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

by Miller, Andy

  Where were we? Oh yes.

  Here at the British Library – which, if you recall, is where I have been writing this letter today – people around me are shutting down their laptops and disconnecting their electric toothbrushes. Rare Books & Music will be closing soon and I need to pack up and go home too. But I have enjoyed sitting here, Michel, talking to you like this. It’s been a lot of fun.

  I am lying, of course. It’s not been fun; I am not even in the British Library. In reality, I left Desk 294 over a week ago, shortly after comparing Against Nature and Beloved to a couple of obscure Neil Young albums thinking, what the hell, I can always take that out later. This letter, which will never be sent, has taken days of work: on the train, in my office, in a café, on the sofa while watching multiple episodes of Oggy et les Cafards with my son. Currently I am at home at my desk, thinking about what to eat for lunch. However, to sustain the beautiful illusion a while longer, let us pretend that, after writing more than 4000 words in a day, ha ha ha ha, I have quit the British Library and am once again sitting in the Archway Tavern with a pint, bashing this out on a phone or something. Yeah, that sounds plausible.

  When I was a kid, my first literary hero was Douglas Adams. There were other writers whose books I loved in childhood, of course, but Adams was the first one who I thought of as a writer, sitting in front of his word processor, being spontaneously clever and hilarious, coming up with the goods. Even when he wasn’t coming up with the goods, which was often, he was an inspiration: heroic accounts of missed deadlines, long baths and Bovril sandwiches. At the age of twelve, I remember being terribly impressed by the dedication from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: ‘To the Paul Simon album One-Trick Pony which I played incessantly while writing this book. Five years is far too long.’ Wow. Here was an occupation that allowed you to stay at home, eat sandwiches and listen to records as much as you liked. In my experience, these remain the chief perks of the job; the work itself, as you note, brings scant relief.

  An imaginary sip of Guinness to accompany this unimaginative ham sandwich.

  Has anyone ever told you how much your work reminds them of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? I shouldn’t think they have. If there were two words inscribed on the cover of Atomised, they wouldn’t be DON’T PANIC. But hear me out. You and Douglas Adams both weave stories out of high-concept scientific theory and philosophy. You portray the individual at the mercy of an absurd and hostile universe. The futuristic neo-humans who figure in Atomised and The Possibility of an Island regard their forebears in much the same way Zaphod Beeblebrox regards the hapless Arthur Dent: a talking monkey. And there is the sense of humour, of course, though obviously yours is blacker and more savage than Adams’. I have no idea whether you would be flattered or appalled by this comparison but I lay it before you like a cat dropping a dead bird at its owner’s feet.

  In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Adams invented the Total Perspective Vortex, an infernal machine which extrapolates the whole of existence from a small piece of fairy cake: ‘When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here”.’ I must have read this sentence a thousand times over the last thirty years; it never fails to make me smile. Your hero H.P. Lovecraft built his supernatural horror stories on a similar concept – the struggle of the human mind to comprehend what he called ‘the terrifying vistas of reality’. Eliot’s famous line from ‘Burnt Norton’ frames the same notion as poetry: ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality’. What I see in your books, Michel, is a combination of all three approaches – the comedy, the horror and the poetry of our day-to-day existence. And what Adams once meant to me, I now see in you. Enjoy your bird.

  When I was seventeen, my father died. One morning, before getting up to go to work in London, he had a massive heart attack. I watched as it happened. The ambulance took him away, then I went to school; he died in hospital a few days later. He was alone when he died. Over a number of years, I either got over the shock or I didn’t – it’s still too soon to say. But it seems to have frozen my reaction to culture at that dramatic, bittersweet moment, forming an unquenchable emotional need to regain that intensity of feeling; as an adult, I am still not sure how else to do it. Isn’t there something inescapably adolescent about this desire even in middle-age for heroes, about still seeking the encouragement and guidance of people we have never met and, with any luck, never will? Yet you have never abandoned yours – not just Lovecraft and Neil Young but Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Pascal, Schopenhauer; the Great Texts of pessimism to which you refer again and again in your books. You and I turn to our heroes for the same reason: they will always tell us the truth.

  I met Douglas Adams several times, four IIRC. My hero came face to face with me and vice versa. The details of these regrettable encounters will have to wait for another occasion though. They are calling last orders at the Archway Tavern – HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT’S TIME! – and I have a train to catch or something. I reach out and drain my imaginary pint.

