The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (28 page)

What the author is trying to say – fuck it, what
I
am trying to say – in this paragraph is surprisingly simple, though the way I have articulated it is deliberately puzzling and playful. It's the most ornate expression of an idea that loops through this book like a double helix. We are creatures made as much by art as by experience and what we read in books is the sum of both. And if Michel Houellebecq is correct and life always breaks your heart – once they have begun,
the processes of decay are absolutely irreversible
– art is the equal and opposite reaction to that inevitable heartbreak, whether as a great book or a forgotten Neil Young album.

Time fades away, in other words; it's not any reason for us to give up trying to make it better.

War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy

The Code of the Woosters
by P.G. Wodehouse

‘Above him there was now nothing but the sky – the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds gliding slowly across it. “How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran,” thought Prince Andrew “– not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!. . .”'

War and Peace
, Book One, Part III, Chapter XVI

‘I braked the car.

“Journey's End, Jeeves?”

“So I should be disposed to imagine, sir.”'

The Code of the Woosters

A twenty-minute drive along the coast from where we live now stands the ruin of a medieval monastery. On overcast days, with rain in the air and the salt sea crashing on the rocks below, there is no more romantic destination. The sky is vast, the light supernal, the prospect blustery and dramatic. This, you say to yourself, is the sort of scene captured by Turner in one of his elemental seascapes, the kind of view which inspired Debussy to the grandeur of
La Mer
.
¹
The closer you study that view, however, the harder it becomes to maintain the impression of a limitless horizon. Industrial wind turbines cut across the natural spectacle. In the distance, through the ozone haze, your eye registers the concrete tower blocks of Southend-on-Sea and the Isle of Sheppey. You remind yourself that this is not the wide open sea of Melville or Murdoch but the Thames estuary, into which thousands of gallons of human effluent are pumped every day. And you recall that it is in the middle of this sewage-filled inlet that, a few years hence, the Mayor of London hopes to float an airport. You buy two coffees from the vending machine in the Visitor Centre with a heavy heart.

‘Happy birthday,' I said to my wife, as I placed the coffees on the table and wiped away the sugar, crisp packets and paper napkins left by the table's previous occupants.

Tina's nose was running and her cheeks were red from being stung by hailstones. ‘I needed that tissue,' she said.

Next to us, Alex was asleep in his stroller. We drank our coffee in what relationship counsellors refer to approvingly as ‘companionable silence'.

It was early October, the season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and my wife's birthday. It was almost a year since the trip
to Broadstairs which had accidentally started the List of Betterment. We were all a year older, at least. Over that time, I had completed forty-eight great books. It had not been painless, trouble-free or fun but as the finish line came in sight, I had no intention of not crossing it; there would be no insolent gestures of defiance in the manner of
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
. After nearly coming a cropper over
Of Human Bondage
and
Pride and Prejudice
, way back before Christmas, I had stuck doggedly to one guiding principle: run the race to its end. I had atoned for taking short cuts in previous events, deepened my knowledge and appreciation of the landscape and rekindled a flagging enthusiasm for fresh air and exercise, by which I mean the precise opposite of fresh air and exercise, i.e. sitting indoors with my nose in a book.
²
Most rewardingly, perhaps, I had learned from past mistakes. With forty-eight great books behind me, and one by Dan Brown, I had trained myself to be good at reading again. Now I was operating at the peak of my fitness. I wasn't about to let it go to waste.

On the way back to the car from the Visitor Centre, the wind and rain whipping round our heads, I tapped Tina on the shoulder.

‘I want to pack my job in,' I said. ‘I think I can make a go of it as a freelancer.'

‘Right,' she replied from inside the hood of her blue Regatta wet weather anorak, the same one she had bought on our honeymoon in the Western Isles of Scotland, one half of a matching pair of anoraks which, when we wore them together, made us look like we were on a special day out from sheltered accommodation – which, in a sense, we were.

‘Also,' I said, ‘I need to write another book.'

‘Is this news meant to be my birthday present?' Tina enquired as she unlocked the door of our oceanic green Volkswagen Polo, the same car which, when we bought it two years earlier, I had promised to learn to drive, as I had faithfully promised to learn to drive earlier cars, a promise which, each time it was made, I sincerely believed would result in driving lessons, a passed test and a more equal division of automotive labour, yet which somehow I perpetually failed to keep, though I resisted the suggestion that I had in any way broken my promise, because one fine day I still intended to make good on it. Still, I knew better than to ask too often for a ride into town.

‘Of course not,' I said.

‘Will I need to be Mrs Pevsner this time?' asked Tina warily.
³

‘Unlikely,' I said.

‘Thank heavens for that,' she said. ‘How long will it take?'

‘Eighteen months . . . ?' I replied hesitantly; it couldn't take much longer than that, surely.

‘All right then,' said my wife, getting into the car. ‘So what is my birthday present?'

‘
War and Peace
,' I said. ‘Will you read it with me? I've got two copies at home. I haven't wrapped yours up yet though.'

Tina looked at me with her pale blue eyes, the same eyes with which she has looked levelly at me for nearly twenty years now, a slight fleck of hazel in the right eye, eyes which are adept at communicating a range of emotions, from amusement to irritation to deep disgruntlement with the occupant of the passenger seat, who will be qualified to offer his opinion on parallel parking techniques when, and only when, he learns to drive, the eyes which have been miraculously reproduced in the physiognomy of our beautiful son, the eyes of the young woman with whom I fell in love behind the counter of a bookshop,
a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, when we were only humble service droids, she the long-suffering R2 unit to my irksome Threepio.

