Jacob's Room Is Full of Books: A Year of Reading

by Susan Hill

  Having finished Greene on Capri again, I set about catching up on Shirley Hazzard’s other work, though it was in that book that I first discovered her genius for the exact, perfect phrase. Describing the Dottoressa Moor, an impossible Capri personality, she writes: ‘A squat, categorical figure, formless in winter bundling, [she] had the rugged, russet complexion of northerners long weathered in the hot south … prominent paleolithic teeth, and memorably pale blue eyes.’ How much more clearly could we be made to see her? And the paleolithic teeth …

  Towards the end of the book, Hazzard recalls a visit of the man who knew absolutely everybody, and about whom absolutely everyone seems to have written – Harold Acton. Describing Acton’s legendary good manners, she recalls someone saying that ‘he was a man who had never in his life preceded anyone out of a room’.

  ONCE UPON A TIME I had two shelves of books about Antarctica and Antarctic exploration. I read them often, in love with those white wastes, the last truly undiscovered, uninhabited places. Men like Ernest Shackleton and Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Robert Scott and their companions had ventured there, sometimes died there, facing those desperate conditions of cold and white-out and disorientation and a challenge that was as much emotional and psychological as physical, but between them all they left very small tracks on those great white spaces, and those tracks were soon covered over.

  Apart from them, for decades no one visited the Antarctic except a few intrepid scientists.

  It was the world’s last most romantic wilderness.

  I planned to write a book about Antarctica. Beryl Bainbridge beat me to it. The moment her novel The Birthday Boys, about Scott’s 1910 expedition, was announced, I knew two things – that my own book would never be written, and that something of the magic of the place I had held on to had died. Not Beryl’s fault, of course.

  But somehow it was still a secret, private, empty, desolate, fascinating, magical place, in my heart and mind. My rows of books grew.

  Recently I was flicking through a magazine which had a ‘Best Travel Destinations’ supplement. I came upon Seabourn Cruises to the Antarctic. Then I had a call from friends saying they had just returned from an ‘adventure holiday in Antarctica’.

  The small secret flame went out at that moment, and today I packed up twenty-seven books about the white continent and took them to the charity shop.

  JOHN KEATS WROTE in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ that ‘The sedge has withered from the lake,/And no birds sing’.

  No birds sing now. When they wind down and fall gradually silent, once all their nesting is done, the year starts to wither like the sedge and we are into the worst two months of the year, July and August. I know that for some these are for holidays and a general out-of-school feeling, but I have always disliked them. I hate everyone being on holiday, only at the end of email messages saying ‘I am on annual leave’. The glory of not being bound by school terms and office hours is that one can take holidays whenever one fancies.

  But it is the morning silence that is so depressing. Birds sing for a purpose. Once that has been fulfilled, I suppose they say stuff the rest of us, who fancy that they sing for our pleasure.

  THOSE REQUESTS. They need to fill the pages of the weekend papers and colour magazines, so they send out questionnaires. Writers are asked questions on things like what book they wish they had written.

  The answer could be anything one admires, and I always think it is preferable to choose a book one has not the faintest chance of having written, so magnificently beyond one’s own capabilities is it, and that includes, of course, the works of Dickens, Thomas Hardy, P. G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene … But of all the novels I admire and whose author’s talent I envy, the one I most often name is Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I have read it and re-read it and it is like a puzzle that looks so simple but is fiendish to unravel. How does he do the movement between the present and the immediate past and the distant past and the future, and back again, all smoothly, without a ruffle? How does he manage to deceive the reader by making the narrator apparently so truthful, only for us to realise he is the deceiver, and self-deceiver, of all fiction. It is so subtle and intricate and I long to work it all out.

  There is plenty of commentary to read about The Good Soldier and no one has written it better than Julian Barnes, who understands this sort of thing from his close familiarity with and expertise on the French novel, but even he cannot really lay bare the workings, as one might the mechanism of a watch.

  I tried to read more Ford. I have no interest left in the First World War, particularly in fiction about it, since having written Strange Meeting – what was an obsession is now quite dead. So I have not even tried Parade’s End. It was adapted for television a few years ago, so, as always happens, the novels had a brief revival, but I wonder if it was a false dawn for F. M. Ford. Certainly, I have never known anyone who has read his trilogy, The Fifth Queen, about Katharine Howard.

  In his lifetime he was famous for both founding and editing influential literary magazines, being an important figure on the contemporary book scene, and for his private life. Among other liaisons, he had an affair with Jean Rhys and was responsible for promoting her early work, before they fell out. None of these things, especially the latter, are of much interest now. Ford surely stands by The Good Soldier. It is a perfect example of a book which has achieved immortality for itself alone. If it contains elements of autobiography, these seem to be quite irrelevant today. Barnes says that ‘He is not so much a writer’s writer (which can suggest hermeticism) as a proper reader’s writer. The Good Soldier needs The Good Reader.’

