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

by Miller, Andy

  Am I going on? I’ll go on.

  When Patrick Hamilton was a half-baked young man loose on the streets of London, he fell insanely in love with a prostitute called Lily Connolly. This infatuation drove him to the brink of financial ruin, set him on the road to alcoholism and inspired his fourth novel, The Midnight Bell, which was published in 1929 when he was only twenty-four years old. Bob is a well-liked barman at the Midnight Bell, a pub off the Euston Road. He lodges in a room above the pub, along the landing from Ella, the barmaid who is secretly in love with him. But Bob becomes obsessed with Jenny, a West End streetwalker; little by little, and without any sexual intercourse, she parts him from his savings of £80, leaving him broke and almost broken. Around this unhappy trio, Hamilton wrote the novels which would subsequently be collected as Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky: The Midnight Bell, then The Siege of Pleasure (1932), in which we learn how Jenny fell into prostitution, and finally The Plains of Cement (1934), where barmaid Ella is wooed by one of the Midnight Bell regulars, the appalling Mister Ernest Eccles.5

  It soon emerged that I had been correct in my long-held supposition that I would enjoy Patrick Hamilton’s writing without having read a word of it. In the space of a few pages, I recognised it. It felt comfortable. The inter-war landscape of Lyons Corner Houses and Clapham omnibuses, the seedy London lowlife, the anguished, juvenile passion, the imminence of spiritual and financial damnation, the girls with bobbed hair, all brought back my own teenage literary crushes: Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Greene’s It’s a Battlefield. Hamilton was another burgeoning Marxist but a better – or more bourgeois – craftsman than Robert Tressell. His politics inform the books but do not dictate them. He shows how it is money, or fear of poverty, that underpins the so-called ‘moral choices’ his characters have to make, without venturing to propose a political solution directly. Bob’s £80 is both a safety net and a stake to which he is tethered; the feckless Jenny, once she has ‘fallen’, cannot resist the pull of ‘easy money’; Ella contemplates marriage to Mister Eccles as a way of obtaining financial security for herself and her mother. It was beautifully done.

  ‘We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value,’ wrote Charles Arrowby. For the novelist Dan Rhodes, The Midnight Bell is a life-like study of boozing (‘[the book is] sodden with the wonderful, nasty stuff’) and boozers: ‘My family had a pub for many years, and from an early age I came face to face with the horrors of the habitué. There are few things more soul-destroying than being locked into an early-evening conversation with a barfly who thinks they are funny or clever or, worst of all, “a character”.’ I had been given my copy of Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by an acquaintance for whom the book was a study in the compulsive madness of addiction, a subject he knew something about. For my part, I looked into these three novels, each successive volume of which I liked more than the one preceding it, and saw my distant younger selves – the boy who worshipped the writers of another era; the cautious adolescent agitator; the demented, jilted Steve Buscemi lookalike, and the reluctant working man.

  What was the difference between saying I had read Patrick Hamilton and finally reading him? The answer was pleasure – both the pleasure of recognition and the irresistible pull of the story he told. And therefore I could read him, under siege on a train, without distractions of my own or anyone else’s making.

  What was really remarkable was how much of my London was in these books. Not just the saloon bars of Soho and Fitzrovia, but Shaftesbury Avenue, Hammersmith Broadway, the garden suburb of Bedford Park, the Great Western Road out past the Hoover Factory, all places I had lived or worked during my fifteen-year stay in the capital. I got drunk here, held down a day job, had my heart broken, fell in love again. This was where I grew up. And although Tina and I had left together, part of me remained here. I finished Twenty Thousand Streets . . . , so much of which felt familiar, and thought: perhaps it is time to move on.

  On a Sunday morning before Christmas, I caught a train into town and took the bus to Primrose Hill. Climbing to the top, I could see the Post Office Tower, the Snowdon Aviary and a homeless man shaking his fist at someone who was both much taller than him and invisible. It was still early. I planned to walk across the city, down the Euston Road, paying my respects at the Midnight Bell or a few pubs like it, through the West End, and along the river to Hammersmith or beyond. It was going to take me all day to say goodbye.

  For company, I had Samuel Beckett. On my iPod was an audiobook of The Unnamable, read by an actor called Sean Barrett. The book ran just under six hours, long enough to carry me from Primrose Hill to Hammersmith. Perhaps it was cheating to listen to something the author intended to be read, but print on paper had not got me very far. I was going to try an alternative route.

  As I set off past the zoo and the Roundhouse, along Camden High Street, past where all the record shops used to be, past the market and the Odeon cinema on Parkway, Beckett’s words murmured in my ear. They drifted around me, catching my attention, retreating, returning, insinuating themselves into my train of thought. I came here a lot once. We saw Blur at the Electric Ballroom. Compendium, the bookshop, was over there, Burroughs and Bukowski tapes, gone now. The Oxford Arms, that was where I saw Glen Richardson perform his Todd Carty musical. Or was it an opera? On second thoughts, maybe that was the Hen and Chickens. It was all a long time ago. ‘Some may complain that they cannot understand The Unnamable,’ Beckett’s publisher and champion John Calder has written, ‘but they should ask themselves how well they understand not only their own lives, but what they see when they look out at the world; how they interpret what they see, little of which could be understood anyway; and especially how they think themselves, what makes them think, what they think about and why; and how they separate what they know from everyday events, from what they know from dreams.’

