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

by Susan Hill

  The over-hyped young novelist with such a massive success the first time and near-oblivion the second? They have to get on quietly with a really good book, discarding any ideas which are not starred first-class, forgetting everyone and everything except the writing. They have to write without expectations but with ambition, they have to write in obscurity, understanding that unless they come up with the goods, and better than the goods, again, they will be nowhere. If they are the real thing, then sooner or later they will indeed come up to expectation. They will be building the foundations of a solid career.

  If I am asked for advice I always say, ‘Don’t give up the day job’, no matter what it is, because however well your first book did, however large a sum of money you may have made, one swallow does not make a summer or one successful book a long and lucrative career.

  Outside the moon is up – the harvest moon over harvest fields. It casts a sheen upon the empty stubbles, the bare rounding slopes, so altered from the close-crowded landscape of standing corn. It has glimmering secrets among the trees, and pierces itself into every entanglement of foliage, and lays faint shadows across the paths. Each finds a ghost of himself beside him on the ground. An elusive radiance haunts the country; the distances have a sense of shining mist. The men move homeward from the field; the last load creaking up the hill behind them, the hoofs of the horses thudding, their breath sounding short. Peace comes, a vision in the fairy armour of moonlight, the peace of ‘man goeth forth unto his work until the evening’ …

  I WISH I HAD WRITTEN THAT. It is from Corduroy, the first book of a trilogy about Suffolk country life before the last war by Adrian Bell. He was another who used to write a column for the EDP, a farmer, an observer, a lover of nature and deeply, intimately knowledgeable about his county and its rural ways of life. They have almost all gone now, but in my lifetime, I was staying in Wiltshire during harvest and we all loaded the bales on to the binder and cold drinks were brought round. Twenty years later, living in an Oxfordshire village, I stood at our gate to watch the tractors as they came groaning up the lane, pulling their load of hay in the moonlight. Those are still to be seen today. The tractors come laden past this gate. Once, when this was a farm, they would have turned in to where I am standing. Yet in some ways, nothing changes. There are no working horses, of course, but tractors round here are not all vast and shiny and as expensive as a house, some are good old sturdy workhorses, decades old. Farmers cannot afford to replace them as we replace our cars and they are all expert motor engineers, keeping the machinery moving, even if it means an emergency running repair with bailer twine.

  Adrian Bell’s Corduroy, together with its successors, Silver Ley and The Cherry Tree, is a record of farming life written by an outdoors person who had a poet’s eye and pen. As a young man in London, indeed, Bell had begun writing successful poetry, but his father sent him, as a wet-behind-the-ears townie, to Mr Colville in Suffolk to see if he had the makings of a farmer. He did and was good at it. He enjoyed it, but he was still – perhaps first of all – a writer.

  Bell’s books go in and out of print, but there are often secondhand copies available inexpensively. Mine sit on the kitchen shelf where local history and topography and suchlike go, next to Lilias Rider Haggard and another, rather more recent East Anglian writer, Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield. Blythe has the gift of turning a phrase so crisply, with such an individual tone, that one re-reads a sentence or two over and over again, for the sheer pleasure of rolling the words in the mouth. Inevitably, one then remembers it. Here he is writing about a visiting choir, come from a nearby town for a local choral festival: ‘They are princely in scarlet, and can sing. It is a known fact. They loll against our tombstones.’ It is the words ‘princely’ and ‘loll’ which do it – somehow this short sentence conveys the lofty air of the visitors, and the innate sense of superiority of the hosts – they are, after all, ‘our’ tombstones.

  TOO HOT FOR ME. The dog and cat seek the shade and only the blasted pigeons make a sound.

  A FRIEND SAYS she is lost without her book group, which does not meet in August. Not against book groups – how could any writer be, though I could never belong to one. But they make people read books when they might not, and read better ones than they might otherwise. It depends on the group, of course. I went to speak to one in Oxfordshire whose next choice was The Odyssey and after that A Pilgrim’s Progress, before they returned to contemporary fiction and Midnight’s Children.

