The Garden For The Blind

I have had no less than five emails in the last two days from different commercial organisations to inform me that ‘the most anticipated book of the year’ is now available for purchase. They’re talking, of course, about Dan Brown’s Inferno.

Now, as a matter of fact, I would rather gnaw off my own arm than read one of Dan Brown’s books. There’s more than one reason for this. For a start, having grown up a Catholic, been educated by Jesuits, and known people in Opus Dei, I find the premises of his works utterly ludicrous. For another, his prose continually strikes me as clunky as this piece in the Telegraph illustrates

But the man shifts product! It cannot be denied. He sells more books in five minutes than I will sell in my lifetime. So is this just sour grapes on my part? Maybe, but I think there’s to it than that. It reminds me of a time when I was very young and my mother took me to a nearby park in which there was a garden for the blind. As we were walking through this garden I told my mother that I couldn't understand the point of it because the blind wouldn't be able to see the flowers. My mother laughed. 'The point is all the lovely smells,' she said.

I didn't reply because I couldn't smell anything at all. As I eventually came to understand some years later, I have almost no sense of smell. (Indeed, I once woke up to find my duvet on fire but it wasn't the smell that had woken me up; it was thirst.)

I think I'm missing some sense when I read, also, and probably when I write whereas Dan Brown has that sense in spades. So when I try to read something like The Da Vinci Code I only get an overwhelming feeling of frustration because I can't smell the part of it that's likeable. I can only smell the bit that's terrible. I'm always trying to smell the bit that's likeable. I know it's there but I can never catch even the faintest whiff.

The Undiscovered World

Over the holiday my grandson and I were playing with a balloon left over from a Christmas party. At a certain point in the game I repeated aloud some lines from one of his favourite books.

To tell the truth, it's a book I really hate reading for a number of reasons. It's written in such sparse language that it feels as though you're scanning a shopping list rather than taking part in a narrative; the illustrations are unsophisticated and remind me of the kind of graphics you encounter in a low-end computer game; and the plot ends up with the hero realising that it had all been a dream - the kind of ending I used to give the stories I wrote in primary school.

But my grandson loves it so I'm obliged to suspend my aesthetic judgement and read it to him over and over again. He's been known to demand this book twelve times in immediate succession, by the end of which I'm practically screaming through my forced jollity.

On this particular occasion as I kicked the balloon towards the front door I quoted gleefully from the text. 'He shoots,' I cried. 'He scores! He's won the game. He gets the trophy. He holds it high. He wakes up.'

The effect on my grandson was electric. He had been running around, laughing giddily but now he stopped in his tracks, staring at me intently with a look of wonder on his face.

It was clear to me that he was experiencing a minor shift in his world view brought on by the realisation that the words he was so familiar with could have an existence outside the covers of the book in which he normally encountered them. He was, in fact, discovering one of the key features of narrative - its extendibility into real life.

I felt immediately ashamed of my cynicism as I understood that what I had dismissed as a clumsy and amateurish piece of writing was for my grandson an essential tool in his struggle to make sense of the undiscovered world that lay all around him as far as his eyes could see.

The Sky Over Leitrim

I know I haven't posted for ages but I've been working all hours, seven days a week and that's the truth. Recently, however I had a week off in our family house in North Leitrim which, for those of you who don't know it, is a lovely and largely unspoilt part of Ireland.

I say a week off but in fact a great deal of my time was spent doing things like standing on the top of a ladder which was itself perched precariously on a wooden bench, clutching a bucket and spoon as I ladled out from the guttering years of sediment which had coalesced into a thick black mass with the consistency of Christmas pudding from which innumerable tiny sycamore trees were attempting to colonise our roof.

However, the evenings were a different matter. Rosie and I sat in silence gazing out at the vast dome of the sky, something that you never see in London. We watched the great cloud masses, forming, dissolving and reforming, throwing up transitory images of animals and demons, boats and chariots, warriors and great grey-bearded giants, all the while descending through a parade of colours from buff, through pink, lilac and purple to inky black. I did not care if I never wrote another word. It was enough just to sit and stare.

We also caught up on a bit of reading and among the titles I devoured was Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn. It quite took my breath away. So rarely do I read something that seems to me to be absolutely perfect but Brooklyn is such a book.

I was reminded of Jane Austen which sounds ridiculous since Austen is so quintessentially English and Tóibín is so very Irish. But both writers concern themselves with the way society, particularly through the vehicle of the family, bears down on the emotional life of the individual; both use dialogue and detail to such cunning effect; and both dissect embarrassment with such forensic precision. My only complaint was that it had to end.

The same could be said for my week away. All too soon I found myself gazing at the heavily made-up and absurdly dressed stewardess as she informed passengers that in the event of an emergency oxygen masks would be released from the panels above our heads. And then before I could even locate the nearest emergency exit I was back in London where the skyline is strictly rationed, where allowances are decreasing daily and where my computer will tolerate no idleness.

Why Did That Book Get Published?

‘If he/she can get published so can I’. This is an assertion I regularly hear aspiring authors say. The brasher ones put it more bluntly. ‘That book (often some international best-seller) is a pile of crap. My book is a million times better than that.’

I think anyone who has ever found themselves thinking like this would be well advised to dedicate some time to reading books that they really don’t like and considering the question, ‘Why did this get published?’ And I mean really considering the question, not simply resorting to some easy formula like, ‘It’s because the general public is stupid,’ or 'he/she obviously knew someone in publishing.'

Reading books that you think are really clever, really well written or really profound, is an important thing to do. It feeds your soul. But reading books that thoroughly irritate you, that seem ponderous, or trashy or impossible to believe in, is also important. It takes you out of your comfort zone, it makes you think hard about the audience for books (i.e. other people). It teaches you lessons you won’t learn in any other way.