  Now there is something I need to think about. What is a good reader? Attentive, obviously. I am not sure if it means one who reads slowly, because you can be so caught up in a book that you read on faster and faster, and not only because it’s a thriller and you want to find out what happens. A good reader is definitely a thoughtful one – thinks about what has been read, goes over its meaning, anticipates. Is attentive, fully committed to and involved with the book. It is possible to be very detached from what one is reading, which may be appropriate occasionally but with fiction is surely not. A good reader pays attention to everything. The surface of the prose. The structure of the book. The tense. The point of view. Perhaps to those even before the characters. Then comes the setting. The story can often come last.

  But is that just me?

  The genius Nabokov has many enlightening things to say about it. Nabokov, the hero, who explained to me why, ultimately, Jane Austen is not as good as she is cracked up to be, and why, ultimately, Dickens is better (than Jane Austen, and than he is cracked up to be.) The book is Lectures on Literature, the chapter is ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’. There are so many pertinent phrases and paragraphs, which go a long way towards clarifying one’s thinking, so many ideas which, once read, seem obvious – but if that were the case, why have I not had them myself? Good reading is always re-reading, he says, partly because the first time one is anxious to find out what happens next – even in the most literary of novels. But also, the first time one is hard at work simply making the eyes move from left to right over unfamiliar prose: ‘the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation’.

  He has a point, and the point makes me think, but it does not give me the lightning flash of illumination that this does, a page or two later: ‘Literature was born, not the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.’

  I have continued to think about that ever since I first read it, ten or more years ago.

  It is the same with Nabokov on Dickens’s Bleak House, the best piece of criticism and explanation I have ever read on either author or novel. You will not encounter the same book you once knew if you re-read Bleak House after reading his el
ucidation.

  Time to re-read Nabokov again. I have not got on with all of his fiction, but Ada or Ardor captured me when I was young, and Pnin in older age, and both left their marks in permanent ink. I mentioned a re-reading of the latter on Twitter. Sarah Churchwell tweeted back, ‘I bloody love Pnin.’

  I bloody do, too.

  THESE ARE SAD, LIMP, GREY, mild days and the year has turned.

  I DEBATE WITH MYSELF AGAIN. Is it better for someone not to read any books at all than to read only schlock/rubbish/badly written junk … whatever you like to call it? Is it better for young people to read nothing at all than read graphic novels – which are really only comics for an older age group? I argue to and fro, ping-pong, pong-ping.

  Might the enjoyment of reading rubbish lead to an enjoyment of rather better books? It might. Or not.

  Might graphic sci-fi lead to … or …

  Does it matter? Is it better to be out in the fresh air or having a fun social life than mugging indoors reading low-grade porn or badly written uber-violent crime novels?

  Probably. Yes.

  Is reading a book a good, beneficial activity, per se?

  Yes and yes.

  But so many people simply cannot see the point.

  * Summer 2017 – six nests.

  AUGUST

  APPLES AND PEARS AND PLUMS. ‘What’s for apple tonight?’ Yes, it’s a glut this summer. Once everyone is tired of picking and hauling them in, and eating yet more apple crumble, the rest fall and lie in the grass for the birds. Blackbirds love apples. A dozen will be gathered at once, pecking away.

  It is hot.

  I READ AN ONLINE COMMENT about a book I have just finished. The author of the comment did not enjoy the novel. I did. But something about the book niggled and I could not work out what. The commentator said that in the end it ‘didn’t amount to anything’.

  That switched on the light. That was what, ultimately, I had found unsatisfying about it and why I find a number of novels of its kind highly enjoyable, but in the end they do not ‘amount to anything’.

  The book in question was a Man Booker winner, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, set in the eighteenth century on the South Island of New Zealand. It is a long book and I devoured it. It is original, exciting, funny, mysterious … a damn good story, with a whole array of wildly idiosyncratic characters. But although a terrific read, it did not touch the sides and has left little trace. It was a book I did not think about for a moment after I had finished it, but I suspect the author intended that I should. (That is not always the case. Not many detective novels or average thrillers leave a trace, and the authors would not expect them to.) The same is true of that one-time mega bestseller, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which was televised very badly a couple of years back. Another book in which you immerse yourself and read breathlessly, but which again doesn’t really amount to anything.

  They have something in common, these books. Add to them The Quincunx by Charles Palliser. They are set in a fantasy period of history, or concern fantasy creatures, or a fantastic array of magic, or else they pick up on some things that actually happened, what was ‘real’, and play with them, moving them on world upon worlds away. They are bewitching and beguiling and fun, and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that and I am not sneering. But they still do not really ‘add up to anything’.

