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

by Miller, Andy

  Beyond Black

  ‘“I have no objection to discuss it. I trust, my dear, I am always open to discussion.” There was a vibration in the old lady’s cap, as though she internally added: “and I should like to see the discussion that would change my mind!”’

  The Mystery of Edwin Drood

  On a beautiful day in late June, the sun sparkling on the lively breakers of Viking Bay, my companions and I followed the Grand Parade from the Pierremont War Memorial to Victoria Gardens on the seafront. Ahead of us strolled Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Mister Micawber and a fierce-looking dog in an England football shirt, for this was the gala opening of the annual Broadstairs Dickens Festival and all were welcome.

  According to my souvenir programme, Dickens visited Broadstairs regularly from 1837 until his extended stay in 1851 when he christened the town ‘Our English Watering Place’. In 1936, the centenary of The Pickwick Papers, an adaptation of ‘Pickwick’ was staged by local residents. The following year, 1937, it was repeated as the centrepiece of a small festival celebrating the centenary of Dickens’ first visit to the town. ‘Under the guidance of Gladys Waterer and Dora Tattam who lived in Dickens House,’ continued my programme, ‘the Festival grew and with the exception of the war years has been held annually ever since. In the 1950s costumed Dickensians around the town added colour to the Festival.’ Now football-shirted dogs had been admitted to the Grand Parade, as they have been to all public events in England in the twenty-first century, lining up beside the Queen at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday and, memorably, in 2012, carrying the Olympic Torch on the final leg of its journey, like a juicy, flaming bone. This is what Gladys Waterer and Dora Tattam might have wanted, and if they didn’t, they should have done. All right?!

  ‘Come to Broadstairs!’ urged Dickens in letters to his friends. ‘Come to Broadstairs! Come now!’ As Claire Tomalin makes clear in her recent biography, being a friend of Dickens could be exhausting. He was a demanding and irrepressible host, perpetually summoning members of his entourage to dine alongside him, listen to him read, stage impromptu theatricals, play billiards till dawn, stride with him for miles across the Kentish fields, campaign vigorously for constitutional reform, tour the workhouses, inspect the morgues, laugh uproariously, weep unrestrainedly and, if they were still breathing, come to Broadstairs.

  Broadstairs was still showing its gratitude 150 years later, not just for one week in June but all the year round, in the names of the shops and businesses which lined the route of the parade: the Dickens House Museum, of course, but also Peggoty’s Café, Copperfields Restaurant, The Old Curiosity Shop (bric-a-brac), Plate Expectations (crockery), Tidy Tim (barber), Gamps (pre-school nursery) and Barnaby Fudge (fudge). We passed all these – all save the ones I have just made up – as the procession wound its way down the hill to the bandstand on the seafront. There we were heartily welcomed by a town crier and, on a makeshift stage in front of a marquee selling arts and crafts, treated to two short extracts from Hard Times, that year’s Festival Play. And then a rather diffident ‘Charles Dickens’ stood up from his writing desk at the side of the stage and asked if there was anyone here present from his various books, from Great Expectations or A Christmas Carol or Nicholas Nickleby, at which point ‘Miss Havisham’ and ‘Jacob Marley’s Ghost’ and ‘Smike’ made themselves known, each expressing a few words of appreciation to their creator, seemingly oblivious to the desperate lives or afterlives he had bestowed on them. The sun shone, the audience applauded, ice cream was endemic. It was the best of times.

  It was hard to think of another author British people might celebrate in this manner; Shakespeare certainly, perhaps Austen or the Brontës, but that was about all. The British still love Dickens, even if they have never read him.1 No writer has ever produced such a cornucopia of archetypes and oddballs, so many of whom endure in the popular imagination. His characters are larger than life and so was he, to the extent that here in Broadstairs, it seemed natural for ‘Charles Dickens’ to share a stage with Mr Pickwick, Scrooge, the Artful Dodger and all the rest. As a writer-celebrity, Charles Dickens was as much his own creation as they were, the hero of his own life and beyond, and the public cannot forget him.

