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

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The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life Page 18

by Miller, Andy


  Now let’s get this over with.

  M. Michel Houellebecq

  Somewhere in Ireland, I believe

  Dear Michel Houellebecq,

  My name is Andy Miller. No, not that one. You do not know me. We have never met and, after you have read this letter, let’s pray we never do. As Mark E. Smith says, ‘You should never meet your heroes, know what I mean? And vice versa.’

  I am writing to you from the lobby of the British Library in London. The St Pancras facility, which consists of reading rooms, galleries, cafés and a shop, was designed by the architect Colin St John Wilson and opened to the public in 1997. It is the largest public building constructed in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century, requiring approximately ten million bricks and 180,000 tonnes of concrete to complete. In the middle of the building is a four-storey glass tower containing the King’s Library, with 65,000 printed volumes along with other pamphlets, manuscripts and maps collected by King George III between 1763 and 1820. The main collection, which is comprised of more than 150 million items, expands at an average rate of three million items per year, like bacteria or metastasising cells in a cancer patient.

  Fig. 14: Bill Woodrow, ‘Sitting On History’.

  (birthday card from Julian Cope)

  I am seated near the entrance of the Library on a piece of sculpture by Bill Woodrow entitled ‘Sitting On History’. The sculpture takes the form of an enormous unfolding book, cast in bronze, tethered to a ball and chain. The book is lying ‘open’ so as to permit simultaneous public functionality as both artwork and bench. Woodrow intended the piece to symbolise ‘the book as the captor of information we cannot escape’, which seems like a downbeat message to proclaim at the doorway to a library. But perhaps I am reading it wrong.

  The basements beneath me extend to a depth of 24.5 metres. Like you, I am indebted to Wikipedia.

  Michel, I selected this spot because I thought the irony might appeal to you, also because there is nowhere else to sit today. When I started coming here fifteen years ago, few people had laptops. Notes were taken on paper, in pencil, as per the Library’s strictly enforced regulations; personal computing was still done in the home. Today the landings and walkways are full of Wi-Fi enabled visitors, bent over screens or sitting cross-legged on the floor. As a result, the Library has been forced to review its policy on the use of power sockets in the Entrance Hall and other public areas. There have been numerous incidents of people trailing adaptor leads across walkways, causing others to trip and injure themselves; furniture gets moved around, blocking access to disabled toilets and fire equipment. According to the ‘Abuse’ section of the bl.uk website, many people use the Library’s power supply to charge not only their computers but also their MP3 players, mobile phones, even electric toothbrushes. Please note: multi-socket extension cables are not permitted in the Library.

  Of course, I am symptomatic of this metabolic change. I write you this letter on my silver Sony Vaio notebook, with its 15.5in screen, its Intel® Core™ 2.53 GHz Processor, four gigabytes of RAM, 500 gigabyte hard drive and DVD SuperMulti Drive, using a piece of proprietary word processing software which keeps flashing adverts for related products at me – OneNote™ Mobile – You need it. Sharpen your Excel skills – Get video training now! – but which I lack the technical ability to disable. This Vaio is not a bad machine but the battery life is poor, a deficiency of the model which has been noted by several users online. Presently I shall have to get up and move to find a power socket. Also, ‘Sitting On History’ is proving to be a pain in the arse.

  Ok. I have moved upstairs to the Rare Books & Music Reading Room where I can sit comfortably on a normal, monopurpose chair and plug this laptop into the desk-mounted power unit, permitting me to carry on with this letter while neutralising the risk to those who walk past without looking where they are going. This is desk 294. It was in this room, at this desk, that we became acquainted – though, as I said above, we have never really met. I had booked a day’s holiday to read Graham Greene’s novel The Name of Action. Greene hated this book, his second, and after its initial publication in 1930, effectively suppressed it; it has never been reprinted or appeared in paperback; original editions sell for many hundreds of Euros. At my request, a copy had been retrieved from one of the temperature-controlled storage units and delivered to the Reading Room. I receive twenty-three days annual leave as part of a package of benefits in my job with a London book publisher. Better to spend a little of it here than in some fucking gîte in the Dordogne, being ripped off by the local farmer and his greedy offspring who, once the old man starts dying, will move him into a nursing home and never visit.

  Several years ago, while researching a book on The Kinks, I spent two weeks up at the British Library’s newspaper and magazine facility at Colindale, North London. Unlike the glossy, futuristic St Pancras reading rooms, Colindale still seemed like something one might find in a black-and-white comedy from the 1950s, with disobliging library technicians presiding over a cataloguing system only they understood and dark cupboards where solitary men leafed through old issues of Picture Post, mumbling to themselves. There was no cafeteria or restaurant at Colindale, just a bare room with red plastic chairs and an automatic vending machine. At lunchtime, my fellow researchers and I would try not to make eye-contact and eat our packed lunches with the same idea: I hope they’re not thinking about me what I am thinking about them.

