The reading room was full to capacity with books. Overfull. Cartons from sales counters and household closures, from deceased estates and merging book businesses had been brought in over the years. When the shelves were too quickly filled, they had built more, developing a system of folding shelves hinged and mounted on gliding casters, that pulled out like a fan to display their contents then folded back against the walls when not in use. This way, Dr Wheeler increased the capacity of the collection by thousands of titles. She managed to include every one of the complete novels of some of her favourite authors: Anthony Trollope, who had published four a year, and was thus an intimidating prospect for most personal libraries; Ruth Rendell, in all her guises; Balzac, whose human comedy seemed endless; and Dick Francis. And she installed, from thrift stores and charity deposits around the country, every single Reader’s Digest title she could find, for what was a ministry of reading in a democratic country if it only included the literary elite? She ensured that every genre and subgenre, however specialist or lowly, was represented. Mills and Boon romances and Bible Society children’s stories. And Bibles, several of them, in various translations.
Finally the reading room was equipped with the most important features of all: readers. The Capital was not necessarily known for its inclusiveness, indeed security had increased since the last election to the point that Dr Wheeler felt the President was becoming a little too presidential. She herself felt more, not less, threatened by the presence of men in black suits and sunglasses with small wires in their ears.
Morrissey was rather slower than the others, who had now all finished. They waited, sipping water, as she came to the final page. Helen and Jonesy were murmuring something about the wet and the crowds. They must have been discussing the recent Torquay literary festival, thought the minister, not an event she cared much for these days, though it had been her initiative several years back. Like all literary festivals it had rapidly grown—not that this was a bad thing—but it was one of these festivals where the author was in danger of outnumbering the reader. If the Torquay trend continued, there would be a real danger of supply outstripping demand. Very bad textual economics.
Finally, Morrissey too was done. She leaned back in her chair, gently cracking a thoracic vertebra.
‘You can see we have a problem,’ the minister said.
Tim’s ponytail shook from side to side. ‘Tricky,’ he said.
‘As you all know, this was vital research. We were on a turning point with our policies. And now this threatens to undermine so much of what we do.’
Kendall took off his thick-rimmed spectacles and polished them. ‘Well, I dispute that,’ he said. ‘The political monopoly of knowledge should be challenged. All the products of the textual industry are flawed and indeed reports hitherto have proved that consumers accept this as part of the contract.’
‘Kendall.’ He looked up at the minister’s sharp tone. ‘You’ve spent far too much time on that UN committee. I know that liberation of the reading class is a tenet of your politics—’ Kendall was a partially unreconstructed Marxist with structuralist leanings ‘—but you’re among friends here, remember. This is the ministry for reading. We’re all about empowering the reader. We always have been. And the flawed text is a given. We had Culler et al to thank for that back in the eighties.’
‘But the report says…’
‘The report says inferior texts, not flawed. There’s a difference.’
‘Why, may I ask,’ Helen said, ‘Fossil Ridge?’
The minister had invited researchers from the International Brain Institute to carry out work on her former lending library readers. These results were recently consolidated with studies conducted in several other places, including the citizens of Frankfurt, undergraduate scholars at Cambridge, UK, and retirees who patronised the public libraries of Miami, Florida.
‘They are the perfect subjects, uncontaminated. And besides, the news is not all bad. Let’s first run through the positives.’
The results were crystal clear: not only did reading stimulate regions of the brain that were separate from the usual language-processing ones, but reading fiction aroused the sensory cortex. Stories stimulated the mind in every way. The IBI’s team had scanned brains of people who had read a short story or a sonnet. Their sensory cortices had lit up like Christmas trees when reading the line, ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May’, while remaining dark and dormant reading the simpler, ‘The wind was strong during May’. Metaphor was the key here, unlocking the door, but it was narrative that threw it wide open. When participants in the studies read sentences like ‘The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off’, their motor cortices were revealed to be as active as if they too had just missed being stabbed by their dead mate’s girlfriend and were running away from danger. It explained the curious sensation of elation and restlessness readers often experienced, sometimes for days, after finishing a title like The Far Pavilions, and indeed the sheer exhaustion felt by those who had made it to the end of a Bryce Courtenay novel.
‘This report states unequivocally that novels go beyond simulating reality,’ she said. ‘It confirms what you and I have known instinctively: readers enter fully into the mind, feelings and entire world of fictional characters. And that this is a good thing.’
All her life the minister had read novels, often guiltily with an idea she would be better off reading something utilitarian. But now here was the proof: reading fiction was work for the brain, as good as experiencing life directly. Reading a novel was literally massaging out the brain’s knots, sticking it on a treadmill, getting it to lift weights, and asking it to swim laps, all at once. And all in the comfort of a lounge chair. Of course reading was sport, of course. She’d known that instinctively, facing up to the bug-eyed sports mistress back in high school. And what could be healthier for the nation than this?