  From Camden onwards, letting The Unnamable spool, I traversed not one but three places called London: the city I had lived in for so long; Patrick Hamilton’s twenty thousand streets, still humming in my mind; and this unreal city, shaped by memory and daydreams and Beckett’s unravelling commentary. After a couple of miles, I had to sit down, not from fatigue but because I was overwhelmed by what I was experiencing. In a pub I did not recognise, somewhere in limbo, I sat and nursed a pint and just listened . . .

  ‘I hope this preamble will soon come to an end and the statement begin that will dispose of me. Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which, little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story, as if it were the first time. So there is nothing to be afraid of. And yet I am afraid, afraid of what my words will do to me, to my refuge, yet again. Is there really nothing new to try?’

  Book Ten

  Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville

  and introducing Book Zero, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

  ‘Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But now I leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true one
s, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is a draught – nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!’

  Moby-Dick, Chapter 32, Cetology

  ‘As someone who had spent his life exploring the hidden interconnectivity of disparate emblems and ideologies, Langdon viewed the world as a web of profoundly intertwined histories and events. The connections may be invisible, he often preached to his symbology classes at Harvard, but they are always there, buried just beneath the surface.’

  The Da Vinci Code, Chapter 3

  It was Friday and I was working from home. To my left lay an unread pile of paperwork. On my right was a half-started copy of Moby-Dick. And on the television screen in front of me was Loose Women, the loose British equivalent of The View. I believe it is important always to take a lunch break.

  As usual on Loose Women – which I had seen before – it was Coleen Nolan who said what everyone was thinking. Perched in her usual berth next to the columnist Carol McGiffin, the former 80s pop princess and bestselling co-author of Upfront & Personal: The Autobiography was taking her turn in a discussion segment entitled ‘What Makes a Good Book?’ Coleen, who according to previous debates sees nothing wrong with reasonable breast enhancement, does not think gay couples should be allowed to adopt, would rather her sons had sex with hookers in Amsterdam than ‘behind a club in Ibiza with absolutely no safeguards’, and really likes chocolate, was speaking up for many of those present.

  ‘I can’t stand all this snobbery about books! Ooh, that one was garbage, ooh it was trash! Ooh, la-di-dah! I mean, it’s supposed to be good if we’re reading, isn’t it? I thought it was supposed to be good!’1

  And the studio audience whistled and cheered and stamped its feet on Shakespeare’s face, forever.

  Which is not to say Coleen was wrong. There is an awful lot of snobbery around books. In the last ten years, much of it has been directed at one man. Has there ever been a more unpopular popular author than Dan Brown? For every satisfied customer of his sensational conspiracy thrillers, there is an offended Catholic, an exasperated academic or an infuriated subscriber to the New York Review of Books raging at his success and fame. For every Coleen Nolan, there is a Michiko Kakutani. Notorious Middlemarch-shirker Salman Rushdie has described The Da Vinci Code as ‘a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name’. None of which has prevented Dan Brown becoming one of the most widely read authors of modern times. Only E.L. James, author of Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels, comes close.

  On average, everyone has read The Da Vinci Code. You have probably read it. Even if you have not read it, statistically you have. My encounter with the phenomenon of Brown was pretty typical. I picked up on the book about a year after Alex was born. Sleep deprivation and kids’ TV had turned my brain to Tubbycustard. All I wanted was something lightweight and undemanding. The Da Vinci Code was both of these. However, as I compulsively turned the pages to discover what incredible nonsense might happen to Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu next – incredible but gripping – I could not help noticing that the book was exceptionally poorly written. You go to a thriller for its thrills, not its poetry, but this was distractingly bad. My eye kept getting snagged on some clunking piece of expository dialogue or pseudo-scholarly statistic or shockingly ugly sentence. ‘Da Vinci was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal PHI,’ exclaimed Robert Langdon, wretchedly. And the movie was even worse.

  I am not saying that Dan Brown cannot write. But whilst reading The Da Vinci Code, I was certainly thinking it.

  However, although The Da Vinci Code did a whole heap of things defectively, it did one thing stupefyingly well – the plot. It was as though Brown had jettisoned all traces of style and credibility from his novel because he had realised, in a flash of Leonardo-like scientific insight, that style and credibility were the very properties preventing his theoretical story-balloon from taking flight. So they had been tossed over the side, along with beauty, truth and five hundred years of literary progress.

  To be clear, Dan Brown knows how to tell a story – but there is more to telling a story than just telling the story. Stephen King understands this, as do Lee Child and Audrey Niffenegger. I am keen to make this point because naysayers of Dan Brown tend to be dismissed as either ‘ooh la-di-dah’ snobs who disdain all escapist entertainment or jealous, sour rivals of a more successful author. ‘All you haters can suck my chubby dick,’ types one web forum contributor calling himself Socrates. ‘Hes got all the riches and the bitches! Does the envy hurt THAT bad? Boo hoo! Boo hoo hoo! Dan Brown’s a really rich writer with millions of fans and I’m not! NO FAIR! Masturbate elsewhere, loserzzz. You people need to get lifes and go out and get laid.’

