Apologies for my absence this week, my friends. I’ve been under the weather and am still suffering the ill-effects of the chronic fatigue that inevitably attaches to whatever ails me. This has had the consequence that I’m also terribly behind in my reviews. Now, I’ve noticed lots of blogging friends signing up for the Women Unbound Challenge, which I thought was tempting, but which I hadn’t intended to join. And then it suddenly struck me that all the reading I’ve done of late (four and a half books) has featured women behaving, or at least trying to behave, in an unorthodox manner. So, belatedly, I’m in. I think that the role of women in novels is notably constrained. Women are confined within a couple of dominant plotlines; they are either a) romantic heroines, pursuing love or b) selfless, devoted mothers or c) wicked and unsympathetic in some way because they are neither a) nor b). It’s quite unusual to find novelists who are trying to do something different with their central female protagonists, and practically nothing upsets the moral universe in which good women are selfless and bad women are out for gain.

So let’s begin with Anthony Trollope’s Miss Mackenzie, a novel that’s been in the news recently because it was advocated by Joanna Trollope as one of Radio 4’s Neglected Classics. Given that it was published in 1865, we’re not going to expect rampant radical feminism here, no. But Trollope did have unusual intentions up his sleeve as he set out ‘to prove that a novel may be produced without any love’. He admitted himself that in fact it didn’t turn out that way in the end, but he still incurred the bewilderment of reviewers at the time by making his heroine plain and unremarkable. Miss Mackenzie, by the time the reader meets her, is an old maid of 36 who has spent her life caring first for her sick father and then her sick brother. Finally she is free and independent, having come into a reasonable sum of money on her brother’s death. And with this little sum, Miss Mackenzie decides to see a bit of the world. She moves to Littlebath (Trollope’s fictional version of Bath) and rents lodgings there, taking with her a niece from her remaining brother’s family, with the intention of paying for her education. And once she is there, the trouble begins, with endless unscrupulous attempts about to be made upon her, in order to secure a stake in her modest fortune.

Money matters, in Trollope’s world, and even an unprepossessing soul like Margaret Mackenzie can clock up a surprising three suitors, all of whom look less attractive than the last, and none of whom seems able to view her separately her from her eight thousand a year. Her family, rather than support and protect her in her newfound independence, are in fact the first of the vultures. Her remaining brother is in trade – which makes for lots of Trollopian fretting about class issues – and his wife is a horrible, grasping sort who needles Margaret mercilessly in order to get a share of her inheritance. Her brother’s business partner, a Mr Rubb, comes courting Margaret with clearly mixed motives. His first act is to secure a hefty loan for the business, which is instantly lost to swathes of debt. Then there are the Balls, a different line of her family, who hold a grudge that they were cheated out of money many years ago and ought by rights to have it now. Margaret’s cousin on this side, John Ball, has nine children, and needs funds. He is manipulated by possibly the most awful character in the novel, the truly ghastly Lady Ball, Margaret’s aunt, who bothers and blackmails her relentlessly and cruelly, to get hold of the money. Then there is a deeply unpleasant clergyman in Littlebath, the Rev. Maguire, whose squint Trollope describes with disquieting horror. He wants to set himself up in his own church and will prove to be one of the most tenacious and underhanded of them all.

But in the middle of this, holding onto her integrity with both hands, is Margaret Mackenzie, who continually balances calm common sense and insight against her desire to be ‘useful’ and give herself and her money over to the worthiest cause. Miss Mackenzie is a wonderful creation; clear-sighted enough to recognize (with sorrow and indignity) when people are out to abuse her, yet quietly passionate about her right to be loved for herself. This is a forward-thinking novel for its time, although its concerns are ancient. There is a profound inquiry into women’s value here, and Margaret wants to be valued at least in part for something other than her inheritance. But since it is the nineteenth century, women are almost inextricably bound up with the money they possess, and Margaret is bitterly aware that while she is relatively rich, no one can view her without money bags popping up before their eyes. And so, about halfway into the novel, Margaret loses all the money she gained, not by any fault of her own, but through a legal loophole.  Whilst she faces poverty and an end to all her worldly aspirations (which were on the tentative side anyway), it does open up a pathway for her to find out which of her unsuitable suitors has the most genuine and lasting desire for her. Because choose one of them she will, before the novel has finished.