  So what does? I recently re-read The Sense of an Ending, the Julian Barnes novel which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize, for which I was a judge. The Barnes was my choice. It was the almost-unanimous choice of the panel. It is a slim book – Barnes is not one to turn out 700 pages. But within its short space it contains truth, beauty, sadness, shrewdness, observation, intelligence, poignancy, self-pity, a man’s coming to terms with his past … everything one can think of about the human condition and more. And it amounts to a great deal. As do all of Barnes’s novels. As do those of, shall we say, Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith and Anita Brookner and Penelope Fitzgerald – and several of them do not write at great length.

  So now I have another criterion by which to assess fiction, after building up a collection of them over many years. Or perhaps they simply categorise it. Books which may be beautifully, brilliantly written and reveal a powerful, fantastic imagination at work, not to mention an author who knows how to transmute research into something else. But which, even so, do not ultimately add up to anything.

  THAT THINGS HAVE CHANGED in the writing/publishing/book world is a truism. Of course they have. Things should change, move forward, improve, progress, however we put it, in any area of life or business. Some of the changes are too obvious to note – the results of the new technology. Some have come about by osmosis. Some have happened as a knock-on effect of other changes.

  But one thing has changed in the last, what, ten years. It has to do with the effect on a writer – and I am thinking primarily of novelists – of a sudden success at the very start of their careers. It is multi-factorial but recently, partly as the result of prizes and their hype, the book trade has been ravenously looking for new blood. New names. New writers. First-timers. This is why agents and publishers are all trawling graduate lists of the (many) schools of creative writing, why they are doing a sort of milk-round, in the way banks and major industries used to visit universities to woo their best graduates.

  It works like this. A young CW graduate has written a novel which wins one of the university departmental prizes. An agent asks to see the novel, is impressed by … something … originality, fine writing, the wow factor – whatever. Agent takes on new author and soon hypes the novel among publishers, several of whom ask to see it and start bidding for it against one another. Because the rule always is that you may not want something until someone else indicates an interest in having it and then you want it desperately. The novel is bought for a decent – but not ridiculously large – sum and the publisher spreads the word about it excitedly. The novel is submitted for some of The Prizes, and gets on to one or two longlists. Then shortlists. And finally, perhaps, it wins something. Winning something changes everything – for a time. The author gets noticed, interviewed, attended to, the book is reviewed – whereas it might well not have been, had it failed to win something. People start tweeting about it. Booksellers recommend (aka ‘hand-sell’) it and soon it gets into the bestseller charts. Even though the entry may not actually represent massive sales, it is being in the charts that counts.

  So far so great. And then our novelist is expected to write the follow-up. The second novel is always hard. Expectations for them have always run high. My second novel was a disaster and should never have seen the light of day, but the first had garnered a lot of publicity and general media attention, and I was very young.

  The writer of a successful, heavily promoted prize-winning first novel now has the weight of everyone’s expectations on their shoulders and these may prove fatal. Ideas do not come. Or bad ideas come. What would have been rejected by the writer, when working away in obscurity, as being not good enough, is now snatched at – there must be a second great idea, there has to be. Publisher, agent, booksellers, even readers ask all the time how it is getting on. In the past if it had not been getting on at all, perhaps even for three or five or seven years, nobody would have worried, the second book would have come when it was good and ready. But now? Now it has to come and soon. Already, this year’s new young graduates and first-timers are biting at the heels of last year’s, agents are back at the universities, the prize judges have been announced.

  So, our author writes book two. It may be very good. It may be way better than book one. Or it may not. But if it does not get on to those longlists and shortlists, if it does not somehow become talked about again, if it does not garner a swathe of good reviews plus quotes from the Famous Established Novelists, if … then from the dizzy heights of those lists and the 60,000 sales, our novelist’s second book may achieve sales of 2,000 if it’s lucky. No one talks about it. The reading public has not rushed
out to buy it. It sinks without trace. This is bad for the ego and the career of our first-timer, and is all too common. The agents and publishers and bookshops and reviewers and gossip columnists and readers have moved on to the Next Big Thing. There is only so much book-spending money each reader has – so they will buy the new novel by X, a long- established favourite, or by the latest prize winner, and … and that’s it. Poor old first-timer. Shattered dreams, a stalled career, instead of having one that builds slowly – and no one takes their calls.

  Meanwhile, the long-established Good Novelist, who has won the prizes and the plaudits in the past, has just published their twenty-fourth novel. And it is fine. It is respectable – no, it is better than that, but the problem is that it sells roughly the same number of copies as the last one and the one before that. It doesn’t break new ground, does not surprise, does not challenge. And the author is sixty-plus. And … ‘Well, I’m sorry, but your sales have been slipping, and of course the new young booksellers haven’t heard of you and may even think you’re already dead and … and everyone is talking about this new young writer who has just come out of a creative writing course and anyway, the manuscript you have sent me is a bit too much like the last – and the one before that and the one before …’

  What is the answer? There isn’t one, except that our older writer needs to pull her socks up, do something different, startle them, change pace, change genres, surprise, delight … or give up. Go quietly on her own terms, not on those of the others.