  Inevitably, however, some characters loom larger than others. There seemed to be no one in the crowd representing the less cherished works like Martin Chuzzlewit or Barnaby Rudge, and there was definitely nobody standing up for Dickens’ final, unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Unless you counted me. This was where Betterment had led me: back to Broadstairs and back to Boz. I was currently in the thick of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the only Dickens novel I had never read. It was, as expected, fantastic.

  Since the stumble over One Hundred Years of Solitude, Betterment had proceeded steadily and without serious incident. I had started keeping a blog, noting my thoughts and impressions of the books as I went. The decision to read Drood at this point was, I admit, partly inspired by forthcoming events in Broadstairs but also, having successfully completed thirty books, I wanted to try something more obscure by a writer I already liked and whose work I was fluent in. Dickens seemed an obvious candidate. I had read nearly all the major novels and had studied him at university. He was a local author. And I approved of his populist streak – no one will ever take to the streets of Hampstead dressed as their favourite character from Margaret Drabble.

  (I say I had chosen Drood because it was the only Dickens novel I had never read. Of course, this is not entirely accurate. It was the only Dickens novel with which I was entirely unfamiliar. In truth, I could not remember if had read Martin Chuzzlewit and Barnaby Rudge or not; if I had, it was a long time ago; equally, the little I knew of those books might have been gleaned from academic hearsay or the Sunday teatime classic serial. But I definitely knew nothing of Drood, if only because, being unfinished, it defied easy TV adaptation.2 So there was that. And although I felt confident I had never lied directly about having read Drood, at some point I had almost certainly expressed genuine enthusiasm for Dickens by claiming to have read ‘everything’ by him, as one does – as one tries not to.)

  The populism of Dickens – by which I mean not only his shameless playing to the gallery as a novelist and performer but also the fact that he was so successful at it – has long represented a kind of barrier to his reputation as a first-rate writer. Can someone so populist and popular really be as good as all that? Certain critics cavil at his humour, his sentimentality, his didacticism, his grotesquerie, his ‘chaste lovers and his puritanical heroines in their all-concealing draperies, sharing ethereal passions and just fluttering their eyelashes, blushing coyly, weeping for joy and holding hands’.3 Virginia Woolf, while acknowledging his greatness, classed him with Tolstoy as ‘the preachers and the teachers’, in contrast to Austen and Turgenev, who were ‘the pure artists’. To some, Dickens represents something regrettably provincial, suburban and middlebrow in the English cultural identity. And certainly, the Broadstairs Dickens Festival could be regarded as all these things; but it was also sincere and welcoming and unpretentious. It was a world away from Bloomsbury.

  The festivities were drawing to a close for the time being, so we decided to repair to the nearest public house, the Charles Dickens (‘Visit us during Dickens Week and your “Great Expectations” will become reality!!’). Inside, the Australian bar staff were all dressed up in period costume, bustles and stovepipe hats. They did not appear perturbed by this, probably because all Australians enjoy being hot.

  ‘What can I get ya?’ asked a cheerful barman in gaiters and cardboard sideburns.

  While I sipped at my pewter tankard of foaming porter – all right then, half a cider – I considered two of the books which had preceded The Mystery of Edwin Drood in my reading. Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black, an idiosyncratic alliance of ghost story and black farce, was located in the middle England where most people live yet which is seldom written about sympathetically by the literary novelists, whose minds are on higher planes and mo
re rarefied places:

  ‘Colette joined Alison in those days when the comet Hale-Bopp, like God’s shuttlecock, blazed over the market towns and dormitory suburbs, over the playing fields of Eton, over the shopping malls of Oxford, over the traffic-crazed towns of Woking and Maidenhead: over the choked slip roads and the junctions of the M4, over the superstores and out-of-town carpet warehouses, the nurseries and prisons, the gravel pits and sewage works, and the green fields of the home counties shredded by JCBs.’

  Suburbia, in other words; my heartland. So Beyond Black had had a head start.

  The other book represented something of a dilemma. It too was a book about suburbia, perhaps the most influential book about suburbia – The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith.4 Its hero, Charles Pooter of the Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, was so amusingly sketched, so palpable, that his name is in the dictionary representing an entire class of suburban, small-minded bore: ‘Pooterish, adj., characteristic of or resembling the fictional character Pooter, esp. in being bourgeois, genteel, or self-important.’ Novelists, newspaper editors and sitcom writers from The Good Life to Peep Show owe the Grossmiths a profound debt of gratitude, and probably royalties.