So, a quick feminist tot-up here on Trollope’s credit and debit sheet. On the negative side, Trollope still can’t come up with any other plotline for a female protagonist than to have her fall in love and, prior to that ultimate salvation, to have her suffer horribly. Women were such empty vessels in the nineteenth century, their ornamental status so absolute and blinding that any other form of ‘doing’ was entirely foreclosed. Furthermore, the happy ending is only reached after the deus ex machina intervention of yet another relative (and a female one), but finally, finally!, a nice person, who is willing to help Margaret out, albeit from her secure, moneyed and titled position. We have not reached the point in history yet where sisters are doing it for themselves. They need to be backed up by another form of authority. Still in the debit column, Margaret has little or no self-esteem, and is aware that she is valuable to those around her only to the extent that she can give herself (and her assets) away. But, and this is a relatively biggish but, she never sacrifices her pride, either financial or personal, refuses to be any kind of a burden on others, is faintly distrustful of her own romantic notions, and remains at all times true to her own sense of priorities and values. She is clear-sighted, quick-witted, not lost to her emotions and always acting with great integrity. There is much more to Margaret Mackenzie than love interest in a novel; she is, for once, a character in her own right.

I loved this book, and found it an engaging and satisfying read, and whilst I couldn’t rate it as highly as La Cousine Bette or Middlemarch, it is certainly worth your time.

I see that my blog friends Dorothy and Stefanie have both been talking about this of late, and I can never resist joining in on their discussions. They have been wondering why a reader might feel guilty about buying books, but I’m approaching this from the angle of being a reader who thinks it’s important to buy them. If you simply cannot afford books at present, that’s fine; we’ve all been there at one time or another. Go read a different post because I’m not addressing you. But if you have a small portion of your disposable income set aside for leisure pursuits, then here are my reasons why you should spend it on books:

1. Reading is extremely good for you. It focuses the mind, hones concentration and improves memory, all in scientifically proven ways.* It is also a way to open your mind to other cultures, other perspectives, other ways of life. Reading on screen, listening or watching television and/or films does not bring the same mental benefits as the slow, in depth, contemplative exercise of reading on the page. It also teaches problem solving and lowers stress. If you think it is important to do a sport or take exercise for the body, it’s equally essential to work out the brain, or else we risk becoming insular, forgetful, restless and opinionated.

2. If you already enjoy reading then it’s important at this particular juncture of history to be evangelical about it. Numbers of young people reading are dropping fast. Half of the American population between 18-24 has never read a book. On average an American citizen reads four books a year (and those are not necessarily fiction). I couldn’t find online statistics for other countries, alas, but I’m sure they are similar. It’s essential that we promote reading as much as we possibly can as there is a genuine risk of it becoming an eccentric hobby, and as I mentioned above, there are essential personal reasons why we do it.

3. But there are also cultural reasons. Buying a book is like placing a vote for a certain way of life. Books ask us to think deeply about the reasons why we do things, they challenge us and they reflect back to us the kind of society we create for ourselves. A culture with a strong literary component is one that considers contemplation, critique and creativity essential factors in the life of its citizens. It’s a culture that is not afraid to question what it does, and that welcomes subversion as being essential to vitality and growth. It’s a culture that doesn’t want to encourage sheep-like compliance or self-centred, short-sighted demands. It’s the culture I’d like to live in.

4. It isn’t necessarily the culture we do live in, and the atrocious state of the publishing industry is testimony to that. Publishing is currently in crisis and much as that may in part be due to the industry’s own excessive expectations following the creation of all those huge multi-media companies in the 90s, we have to support it if we want it to continue, and therefore gain the benefits of a vibrant book culture. Cutbacks in publishing do not lead to only the best-written books making it onto the marketplace, as we know. Instead, frightened publishers churn out celebrity biographies and Dan Brown-alikes. So, support the industry before we lose it, or lose any chance of intervening in its future. Buy the books you would most like to see published. Buy the kind of books you would like to write, if you feel that way inclined. Buy wall-to-wall Jilly Cooper and children’s annuals, if that’s what pleases you; bestsellers make it possible for publishers to risk other types of books and maintain a diverse list.

5. It’s important to support libraries too, for all those people who simply cannot afford books. But the only way to show that reading remains important, to governments, to industries, to advertisers, is to buy a book. Only the market with its cold, hard statistics has real, uncontentious power at present.

