuttlecock, blazed over the market towns and dormitory suburbs, over the playing fields of Eton, over the shopping malls of Oxford, over the traffic-crazed towns of Woking and Maidenhead: over the choked slip roads and the junctions of the M4, over the superstores and out-of-town carpet warehouses, the nurseries and prisons, the gravel pits and sewage works, and the green fields of the home counties shredded by JCBs.'

Suburbia, in other words; my heartland. So
Beyond Black
had had a head start.

The other book represented something of a dilemma. It too was a book about suburbia, perhaps the most influential book about suburbia –
The Diary of a Nobody
by George and Weedon Grossmith.
⁴
Its hero, Charles Pooter of the Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, was so amusingly sketched, so palpable, that his name is in the dictionary representing an entire class of suburban, small-minded bore: ‘
Pooterish
,
adj., characteristic of or resembling the fictional character Pooter, esp. in being bourgeois, genteel, or self-important
.' Novelists, newspaper editors and sitcom writers from
The Good Life
to
Peep Show
owe the Grossmiths a profound debt of gratitude, and probably royalties.

What was the dilemma? It was this: I could not decide if it was acceptable to like the book or not. I knew I liked it but I was not sure if I ought to. On the one hand,
The Diary of a Nobody
is riddled with the authors' snobbery and class-hatred – I am referring to the Grossmith brothers, not Pooter. On the other, the book is funny, humane and true. But is its longevity wholly due to the latter fine qualities? Are we laughing at Charles Pooter and his successors or with them?
⁵
Personally, I rarely use the term ‘Pooterish' unless I am applying it to myself. It only ever seems to be deployed as an insult.

The Diary of a Nobody
first appeared in instalments in the humour magazine
Punch
, where it was swiftly and widely
acclaimed. On one level, the Grossmiths had minted an instant cultural icon, the original Alan Partridge or David Brent. On another, though, they were simply putting a comic spin on one of the prevailing themes of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century arts and letters: the sheer awfulness of the plebs. As lovingly described by John Carey in his book
The Intellectuals and the Masses
, several generations of writers and artists, from H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster to modernists like T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf, even Orwell, were horrified by the swarming middle-classes, the jumped-up clerks and opinionated shop girls with ideas above their station, and pursued the topic at length in their essays, novels and poetry. How they loathed us, with our little patch of garden, our packed commuter trains, our despicable, belching crematoria – even when we die, they must suck our greasy ashes into their plutocratic lungs. The intellectual's distaste for suburbia persists. We are
middle England
; we live in laughable towns like Surbiton, Slough and Croydon; we are literally sub-urban.
⁶

In Chapter 20 of
The Diary of a Nobody,
Mr and Mrs Charles Pooter are invited to a dinner in Peckham in honour of Mr Hardfur Huttle, ‘
a very clever writer for the American papers
' with, Pooter observes, ‘
an amazing eloquence that made his unwelcome opinions positively convincing
':

‘I shall never forget the effect the words, “happy medium,” had upon him
[i.e. Huttle]
. He was brilliant and most daring in his interpretation of the words. He positively alarmed me. He said something like the following: “Happy medium, indeed. Do you know ‘happy medium' are two words which mean ‘miserable mediocrity'? . . . The happy medium means respectability, and respectability means insipidness. Does it not, Mr Pooter?”

I was so taken aback by being personally appealed to, that I could only bow apologetically, and say I feared I was not competent to offer an opinion.'

I recognise Pooter's hot flush of panic at being ambushed like this. When Huttle brashly concludes that the ‘
happy medium . . . will spend the rest of his days in a suburban villa with a stucco-column portico, resembling a four-post bedstead
', his suburban captive audience takes the only available course of action: ‘
We all laughed
.'

Three brief observations. Firstly, this is meticulous comic writing, perfectly balanced and socially acute. Secondly, people with unwelcome opinions – journalists like Hardfur Huttle – will always be with us. Finally, these people expect us to laugh at ourselves, and we usually oblige them. We are nothing if not polite.

Happy medium, middle England, middlebrow: all names for the same unfortunate tendency. ‘
The middlebrow
,' wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘
is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige
.'
⁷
She must be turning in her family plot. According to academic commentators like David Carter, the middlebrow is undergoing an unprecedented ‘contemporary resurgence', evidenced by the booming popularity of festivals, literary prizes, online discussion and, yes, lists of the greatest books of all time. By sheer weight of numbers, the plebs appear to have gained the upper hand at last. And nothing exemplifies their triumph more than the irresistible rise of the reading group.

Sitting in the Charles Dickens pub with my cider, I set aside my copy of
Edwin Drood
and pulled the local paper out of my bag. On the train on the way over, one story had caught my eye. Under the headline
Book group will avoid the highbrow chat
, it ran as follows:

IF YOU have ever been tempted by the idea of joining a book club but put off by the thought of highbrow discussions, the town's latest group could be for you. A club meets at the Umbrella Centre each month to discuss literature – but you don't even have to read the book to take part. Organiser Liz W. said the idea was to have fun and make new friends. ‘We choose books that are easy to read, and that have been made into films so you don't even have to
read if you don't want to,' she said. ‘It should be fun and it's as much about socialising as it is about the books.' The group was set up after people complained they felt intimidated by groups held in people's houses. It particularly welcomes male members.

At the end of the piece there was a contact phone number. Fortunately, I was already a member of a book group otherwise I might have been tempted to join. It sounded mind-boggling yet somehow inevitable: a book group where you didn't have to read the book. Wherever she lies, Virginia Woolf must be punching herself in the face.