  What was the dilemma? It was this: I could not decide if it was acceptable to like the book or not. I knew I liked it but I was not sure if I ought to. On the one hand, The Diary of a Nobody is riddled with the authors’ snobbery and class-hatred – I am referring to the Grossmith brothers, not Pooter. On the other, the book is funny, humane and true. But is its longevity wholly due to the latter fine qualities? Are we laughing at Charles Pooter and his successors or with them?5 Personally, I rarely use the term ‘Pooterish’ unless I am applying it to myself. It only ever seems to be deployed as an insult.

  The Diary of a Nobody first appeared in instalments in the humour magazine Punch, where it was swiftly and widely acclaimed. On one level, the Grossmiths had minted an instant cultural icon, the original Alan Partridge or David Brent. On another, though, they were simply putting a comic spin on one of the prevailing themes of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century arts and letters: the sheer awfulness of the plebs. As lovingly described by John Carey in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, several generations of writers and artists, from H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster to modernists like T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf, even Orwell, were horrified by the swarming middle-classes, the jumped-up clerks and opinionated shop girls with ideas above their station, and pursued the topic at length in their essays, novels and poetry. How they loathed us, with our little patch of garden, our packed commuter trains, our despicable, belching crematoria – even when we die, they must suck our greasy ashes into their plutocratic lungs. The intellectual’s distaste for suburbia persists. We are middle England; we live in laughable towns like Surbiton, Slough and Croydon; we are literally sub-urban.6

  In Chapter 20 of The Diary of a Nobody, Mr and Mrs Charles Pooter are invited to a dinner in Peckham in honour of Mr Hardfur Huttle, ‘a very clever writer for the American papers’ with, Pooter observes, ‘an amazing eloquence that made his unwelcome opinions positively convincing’:

  ‘I shall never forget the effect the words, “happy medium,” had upon him [i.e. Huttle]. He was brilliant and most daring in his interpretation of the words. He positively alarmed me. He said something like the following: “Happy medium, indeed. Do you know ‘happy medium’ are two words which mean ‘miserable mediocrity’? . . . The happy medium means respectability, and respectability means insipidness. Does it not, Mr Pooter?”

  I was so taken aback by being personally appealed to, that I could only bow apologetically, and say I feared I was not competent to offer an opinion.’

  I recognise Pooter’s hot flush of panic at being ambushed like this. When Huttle brashly concludes that the ‘happy medium . . . will spend the rest of his days in a suburban villa with a stucco-column portico, resembling a four-post bedstead’, his suburban captive audience takes the only available course of action: ‘We all laughed.’

  Three brief observations. Firstly, this is meticulous comic writing, perfectly balanced and socially acute. Secondly, people with unwelcome opinions – journalists like Hardfur Huttle – will always be with us. Finally, these people expect us to laugh at ourselves, and we usually oblige them. We are nothing if not polite.

  Happy medium, middle England, middlebrow: all names for the same unfortunate tendency. ‘The middlebrow,’ wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.’7 She must be turning in her family plot. According to academic commentators like David Carter, the middlebrow is undergoing an unprecedented ‘contemporary resurgence’, evidenced by the booming popularity of festivals, literary prizes, online discussion and, yes, lists of the greatest books of all time. By sheer weight of numbers, the plebs appear to have gained the upper hand at last. And nothing exemplifies their triumph more than the irresistible rise of the reading group.

  Sitting in the Charles Dickens pub with my cider, I set aside my copy of Edwin Drood and pulled the local paper out of my bag. On the train on the way over, one story had caught my eye. Under the headline Book group will avoid the highbrow chat, it ran as follows:

  IF YOU have ever been tempted by the idea of joining a book club but put off by the thought of highbrow discussions, the town’s latest group could be for you. A club meets at the Umbrella Centre each month to discuss literature – but you don’t even have to read the book to take part. Organiser Liz W. said the idea was to have fun and make new friends. ‘We choose books that are easy to read, and that have been made into films so you don’t even have to read if you don’t want to,’ she said. ‘It should be fun and it’s as much about socialising as it is about the books.’ The group was set up after people complained they felt intimidated by groups held in people’s houses. It particularly welcomes male members.