6. Books are relatively cheap. A full price book still costs less than a cinema, theatre or concert ticket, a meal out or half a tank of petrol. The problem with book buying is that it tends to be small amounts spent regularly, which become more noticeable to the consumer than a large amount spent infrequently. You could buy a book a week for a whole year and spend less than you would on a couple of nights at a mid-range hotel. Other consistent expenditure on non-necessities – on snack foods, on alcohol, on cigarettes, on clothes shopping, on travel – adds up to much more than book buying and is generally worse for you or the environment. I’m not quite sure why it is, but people tend to be more tenacious about indulging their vices than their virtues. If books could be proven to be bad for you, sales would start to increase, I suspect.

7. So you already have books on the shelves? Well, the good news is that books do not have use-by dates. Have a look in the fridge instead and see what ought to be thrown out, calculate the cost of those items and compare it to the price of a book. Books sit around and wait for the right time for you to read them. There have been periods of stringent economy in my household when my husband was out of work, or when I’ve been ill with chronic fatigue, when I’ve been extremely glad of having a stack of books laid in. And being able to choose exactly the right book for the moment contributes a lot to the quality of my reading life, I think.

8. So you are running out of space on the shelves? Well, think first of all how wonderful your house looks, packed full of gorgeous books. And how it reflects back to you the life of your imagination over the past few decades. And how it says you’re the kind of contemplative, thoughtful, open-minded person I mentioned in the first point. And then either, a) squeeze in another bookcase or b) have a bit of a cull and give books to the friends who can’t afford them, or the charity shops, or even sell them at a car boot sale for a book slush fund.

9. Finally, I rather liked this article about spending money, which claims that 80% of people who suddenly come into a great deal of money run through it in the first year, whilst 12% end up committing suicide. Sudden wealth isn’t necessarily an advantage, then. But the article suggests that the most worthwhile expenditure is on education, and books at all levels, whether text books or guides or even mind-expanding fiction, are an education waiting to happen. Buying books is always an investment – in my own mental development, and in the healthy, vibrant life of my culture. I think that’s worth it.

* Writing this post made me order (!) Maryanne Wolf’s book, Proust and the Squid, which is all about reading and neuroscience – so in time I might have more precise details on this topic.

·    I hardly ever do bullet points – you know concision is not my greatest suit, and they seem to have made the formatting go crazy. But I’m really tired in a brain-dead sort of way. It’s been a busy and demanding couple of weeks and whilst I have things to say, they are mostly incoherent.

·    For instance, I saw a blog post (and can’t even remember where) about what prompts readers to buy books. The blogger wrote that the less she knew the better. A few lines of appealing premise or a strong recommendation were more powerful than a detailed account of a novel. She put this down to a divining instinct for passion, but I would put it down to the romance of the imagination. It’s like relationships – the more you know about a person, the more reasons you have not to become involved with them. These days what makes me buy a book is a combination of the storyline and the style of writing; I’ve come to recognize the kinds I like and a quick read of a paragraph or so in the store is generally revealing. I also have stretches where I like to take a punt on an author I’ve never heard of before, particularly when recommended by a friend, virtual or real. And I like to read some of the prize winning books, but rarely at the time when the prize is awarded.

·    I keep meaning to tell you that I met Gabriel Josipovici, finally, at a party a couple of weeks ago. I hardly ever go to parties, but it was thrown by a friend in the English department who I like very much and who has long wanted to engineer a meeting between us. So I made a special effort. Gabriel was completely charming, as you may imagine, and managed to add substantially to my tbr list in the half hour or so we spent chatting, as well as telling me all kinds of wonderful literary stories. He was so clearly someone who has devoted his life to writing and teaching. My husband asked me what he was like afterwards, and the best I could say was that he was like the condensed spirit of literature.

·    I was sent a copy of Mary Beard’s book It’s A Don’s Life, one of the first true crossover blog books. It’s a selection of posts from her long-running blog, which is regularly featured in The Times newspaper. Interestingly, someone made the decision to include (selected, I think) comments. They sound to me like the questions you have to field at academic conferences – all concerned with intellectual one-upmanship, often tangential, always revealing more about the questioner’s prejudices than the content of the speech. I felt very glad to have such a wonderful audience here at the Reading Room, who never, ever let their egos get in the way of a discussion. It’s a hard book to write about, not least because I didn’t love it when I would have liked to. I’m thinking a lot about the differences between reading on screen and on the page, the particularities of the genre of blogging and what makes a good compilation book.