I had decided to join a book group after the crisis of confidence brought on by
Absolute Beginners
and
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. It might do me good to be more outward-looking, contemporary and sociable in my reading, I thought. A friend in the town told me that his group had just lost someone and a vacancy had come up. This group was almost the opposite of the one described in the local paper – it met once a month in people's houses, the chat aimed to be serious and, in an old-fashioned way, members did actually have to read the book. It may not have been everyone's idea of fun but it was certainly mine. The group was called Sparta B.C. (book club), which reflected both a sense of discipline and asceticism, and also its founder's enthusiasm for The Fall's ‘Theme From Sparta F.C.'.

‘We mostly read modern fiction,' said my friend. ‘Last month we read
Atomised
– you know, the Houellebecq book. Some people
hated
it.'

Houellebecq's on my list, I said. Count me in.

Unusually for a book group – for anything called Sparta – there were as many female Spartans as there were male, which appealed to me. A fraternity was not what I was seeking.
⁸
They were a friendly bunch, enthusiastic and opinionated, comprising a solicitor, a creative-writing student, a carpenter, a singing teacher and three psychotherapists.

I was fortunate to have stumbled on a mixed group. The majority of reading groups are all-female – according to some surveys, perhaps as many as 90 per cent. Correspondingly, there is a measure of snobbery directed against them as both intellectually feeble and the modern equivalent of coffee mornings or knitting circles, what the academic Beth Driscoll calls the ‘feminized middlebrow'.
⁹
It is demonstrably sexist to define all reading groups as dumb and girly and little more than an excuse to sit around gossiping about kids, schools, shopping, etc. And yet how can we square that with the group advertising for members in my local paper –
you don't even have to read the book
– or with this tweet which was posted yesterday by one local mum?
Book club tonight = quick chat about book + long chat about school / children / work / family / gossip + wine, yipee!
(sic) Or, more generally, with the graffito scribbled in marker pen on the wall of the nearest bookshop:
BOOK ARE FOR WIMPZ
? (To which the reply must be, yes, but at least we can string a sentence together.) That's the trouble with stereotypes: they are not wholly disconnected from the truth.

The first few Sparta meetings were agreeably Spartan, in a twenty-first-century middle-English kind of way. There was red wine; the crisps were burnished with paprika and sea-salt. There was small talk about schools and children. And there was gladiatorial combat governed by an ancient and binding set of rules of behaviour. It was terrible and civilised and
all terribly civilised
– an all-in orgy of all-out passive aggro. You needed to keep your wits about you. In the beginning, I enjoyed it.

However, disenchantment crept in during a discussion of
Cakes and Ale
by Somerset Maugham. This was not the one
with the waitress but a different book entirely. In
Of Human Bondage
, the lower-class strumpet who turns the hero's head is called Mildred, and you will recall that she is thin and anaemic. But in
Cakes and Ale
, the lower-class strumpet who turns the hero's head is plump and rosy-cheeked; Maugham dug deep for a name and came up with ‘Rosie'. Mildred is younger than the protagonist of
Of Human Bondage
, who in later life leaves his small Kent town to become a successful author rather like Somerset Maugham; whereas in
Cakes and Ale
, Rosie is older than the protagonist, though this does not materially affect his decision to leave his small Kent town and become a Maugham-ish author in later life too. There was one major difference between the books, however. Although
Cakes and Ale
shared many of the themes and preoccupations of
Of Human Bondage
, it had the considerable advantage of being hundreds of pages shorter. But when I expressed this opinion to the group, I was taken aback that several people – gulp – disagreed with me. Specifically, two of the women of Sparta felt I had completely misjudged ‘her', i.e. Rosie. They seemed offended, as though it was the character itself, and by extension all women like ‘her', that was causing me problems, rather than the patronising way in which ‘she' had been written by the chauvinistic Maugham. I'm on your side, I wanted to say, but I seemed unable to make myself understood. I went home fuming – as, I'm sure, did they.

After a sleepless night and several days of running through the contretemps in my mind, I concluded that the fault was entirely mine. I had not wanted to read
Cakes and Ale
and had probably done so in bad faith, with the result that I had channelled all my petulance into expressing a dislike for the book, a dislike which of course had been inevitable, with a vehemence that must have seemed like exasperation with the person who had chosen it. Inadvertently, I had made it personal. The alternative explanation was simply that I had been wrong about
Cakes and Ale
. But that was absurd.

When my turn came to make a selection for the group, I decided I needed a book about which I could be entirely positive and eloquent and which could not be misconstrued in any way. I chose
Beyond Black
. The story was strong, the subject matter was accessible, if a little quirky, the setting was familiar and the quality of Hilary Mantel's prose was beyond reproach. I could vouch for all this because I had read the book for Betterment, but if my fellow Spartans did not entirely trust me, they could always take the word of Philip Pullman, Helen Dunmore, Fay Weldon or any of the twenty or so rave reviews reproduced on the paperback cover and across several fly pages – ‘
wonderfully funny', ‘laceratingly observant', ‘pins elusive Middle England to the page', ‘an illuminating study of what can happen when you try to confront the past with honest choices made in the present
'.
¹⁰
And if none of that worked, at the back was a brief explicatory interview with Hilary Mantel and a set of notes for reading groups. I eagerly awaited the next meeting when everyone would thank me for introducing them to such a wonderful novel and I would be forgiven for whatever it was I had misunderstood about
Cakes and Ale –
i.e. nothing.

What actually happened was this. I could not get back from London in time for the meeting, so I missed it. A few days later, I bumped into one of the psychotherapists in the high street. Sorry I couldn't make it, I said, work stuff. How did it go?