  At the end of the piece there was a contact phone number. Fortunately, I was already a member of a book group otherwise I might have been tempted to join. It sounded mind-boggling yet somehow inevitable: a book group where you didn’t have to read the book. Wherever she lies, Virginia Woolf must be punching herself in the face.

  I had decided to join a book group after the crisis of confidence brought on by Absolute Beginners and One Hundred Years of Solitude. It might do me good to be more outward-looking, contemporary and sociable in my reading, I thought. A friend in the town told me that his group had just lost someone and a vacancy had come up. This group was almost the opposite of the one described in the local paper – it met once a month in people’s houses, the chat aimed to be serious and, in an old-fashioned way, members did actually have to read the book. It may not have been everyone’s idea of fun but it was certainly mine. The group was called Sparta B.C. (book club), which reflected both a sense of discipline and asceticism, and also its founder’s enthusiasm for The Fall’s ‘Theme From Sparta F.C.’.

  ‘We mostly read modern fiction,’ said my friend. ‘Last month we read Atomised – you know, the Houellebecq book. Some people hated it.’

  Houellebecq’s on my list, I said. Count me in.

  Unusually for a book group – for anything called Sparta – there were as many female Spartans as there were male, which appealed to me. A fraternity was not what I was seeking.8 They were a friendly bunch, enthusiastic and opinionated, comprising a solicitor, a creative-writing student, a carpenter, a singing teacher and three psychotherapists.

  I was fortunate to have stumbled on a mixed group. The majority of reading groups are all-female – according to some surveys, perhaps as many as 90 per cent. Correspondingly, there is a measure of snobbery directed against them as both intellectually feeble and the modern equivalent of coffee mornings or knitting circles, what the academic Beth Driscoll calls the ‘
feminized middlebrow’.9 It is demonstrably sexist to define all reading groups as dumb and girly and little more than an excuse to sit around gossiping about kids, schools, shopping, etc. And yet how can we square that with the group advertising for members in my local paper – you don’t even have to read the book – or with this tweet which was posted yesterday by one local mum? Book club tonight = quick chat about book + long chat about school / children / work / family / gossip + wine, yipee! (sic) Or, more generally, with the graffito scribbled in marker pen on the wall of the nearest bookshop: BOOK ARE FOR WIMPZ? (To which the reply must be, yes, but at least we can string a sentence together.) That’s the trouble with stereotypes: they are not wholly disconnected from the truth.

  The first few Sparta meetings were agreeably Spartan, in a twenty-first-century middle-English kind of way. There was red wine; the crisps were burnished with paprika and sea-salt. There was small talk about schools and children. And there was gladiatorial combat governed by an ancient and binding set of rules of behaviour. It was terrible and civilised and all terribly civilised – an all-in orgy of all-out passive aggro. You needed to keep your wits about you. In the beginning, I enjoyed it.

  However, disenchantment crept in during a discussion of Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham. This was not the one with the waitress but a different book entirely. In Of Human Bondage, the lower-class strumpet who turns the hero’s head is called Mildred, and you will recall that she is thin and anaemic. But in Cakes and Ale, the lower-class strumpet who turns the hero’s head is plump and rosy-cheeked; Maugham dug deep for a name and came up with ‘Rosie’. Mildred is younger than the protagonist of Of Human Bondage, who in later life leaves his small Kent town to become a successful author rather like Somerset Maugham; whereas in Cakes and Ale, Rosie is older than the protagonist, though this does not materially affect his decision to leave his small Kent town and become a Maugham-ish author in later life too. There was one major difference between the books, however. Although Cakes and Ale shared many of the themes and preoccupations of Of Human Bondage, it had the considerable advantage of being hundreds of pages shorter. But when I expressed this opinion to the group, I was taken aback that several people – gulp – disagreed with me. Specifically, two of the women of Sparta felt I had completely misjudged ‘her’, i.e. Rosie. They seemed offended, as though it was the character itself, and by extension all women like ‘her’, that was causing me problems, rather than the patronising way in which ‘she’ had been written by the chauvinistic Maugham. I’m on your side, I wanted to say, but I seemed unable to make myself understood. I went home fuming – as, I’m sure, did they.