·    I’m also struggling with another review book, and a real disappointment as it sounded fantastic in principle. It’s called The Invisible City by Emili Rosales and is one of those split narratives that intertwine past and present. The main character is an architect who stumbled as a child across the remnants of a lost city. One day he is sent, out of the blue, information about the city that leads him on a quest to discover what happened to it. The other strand of narrative is the contents of the manuscript that tell the story of the city’s creation. I am finding the narrative very hard to follow, and don’t know whether it’s the fault of the translation, or a kind of generic difficulty for me with Spanish texts. I have had trouble with all the Spanish writers I’ve ever read; I find their work tends towards incoherence and is always a little overblown. Latin America, I have no problem. But Spain, and the lacunae and skips and hops in the story have me all confused.

·    A little while back, I gave my first literary supervision in about five years. I felt extremely nervous and realized I had fallen completely out of practice. I simply couldn’t remember the vocabulary; the way I used to ask questions or the way I used to explain things and express myself. You’d think all these years of blogging about books might have kept me in touch with book-speak. But academic discourse is such a particular thing. It alarms me how quickly I forget; other people seem able to spread themselves over all kinds of different competencies, but I’m only able to do the one thing I am currently practicing doing.

·    I’m about to embark on a long, momentous campaign to update and improve teaching practices across the board in my college. Educationally, there is absolutely nothing to dislike, but this is going to be a long, hard battle of diplomacy. Telling teachers we could be teaching better is always taken as a personal insult, even though it is by no means intended that way. I’ve been meeting with the development director, who is the man who might be able to get hold of some cash to ease the proposals through. A colleague had told me he was tall, dark and handsome and I said ‘great!’ not believing a word of it. But guess what – he is most certainly those things. And yesterday he was wearing a lovely black velvet jacket. As I said goodbye to him and we shook hands just outside his doorway, I was startled to suddenly see my own dear husband crossing the courtyard, on his way to a different meeting. I would have believed it was a hallucination, but no, it really was him. Later on, I told him all about the handsome development director, and then his unexpected appearance and he said to me, ‘That money I paid the white witch all those years ago was well worth it.’

It’s been a hectic week or so, what with my son’s birthday, which coincided with him coming down with a flu-ey cold, and a lot of work at college. And so I was very happy to sink into a comfort novel, The Whole World Over by Julia Glass. It’s a novel that sprawls over a number of protagonist’s lives as they connect and intersect, moves between New York and New Mexico, and ties the personal in with the historical. It’s also well-written and engaging and for once I really enjoyed the fact that it was long and detailed, a book to get lost in.  But it also made me wonder a great deal about the difficulties that arise if authors refrain from passing judgement on their characters, and try to let their actions speak for themselves.

The main focus of the story is on a troubled marriage between Greenie, a talented chef whose career is on the up, and Alan, a psychotherapist whose client numbers are dwindling. They have a four-year-old son, the precocious George, who holds them just about together, whilst becoming the vehicle for their subtle competitiveness and for the excess love they can’t manage to give each other. The story begins as Greenie’s restaurant-owner friend, Walter, tells her he’s recommended her for a job with the Governor of New Mexico. At first, Greenie thinks this is a wind-up, but then the call comes for her to audition her culinary skills and, in a kind of whirlwind career romance, she finds herself agreeing to become his personal chef and break her small family apart, moving down south and taking George with her. Alan, as one may imagine, is not best pleased at what he sees is a unilateral and hostile decision, particularly when Greenie wants to sell it to him as a fresh start.

But Alan has worries of his own, beyond a crumbling marriage and a practice in the doldrums. Five years ago, after a row with Greenie, he attended a hometown school reunion alone and had a misguided one-night stand with an old crush. Now it looks as if that event may have had dramatic consequences in the form of another child. And whilst Alan rushes around trying to get to the bottom of this muddle, Greenie finds herself caught up with an old crush of her own and the possibility of a second chance at a relationship her mother nipped in the bud. This is a novel about venturing out and coming home, about taking risks in order to be safe, about the return of the past and the complete unpredictability of the present. Most of these concerns are played out through the prism of relationships and the search for dependable love. Revolving around the central nexus of Alan and Greenie are a number of other lonely or dislocated hearts. Walter, the restaurant owner, longs for the kind of settled relationship that the gay community doesn’t easily provide, although his attempt at this involves an affair with a man who is currently in such a long-term couple. This newfound love, Gordie, turns up with his partner, Stephen, in Alan’s consulting rooms as they argue over whether or not to try adopting a child. Also intertwined in the network of New York lives is Saga, a young woman who has suffered long-term damage as the result of a freak accident and can no longer manage numbers or her memory. Saga has been taken in by her Uncle Marsden, whose own children are less than happy about the arrangement, having a weather eye on their inheritance. Saga, however, simply wants to rebuild her life and gain some measure of security.

