The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (25 page)

Krautrocksampler
showed the way. If Cope could turn a teenage inspiration into something amusing, audacious and useful, surely I might do the same? Obviously, my life was nothing like the Arch-drude's nor did I have his gift for heroic overstatement; any book I wrote would draw from a more mundane pool of experience and utilise fewer CAPITALS!!! and Exclamation Marks. But
Krautrocksampler
certainly proved it was possible to go back to the past, to ‘those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened', and in doing so, revitalise both the present and the future. And if a list of fifty Krautrock records could do that, then why not fifty books?

So, improbable as it may seem,
Krautrocksampler
did offer me some kind of an answer – if not to life, the universe and everything, then to my long dark tea-time of the soul. If you squinted, you could just about make out the COSMOS.

Around the time he conceived
Krautrocksampler
, Cope recorded a shimmering version of Roky Erickson's ‘I Have Always Been Here Before', adapting the original lyrics to encompass his recent shamanic Visions, the long barrows of Wiltshire and an essay by Carl Jung, no mean feat in four and a half minutes.

‘The childish man shrinks back from the unknown world

And the grown man is threatened by sacrifice.

Whosoever protects himself from what is new and strange

Is as the man who is running from the past.'
⁸

Here, hiding in plain hearing, was the lesson not just of
Krautrocksampler
, but of the entire List of Betterment. Do not fear the present or the past; use them both to face the future.

Perhaps the time had come, if not to put away childish things, then to share them with the child who lived in the room next door. I gathered together my stray comics and annuals and
The Essential Silver Surfer, Vol. 1
and left them in a pile in the corner of Alex's bedroom. Let him find them for himself when he's ready, I thought. They'll give us something to talk about when he's older.

Postscript: Be careful what you wish for . . .

I am sitting at my desk, trying to think of a good way to tie up this chapter, when there is a knock at the office door.

‘Dad?'

‘Yes, Alex, what is it?'

‘Can I ask you something?'

‘Go ahead.'

‘Dad, when you were a kid, who was your favourite
Spider-Man
villain?'

‘Oh I can't really remember. Name a few.'

‘Mysterio, Master of Illusion.'

‘Yes, I liked him.'

‘The Vulture.'

‘He was all right.'

‘The Kangaroo.'

‘I don't remember him. Was there really one called the Kangaroo or have you just made that up?'

Alex goes into his bedroom and returns a moment later to show me the cover of
Amazing Spider-Man #81, ‘The Coming of the Kangaroo!'

‘He does massive leaps, look.'

‘I can see. Does he carry a little version of himself around in a pouch too?'

‘Dad! Was Galactus your favourite villain in
Spidey
?'

‘I suppose so. But he wasn't really in the
Spider-Man
comics much. He was more in
Fantastic Four
or
The Silver Surfer
.'

‘Who was your favourite in
Spidey
then?'

‘Er . . . I liked the Green Goblin.'

‘The first one or the second one?'

‘Um, look, sorry, can I just get on with this?'

‘Oh sure.'

Later . . .

‘Dad?'

‘Alex?'

‘In
The Silver Surfer
, is Mephisto the Devil?'

‘Yes. Well, no. Sort of. It's tricky to explain.'

‘Is Son Of Satan the son of Mephisto?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Is he really the son of Satan, then?'

‘Er . . .'

‘Do Mephisto and Satan ever meet?'

‘Alex, I just need to finish this bit.'

Later . . .

‘Alex, you know you were asking earlier if Mephisto and Satan ever meet? Well, I texted Stewart to ask him because it's the sort of thing he would know. He says, “
Ah. I believe that Satan and Mephisto are two separate entities. Satan is definitely a character and I remember a line that said he is ‘but one of many rulers of various pocket dimensions known as hell' or something. Hope this helps
.”'

‘Dad, when you were a kid, what were your favourite Marvel comics?'

‘
Spider-Man, X-Men, Silver Surfer. Fantastic Four. Avengers
. I liked them all. I really got into them when I was about your age. They're one of the things I think of when I think about my childhood. I wonder what you'll think about when you look back on your childhood.'

‘You writing your book for ages and ages and ages and then saying you'd finished it and then writing it some more for ages after that.'

‘Oh . . . '

‘But I got to see you a lot, so I don't mind.'

‘Thanks, Alex.'

And, not for the first time during the writing of this Greatbooksampler, I close the door behind me and weep like Norrin Radd.

Atomised
(
Les Particules élémentaires
) by Michel Houellebecq

(Supplementary Books Three to Ten –
Whatever
;
Platform; Lanzarote; The Possibility of an Island
;
The Map and the Territory
;
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World
,
Against Life
;
The Art of Struggle
, all by Michel Houellebecq;
Public Enemies
by Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy)

‘One of the readers' emails that gave me the most pleasure in my life was one where some guy started relating (not without talent) different anecdotes from his personal life; then he realized that that wasn't enough, that he should have sketched out his main themes, set out his principal characters, marked out the social boundaries, a whole bunch of things that he was happy for me to do in his place, and concluded with this sentence, which was exactly what I had wanted to hear for a long time: “Thanks for all the hard work.”'