I’m not saying it’s easy. Once, following my own advice, when I was obliged to travel from London to Newcastle and back by train in one day, I took a copy of Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer and nothing else. I was determined to get to grips with it. But I failed. In the end I found that I preferred to stare out of the rain-streaked window for seven hours rather than lose myself in Jeffrey Archer’s prose.

Nevertheless I still think that reading books that you would never have published yourself if you had been in charge of the publishing house is an extremely useful exercise. Because the truth is that there is always a reason why a book gets published and it is not, no matter how much you might want to believe it, because the author is sleeping with, related to, lives next door to, or went to school with the editor. Or that people are stupid. It's because the author is doing something right. You just haven't spotted it yet.

A Reading Revolution

I’ve recently come back from a week spent in Cheshire with eighteen other writers. We were all on a training course run by The Reader Organisation teaching us how to facilitate reading groups.

Surely you don’t need to be trained to run a reading group, I hear you say. Well that’s what I thought before I went. After all, I’d run a reading group in my local community for several years. But not the way The Reader Organisation runs them.

They started off in Liverpool as a small project run by the university. Now they’ve practically taken over the whole of Merseyside, they have a group at the heart of government in the Cabinet Office, and Australia is inviting them to set up their operation over there.

So what’s it all about? Well I wouldn’t like to be too definitive. I only spent a week there. But, in short, what they’re trying to do is create a reading revolution. They’ve had enough of celebrity biographies, of people being deprived of their access, no their entitlement, to our rich cultural heritage.

The engine of change is guided reading groups in which the facilitator reads aloud with the group, stopping every now and then to talk about the text, but not in a directed way. This is not about telling people what to think. It’s about finding out how the text resonates with each and every reader.

The focus is on writers of proven depth, and they concentrate on evoking an emotional response. That’s the key. They don’t have any truck with critical theory, which they see as all too often creating barriers to reading.

Does it work? You bet it does. They work with prisoners, with people who have mental health problems, with recovering addicts, with difficult teenagers on problem estates, with elderly people in care homes suffering from dementia (yes, that’s dementia folks), with people recovering from strokes. And the group members gain confidence, self-esteem and articulacy. I know because I met a number of them.

I know this probably sounds like a description of a cult to you. But if it is, then it’s an entirely benevolent cult because it’s purpose is to re-establish the reading habit as a way of rebuilding community, and as a force for social good and personal change. Their mission is quite simply to put our society back in touch with a huge, artistic and emotional resource that our educational system, with its emphasis on talking about books rather than on reading them for pleasure, seems to have entirely lost touch with.

That name of that resource is literature.

The Pleasure Of Reading

One of the delights of being on holiday is that you can gorge yourself on reading without feeling guilty about neglected chores. And that's exactly what I've been doing. I don't normally review books in this blog because I've got a Goodreads page where I do all that, but every now and then I read something that strikes me as so special I really must mention it. In this case it's The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. It's such an enormous pleasure to read, so solidly and carefully made, so emotionally involving that I feel quite reassured about the state of the contemporary British novel.

Perhaps that sounds silly but you read so much pompous twaddle like - well perhaps I'd better not say - and you think, 'God, is this the best we can do nowadays?' But then along comes Sarah Waters and you find yourself thinking, 'Bloody hell, this is like some hitherto undiscovered masterpiece by a classic nineteenth century author, except it's modern at the same time.'

Only a couple of days ago I said in a post that, as an author of whatever genre it's all too easy to be intimidated by master writers whether alive or dead. But Sarah Waters doesn't intimidate; there's nothing pretentious or showy about the writing. It's just an incredibly good piece of work. I know that when I get to the end I will be distraught that it's over but I still can't bear to put it down.

I remember having that feeling as a child, taking books home from the library and losing myself in them for days, getting to the end and feeling like I had lived part of somebody else's life. It's so good to recapture that.

The Most Disappointing Book I Ever Bought

The most disappointing book I ever bought was a collection of short stories produced by the Arts Council of England many years ago. At that time they used to publish an anthology of new writing annually in a thick paperback edition. I would buy it as soon as it came out, keen to see what was happening at the cutting edge of literature.

In those days I was at the start of my career, married with two small children, and struggling to pay the rent on our flat in a fairly insalubrious part of South-East London. We couldn’t afford a washing machine so once a week I would make a pilgrimage to the laundrette with my washing in a black plastic sack and sit there reading while it tumbled round and round in one of the huge old machines that looked like they had been designed and built in the Soviet Union a decade earlier. It was not a chore I enjoyed. The place had an air of ingrained poverty and was frequented mostly by misfits and oddballs of one kind or another

On this occasion I set off as usual with my washing and my box of detergent, feeling a little less reluctant for I had my brand new anthology with me. When I got to the laundrette I saw with considerable pleasure that the place was empty. For a brief interval the daily struggle to feed, entertain, bath and put to bed two impossibly lively children could be forgotten, or at least exchanged for an hour’s uninterrupted reading. Bliss! Whistling to myself, I emptied the clothes into the washing machine, selected the wash I wanted, put in my coins and sat down to begin – only to discover that somehow I seemed to have forgotten my book. I was so cross I could have kicked myself, and the ensuing hour passed unbearably slowly.

At last, however, the washing cycle was finished. I opened the door of the machine and began to take out the clothes. But what on earth had happened to them? They all seemed to be covered in a slimy grey film. It took me a surprisingly long time to work out that I had not, after all, left my book behind. Instead I had impregnated all my clothes with the most exciting new writing that England had to offer.