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

by Miller, Andy

  And what did life have in store, according to these guidebooks? In the Marvel universe, this angst intensified in adolescence, with girlfriends and fighting and general turmoil, but so did the alter egotism. The trick was to get bitten by a radioactive spider, be a billionaire playboy, etc., and then your alter ego was empowered to act out its, and your, fantasies: dressing up in a homemade costume, slugging all-comers and eating nothing but Hostess Twinkies. Sok! Zap! Barf! Etc!

  When you grew to adulthood, you ceased to be a superhero and turned into a fretful Fillyjonk or a pompous Hemulen or a Grandpa-Grumble. If you became a parent, you were invisible like the adults in Peanuts or Pooh, an unseen presence just outside the frame. And as life dragged on, you grew mystifyingly captivated by work or chores or gardening, until even the appeal of these fell away and you found yourself stranded like Moominpappa in the opening lines of Moominpappa at Sea:

  ‘One afternoon at the end of August, Moominpappa was walking about in his garden feeling at a loss. He had no idea what to do with himself, because it seemed everything there was to be done had already been done or was being done by somebody else.’

  And eventually the freezing, friendless, lonesome Groak would catch up with you and that would be the end of it. Moominpappa at Sea is a chronicle of mid-life crisis foretold, for readers of nine and over. Looking back, I wonder that I bothered growing up at all – if indeed I did. It was all too true.

  Were Mum and Dad aware that, like Nostradamus in the pages of The People’s Almanac, I was reading these runes and determining a bleak future – a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom? Ought they to have steered me away from such morbid, introspective fare to healthy, sunny Swallows and Amazons or Just William? Well, thank God they didn’t. I was a child with a morbid, introspective streak and it comforted me to see this streak reflected back at me in fiction, where it could be treated with compassion and laughter.

  In fact, Look-in aside, my parents seemed happy to let me follow my own path through the bookshelves of our libraries and stationers. There was no one in my life pushing the canon of children’s literature, no one waving a proto-List of Betterment in my face. No one tried to improve me with C.S. Lewis or A Child’s Garden of Verses. Though I grew to appreciate it later, I can remember trying out Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland at the age of eight and being tremendously disappointed; it was so much better on TV.

  The biggest influence on my burgeoning taste was probably television, which could have been a bad thing had I not had the extreme good fortune to be living in Britain in the 1970s. In the first instance, this meant Jackanory on BBC1, a programme whose format was cheap, simple, educational and entertaining: point a camera at an actor like Alan Bennett or Judi Dench or Mai Zetterling or Kenneth Williams and at teatime every day they read to you from a good book. It was via Jackanory that I and millions of other impressionable children were given a chance to discover the Moomins and The Eighteenth Emergency, and treasure like The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, Ludo and the Star Horse by Mary Stewart, Black Jack by Leon Garfield; the magic of reading itself.

  But our generation was fortunate twice over. The huge captive audience and empty schedules meant that programme makers frequently turned to books from an earlier era as dramatic source material. You need not have read E. Nesbit to know The Railway Children or The Phoenix and the Carpet or Five Children and It, or Pamela Brown, Frances Hodgson Burnett or John Masefield to know The Swish of the Curtain, The Secret Garden and The Box of Delights, respectively. By modern standards, these adaptations were daringly sedate and wordy. Because I loved Doctor Who, I also loved the Target series of novelisations of the Doctor’s adventures – I think Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius by Terrance Dicks was probably the first book I ever read from cover to cover in one go, glued to the back seat of our Morris Marina. And on Sundays, the BBC broadcast the Classic Serial, dramatisations of Carroll or Swift or Dickens for the family to watch together. I know this all sounds very worthy and middle-class and paternalistic but my point is this: if you were a child who liked books, who actually was much of a reader, there were books in libraries, books in bookshops, books at school and books on TV. You’d never had it so good; and, arguably, nor would you again.12

  My parents gave me their love of reading, as I have said, but they were not snobs, inverted or upright, who favoured books over other forms of entertainment. There were few cultural neighbourhoods that were not for the likes of us; we watched Coronation Street and 3-2-1 like everyone else. But my parents were not modernists. What preconceptions they did have were reserved for ‘modern art’ and pop in its post-Beatles form, which Dad in particular thought was one gigantic racket, monetary and musical. When we traded the Morris Marina for a car with a cassette player in it, my tape of Dare by the Human League was barred, along with all my other tapes – XTC, Skids, the lot. The only albums we could listen to without an argument were original cast recordings of songs from the shows: Oliver!, Kiss Me Kate, My Fair Lady, all of which we were word-perfect in. I consider myself lucky. These were my introduction not only to Lionel Bart, Cole Porter and Lerner and Loewe, but also Dickens, Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw, not to mention Oliver Reed, Ann Miller and Audrey Hepburn (and CinemaScope, and Bob Fosse, and Cecil Beaton, et cetera, et cetera).13

  Our number-one tape for long car journeys was the Broadway cast recording of Guys and Dolls. The last time I had been to Bournemouth, it had been in the car with Mum and Dad, sitting in the back seat, singing along to ‘Luck Be a Lady’ and ‘My Kind of Town’, and making a better fist of it than Marlon Brando.14 And here I was again in solitude, a hundred years later. I wandered the streets, missing my family – my families – and wanting to be with them.