Public Enemies

Another Word of Explanation

Do you recall how, at the beginning of this book, way back in the introduction, there was a long quotation from the author Malcolm Lowry about a book being like ‘a sort of machine'? It started like this: ‘
It can be read simply as a story which you can skip if you want. It can be read as a story you will get more out of if you don't skip.
' And you read that paragraph and thought, ‘What? What's that got to do with anything?' Well, the chapter that follows is what it had to do with. It's rather weird and confusing and you may want to skip it. Were I the editor of this book, I would have omitted it entirely. But I am not the editor, I am the author. For a little while yet, the author is the one controlling the machine.

What follows is a fan letter that Andy Miller wrote to the writer Michel Houellebecq shortly after finishing his novel
Atomised
. Like most fan letters it is garbled and gushing and a bit of an embarrassment but it catches something a more elegant or considered appreciation might not: the rush of excitement, the absolute surrender, that occurs just a few times in our lives, when we read a book for the first time and think: yes, the world is like
that
.

Before
Atomised
, Andy Miller had read a great many great books; recently, he had even been inspired to start writing a new book of his own. What this letter to Houellebecq captures, however, is the heady intoxication of reading for its own sake. Of course, when we're intoxicated, we sometimes do things we later regret. In the course of the communiqué, Miller bangs on about Neil Young and muses at length on subjects as diverse as hero-worship, the writer Douglas Adams, the function of art, etc., culminating in a knowingly obtuse ‘cryptographic puzzle', which the author suggests contains the key to this entire book! As if.

If you do decide to proceed from here, I must remind you of another of the author's statements from the introduction: ‘
I am not urging you to read all the books in this book
.' From its first page, Andy Miller felt that
Atomised
was a great book, the greatest he had read for years, as you will learn if you choose not to skip this chapter. I agree with him. But you do not need to feel the same way. Like the members of Andy Miller's book group, you may have read
Atomised
a few years ago and hated it; or, based on what you have seen in newspapers and magazines, you may feel you know all you need to about its controversial author –
tant pis!
Try not to let it obscure the point of this bit, which is: never abandon the possibility that, however old you are, there might still be a book out there that will make you gush and garble and do something you
might regret. It means you're still alive.

Now let's get this over with.

M. Michel Houellebecq

Somewhere in Ireland, I believe

Dear Michel Houellebecq,

My name is Andy Miller. No, not that one. You do not know me. We have never met and, after you have read this letter, let's pray we never do. As Mark E. Smith says, ‘You should never meet your heroes, know what I mean? And vice versa.'

I am writing to you from the lobby of the British Library in London. The St Pancras facility, which consists of reading rooms, galleries, cafés and a shop, was designed by the architect Colin St John Wilson and opened to the public in 1997. It is the largest public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century, requiring approximately ten million bricks and 180,000 tonnes of concrete to complete. In the middle of the building is a four-storey glass tower containing the King's Library, with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820. The main collection, which is comprised of more than 150 million items, expands at an average rate of three million items per year, like bacteria or metastasising cells in a cancer patient.

Fig. 14: Bill Woodrow,
‘Sitting On History'.

(birthday card from Julian Cope)

I am seated near the entrance of the Library on a piece of sculpture by Bill Woodrow entitled ‘Sitting On History'. The sculpture takes the form of an enormous unfolding book, cast in bronze, tethered to a ball and chain. The book is lying ‘open' so as to permit simultaneous public functionality as both artwork and bench. Woodrow intended the piece to symbolise ‘the book as the captor of information we cannot escape', which seems like a downbeat message to proclaim at the doorway to a library. But perhaps I am reading it wrong.

The basements beneath me extend to a depth of 24.5 metres. Like you, I am indebted to Wikipedia.

Michel, I selected this spot because I thought the irony might appeal to you, also because there is nowhere else to sit today. When I started coming here fifteen years ago, few people had laptops. Notes were taken on paper, in pencil, as per the Library's strictly enforced regulations; personal computing was still done in the home. Today the landings and walkways are full of Wi-Fi enabled visitors, bent over screens or sitting cross-legged on the floor. As a result, the Library has been forced to review its policy on the use of power sockets in the Entrance Hall and other public areas. There have been numerous incidents of people trailing adaptor leads across walkways, causing others to trip and injure themselves; furniture gets moved around, blocking access to disabled toilets and fire equipment. According to the ‘Abuse' section of the bl.uk website, many people use the Library's power supply to charge not only their computers but also their MP3 players, mobile phones, even electric toothbrushes. Please note: multi-socket extension cables are not permitted in the Library.