The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ Wake or as epic as Clarissa, but it seems to occupy a special status as a book that sorts the heavyweights from the halfwits. For this reason alone, it had always been a fixture of the phantom list; and I suppose it was vaguely reprehensible that a graduate of English Literature should not have read what Virginia Woolf called ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’. I recall as a teenager watching Salman Rushdie on a BBC2 literary panel game – The Book Quiz, was it? – where Rushdie was able to identify some lines from a Bob Dylan song, but not from Middlemarch, which he confessed he had never read – cue much amusement amongst his fellow panel members. Was this, it suddenly occurs to me, where I first picked up the awful habit?^fn9

      fn9. ‘I made the mistake of going on a TV quiz show and admitting that I’d never read Middlemarch … and I don’t think I’ll ever live it down. When I saw I was in trouble I went out and bought it, and I’m planning to read it. I hear it’s good.’ Salman Rushdie to John Haffenden, 1983.

      After a week and a hundred or so hard-won pages, I knew I was in trouble. I found there were plenty of other jobs I suddenly wanted to do – cleaning the oven, a spot of long overdue filing – anything other than pick up this torturous book. There seemed to be a problem. Who were all these various doctors and ladies and landlords and parsons and what on earth were they saying to one another? The whole experience did nothing but compound the sense of my own wretched floccinaucinihilipilification. Not only was I not enjoying Middlemarch, it left me feeling dejected. I was not up to a task others performed with apparent ease. Perhaps I had done little more than swap number puzzles for intellectual fakery – pseudoku. When it came down to it, perhaps I was a halfwit.

      Fortunately, at this point Tina staged an intervention. Much as she wished the oven to be clean and the phone bills to be in tidy, chronological order – wished it with all her heart – she also recognised that what I was doing really mattered to me. She had watched as I struggled with The Master and Margarita, and so she reminded me that I needed to let the book do the work. So what if not every line made sense? The drift would do for now.

      ‘Have you actually read Middlemarch?’ I asked her. ‘There is no drift, there is only confusion. Or as the author would say, in the instance of this poor history, it would not be unfair to envisage a state of superlative driftlessness, and where driftlessness lies about us, there too – alas! – confusion may abide. Etc.’

      ‘Oh, stop being so melodramatic,’ she said. ‘Just do what I did. Read fifty pages a day and leave it at that.’

      Do you perceive my wife’s brilliance? Is it plain to you, simple reader? It lay not in the essential nobility of her heart, or that she herself already stood atop Middlemarch and was gently beckoning her husband to join her. No. It was that she had a system. Fifty pages every day. It wasn’t exciting, in itself it did not elevate the spirit, but it worked. It allowed time for books and time for life to go on. It was the key both to all mythologies and a clean oven.

      And so I accepted that the first few days of Middlemarch would be a chore. I started over, counting down each fifty-page segment like it was my homework. Gradually, however, the mists dissolved and the sun began to shine on a fictional corner of the West Midlands. The model for Middlemarch had been Coventry, so in the short term, some amusement was had from reading the highfalutin dialogue aloud with a regional twang (‘I am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader’) and speculating how close Middlemarch lay to Ambridge. Just as with The Master and Margarita though, there was something seductive about Middlemarch and I started to succumb; but whereas Bulgakov’s technique is conjuring and grand gestures, Eliot works an intellectual seduction, a slow game of pace and frustration. Sentences picked up as I became accustomed to the rhythms of the prose. The per diem fifty pages increased; I stopped mucking about with the voices. I shan’t pretend that I understood all the subtleties of issues pertaining to the Reform Bill of June 1832, around which the novel thematically revolves, but the layering of character and motive – and the moral issues the characters have to confront – seemed thrillingly ambitious and sophisticated. When the novel’s perspective switches from Dorothea to Casaubon at the start of Chapter 29 – ‘but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?’ – there follows a passage so sublime and wise and complex that the only word to describe it is: genius.

      (A spoiler follows. As in the sport of football, look away now if you don’t want to know what happens.)

      By the time Casaubon dies in the summerhouse, resentful and alone, I was besotted with the book. I could not believe how much I was enjoying it.

      On a seven-hour journey back from Edinburgh, I hardly lifted my head from my book, welcomed an enforced delay in the airport departure lounge, was grateful to miss a connection at Heathrow, sat in the bone-freezing cold at the station for half an hour in order to discover the ending for Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw, before walking home, elated. I mean exactly that; I was elated. I felt the unmistakable certainty that I had been in the presence of great art, and that my heart had opened in reply.

      Plus, now I was someone who had read Middlemarch and The Master and Margarita. Two down.

      We live in an era where opinion is currency. The pressure is on us to say ‘I like this’ or ‘I don’t like that’, to make snap decisions and stick them on our credit cards. But when faced with something we cannot comprehend at once, which was never intended to be snapped up or whizzed through, perhaps ‘I don’t like it’ is an inadequate response. Don’t like Middlemarch? It doesn’t matter. It was here before we arrived, and it will be here long after we have gone. Instead, perhaps we should have the humility to say: I didn’t get it. I need to try harder.

      I learned to love Middlemarch. I had also been reminded of the value of perseverance. I determined to finish what I had started. So the following weekend, we finalised the selection. I wrote down the names of the books on a piece of paper and Tina witnessed and signed it. We christened it ‘The List of Betterment’. And afterwards we sat down to a special Sunday lunch which Dad had prepared for the whole family.

      Baked potatoes.^fn10

      fn10. An echo of Roger Hargreaves here. I am thinking particularly of the words with which he draws Mr Strong to its droll yet satisfying conclusion – ‘Ice cream! Ha ha!’

       Postscript

      This was not quite the end of Middlemarch. Of the novels I read during this period, Middlemarch is one that stayed with me over several years – haunted me, I should say. As one deadline after another expired, and still I came no closer to completing work on this book, I would remember poor old Casaubon and his unfinished Key to all Mythologies: ‘the difficulty of making his Key to all Mythologies unimpeachable weighed like lead upon his mind …’ And I would also recall Dorothea’s forlorn plea to her husband: ‘All those rows of volumes – will you not now do what you used to speak of? – will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write …’

      And so I give thanks that, if you are reading these words, I have been at least partially successful and not conked out at my desk before I could finish what I started; and I also give thanks that we, unlike the Casaubons, are still married.

       Fig. 4: Propped up by a saint. Photo: Alex Miller.

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