  Two final anecdotes before I go. A few months ago I happened to be in New York when Neil Young played a couple of dates at Madison Square Garden. We had tickets for the opening night, way back in an upper balcony. As the house lights dimmed, two guys in the seats in front of us whooped and raised their paper cups of beer in salutation. Neil and his band launched at full tilt into a succession of his greatest, loudest songs: ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’, ‘Powderfinger’, ‘Cinnamon Girl’, ‘Cortez the Killer’ . . . It was like they were getting the encores out of the way first – which, as it transpired, they were. Looking across to bassist Rick Rosas and drummer Chad Cromwell, the author of Ragged Glory and Comes a Time nodded his head and the band ploughed into a brand new song, a song no one other than the musicians on stage had ever heard before. When it finished, few in the crowd seemed impressed; the new song was greeted with the wettest smatter of applause. After three further unfamiliar songs, the two guys in front of us grew restless. ‘HEY NEIL!’ shouted one. ‘PLAY SOMETHING WE FUCKIN’ KNOW!’ His buddy, who was wearing a Neil Young t-shirt he had just bought from the merchandise stand, agreed. ‘YEAH NEIL, YOU FUCKIN’ ASSHOLE!’ he yelled. ‘NO MORE NEW CRAP!’ At this, Neil approached the microphone and cleared his throat. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘We’re auditioning for our old record company. The president, the CEO, they’re all here tonight, Madison Square Garden. So when you hear those new songs, you make a shitload of noise whether you like ’em or not. OK?’ And with that, he counted off another brand new disappointing song. ‘ASSHOLE!’ screamed our neighbours. Everyone was happy.

  Similarly, in his short story ‘The Vane Sisters’, Vladimir Nabokov – a virtuoso I gather you do not hold in high regard, Michel – plays a subtle game with the reader. He conceals a message from the eponymous girls, both deceased, as an acrostic puzzle, unpicked by taking the first letter of each word in the final paragraph to form a Ouija board-like communiqué from the hereafter. This is not cryptography for the sake of it. Nabokov wants to investigate how our view of the world is shaped and articulated by forces beneath the surface: memories, stories, games. But when he submitted ‘The Vane Sisters’ to The New Yorker for publication, it was rejected for its elaborate obscurity. And when it finally appeared in Encounter eight years later, the magazine was obliged to tip off its readers to the story’s veiled rationale because no one, including the author, was sure it could be deciphered otherwise. ‘This particular trick can be tried only once in a thousand years of fiction,’ Nabokov later wrote. ‘Whether it has come off is another question.’

  Michel, as a concluding ‘thank you’, I have incorporated a different sort of cryptographic puzzle into the closing stanzas of this letter. It is intended as a joke to be appreciated only by you and maybe a handful of others. Whether it has come off is another question.

  Why do our
heroes need us? To worship them? To foot their bills? To make a shitload of noise? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, should the tree be pulped to print a story no one can understand? If Neil Young plays new songs in a forest, are the squirrels entitled to throw acorns and squeak irately for ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’? These are not easy questions to answer. But without heroes to point the way, we stumble around, lost in the fog, alone.

  Time fades away, Neil once sang in that ‘unmanly’ voice, ‘un peu de la femme, du vieilliard ou d’enfant’. We journey through the past, searching for the two or three great and simple images in whose presence our heart first opened. We do not know where to look, only that we must keep looking; absolute stillness is death. We hear other voices, preachers, teachers, the pure artists, but they seem distant, indistinct. Yonder stands the sinner, speaking a truth others find unpalatable, and it stops us in our tracks. The voice may come to us from Moscow a hundred years ago or LA in the 70s or Paris not far from now or the Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. It speaks to us and we move towards it up the difficult and rocky road. We fall bloodied to our knees but it calls us on. Its message is an old one: keep love in mind; keep going; don’t be denied. It is the bridge from their history to ours, the song that will accompany our future, the remainder of the journey, our last dance.

  Michel, it doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s all a load of shit: here is the phrase with which I planned to end this letter. But now the moment has come, I find I can’t do it. It might be funny, if only to me, but it would no longer be true. Your disgraceful books, for all their ridicule and despair, their disregard for contemporary society, their obsession with the inevitability of bodily decay, their ingrained and bitter pessimism, offered me what I now realise I had been searching for all along: hope. I could go on living in the world, as long as there were books like Atomised in it.

  Please – je vous en prie! – have the last word:

  ‘It’s the voice of a human being, with a naïve and important thing to tell us: the world will always be the way it is, that’s its affair; it’s not any reason for us to give up trying to make it better.’

  Sincerely yours,

  A. Miller

  A Final Word of Explanation

  Well, there it is. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

  Readers who have made it this far may be curious as to the nature of the Nabokov-like ‘cryptographic puzzle’ mentioned by the author on page. On the next page, please refer to the neighbouring paragraph beginning ‘Time fades away, Neil once sang . . .’ Hidden within it are the names of all the songs on Neil Young’s album Time Fades Away in the sequence in which they appear on the original LP: the title track, ‘Journey Through the Past’, ‘Yonder Stands the Sinner’, and so on. This passage also contains certain images and phrases from The Year of Reading Dangerously that it would be impossible for anyone except the author to recognise – anyone, perhaps, except the attentive reader of this book who hasn’t already skipped ahead to War and Peace.

  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.

  Books 49 and 50

  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 ano
ther 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.