‘All right then,' she said.

‘Thank you,' I replied.

Tina studied her windblown face in the rear-view mirror. ‘Look at that,' she said. ‘Farmer f**king Giles.'

‘Farmer who?' asked Alex, who had just woken up.

‘Farmer funky Giles,' Tina replied. ‘He's like a farmer, but he's a funky farmer. On his farm, he's got a disco. After tea, all the animals go to the barn and play party games and have a disco.'

‘Really?' asked Alex.

‘Absolutely,' I said. ‘He's really funky!'

At moments such as these, service droids stick together.

As we turned out of the car park and into the lane that leads back to the main road, I glanced over at the square-topped towers of the monastery, silhouetted against the bay and the lowering sky. ‘
From the water they are a moving sight on the brink of the bleak promontory
,' remarks the Pevsner guide to North East and East Kent. ‘
It is a disgrace that the inland road approaches through the vulgarest caravan site in the county
.' It is this kind of interjection that gives the
Buildings of England
series its inimitable character. The guide will be calmly listing the architectural properties of a building, its apsidal chancel or pilaster buttresses, and then, all of a sudden, explode with rage or incredulity at whatever monstrosity has just offended the compiler's eye: a particularly hideous office block or leisure centre, a caravan site which is not merely vulgar but
the vulgarest in the county
.

Many of my favourite books mimic the Pevsner guides in this respect, as though the narrator and their subject have become locked in an increasingly ill-tempered tussle for control of the text:
Pale Fire
by Nabokov,
Revolution in the Head
by Ian MacDonald,
Flaubert's Parrot
by Julian Barnes, most of B.S. Johnson's novels, even Roger Lewis's cantankerous
The Life and Death of Peter Sellers
. I suppose
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
is the prototype in fiction; and, although it was not my intention at the outset, it seems to be how
The Year of Reading Dangerously
has turned out. At every turn, the author's attempts to dictate their terms are frustrated and contradicted by the book they find themselves writing or the circumstances in which they are trying to write it; hence the term
contradictatorial
, which I have just come up with despite the hellish drilling and banging of the workmen doing up the property next door.
⁴

Like many women, I suspect, Tina does not have much time for the Contradictatorial School. It does seem to be a style of writing that is practised and enjoyed almost exclusively by men, a fact which disappoints me. For a previous birthday, I had bought her Ian MacDonald's scintillating
Revolution in the Head
which, as a huge Beatles fan, I thought she would love; one of the talents that first attracted me was her ability to recite The Beatles' Christmas 1964 fan-club flexidisc in its entirety. But she could not get along with it. Maybe there is something intrinsically blokeish about a book which takes The Beatles' recorded legacy, lays it out in precise chronological order, weighs and measures it, and then complains vehemently about the parts it doesn't like. And it is this in-built, ineluctable blokeishness I find disconcerting. I have spent most of my adult life trying not to act like a typically male man, so to discover one's predilection for a book, or particular style of book, may well be governed not by taste or choice but by an arbitrary allocation of
chromosomes and gametes, feels like an own goal, as though one had been compelled to conclude a thematically important paragraph with a cliché drawn from a sphere of activity one professed to despise; balls to that.

Most straight men are an embarrassment; that much is clear. They enjoy porn, Sky Sports, racing cars, barbecues and gadgets; they stink of Lynx deodorant. Though they mostly prefer the company of other men, they are scared stiff of being mistaken for women or homosexuals. In general, as we have seen, they perceive reading as a feminised activity and, although they do read books, these tend to be about either Joe Strummer or the Mafia, or have some rigid practical application, e.g.
How to Cook Great Barbecue Food without Looking Too Gay
. According to a survey from the National Literacy Trust, four out of five fathers have
never read a bedtime story to their children
, either because they see it as the mother's job or because
We're Going on a Bear Hunt
doesn't have enough lesbians in it. Four out of five! I have to share toilet facilities with these losers. In the words of Eeyore the Donkey, which four out of five men may never know the joy of sharing: ‘
“Pathetic,” he said. “That's what it is. Pathetic.”
'

Fig. 15:
‘Down Hole'
, David Shrigley, 2007.

(© David Shrigley)

Tina has always said she could never have married a man who did not love books. Was she aware how reckless she had been? At a stroke, she was reducing the field of potential life-partners by up to 80 per cent. Take into account the 10 per cent of men who are gay and that leaves a shallow breeding pool consisting mostly of the myopic, weak-chested or lame. Really, as I never tire of reminding her, she was lucky to have found me. So what if I had never learned to drive? I had all my own teeth and would rather the cost of a Sky Sports subscription be spent on fresh flowers and tickets to West End musicals – and books, of course.

I strive not to behave like a manly man. Likewise Tina, though unquestionably a womanly woman, is by no stretch of the imagination a girly girl. She does not totter round the place on high heels, spend weekends being pampered with her girlfriends at a luxury spa hotel, or even possess a red lipstick (‘tarty', apparently). She did confess to a little crush on David Tennant when he was Doctor Who but then so did I. In fact, when we discuss our relationship, we often conclude it is more like a double act than the traditional union of husband and wife: R2-D2 and C-3PO, Bob Ferris and Terry Collier from
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?
, Blanche and Baby Jane Hudson, even Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon in
The Trip
, driving around the English countryside, bickering and trying to make one another laugh. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not us.