The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (26 page)

Of course, I am symptomatic of this metabolic change. I write you this letter on my silver Sony Vaio notebook, with its 15.5in screen, its Intel® Core™ 2.53 GHz Processor, four gigabytes of RAM, 500 gigabyte hard drive and DVD SuperMulti Drive, using a piece of proprietary word processing software which keeps flashing adverts for related products at me –
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– but which I lack the technical ability to disable. This Vaio is not a bad machine but the battery life is poor, a deficiency of the model which has been noted by several users online. Presently I shall have to get up and move to find a power socket. Also, ‘Sitting On History' is proving to be a pain in the arse.

Ok. I have moved upstairs to the Rare Books & Music Reading Room where I can sit comfortably on a normal, monopurpose chair and plug this laptop into the desk-mounted power unit, permitting me to carry on with this letter while neutralising the risk to those who walk past without looking where they are going. This is desk 294. It was in this room, at this desk, that we became acquainted – though, as I said above, we have never really met. I had booked
a day's holiday to read Graham Greene's novel
The Name of Action
. Greene hated this book, his second, and after its initial publication in 1930, effectively suppressed it; it has never been reprinted or appeared in paperback; original editions sell for many hundreds of Euros. At my request, a copy had been retrieved from one of the temperature-controlled storage units and delivered to the Reading Room. I receive twenty-three days annual leave as part of a package of benefits in my job with a London book publisher. Better to spend a little of it here than in some fucking gîte in the Dordogne, being ripped off by the local farmer and his greedy offspring who, once the old man starts dying, will move him into a nursing home and never visit.

Several years ago, while researching a book on The Kinks, I spent two weeks up at the British Library's newspaper and magazine facility at Colindale, North London. Unlike the glossy, futuristic St Pancras reading rooms, Colindale still seemed like something one might find in a black-and-white comedy from the 1950s, with disobliging library technicians presiding over a cataloguing system only they understood and dark cupboards where solitary men leafed through old issues of
Picture Post
, mumbling to themselves. There was no cafeteria or restaurant at Colindale, just a bare room with red plastic chairs and an automatic vending machine. At lunchtime, my fellow researchers and I would try not to make eye-contact and eat our packed lunches with the same idea: I hope they're not thinking about me what I am thinking about them.

The atmosphere in Rare Books & Music, by contrast, does not make one feel as though one is being indulged in an embarrassing vice. People here read exemplarily. There is something uplifting about the conspicuous contemplation that seems to be taking place all around, so that even if one has come to do no more than
read for pleasure
– if such a thing is still possible – one feels oneself joining a noble communal endeavour. Much has been written about the barely suppressed erotic charge of this environment. Are there attractive, bookish, large-breasted young women here? Do they periodically retire to the toilets for extended bouts of graphic lovemaking? No, because this is a library and not a Michel Houellebecq novel. It's a
ménage
of the mind.

At the time these events took place, I was nearing the end of a year-long effort to read fifty great books which, at one time or another, I had lied about having read before – mostly fiction, classics, a couple of politics and philosophy titles. Some of the choices were obvious:
Moby-Dick
,
Pride and Prejudice
,
Jane Eyre
, the manuscript of which resides in a glass case several floors below where I am now. It had also taken in quite a few cult books: Americans of course, some
Silver Surfer
comics,
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
by Robert Tressell, if you know that novel in France. It was only reading books, yet in my head I seemed to be engaged in a heroic struggle, rather like the quasi-Nietzschean depiction of Neil Young you contributed to Michka Assayas'
Dictionnaire du rock: ‘A man advancing, on a difficult and rocky road. Often he falls bloodied to his knees; he gets up again and keeps going
.'

Throughout this uphill struggle, I had been hoping for the
coup de foudre
, the lightning flash which might illuminate the muddy track ahead of me. I had been moved and inspired and humbled by the books I had read – who could read
Anna Karenina
without experiencing all of these? – but I had yet to be shocked by something utterly unexpected and new.
The Master and Margarita
had come close; so too, if you can believe it, had Julian Cope's
Krautrocksampler
. But I was still waiting for that bolt from out of the blue.

Take the two books I had just completed, Toni Morrison's
Beloved
and Huysmans'
À rebours
, which I read in Robert Baldick's translation under the title by which it is best known in England,
Against Nature
. Morrison's novel was magnificent, a model of technical accomplishment, a super-refined product like the Canon Libris laptop-printer combination or the Camel Legend parka. And what is there to say about Huysmans that has not already been said a thousand times? Ludicrous, overripe, decadent yet somehow indestructible; I could fill the pages of this letter with quotes from
Against Nature
, entire paragraphs, which struck me as uncanny in their wit and modernity. It is a bad, wicked novel but a great one. But although I had devoured and appreciated
Beloved
and
Against Nature
for their literary qualities and cultural significance, and gained pleasure from doing so, they were only books; perhaps it was unreasonable to expect them to be anything more. They were like 1994's
Sleeps with Angels
and 1982's
Trans
respectively, two fine Neil Young albums, one the mature statement of a master, the other an experimental flop championed by a significant minority, but both chiefly understood in relation to other Neil Young albums and appreciated almost exclusively by fans of Neil Young. Or so I felt at that time, though perhaps not in those exact terms.

I was nearly forty years old, a married man, a father and, however much I wriggled, a mature adult. Midway on life's journey, it was probably unrealistic, if not a little pathetic, to expect books to be anything more than books.