But then she sighed. Jonesy sighed. Morrissey followed. They all sighed. A long drawn out exhalation that expressed what was in all their hearts. They turned to the penultimate page of the report, the section they had all underlined. ‘Fiction,’ it stated, ‘offers a rich replication and a vivid simulation of reality. The brains tested did not distinguish between any sort of fiction but responded to all examples that explored human social and emotional life.’ There followed a list of sample authors and their texts utilised in the research.
Kendall snorted. ‘May as well tell Franzen and Atwood to give up now,’ he said.
The wonderful and thoroughly frightening result of the IBI study was the fact that the brain—that complex, unpredictable, maddening organ—the brain, in its apprehension of what stimulated sensory, motor or olfactory cortices, did not distinguish between good literature or bad. It responded equally to the mangled metaphors of James Patterson or the clichéd imagery of the local town poet as it did to the sublime prose of Sebald. In identifying so closely with the stories of Nicholas Sparks or the poems of Walt Disney the brain neglected to discriminate between the quality of the language. Depressingly, it seemed that Gina Rinehart’s poem ‘Our Future’ was equal to Intimations of Immortality.
Theirs was a democracy and the minister had striven to represent all forms of literature and demonise none, but this was a bitter blow. Poor little Helen put her small head in her delicate hands and groaned. ‘We may as well give up now.’
‘Pull yourself together, Helen.’ The latent librarian in Dr Wheeler spoke more harshly than she meant.
‘I’m more worried about this,’ Kendall said, tapping at the section reporting on two smaller studies conducted earlier and incorporated into the report. Professor Grayson T. Greer and Dr Thurston Davies Ward (the minister loved the names of American academics) had concluded that people who read fiction regularly were better able to understand others, to sympathise, to empathise. They were, undeniably, better human beings. ‘Fucking Leavis was right, apparently.’
‘Now, no need to get carried away. It’s not that clear,’ Jonesy sa
id. ‘It could be flawed research. Maybe it’s just that more empathetic kinds of people read novels in the first place.’
‘It can’t be right,’ said Helen. ‘My English lecturers at uni were the worst types. The very worst.’ She shuddered. ‘Living disproof of the theory that reading made you a better person.’
‘But we want that, don’t we?’ Her staff all looked at the minister as if she’d gone mad. ‘I mean, we want proof that reading is good for you in every way. Not that moral nonsense, of course. But we want this scientific research to support our work, to show that the brain is enlarged and improved by reading fiction.’
‘These findings prove that readers identify with the independence of Sybylla Melvin, or the paedophilia of Humbert Humbert,’ Morrissey said. ‘Readers will turn to any author to seek role models. Miles Franklin or Vladimir Nabokov.’ The minister threw a glance at her. Morrissey was not normally so perspicacious. ‘Or Ayn Rand or Harold Robbins or Barbara Cartland.’
‘Or Kathy Lette,’ Helen said.
‘Exactly,’ Kendall said.
They all stared at the desk at that.
‘Well,’ Dr Wheeler finally said. ‘Let’s concentrate on the positives. Reading great literature enhances us in every way. So, apparently, does reading bad.’
‘What about the opposition?’ Jonesy said. ‘They’ll crucify us when they find out about this.’
‘They’re not going to, are they?’ She waved her hands at their copies of the report. ‘All completely confidential. You’re not even going to take these away. And Ainsley can be trusted implicitly. She’s the only one who’s liaised with the International Brain Institute.’
‘But the IBI could send their report to anyone!’ Morrissey was chewing a fingernail.
‘No,’ Dr Wheeler said. ‘There’s an exclusivity clause built into the brief. I commissioned it, and paid for it. It’s mine alone. Ours.’
‘How much?’ Tim asked.
‘Enough.’ Her left cheek twitched a little. ‘Look, you really don’t need to know. Jonesy has just raised the whole point of this exercise. The opposition. Now, I’ve had an idea.’
6 Ramelli’s reading machine
The President considered the idea rather ambitious, but agreed it should be attempted. Several important pieces of legislation had recently been stymied thanks to a couple of independents, hitherto cooperative, becoming rather too independent. An increasingly empowered opposition whose popularity was rising in the opinion polls could only mean one thing come the next election. The President was smart enough to know that success would rely almost entirely on his own personal efforts, but not intelligent enough to understand how to do that. He needed to offer an alternative to the tireless capers of the Leader of the opposition and his circles. But he was neither intellectual nor athlete, occupying an unhappy place that saw him most comfortable attending the rugby rather than participating in it. Better still, watching it on TV, before MasterChef or The Voice. During all the years of his leadership he feared being found out to be neither sportsman nor nerd. Not for him the ability to dismiss cricket in favour of Mahler. He regarded bat and ball sports and classical music with equal confusion and boredom. He preferred a magazine to a book but would read the odd crime fiction paperback despite what Dr Wheeler assumed about his preference for hardbacks. But her monthly titles were simply shelved behind his desk where they featured in the occasional news photo: the nation would have assumed he was as au fait with David Malouf’s latest works as he was with the national debt. But with an election on the horizon, he needed to act. He needed to boost his popularity and plant himself firmly in a distinct cultural space and so capture the hearts and minds of the voting public. Resistance to reading aside, he’d known the best person to sort this out was Dr Wheeler. And now, looking over the drawings and notes she’d presented him with, he thought she might just have done it.