I must stress again at this point how much I enjoyed this novel. It was a really good read. But that doesn’t prevent me from becoming curious about its moral universe, which is to say its internal reward system for good and bad behaviour. All novels have a moral universe that is unique and powerful, and it is most clearly visible in the twists and turns of the plot and their ultimate conclusion. Who wins and who loses? Which actions make a difference? What constitutes happiness or success? What are the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) moral messages that the novel sends out? Part of the difficulty in grasping the morality of this novel lies in the fact that Julia Glass gives very little indication as to what we are supposed to think. Things just happen, and then happen some more, and she avoids scenes in which characters contemplate their actions or are seen from the outside by their fellow protagonists. But the unwillingness to judge goes deeper than that and makes for some odd interactions.

For instance, the issues that drive Alan and Greenie apart are never properly resolved, or even discussed. It seems strange that a man who is a relationship counselor should let himself fall into the trap of a one-night stand, unless of course he is not a good counselor, which would account for the falling-off practice and his own discontent. But that’s not the interest here. When Greenie finds out about his other child, she takes it calmly, too calmly, and returns to New Mexico instantly to commit to her relationship with her childhood sweetheart. The novel records her free indirect speech, assuring herself this is not an act of revenge, and yet are we to believe that? At the very least, Alan’s actions have released her from her marriage bond, or given her license to redress the balance. And then, shortly afterwards, George gets himself into a scrape, the kind of silly, foolish action that’s typical of his age, but his parents completely overreact. Alan rushes down to New Mexico, blames Greenie for not paying enough attention to him, and actually takes the child away from her. What are we to make of this? Except perhaps to see that if Alan and Greenie directed their anger and distress at one another, where it belongs, it would not have to be played out on the child. There are various hints in the story that the prank was wholly of George’s creation, that he may be developing an evil streak due to his parents’ estrangement, but George himself is always depicted as utterly self-contained and cheerful. And his father, the counselor, makes no attempts to get to the bottom of his behaviour. Later on, in a scene that is meant to be touching, George gets given a pocket knife. He’s five years old and with a history of recklessness. How can this be wise?

Although this is a novel with a definite plot, I had to wonder whether it wasn’t also episodic on the sly. While the events linked up, made patterns and echoes, the emotions surrounding them were compartmentalized. What happened in one part of a protagonist’s life was left quite separate from their feelings in another, which is I suppose what happens if we ignore the deep psychological dimension that binds all our actions, thoughts and feelings together. My experience suggests to me that our lives are all of one piece, all cut from the same cloth that is our soul and subject to the repeating flaws in its warp and weft. Events that happen to us may well be random, but our responses to them are consistently coordinated from the bedrock of the self. So I was most intrigued by a novel that turns this about face, finds pattern in events and eschews comment on the personal.

This is the first novel I’ve read that incorporates 9/11 into its structure, and coming as it does at the conclusion, I wondered what would be made of it. It functioned as a wake-up call, and again, I felt unsure. Is it right to use these great historical events as triggers for personal development, or is it right to leave them in their senselessness and waste? I couldn’t decide whether this novel was the result of an individual perspective by Julia Glass that invited her readers to do all the figuring out, to see her characters as driven by motives and emotions they were simply not in touch with. Or whether it was part of a wider, broader development in the moral universe of the contemporary novel, that looks outwards at the world, over and again, to find meaning and validation, whilst quietly side-stepping the internal configurations of the emotions as too complex, too hidden and too capricious to be meaningful?  I think it matters to think about this, because this kind of novel works hard to reflect a world we know intimately and recognise as being somehow ‘real’. What it tells us has much to say about who we think we are.

And I must repeat once again – I did enjoy reading this novel! I know it can be hard to separate out a literary critical reaction from a purely critical one, but it made me think and question and want to challenge it in a way that did not detract from my reading pleasure.

Just recently I’ve read two books on the subject of silence. I will say up front that I am a fan, after spending long, quiet, chronic fatigued years mostly alone. The experience has made me crave silence rather than avoid it, because it’s only in quietude that you can think, really think, and whilst it wouldn’t suit everybody, profound contemplation has certainly given me the richest hours I’ve known. But both these books consider what justification there can be in a life lived in solitude and reflection, as it is a route chosen by so few and one that is often accused of being selfish and even dangerous. One is by the prince of travel writers, the dashing Patrick Leigh Fermor, who describes three separate experiences of monasteries in A Time to Keep Silence. The other is written by the feminist and short story writer, Sara Maitland, who decided in her fifties that she wanted to choose a life of retreat and has detailed her explorations in A Book of Silence. I didn’t set out to read the two books together; I just wanted to read something by Leigh Fermor and that was the book I happened to pick up. But they do make for an intriguing comparison.