On my way out of the house that morning, then, I had grabbed my copy of
Atomised
off the shelf because
Atomised
was the next book on my list and I needed something for the train. It was the same copy I had bought in the late twentieth century but never read. At the station, I succumbed to a magazine instead, a habit it was proving hard to break. As the autumn countryside sped past, I flicked through the magazine and gazed out the window, conserving my energies for
The Name of Action
. When I arrived at the Library, I was glad to observe Library protocol by depositing my belongings in a downstairs locker, save for a pencil, a notepad and your novel. I rode the escalator to Rare Books & Music, found Desk 294, retrieved
The Name of Action
from the Issue Desk, sat down on this excellent chair and began to read.

The Name of Action
was terrible. It was as though someone had concocted a malicious novel-length satire of a Graham Greene novel. No wonder Greene had tried to bury it. This was not like Neil Young's obstinate refusal to issue
Time Fades Away
(1973), one of his most important albums, on CD or via Spotify or iTunes – or maybe it was, except that
Time Fades Away
is a masterpiece and
The Name of Action
, which lacked anything in the way of a convincing setting, theme, character or plot, was a piece of crap. Either way, as a book, it could only be of interest to Greene completists. My pilgrimage was meant to be about enlightenment, not complete-ism for some bourgeois record-collector to get purist about, to paraphrase another of my old heroes.

I picked up your book, Michel, and opened it. Like
The Name of Action
, it was a first edition; and its publisher was William Heinemann, the same windmill logo embossed in gold leaf on both spines, seventy years apart. After successive corporate takeovers during the 1980s, William Heinemann is now part of Penguin Random House, the conglomerate which employs 10,000 people across five continents and comprises nearly 250 ‘editorially and creatively independent imprints'; in the UK, its most admired authors are probably you and the late Michael Jackson. Only half-concentrating, I cast my eye down the opening paragraph of the Prologue:

‘This is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless closely in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared; the relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.'

Ha! That was very good.

I read a little further. A biologist called Michel Djerzinski has organised his own leaving drinks to mark his departure from the research institution where he has worked for seven years. The party is a dismal failure; by 7.30pm it has broken up. Djerzinski walks one of his colleagues back to her car, a Golf. He smiles, they shake hands. He has remembered to smile, preparing himself mentally, but in retrospect wonders whether they could have kissed on both cheeks, ‘
like visiting dignitaries or people in show business
'. When his now ex-colleague does not immediately start her car, Djerzinski sits in his Toyota and wonders what she can be doing. ‘
Why had she not driven off? Was she masturbating while listening to Brahms?
' Djerzinski drives back to his Paris apartment, feeling like a character from ‘
a science-fiction film he had seen at university
'. He discovers his pet canary has died. He eats a ready-meal from Monoprix's Gourmet range ‘
washed down with a mediocre Valdepeñas
', and dumps the dead bird in the rubbish chute: ‘
What was he supposed to do? Say mass?
' Djerzinski goes to bed, has a terrifying nightmare about giant snapping worms, old coffee filters and ravioli in tomato sauce, swallows some sleeping pills and passes out. ‘
So ended his first night of freedom.
'

That was it. I gathered up my stuff, returned
The Name of Action
to the Issue Desk, retrieved my bag from its locker and, without giving ‘Sitting On History' a second glance, sprinted out onto the Euston Road and jumped on a number 390 bus heading for Archway. The longed-for
coup de foudre
had finally occurred.

While reading Huysmans a few days earlier, I had scribbled down the following passage from
À rebours
, which seemed to capture what I was still searching for: ‘
However much a reader wants to rid himself of prejudice and refrain from passion, he naturally prefers those works which correspond most intimately with his own personality . . . He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle.
' Now here I was, carried along both with
Atomised
and on it; similarly, the 390 bus to Archway. If this were a book, it would be almost too perfect.

I was making for the Archway Tavern, the pub in North London where The Kinks were photographed for the gatefold cover of their 1971 LP
Muswell Hillbillies
. I felt myself drawn to the place like a spawning salmon or a dying elephant or, more accurately, an ageing, sentimental Kinks fan. As with
The Unnamable
by Samuel Beckett, which I had listened to in a pub – it's a long story, Michel – I wanted to be out in the world, with a drink in my hand, surrounded by slot machines and Irish alcoholics. I knew intuitively that
Atomised
was a vital book and, for that reason, I did not need to read it in a library; the library I needed was inside me.

Here is what I liked most about
Atomised
: it was brutally, bitterly, appallingly funny. I sat in that pub and sniggered so hard and so often that I frequently had to stop reading and put the book down to pause and metaphorically rub my disbelieving eyes. Yes, it was bleak. Obviously it was filthy, monotonously so. But more than anything,
it was alive and it spoke to me
. I was so taken aback that all I could do was laugh.

I am not sure I could ever truly love a book I didn't find funny, at least a little. This may be a failing on my part but if the writer offers no palliative, nothing to manage the pain, ironically I find it hard to take their work seriously. Perhaps it's because I'm English. Near the end of
Atomised
, there's an English character who says this:

‘People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There's some truth in it; it's pretty stupid, though. Irony won't save you from anything; humour doesn't do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn't matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you've developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That's when you stop laughing. After that, there's just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. You might say, after that, there's only death.'