‘And it will be a way of getting that lot off their iPhones,’ she said.
The careless use and abuse of handheld devices had contributed to much recent controversy, specifically surrounding the shadow treasury office whose phone logs were in disagreement with claims its staff were in Brussels or Houston for conferences and summits. These cities, it was well known, were considered the most boring in the world, and therefore the public was alarmingly tolerant of the alleged jaunts of the shadow treasurer in places like Majorca and Cancun.
‘I’m not sure that would be feasible. And don’t people love their handhelds?’ The President had a deep attachment to all his devices. He wondered if she knew how long he spent in the bathroom with his iPad.
‘I think it’s worth a try,’ Dr Wheeler said. ‘Besides, Ramelli’s reading machine is considered by historians to be the original hypertext program, predating the world wide web by four hundred years.’
‘Is that true?’
‘It says so on Wikipedia.’ They both laughed.
It was an idea so original to the point of being mad. But Dr Wheeler exuded implacable confidence. Fossil Ridge had clearly been an exceptional training ground if it nurtured this sort of temperament. The President congratulated himself on appointing her to the ministry. When she’d argued for the title of Reader, he’d remained privately unconvinced at the time, even though he’d concurred. Now he suspected she might be a genius.
The machine allowed a reader to scroll through several texts at a time. In fact Dr Wheeler commissioned two prototypes, not one. The first followed Agostino Ramelli’s design and was like a small Ferris wheel, delivering opened books on trays to the reader who could then browse through up to ten at a time. Seated comfortably, the reader only had to push down on levers either side of the machine to bring the next text forward, or to recall the previous one, with the pages remaining in place where the reader left them, and positioned at a perfect angle for neck comfort. And the other machine was simply an immense lazy Susan, a circular table mounted with ball bearings on top of another slightly larger one, on which the reader could assemble as many texts as would fit, and twirl the top layer to read in order or at random, making notes if they wished on small tablets of paper fixed to the ledge left by the bottom layer. Paper-shy readers were not neglected. For them the minister commissioned a design that incorporated an easy chair and a screen. Readers could sit back in comfort, their legs raised, and read an e-reader held in place by a slender bracket, adjusted for size. By brushing their fingertips over a remote touchpad on the arm of the chair, they could turn a page with the least effort. The minister circulated copies of the woodcut images of Ramelli’s reading machine to designers and draughtspeople and within a short time had two sample machines supplied by a furniture maker who specialised in bespoke items like revolving bookcases and spiral steps for small private libraries. The revolving bookcase and the sliding book panels, as well-known and ingenious as they might have been, were only a means of storing books. The reading machine was storage and use combined. And the design meant that reading was addictive. Of course reading already was, for Dr Wheeler and many like her, but for the opposition, addiction needed to be cunningly nurtured. The samples seemed perfect. She would test them at once.
After less than a day trialling the Ferris-wheel-like reading machine the President was waving away his media advisers and policy directors and cancelling important meetings. He had even refused a long-anticipated lunch with the chief executive officer of Qantas. When Dr Wheeler went to check on him in the afternoon he was wolfing down a peanut butter sandwich brought to him by a worried assistant, keeping one hand on the lever that operated the machine.
She peered over his shoulder. He was leafing through Tristram Shandy, smiling broadly through his sandwich. On the tray below it, just at knee-level, was an issue of Griffith Review. As the President pressed the lever, the machine rotated with the most satisfying gliding movement and with a smooth stop delivered a copy of All The President’s Men right below his face. When she finally spoke to him, the President did not even turn his head to reply.
&nbs
p; ‘So,’ she repeated. ‘Success?’ He nodded, a few crumbs falling from his mouth onto the next novel, which she could see was a gold-embossed one. She brushed them off discreetly. Even a Robert Ludlum title deserved respect. More than respect, if it meant that it helped corral the reluctant reader.
‘We’re good to go then?’ The President only nodded again.
It only took a few weeks. The Leader of the Opposition was pleasantly surprised by the spirit of bipartisanship demonstrated by Dr Wheeler. Previous ministers had tended to treat the opposition with contempt, especially the more conservative and rural members who were considered incapable of engaging with narrative beyond stock or weather reports published in The Land or Agriculture Weekly, or whose appreciation of literature began and ended with ‘The Man from Snowy River’. Now when the minister’s departmental assistants began demonstrating the features of the reading machines, they were respectful, generous-minded. The Leader himself settled into the chair of the Ferris wheel machine and instantly relaxed. An active soul, a man who naturally gravitated towards pursuits like mountain climbing and kickboxing, he was generally disinclined to sit still for long enough to read a short story. Even in the chamber he was active, flexing his biceps, bouncing on the balls of his feet while speaking, or scurrying around consulting or plotting when not. Once he had even brought his weights to the chamber, unselfconsciously lifting a set of pink barbells up and down as he stared at the President with what he hoped was a cynical eye.
Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 9, Issue 5 Page 3
