by Miller, Andy
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, li
ke 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.
‘Hello,’ I said, as I arrived in front of his table. ‘Please could you write, “To Andy, with frank admiration”?’
Without saying a word or even glancing up, Adams reached over, took a copy of Life, the Universe and Everything from the top of the pile, grimly scribbled the requested dedication – as no doubt he was asked to do every single time he undertook a public signing – and pushed the book across the desk towards me. Nothing further was said and, without so much as a farewell glare, our first meeting was over.
I still have the book, of course. Looking at this inscription now, thirty years later, it occurs to me that ‘frank admiration’ was probably the precise opposite of what Adams was feeling towards us, me and all the other towel-packing dweebs who had dragged him all the way from Islington to Croydon on a hot Saturday afternoon. But I am not sorry I asked.
Fit the Second – Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Mall, London, 29 July 1987
Five years have passed. I am now a student at the University of Sussex in Brighton, where I am studying English Literature. I have just completed my first year’s studies and am back at home for the summer holidays. In Time Out magazine, I notice that Douglas Adams will be appearing at the ICA in The Mall to discuss his new novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The ICA is where I once met Fat Puffin but I am older now and much, much cleverer; just a few weeks earlier, I sat at the feet of visiting lecturer Ian McEwan and asked him where he got his ideas from. I decide I will do Adams a favour and attend.
At the ICA, Adams is in conversation with his friend and occasional co-writer, TV producer John Lloyd. There must be seventy or eighty people in the audience, several of whom have brought towels with them. Sad! Adams seems far happier and more relaxed than at our last meeting. As the event goes on, I am struck by the disparity between how I have always thought of his work – i.e. funny sci-fi – and how everyone else here seems to think of it – i.e. art, philosophy, science – literature, in other words. But they have all got it wrong. I know literature; I have been studying it for nearly a year. Literature is Ian McEwan. Literature is not Douglas Adams. I must tell everyone this.
When the moment comes for questions from the floor, I raise my hand. Over the course of two minutes and twenty-three seconds, I stammer out a meandering and loaded question which, though I attempt to make it sound impressively lofty and erudite, can be summarised thus: ‘Are you as surprised as me that everyone here, including you, is taking you so seriously?’
In response, Adams is thoughtful and good-humoured and, wrestling with the baffling pretentiousness of his interlocutor, takes even longer to answer the question than it had taken me to ask it, though in essence his reply can be boiled down to three words: ‘Yes. And no.’
In my seat in the audience, smiling and nodding while Adams gamely tries to untangle whatever it is I have just asked him – even I’m not sure – I wish I had something to wrap around my head, like a towel. My cheeks are burning and I have started to sweat. And with good reason: it dawns on me I have, with ill-concealed rudeness, told Adams to his face that his work is not worth taking seriously when, actually, it still means more to me than most of the ‘serious’ literature I have studied over the previous nine months. In short, I have behaved like a total dick. At the end of the session, I queue to buy a copy of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and get it signed by the author. This time I am the one who can’t make eye-contact.17
The accidental triumph of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I have belatedly realised, is that it is not merely literature but the best kind of literature – highbrow, lowbrow and middlebrow all at once. I say accidental because Adams had no such design in mind when he wrote it and these qualities are bestowed more by the audience than the author. But if you want big ideas about science or art or philosophy, there they are. If you want the poignant tale of a dispossessed man looking for a home, you have it. And if you want jokes – genuine, bona fide funny-ha-ha jokes – making fun of computers, digital watches and ape-descended life forms, no one has ever done it with more originality or genius or craft than Adams. If that isn’t literature, I don’t know what it is.
Fit the Third – London 1992
Another five years have elapsed. Equipped with an English degree and some opinions, I have managed to find work in a West London bookshop. I am currently in charge of author events. Douglas Adams is about to publish Mostly Harmless, ‘the fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy’. I have a proof copy I have already read twice. I call the publisher to see if Adams would like to come and read at our shop, maybe on a Sunday afternoon. They say yes immediately. I put down the phone and start to feel rather nervous.
Though Mostly Harmless is a better book than So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, it isn’t great. It isn’t nearly as strong as Last Chance to See, Adams’ account of his encounters with such elusive creatures as the Komodo dragon and the kakapo. However, this is not what I am nervous about; if I have learned one valuable lesson over the previous five years, it is to keep my true opinions to myself. No, I am nervous because this will be the third time I have met Douglas Adams and neither of our previous encounters has gone particularly well. I still blush when I recollect what occurred at the ICA and I guess Adams was trying to scrub Croydon from his memory even as it was happening. As the day of the reading approaches, I am not seeking closure or a moment of connection; I just don’t want the event to suck.
‘This is Andy,’ says the woman from the Pan publicity department. ‘He’s in charge today.’
‘Hi Andy,’ says Douglas Adams who, though greying at the temples, remains exceptionally tall. He frowns and glances sharply at me. ‘Wait a minute. Aren’t you that little prat from the ICA?’
This is what I fear might happen but, of course, it doesn’t.
‘I love the new book,’ I tell Adams when he actually arrives at the shop. ‘Absolutely fantastic.’ And I usher him upstairs to where a sold-out crowd of admirers awaits, many of whom have reserved seats at the front with towels.
The reading is a huge success and we sell a lot of books. Adams is affable and laughs often. Watching from the back, it occurs to me that he has had to learn how to do this, or at least, how to do it in front of strangers, some of whom inevitably seek to bamboozle him with
their in-depth perception of his work – is it hot in here? – or enquire repeatedly if Marvin the Paranoid Android really is dead, his complete absence from Mostly Harmless notwithstanding. And rather than become frustrated or exasperated by this element of his working life, Adams grins and bears it all with politeness and good grace, a forbearance for which he receives my frank admiration.
After the signing is finished and the public have left, by way of thanks we usually let our visiting authors select a book to take away with them. I walk with Douglas Adams down to the basement floor of the shop, where there are heaps of new titles on display, the latest in philosophy and history and science. Flushed with the success of the afternoon, I am seized with the urge to make a grand gesture.
‘Take what you want,’ I tell him. ‘As many as you like.’
And I accompany Adams around the basement, as he gathers a massive pile of hardbacks, for which he does not pay and which I do not have the authority to give away. He asks my advice, I offer it. Several times he asks me if I’m sure about this, it seems very generous, etc., and I wave away his objections with an air of easy and entirely assumed munificence. Effectively, I am aiding and abetting a celebrity shoplifter. But again, thinking back, I am not sorry. For half an hour, it means Douglas Adams and I talked about books.
As Adams climbs into a waiting taxi, after I have helped him in with a clutch of carrier bags containing hundreds of pounds’ worth of stock, he turns and thanks me for a very enjoyable afternoon. And I shake his hand and say what I failed to five years earlier, and five before that.