  The atmosphere in Rare Books & Music, by contrast, does not make one feel as though one is being indulged in an embarrassing vice. People here read exemplarily. There is something uplifting about the conspicuous contemplation that seems to be taking place all around, so that even if one has come to do no more than read for pleasure – if such a thing is still possible – one feels oneself joining a noble communal endeavour. Much has been written about the barely suppressed erotic charge of this environment. Are there attractive, bookish, large-breasted young women here? Do they periodically retire to the toilets for extended bouts of graphic lovemaking? No, because this is a library and not a Michel Houellebecq novel. It’s a ménage of the mind.

  At the time these events took place, I was nearing the end of a year-long effort to read fifty great books which, at one time or another, I had lied about having read before – mostly fiction, classics, a couple of politics and philosophy titles. Some of the choices were obvious: Moby-Dick, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, the manuscript of which resides in a glass case several floors below where I am now. It had also taken in quite a few cult books: Americans of course, some Silver Surfer comics, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, if you know that novel in France. It was only reading books, yet in my head I seemed to be engaged in a heroic struggle, rather like the quasi-Nietzschean depiction of Neil Young you contributed to Michka Assayas’ Dictionnaire du rock: ‘A man advancing, on a difficult and rocky road. Often he falls bloodied to his knees; he gets up again and keeps going.’

  Throughout this uphill struggle, I had been hoping for the coup de foudre, the lightning flash which might illuminate the muddy track ahead of me. I had been moved and inspired and humbled by the books I had read – who could read Anna Karenina without experiencing all of these? – but I had yet to be shocked by something utterly unexpected and new. The Master and Margarita had come close; so too, if you can believe it, had Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler. But I was still waiting for that bolt from out of the blue.

  Take the two books I had just completed, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Huysmans’ À rebours, which I read in Robert Baldick’s translation under the title by which it is best known in England, Against Nature. Morrison’s novel was magnificent, a model of technical accomplishment, a super-refined product like the Canon Libris laptop-printer combination or the Camel Legend parka. And what is there to say about Huysmans that has not already been said a thousand times? Ludicrous, overripe, decadent yet somehow indestructible; I could fill the pages of this letter with quotes from Against Nature, entire paragrap
hs, which struck me as uncanny in their wit and modernity. It is a bad, wicked novel but a great one. But although I had devoured and appreciated Beloved and Against Nature for their literary qualities and cultural significance, and gained pleasure from doing so, they were only books; perhaps it was unreasonable to expect them to be anything more. They were like 1994’s Sleeps with Angels and 1982’s Trans respectively, two fine Neil Young albums, one the mature statement of a master, the other an experimental flop championed by a significant minority, but both chiefly understood in relation to other Neil Young albums and appreciated almost exclusively by fans of Neil Young. Or so I felt at that time, though perhaps not in those exact terms.

  I was nearly forty years old, a married man, a father and, however much I wriggled, a mature adult. Midway on life’s journey, it was probably unrealistic, if not a little pathetic, to expect books to be anything more than books.

  On my way out of the house that morning, then, I had grabbed my copy of Atomised off the shelf because Atomised was the next book on my list and I needed something for the train. It was the same copy I had bought in the late twentieth century but never read. At the station, I succumbed to a magazine instead, a habit it was proving hard to break. As the autumn countryside sped past, I flicked through the magazine and gazed out the window, conserving my energies for The Name of Action. When I arrived at the Library, I was glad to observe Library protocol by depositing my belongings in a downstairs locker, save for a pencil, a notepad and your novel. I rode the escalator to Rare Books & Music, found Desk 294, retrieved The Name of Action from the Issue Desk, sat down on this excellent chair and began to read.

  The Name of Action was terrible. It was as though someone had concocted a malicious novel-length satire of a Graham Greene novel. No wonder Greene had tried to bury it. This was not like Neil Young’s obstinate refusal to issue Time Fades Away (1973), one of his most important albums, on CD or via Spotify or iTunes – or maybe it was, except that Time Fades Away is a masterpiece and The Name of Action, which lacked anything in the way of a convincing setting, theme, character or plot, was a piece of crap. Either way, as a book, it could only be of interest to Greene completists. My pilgrimage was meant to be about enlightenment, not complete-ism for some bourgeois record-collector to get purist about, to paraphrase another of my old heroes.

  I picked up your book, Michel, and opened it. Like The Name of Action, it was a first edition; and its publisher was William Heinemann, the same windmill logo embossed in gold leaf on both spines, seventy years apart. After successive corporate takeovers during the 1980s, William Heinemann is now part of Penguin Random House, the conglomerate which employs 10,000 people across five continents and comprises nearly 250 ‘editorially and creatively independent imprints’; in the UK, its most admired authors are probably you and the late Michael Jackson. Only half-concentrating, I cast my eye down the opening paragraph of the Prologue:

  ‘This is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless closely in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared; the relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel.’

  Ha! That was very good.