  Another friend writes that she has given up on fiction because she finds new novels either pretentious and sub-James Joycean, or junk. She reads non-fiction instead, mainly about wild life and country life and the history of the landscape. I alternate but I never give up on fiction for long, even if it is the classics only for a few months. It’s just the way the wind blows me. I wish I could read fat historical biographies and books about battles, though I am not sure why. The only history that really absorbs me is of the twelfth century and, lately, about Society and aristocratic women in the twentieth. One leads to another. The medieval monks write on parchment, shear their sheep, construct an elaborate drainage system, pray and fast. The satin-clad, Marcel-waved, cigarette-holder gels turn into ambulance drivers and secret agents in wartime.

  The Raj is of never-ending fascination, too, but that can equally well be fiction. Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet never fails and it has the ring of truth. Ootacamund must be full of ghosts. The hills – a paradise for birds. And scorpions. Scorpions. Suddenly I fly from the Raj to Corfu and the story of how Gerry Durrell kept his scorpions in a matchbox and how his brother Larry opened it in advertently … ‘It’s that bloody boy again!’ That sends me running to the shelf where my battered copy of My Family and Other Animals lives. Some books here should really be replaced with new, but the battered old ones read best, I find.

  THE SWIFTS HAVE GONE. The saddest moment has been and gone, the one when you realise the skies are empty overhead and know there is such a wait until they arrive again next May, and then only for such a brief stay – though not quite as brief as that of the cuckoo. Swifts belong to one of the most ancient of bird groups, the Apodidae, and they are long-lived, as small birds go. They are monogamous and the same pair will breed together in successive years. They may spend two or three years on the wing before breeding and making a nest, they sleep on the wing and are the only birds known to mate on it, too.

  But they do not bear the best Latin name for a bird. That is surely the one for the wren. Troglodytes troglodytes.

  I HAVE NEVER READ ANYTHING by Ursula Le Guin because she writes fantasy and science fiction and I do not enjoy reading either, though as a child I certainly loved fantasy. Most children do. Perhaps a lot of us just grow out of it, although I know that many do not. Sci fi is somewhat, though not totally, different. Some people only ever read science fiction. They are obsessive. They may go to congresses and conferences and fan gatherings. A lot of them are men. It is a strange and entirely harmless world and it gives much harmless pleasure but I just cannot suspend my disbelief enough to want to join them. I have tried, Heaven knows, but never got beyond one third of a book.

  I enjoy discovering what other writers think, though, about writing, literature, the world, politics and even Troglodytes troglodytes. I search out collections of essays in which I may find all these things and more. Ursula Le Guin’s fiction may not be to my taste but when I came upon her Words are My Matter I bought it. She talks a lot of sense, though she is annoying when she bangs one drum over and over – in complaints against commercial publishers, present-day publishing, and the general decline of both. She also hates chain booksellers and regards them as mere pushers of product, without interest or knowledge of literature or love of books. She is wrong about that, at least in this country (Le Guin is American). Most of the staff I have encountered in various branches of the largest chain bookseller in the UK have been passionate and informed readers, anxious to lead their customers to something new and delightful. Quite a fe
w of them have become published writers themselves. (The only chain of shops whose staff are entirely ignorant of and uninterested in the books they stock mainly sells stationery, confectionary, newspapers and magazines.)

  But Le Guin has some pertinent and intelligent things to say about her own chosen genre of fiction, and about genre fiction in general. Every writer and reader (and bookseller) should be required to read her chapter on this subject.

  The trouble with opposing Litfic to Genrefic is that what looks like a reasonable distinction of varieties of fiction hides an unreasoned value judgment – Lit superior, Genre inferior. This is mere prejudice. We must have a more intelligent discussion of what literature is …

  To get out of this boring bind, I propose an hypothesis:

  Literature is the extant body of written work.

  All novels belong to it.