  When I returned home, I could not bring myself to start a new book. The List of Betterment seemed to have reached a dispiriting conclusion. I kicked about the house, went to work and fell back into bad habits on the train: crosswords, paperwork, magazines. The gap between the agony of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the ecstasy of Absolute Beginners seemed too wide to bridge.

  Looking back, Absolute Beginners is perhaps the only book I can truthfully say has changed my life – I mean actually changed it, as opposed to a sort of media-friendly shorthand for ‘a book I really like and would be willing to talk about for money’.

  Teenage boys of my generation graduated to adult reading through the gory horror thrills of James Herbert or the thrilling Nazi gore of Sven Hassel. I, on the other hand, mooched about in my customary gloomy place, sometimes with humour – Douglas Adams, David Nobbs – and sometimes without – Graham Greene, George Orwell. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Our Man in Havana, Coming Up for Air. Jokes or not, these were my comfort and my maps, one middle-age meltdown after another.

  I first came to Absolute Beginners in 1984, when the book was probably at the peak of its popularity. Paul Weller was its most famous advocate, and his group The Jam had released a single with the same title.15 A film was in production. It was one of those cult novels which, if you were sixteen as I was, you needed to have read.16 I raced through it in a day, whilst on holiday with my parents in Scotland. Yeah! My body may have been on the car deck of a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry between Oban on the mainland and the historic Isle of Iona but my heart was in the jazz joints of 1950s Notting Hill – or Napoli as MacInnes had rechristened it. Dig!

  I remember finishing it while sitting up on deck on the return crossing, oblivious to the Scottish summer gale that battered the boat. I had never been grabbed by a book in quite the way Absolute Beginners grabbed me (not even Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius). It engaged me intellectually, emotionally – completely. I felt it spoke to me and for me. I have a photo of Mum and Dad I took on Iona that afternoon, standing in front of its medieval abbey. It is the last photograph of my childhood, my parents as I saw them when I was still the junior member of our small family (my father died the following year). When we got home, I was not th
e same. I was at long last a teenager; no, not a teenager – a young adult. I could see a path out of childhood.

  So Absolute Beginners gave me an exit strategy, a teenage identity I could relate and aspire to. In the process, it liberated and liberalised me – awakened in me the nervous excitement of being young, on the brink, in the same way that great pop music does. At a stroke, it made me more tolerant towards difference of many kinds. It made me feel all right. It changed my life.

  I read the book over and over again in late adolescence. Its spell never diminished. And then I went out into the world and forgot about it, let it become a memory. So when, in the dying months of my thirties, I re-read the book for the first time in twenty years, it turned me upside down all over again. Variously, I felt: homesick, elated, angry, exhilarated, righteous and all right. I felt vindicated. When I was sixteen, I knew where it was at.

  I was working in West London. I had made a life in books. The company’s office was in Ladbroke Grove, exactly where the novel is set; until recently, we had lived nearby with our young son. In the week I read the book again, the British National Party made significant gains in London at the local council elections. It was depressingly easy to transpose the 1950s race riots of the novel to the streets around me; their names, after all, had not changed. But the book didn’t just draw a line between the present and the past (my present and my past), it made me feel they were happening simultaneously – a superimposing of the 1950s (the events of the book), the 1980s (me when I first read it), and my life in the twenty-first century, its likely future, a telescoped view of the whole ambiguous relationship between me and London and books.

  ‘Every job I get, even the well-paid ones, denied me the two things I consider absolutely necessary for gracious living, namely – take out a pencil, please, and write them down – to work in your own time and not somebody else’s, number one, and number two, even if you can’t make big money every day, to have a graft that lets you make it sometime. It’s terrible, in other words, to live entirely without hope’.

  What, I asked myself, was the point of reading these books if all it was going to achieve was a succession of ticked boxes? What was it for? What was dangerous about reading dangerously unless you acted on it?

  Albert Camus once wrote ‘A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’ The quote is emblazoned on the gatefold cover of Scott Walker’s 1969 LP Scott 4, which is where I first encountered it. Walker is an artist who has moved forward incrementally, his bursts of noise and activity punctuated by ten-year silences while he waits for something new to say. In an interview published at the time of his last album, Walker was asked why he had so dramatically changed the style of his music in the late 1970s:

  ‘I suddenly woke up . . . I’d acted in bad faith for so long I’d lost my heart for the world, sort of. I had to discover my life again, to just do it for me alone. So I made the decision: no more bad faith.’

  Bad faith is what had happened to Absolute Beginners – the film turned out to be such a disaster it killed off interest in the book. Perhaps I was a victim of bad faith too. I had nearly killed the thing I love. I had forgotten the parquet floor, the boy sitting in the back seat or stretched out on his bed on a summer’s day, lost and found in a good book. I needed to keep faith with those ‘two or three great and simple images’ and I needed to discover them again. I had to keep reading, wherever that took me. I had to move on.