  I read a little further. A biologist called Michel Djerzinski has organised his own leaving drinks to mark his departure from the research institution where he has worked for seven years. The party is a dismal failure; by 7.30pm it has broken up. Djerzinski walks one of his colleagues back to her car, a Golf. He smiles, they shake hands. He has remembered to smile, preparing himself mentally, but in retrospect wonders whether they could have kissed on both cheeks, ‘like visiting dignitaries or people in show business’. When his now ex-colleague does not immediately start her car, Djerzinski sits in his Toyota and wonders what she can be doing. ‘Why had she not driven off? Was she masturbating while listening to Brahms?’ Djerzinski drives back to his Paris apartment, feeling like a character from ‘a science-fiction film he had seen at university’. He discovers his pet canary has died. He eats a ready-meal from Monoprix’s Gourmet range ‘washed down with a mediocre Valdepeñas’, and dumps the dead bird in the rubbish chute: ‘What was he supposed to do? Say mass?’ Djerzinski goes to bed, has a terrifying nightmare about giant snapping worms, old coffee filters and ravioli in tomato sauce, swallows some sleeping pills and passes out. ‘So ended his first night of freedom.’

  That was it. I gathered up my stuff, returned The Name of Action to the Issue Desk, retrieved my bag from its locker and, without giving ‘Sitting On History’ a second glance, sprinted out onto the Euston Road and jumped on a number 390 bus heading for Archway. The longed-for coup de foudre had finally occurred.

  While reading Huysmans a few days earlier, I had scribbled down the following passage from À rebours, which seemed to capture what I was still searching for: ‘However much a reader wants to rid himself of prejudice and refrain from passion, he naturally prefers those works which correspond most intimately with his own personality . . . He wanted, in short, a work of art both for what it was in itself and for what it allowed him to bestow on it; he wanted to go along with it and on it, as if supported by a friend or carried by a vehicle.’ Now here I was, carried along both with Atomised and on it; similarly, the 390 bus to Archway. If this were a book, it would be almost too perfect.

  I was making for the Archway Tavern, the pub in North London where The Kinks were photographed for the gatefold cover of their 1971 LP Muswell Hillbillies. I felt myself drawn to the place like a spawning salmon or a dying elephant or, more accurately, an ageing, sentimental Kinks fan. As with The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, which I had listened to in a pub – it’s a long story, Michel – I wanted to be out in the world, with a drink in my hand, surrounded by slot machines and Irish alcoholics. I knew intuitively that Atomised was a vital book and, for that reason, I did not need to read it in a library; the library I needed was inside me.

  Here is what I liked most about Atomised: it was brutally, bitterly, appallingly funny. I sat in that pub and sniggered so hard and so often that I frequently had to stop reading and put the book down to pause and metaphorically rub my disbelieving eyes. Yes, it was bleak. Obviously it was filthy, monotonously so. But more than anything, it was alive and it spoke to me. I was so taken aback that all I could do was laugh.

  I am not sure I could ever truly love a book I didn’t find funny, at least a little. This may be a failing on my part but if the writer offers no palliative, nothing to manage the pain, ironically I find it hard to take their work seriously. Perhaps it’s because I’m English. Near the end of Atomised, there’s an English character who says this:

  ‘People often say that the English are very cold fish, very reserved, that they have a way of looking at things – even tragedy – with a sense of irony. There’s some truth in it; it’s pretty stupid, though. Irony won’t save you from anything; humour doesn’t do anything at all. You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks your heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, or how reserved, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. After that, there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. You might say, after that, there’s only death.’

  Was it wrong to find even this amusing? I don’t mean to suggest that Atomised was only funny – it was shocking and cerebral and heart-breaking and all the things I said above – nor that it was merely funny. For someone approaching his fortieth birthday, it was a far from reassuring r
ead. Every character in the novel who had achieved their fifth decade was either depressed, alienated, sexually tormented, haunted by the sense of their own encroaching obsolescence, riddled with cancer or dead. But the view of modern life it proposed, and the manner in which you expressed it, seemed so truthful to me, so fastidious and brave, I could only laugh in grateful recognition. It was existence broken down to its elementary particles: work, desire, ageing, death and the Monoprix’s Gourmet range of ready-meals. On that particular day in the Archway Tavern, however, with a pint of Guinness in front of me and The Kinks on the jukebox, Atomised did not feel like the sequel or prelude to other books. It felt like life.

  You know Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps? You must do; in an email to Bernard-Henri Lévy, you write: ‘If there is an idea, a single idea that runs through all of my novels, it is the absolute irreversibility of all processes of decay once they have begun.’ Why use three words when thirty will do, eh Michel? Now I have read your other work, the novels, the poetry, watched the movies you’ve directed, even listened to Présence humaine, the CD you recorded with Bertrand Burgalat – you know I love you but, sorry, it’s shit – I can confirm the veracity of this statement. But I admire the repetition in your books: the assiduous cataloguing of correct brand names, the references to film and music which, unlike most literary novelists, you get right, the recurring portrait of a society in which everything is commodified. I’m not bothered by the ridiculous amounts of sex your characters have or the sub-porno scenarios you describe; they are of a piece with the minutiae of package holiday arrangements in Platform, the mechanics of the cartographic process in The Map and the Territory and, for that matter, the vocabulary of science, those long chains of genetic code whose effect in Atomised is mesmerising to the point of boredom. It is the method by which you interrogate, over and over, that single, recurring idea of irreversible decay. Or, to quote the toiling Neil Young once more, from his fifth live album Year of the Horse: ‘It’s all one song.’

 

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