  Socrates, let me address your concerns. Liking bad books does not make you a bad person; equally nor does preferring good ones. Am I jealous of Dan Brown? I am not. I do not aspire to Dan’s prose style nor do I wish to be a global figure of fun. Interestingly, although he is many, many times more successful than I am, until the publication of The Da Vinci Code, Dan and I sold similar quantities of books, after which he pulled ahead of me by a factor of approximately 40,000 to 1. Nonetheless, I wish him well – after all, we are all writers and we should stick together. (Are you listening, Salman?) As for the riches, of course I would love to earn just a fraction of Dan’s wealth but that does not mean I want to do it his way. I would like Donald Trump’s billions, without necessarily committing myself to his hairstyle.

  Secondly, there is nothing wrong with escapism. I love escapism. As Brian Eno once observed, ‘We’re all perfectly happy to accept the idea of going on holiday, nobody calls that escapism.’ I frequently yearned to escape from my dull routine and a great book – of any stripe – offers us a cheap getaway from reality. But there are all sorts of holiday destinations and a multitude of ways to travel. We don’t always have to end up behind a club in Ibiza with absolutely no safeguards.

  Finally, Socrates, I question whether your dick is particularly chubby. Your confrontational manner suggests otherwise. In reality, I imagine your dick to be rather twiggy and bent, like a bent twig or a Twiglet. Perhaps it is you who should masturbate elsewhere, if you are able. (I wonder if you will ever read this, you who posted your thoughts on the Internet, never thinking they would be noted down and reproduced in a book, a copy of which will reside in the British Library for future generations to consult and snigger at you and your thin abnormal penis. What a surprise you’ll have if you do!)

  Memories of The Da Vinci Code’s compelling plot had visited me often during my trawl through Moby-Dick, a book which might fairly be described as ‘putdownable’. It is widely hailed as ‘the great American novel’ but as many a despairing high-school student will attest, it’s no Da Vinci Code. Moby-Dick is long, gruelling, convoluted graft. And yet, as soon as I completed it, once I could hold it at arm’s length and admire its intricacy and design, I knew Moby-Dick was obviously, uncannily, a masterwork. It wormed into my subconscious; I dreamed about it for nights afterwards. Whereas when I finished The Da Vinci Code, which had taken little less than twelve hours from cover to cover, I chucked it aside and thought: wow – I really ought to read something good.

  Moby-Dick is a work of genius and some of its genius seemed dark or supernatural. It most reminded me of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now or Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, both products of isolation and psychosis, and both somewhat out of the control of their ostensible creators. Or perhaps that is a definition of genius, a force that cannot help but beget itself, regardless of the toll it takes on the artist; in all three cases, these men struggled to locate such ungodly inspiration in their later work. Melville knew he had birthed, in his words, ‘a wicked book’. In a letter to a female neighbour, he wrote: ‘Dont you buy it – dont you read it . . . A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.’ Moby-Dick is a miscreated,
mystical leviathan, often unfathomably deep, whose flaws and imperfections miraculously become the contours of the immaculate whole.

  It also begs interpretation. The whiteness of the whale, its supernatural blankness, has been made to stand for society’s preoccupations in any given era from the early twentieth century on – sexual, political, spiritual, military, cosmic, personal. (‘Call me Ishmael.’ ‘No, call me Ishmael.’) The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end – a cliché but physically what happened – as I read of ‘the damp, drizzly November’ in Ishmael’s soul, compelling him to flee the ‘thousands of mortal men . . . tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks’. Here was I, undertaking my own voyage of discovery, adrift on the sea of books: ‘Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.’ I preferred not to think too hard about who or what my white whale might be. But at the same time, Moby-Dick is mesmerisingly, eternally interpretable, so much so that Melville reminds us early on that, whoever we are and whatever our discipline, we are always reading ‘. . . that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.’

  However, we should not overlook the fact that, for fifty years, few readers saw their reflection in Moby-Dick or hailed it as a ‘great book’. It took a new century, a World War and the innovations of modernism before the critical establishment was willing or even able to comprehend it; readers only began to come aboard in appreciable numbers after World War II. In contrast with Melville’s early seafarer yarns Typee and Omoo, which had attracted enthusiastic reviews and healthy sales, the publication of Moby-Dick in 1851 was, in the words of Robert McCrum, ‘a horrible combination of a botch and a flop’. Total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher Harper & Brothers; forty years later, it had still not sold out its first edition of 3000 copies. Following the poisonous reaction to his next, even weirder, novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities and the rejection of Isle of the Cross (now lost) in 1854, Melville wrote very little. He lectured; he tried his hand at poetry; he drifted. Eventually, his wife and her relatives used their influence to secure him a post at the New York City customs house where for the next twenty years he worked as an inspector, ‘a humble but adequately paying appointment’. There were whispers of insanity, heavy drinking and violence; one of his sons shot himself, another ran away from home and was never heard from again. When Melville died in 1891, he and his Leviathan were more or less forgotten.