The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (31 page)

Yet at the same time, the public's appetite for book-blah seems insatiable. Book clubs thrive in living rooms and online;
literary festivals draw ever more appreciative audiences; television and radio teem with celebrity booklovers; social networks buzz with instant comment and opinion. People love talking about books or listening to other people talk about them. And for those who want to try their hand at writing one, it has never been easier to get your magnum opus out into the world; with the aid of the web and tools like Calibre or Mobipocket, anyone can be a self-published Marx or Melville. Bestsellers have been created which previously would have been overlooked by mainstream publishing, such as Amanda Hocking's
Trylle Trilogy
or
Fifty Shades of Grey
by E.L. James.
¹¹
Glad tidings for freelancers: decent editors are suddenly much in demand.

In short, we have the chance to decide for ourselves how and what we read – and whether to pay for it. We need no longer rely on traditional brokers of culture and taste: agents, publishing houses, critics, booksellers, librarians. We can roam through space and history, choosing only what we know we like and ignoring all the chatter that seems irrelevant to us. If nothing takes our fancy, we can make our own books and launch them into the void. We can sell our work for peanuts or even give it away; having cut the ties to overheads such as production and distribution, we become our own typesetter, agent and publicity machine.

And what of printed books themselves? If we are bold and far-sighted enough, we can free ourselves from the burden of them – nasty, dusty things. According to some experts, they, like us, will be extinct in a generation. Hoarding boxes of books will seem like the symptom of a deeper malaise in a far-off historical epoch, quaint at best, like clots on the lungs of a Victorian consumptive. To own printed books, to value or prize them, this too may pass; it is happening already. We shall glide unencumbered through a future of clean, white lines and empty spaces, electronic, interconnected . . .

‘
“I know,” said Marvin, “you keep going on about it. It sounds awful.”
'

It may not surprise the reader to learn that I held back from buying an ereader. I was already in a lifelong, if somewhat abusive, relationship with books; I did not need to dally with a gadget. When ebook enthusiasts said there was none of the effort or inconvenience one associated with the bulk or weight of a printed book, I dismissed them. What were they talking about? Never in my entire life, not once, had I felt myself inconvenienced by having to use either hand, or both simultaneously, to hold a book; on the contrary, holding on to books would count as one of the top five uses to which my hands have been put over the years, maybe top three.
¹²
Each time someone breathlessly informed me they would never have read, say,
A Confederacy of Dunces
if it weren't for their new Kindle or Nook, all they were telling me was that they were a fully paid-up confederate dunce. Was this kind? Was it fair? No, and nor is life; for if it were, our towns and cities would still boast well-stocked libraries and bookshops, and the trees would be festooned with leaves and not bags of dog-shit. But I bow to the will of the people.

Therefore, with the motivational Cope–Jung axioms from page 227 still ringing in my ears, I decided I must face up to the future and acquire a Kindle;
¹³
I did not want to be the man who shrinks back from the new and strange.
¹⁴
Within a few weeks, the conclusion I reached was this: if you
like
reading, this is the object, unbeknownst to you, you have been waiting for; but if you
love
reading as I do, you may struggle to comprehend what all the fuss is about. Did it make reading better? Of course not. It's a useful addition to our library, not a replacement for it. I take the Kindle with me wherever
I go. But I also take a good book.

And so we return to
Under the Volcano
, Malcolm Lowry's tale of mescal and damnation set beneath Mexican skies. I chose this novel to commence my e-reading life because it was the book from the List of Betterment I most wanted to revisit. I had blogged about it during that summer. What I did not mention then was, although the dissipated, tempestuous atmosphere of
Under the Volcano
had made a strong impression on me, I was not sure I had grasped much of the book's deeper meaning. The substance of it slipped through my fingers. This is why I wrote only briefly about it at the time; neither the book nor the blog lent themselves to adequate first impressions and I did not want to commit myself until I knew what I was talking about. However, after the List of Betterment came to an end, the mood, the ghost of
Under the Volcano
remained until, six months later, I felt compelled to return to it. On a second reading, I felt I understood it better; the narrative came into focus and chains of images started to form around it: the riderless horse, the overgrown garden, the mescal hallucinations,
Las Manos de Orlac
, the poor dead dog. I realised, as I neared the final chapter for a second time, that I was going to have to read the novel at least once more and, moreover, that I wanted to.
¹⁵
I had not recognised it at first but when all was said and done,
Under the Volcano
was one of the great Great Books.