  Her next point flows from this simple but all-encompassing distinction. There is, she says, a real mystery which we can work at to try and solve, every time we read a book.

  Why is one book entertaining, another disappointing, another a revelation and a lasting joy? What is quality? What makes a good book good and a bad book bad?

  Not its subject. Not its genre. What, then? That’s what good book criticism, good book talk, has always been about.

  I wonder, though, how much of this is subjective, even if we get past the ‘I liked the hero’ and ‘I don’t like novels written in the present tense’. Of course, academic literary criticism is not subjective – or it would like us to think that it is not.

  GLORIOUS TWELFTH?

  Rough shooting is one thing, part of the farming way of life, which is as much about conservation as anything – and of course was always a way of hunter man feeding himself and his family. But driven pheasant shooting – killing thousands of birds which have been reared only for the shoot, and which are later two a penny at the butchers, so that a large percentage of those shot are just buried in a pit – that is another matter. Grouse shooting is a little better, but not much. I enjoy roast pheasant but could never stomach grouse again after I learned how many red worms its body contains. But those who would ban country sports do not understand that simply to leave everything untouched, unculled and allowed to breed unchecked, would be a far worse cruelty, would cause the destruction by neglect of much of the country and shrink the rural economy rapidly. And a good shot ensures that a bird dies a very quick death.

  THIS IS THE TIME OF YEAR when the book trade starts to gear up for the autumn rush. There are more new titles published in September and October than in any other months, most of them aimed at Christmas buyers. The Man Booker Prize longlist appears at the end of July, then the shortlist in September, with the winner announced in October, to send everyone into a frenzy. The Costa Book Awards and several lesser ones come at the end of this year or the beginning of next. All of them hike sales of new books, which, whatever else one may think of prizes, can’t be a bad thing.

  I always wait until at least a year after any of the prizes before reading those on the lists which appeal. It is amazing how everything settles down and finds its natural level. Hype never did any reader much good.

  SHIRLEY HAZZARD AGAIN. I could start a Hazzard quote-a-day:

  The attempt to touch truth through a work of imagination requires an inner center of privacy and solitude. We all need silence – both external and interior – in order to find out what we truly think.

  Just finished the Ursula Le Guin essays, too. Here is a very handy quote for other writers:

  But please don’t ask me where I get my ideas from. I have managed to keep the address of the company where I buy my ideas a secret all these years, and I’m not about to let people in on it now.

  Of all the opening lines I envy and remember with glee every so often, perhaps this is the one that makes me smile: ‘One day in my young youth at high summer, lolling with my lovely companions upon a haystack, I found a needle’ – Muriel Spark, ‘The Portobello Road’.

  I SUPPOSE WE WILL NEVER, until the end of time, stop the knee-jerk comments about the 2011 Man Booker Prize, for which I was a judge, together with Dame Stella Rimington, Gaby Wood, Chris Mullin and Matthew d’Ancona. It has gone into folklore as the year the judges were of inferior and ‘populist’ quality, who had not a clue about literature. I read that I was ‘supremely unqualified’ for the task. I do wonder how else I might have improved my chances of being qualified. I have a first class honours degree in English from King’s College, London; I have published over fifty books, including several prize-winning novels; I have been a regular reviewer of fiction in a wide variety of newspapers and journals since 1963; I introduced a TV book programme, presented BBC Radio 4’s Bookshelf and A Good Read; and I have been not only a previous Booker Prize judge but a judge for every other major fiction prize. In what way was I ‘unqualified’?

  The rest were a mixture: a leading journalist and former editor of the Spectator; the then literary editor of the Daily Telegraph; a politician and former MP who had written some very well received memoirs; and the former head of MI5, who is one of the best-read women I have ever met. The literary director of the Booker Foundation, Ion Trewin, who knew more about the book scene and literary prizes than anyone living, selected us.