  Open your heart and dare to keep feeling fascination. See, Dad? I told you the Human League were good.

  The following Monday morning, I boarded the 6.44am train with a renewed sense of purpose. In its own tiresome way, One Hundred Years of Solitude had reminded me, as Absolute Beginners had done, that we never know where inspiration might strike next nor in what guise. So far the List of Betterment had offered me glimpses of something bigger and better. It was up to me to keep looking for it, to push reality aside until I relocated the magic of reading – and no lousy magical realists were going to stand in my way.

  I took off my coat and sat down. From my bag, I pulled Don Quixote – book twenty-seven. I had started reading again. This time I would not stop until the train came off the rails.

  In 1979 we moved house, to another town and a new school. Our new library was acceptable, I suppose, despite being more welcoming and user-friendly than the old ones. There were still plenty of books in it, and not just books. This library contained a small selection of LPs for hire. The week after we moved into our new home, I borrowed Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the double blue album, the one that went from 1967 to The Beatles’ break-up, and while Dad was at work, I played ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘I am the Walrus’ over and over again, utterly enthralled in a way I did not recognise; whatever it was, these songs were alive and they spoke to me. Our new town also had a bookshop in it and, more significantly perhaps, a record shop. But that is another story.

  The town where I live now has, for the time being, a bookshop, a record shop and a library too: use them or lose them, as the phrase goes. Of course, technology, cuts and big-box stores will ensure we lose all three eventually but we carry on using them regardless. The bookshop is a good one, the record shop can order what I want and although the library is more like a drop-in centre than a sanctum sanctorum, at least it is there, serving the community and its children. In Croydon, at the time of writing, to save a bit of money the local authority is trying to shut permanently the branches where my love of books flourished. If they succeed, presumably the council will heave the remaining stock into a dumpster and take a hammer to the precious parquet flooring, which they can then sell off block-by-block to incurable nostalgics like me. I do not want any of this to happen but life flows on, within you and without you.

  My son likes books and we indulge him just as much as my parents indulged me. It is easy to do when you have a child who loves reading and when there are so many amazing new books out there: Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson and Wimpy Kid; the absurd adventures of Mr Gum; Harry Potter and His Dark Materials; Varjak Paw, the mystic warrior cat; Patrick Ness and Philip Reeve; and the series I would have adored as a child, the morbid, hilarious and linguistically punctilious A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket. Let’s not be snotty about the gleeful boogerism of Captain Underpants or the fighting fantasy heroics of Beast Quest either. Alex polishes off each new instalment in the never-ending saga like I polished off Doctor Who books, stretched out on the bed or sitting in the back seat of the car while Mum and Dad go about their grown-up drudgeries. And, overlooking the part it played in her son’s downfall, his grandmother has enrolled him in the rejuvenated Puffin Club, who will be delighted to receive yet another plug in a book that is not even published by Penguin.17

  Fig. 12: ‘From the library of Alex Miller’: Puffin Club bookplate, circa 2012.

  (birthday card from Julian Cope)

  As a child, reading is something you do while you are waiting for life to begin. As a parent, however, if you are lucky and you seize your chance, you can be part of it too. Last summer, while his mum was ill, Alex and I read The Hobbit together. Sometimes he read to me, mostly I read to him. I did Gandalf as Sir Ian McKellen and Bilbo as a sort of bouncy

  Roy Kinnear. My Gollum was a whispered triumph, my precious - ss - ss, while the dwarves seemed to hail from somewhere near Bristol via Treasure Island – it was difficult to pinpoint. And Smaug, the terrible dragon under the Lonely Mountain, the Great Worm coiled on his dragon-hoard of gold, spoke loudly and languorously in the unmistakable, rich baritone of the best Doctor Who, Tom Baker: ‘I am armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems. No blade can pierce me.’

  Thus, while it lasted, we held the world at bay. And we were sorry when it had to come to an end.

  III

  ‘Mais ne lisez pas, comme les enfants lisent, pour vous amuser, ni comme
les ambitieux lisent, pour vous instruire. Non, lisez pour vivre.’

  ‘But do not read, as children read, for fun, or like the ambitious read, for training purposes. No, read for your life.’

  Gustave Flaubert, letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, June 1857

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’

  Books 28, 29 and 31

  Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

  The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith

  The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens

  ‘April 27.–Painted the bath red, and was delighted with the result. Sorry to say Carrie was not, in fact we had a few words about it. She said I ought to have consulted her, and she had never heard of such a thing as a bath being painted red. I replied: “It’s merely a matter of taste.”’

  The Diary of a Nobody

  ‘Nutmeg graters. Toby jugs. Decorative pincushions with all the pins still in. She had a coffee table with a glass top and a repeat motif of The Beatles underneath, printed on wallpaper – it must have been an heirloom. She had original Pyrex oven dishes with pictures of carrots and onions on the side. She had a Spanish lady with a flouncy skirt that you sat on top of your spare loo roll. I used to run to her house when I wanted to go to the toilet because there was always some bloke wanking in ours.’