Under the Volcano
is a purposefully obscure novel. In his letter to publisher Jonathan Cape, to which I referred in the introduction of this book, Lowry describes it as ‘
my churrigueresque Mexican cathedral
' – a baroque and broad church. Though Cape acknowledged the novel's intricate construction, long passages perplexed or repelled him; he and two of his editors suggested major amendments to the book prior to publication, changes on which they were politely insistent. Lowry responded with a defence of the work he had laboured at for almost seven years. He contended – successfully, for the novel was published as it stood – that no reader could consciously apprehend all the meanings of
Under the Volcano
on ‘
first or even fourth reading
' but its cumulative effect might be felt
unconsciously
. ‘
The book should be seen as essentially
trochal,' he wrote. ‘
I repeat, the form of it as a wheel so that, when you get to the end, if you have read carefully, you should want to turn back to the beginning again . . . For the book was so designed, counterdesigned and interwelded that it could be read an indefinite number of times and still not have yielded all its meanings or its drama or its poetry
.' This was how I came gradually to appreciate the architecture and revolutionary design of
Under the Volcano
. It was a cathedral and a wheel; as Lowry said, a sort of machine.

I hardly need add that
Under the Volcano
is not for everyone. It is fragmentary and hallucinogenic. The style is intensely allusive, while the plot can accurately be described as elliptical. Some readers climb aboard the train and go for a round trip and have a great time. Others judge that Lowry's machine turns in an ever-tightening gyre until, like the mythical bird, it disappears up its own arse. In the sage words of Dan Brown, they should probably just read somebody else.

Anyway, it seemed appropriate to inaugurate a new sort of machine with an old one, and so I undertook my third pass at
Under the Volcano
on the Kindle. Or at least, I tried to. The ereader could not cope with it; more precisely, I could not cope with the ereader. I missed the slow satisfaction of accumulating pages between the thumb and fingers of the left hand. After three chapters, I reverted to my dear old paperback, such was the effort needed to overcome the innate drawbacks of reading this type of a book on this type of screen. There was no air; the blocks of text were too dense and relentless. If the driver of the book is the plot, and we are gripped by it, we read
in the moment
, thinking more or less only about the action as it unfolds and the words as they scroll in front of our eyes. But
Under the Volcano
is not a page-turner like
The Da Vinci Code
or
Fifty Shades of Grey
; it is a book that needs to be thought about, put down, reflected upon, flicked through, flicked back and read again. And this, remember, was a book I had read before. Though it would be a kind of achievement, I doubt any reader who completed their first attempt at the novel in this way would ever feel like trying it again.

Inevitably, there will come a time when the technology is up to the challenges of a book like
Under the Volcano
. Tablet computers are evolving rapidly. Right now, no doubt someone is preparing an app, perhaps using the content from Chris Ackerley and David Large's invaluable web-based companion to the novel.
¹⁶
When T.S. Eliot's publisher produced a
similar guide to
The Waste Land
for the iPad, it proved a hit with consumers, who could tap the screen and learn more about the costumes and the recipes, e.g. hot gammon, a pocket full of currants, a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. But, to come full circle, reading about
Under the Volcano
is not the same as reading
Under the Volcano
, diverting and demystifying though it may be. It is not the thing itself.