  We worked very hard, we read over 120 novels. But, because these things are always chance, it was not a vintage year for literary fiction. We had an awful lot of poor stuff to wade through, but wade we did, and our discussions – aka arguments – were long, fierce and passionate. It was not easy to compile a longlist of novels we all felt were worthy, and if the criterion was, as it must be, that every book included was a potential winner of the prize, then we failed because, hands on hearts, we did not feel that one or two of our longlist choices were worthy of winning. That was, again, because of the low-ish standard of that particular year’s entries.

  But when it came to the shortlist, we had no doubts. Our arguments were just as passionate, but really the shortlisted novels chose themselves. So far so good. But then we came to the announcement of the shortlist, which is always at a press conference. No problem there. We had no agenda and, of course, the winner is only chosen on the day of the prize dinner. But some members of the assembled press corps clearly did have an agenda, and one of the first questions was, Had we failed to put on our shortlist the novel by Alan Hollinghurst because he was a homosexual? Stella Rimington would have refused to answer such a question on principle, and Chris Mullin confessed that he had not even known that Hollinghurst was a gay man. Matthew, Gaby and I did know but felt that it was totally irrelevant. We were choosing a book, a novel, not an author for his or her sexuality. It was a shocking accusation.

  Still, we might have got through unscathed, had one member of the press pack not asked the perfectly legitimate question about what had been our criteria for selecting the shortlist. Chris Mullin answered first, for no special reason, but what he said was our downfall and will haunt us all for the rest of our days. He said that what he had been looking for was that they had to ‘zip along’. Which of course was translated as ‘an easy read’, which became ‘something popular’, and so on, and so on.

  I do not know why Chris used that phrase. I know what he was trying to say, but for it to ‘zip along’ is not one of my litmus tests for a great novel. But there it was. It stuck. It scuppered our chances of being taken seriously. It scuppered everything. We have gone down in book history as a bunch of lightweights who had no business being asked to judge a prize for literary fiction. Judging by some of the comments you would think we were all barely literate.

  Our winner, which was a not-quite but nearly unanimous choice, was Julian Barnes’s fine novel The Sense of an Ending, which improves with each re-reading, as Barnes always tends to do. Nobody complained. Everyone in the room at the dinner was happy. The book sold in huge quantities. But we will still never live our reputation as the ‘zip along’ judges down. Ironically, the last time I saw Chris Mullin was at
the memorial service for Ion Trewin. He was a bit rueful.

  SEPTEMBER

  THIS GARDEN IS IN SOUTH-WEST FRANCE. The house is small and the garden is large, with old, shady trees and places where comfortable chairs and small tables have been set out of the sun. They are for snoozing, for sitting out over a glass of wine. For reading. There is a deep covered terrace, too, with sofas and chairs. Another reading spot.

  I am not a sun-worshipper and it has been very hot, so I have followed the shade with my book, under the trees, which have not yet begun to turn. It is very still. There has not been the faintest breeze, for days. The three cats belonging to the main house stay inside, or in dark places beneath shrubs, until evening. The three red hens do the same.

  I have brought a heavy book bag, as usual, but, also as usual, in the rented cottage there is a small bookcase packed with other people’s left-behinds.

  They fascinate me, those holiday reads, and I have studied a good many in my time. Indeed, I have compiled a list of the authors whose books – always in paperback – are most often found in rented properties, both at home and here in France. I start going through them as soon as I have unpacked and I rarely score fewer than five.

  The list does change every few years.

  This year the bookcases have contained, in no particular order:

  Joanna Trollope *

  Dan Brown

  Jenny Colgan

  Stephen King *

  Daphne du Maurier

  Victoria Hislop *

  Ian McEwan *

  Val McDermid *

  P. D. James *

  Ruth Rendell *

  Jojo Moyes *

  And Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin has not been found for a while.

  The asterisk means that those authors are in this year’s house. Several authors dropped off the bottom a couple of years ago – Catherine Cookson, Dean Koontz, Gerald Durrell, Peter Mayle. John le Carré comes and goes.