And yet, I have kept
Under the Volcano
on my Kindle. Irrationally, I like carrying it around with me. It is sitting on the desk here, look. The rest of the List of Betterment is on it too. Really, who needs 4001 books for a lifetime? Speaking for myself, I believe I could live out my days with just these fifty and be happy. I re-read quite a few of them while writing this book and I was never bored or let down or disappointed. The Andy Miller who exists in
The Year of Reading Dangerously
, who will be sheltered inside it once the story is complete, will spend eternity reading and re-reading that list, like Christopher Robin and Pooh at the top of the Forest, the enchanted place at the end of
The House at Pooh Corner
, sixty-something trees in a circle (‘
Christopher Robin knew that it was enchanted because nobody had ever been able to count whether it was sixty-three or sixty-four . . .
'). I have granted him that life and I envy him. Though they may not necessarily be the right ones, that Andy Miller has answers.

On the Kindle, I also carry around the books I have probably read more times in my life than any other:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
and its four sequels. How splendid it is to have them on an electronic book ‘
with a screen about three inches by four
', like the Guide itself. Douglas Adams would have approved. Unlike me, he was a man who embraced new technologies. Having begun his writing career as a self-confessed ‘computer dissident' – ‘I made my living making fun of computers' – he transformed, seemingly overnight, into the epitome of the early adopter. He is said to have owned the first Apple Macintosh in the UK. Was this the machine on which he wrote
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
, the fourth and worst of the
Hitchhiker's
books? In creative terms, Adams may have been better served by a humble typewriter, or a pad of paper and a biro. Computers presented the temptation of infinite rewrites and, as we have seen, Adams needed no encouragement in that direction.

Adams was only forty-nine when he died in 2001, a little older than I am now. This was a personal tragedy for his wife Jane and young daughter Polly. His early death also robbed the planet of Adams' humour, creativity and campaigning energy on behalf of endangered species such as the Bengal Tiger and the Northern White Rhino. And, if one subscribes to either Richard Dawkins' or Oolon Colluphid's proof of the non-existence of God, it was also a fatal error for Adams, because by doing something as uncharacteristically stupid as dying, he narrowly missed the techno-uprising he had predicted when he was alive. As his friend and fellow Apple buff Stephen Fry says, what is the confluence of the iPad and the Internet if not the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself, a bank of knowledge compiled by all of us? Of course, such a collaborative mechanism is not without its quirks. ‘The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
is a very unevenly edited book
,' wrote Adams presciently, ‘
and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time
.'

I met Douglas Adams on several occasions, most recently around the time of his virtual sixtieth birthday party. I would like to bring this book about books to a close by briefly describing each one of these meetings. After all, now that several biographies of Adams have been published and one former acquaintance is said to be working on an entire volume about what it was like to be his flatmate, I, like Charles Pooter, fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody' – why
my
reminiscences of Douglas Adams should not be interesting. So here they are.

Fit the First – Websters Bookshop, Croydon, 1982

On a hot Saturday afternoon, I waited in line for three hours for Adams to sign a copy of his new
Hitchhiker's
book,
Life, the Universe and Everything
. The long wait was not down to the size of the queue, which snaked round the edge of the shop and out the front door. With a certain inevitability, it was because Adams was terribly late.

Not that I minded. Thirteen was probably the peak of my
Hitchhiker's
infatuation. I adored the novels, the LPs, the original episodes I had taped off the radio and memorised. On this particular afternoon, I had my towel with me. No one had suggested I do this, it was a spontaneous and hilarious gesture I thought Adams might appreciate; in the event, many of those in the queue ahead of me seemed to have had the same brainwave. At least while we waited, we had something to
sit on.

Eventually, from a door near the back of the shop, an exceptionally tall and grumpy-looking man emerged. He marched across to the signing table and, without making eye-contact with anyone, began signing books with a gusto that can only be described as furious. In my career, I have encountered many pissed-off authors but none has ever seemed quite so nakedly unhappy as Douglas Adams did that afternoon. But I was thirteen, with a towel, and therefore equipped to screen out anyone's feelings except my own. As the queue inched forwards, I asked myself what spontaneous and hilarious message I might ask my hero to write. Then I remembered how Zaphod Beeblebrox signed photos of himself in part two of the second radio series of
Hitchhiker's
.