Let’s begin with Patrick Leigh Fermor, a kind of traveling James Bond. He left behind a very undistinguished education, getting thrown out of posh boarding schools, to walk at the tender age of 18 from Rotterdam to Istanbul, sleeping in castles and hayricks en route, and ending up living with a Byzantine princess, twelve years his senior, in Moldavia until the war separated them. His first two books recounted this epic journey and made his name. I mustn’t get sidetracked by his biography, although it’s easy to do so because it’s full of romance and espionage and adventure in lovely locations. Leigh Fermor doesn’t read like a man who had a sketchy education. In fact he has described himself as a wandering scholar, and his books are packed with glorious detail of history, anecdote and reportage. He is one of those writers who finds the exact word for absolutely everything, which gives his prose an oddly poetic effect, full of terms like ‘triforium’ and ‘chasuble’, ‘pontificalia’ and ‘myrmidon’. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what these mean (I certainly didn’t), the effect is ripplingly rich.

The story of the first monastery he stays in, The Abbey of St Wandrille de Fontanelle, a gorgeous Benedictine establishment, is concerned with the effects of adapting to a silent, regulated existence. Left completely alone and in silence, Leigh Fermor has initial difficulties adapting. He sleeps badly, he feels restless and depressed, lonely and flat. And then a different, more profound sleeping takes over that opens him up to a small, personal resurrection. ‘No demands,’ he writes, ‘once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy; there were no automatic drains, such as conversations at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life. Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away into some distant limbo and not only failed to emerge in the small hours as tormentors but appeared to have lost their dragonish validity.’ He says, in a way that makes my mouth water, ‘Work became easier every moment’. Packed around the account of his experience are descriptions of the life of the abbey and the monks he does exchange brief conversations with, as well as an account of the history of the monastery, which seems to have been fraught with dissolutions, attacks and disasters. But despite this, the atmosphere is one of eternal peace, and his experience is a positive one.

It seemed a bit odd that Sara Maitland, who describes herself as a religious person, should eschew the monastic altogether in her account, although she does spend time with both the zen Buddhists and the Quakers. The heart of her experience of silence is in the wilds of Scotland, however, where she first rents a small house for forty days and forty nights, and then eventually builds one in which she will live. Maitland gives a brief account of her life, with its start in a big, noisy, highly educated family, her political and religious enlightenment at Oxford, her marriage to a minister of the church and its ending, and her gradual embrace of ever greater quiet and isolation. She incorporates other accounts of long stretches of silence encountered by explorers, sailors and other recluses, and the second half of the book (which I haven’t finished) is a bit more theoretical, although never dry. It seemed to me that at the bottom of this book was a battle Maitland was fighting with a composite figure made up of all the people who told her she shouldn’t cut herself off like this. She quotes extensively from a friend’s letter, telling her that silence is a route to oppression and annihilation. The letter is deliberately provocative she says, but she returns to it across the text, as if she can’t quite free herself from its message. Despite the experience of hearing voices (it was a choir singing in Latin, she tells us, fiercely defensive – what’s not to like?) and having the odd hallucination and low moment, she is quite determined that everything about silence is good, valuable and productive for her. I found this an interesting and intriguing book, but to be completely honest, Maitland got on my nerves a bit. I’m all for silence, but the element of polemic in the account jarred occasionally.

I wondered whether the resolute positivity of her book had anything to do with the creeping associations of selfishness that dog the pursuit of silence (and almost always isolation). Maitland talks a lot about the experience of silence, but she doesn’t (or not in what I’ve read so far) say what she wants the silence for, what she wants to get out of it, beyond a testing of her own limits. In Patrick Leigh Fermor’s book, one of his later retreats is at a Trappist monastery, the monks renowned for their austere and comfortless existence. I didn’t realize until I read this that the discipline of the monk is offered up as a kind of endless atonement for the sins of humanity. Fermor describes how ‘By fierce asceticism, cloistered incarceration, sleeping on straw and rising in the darkness after a few hours’ sleep, by abstinence, fasting, humiliation, the hair shirt, the scourge, the extremes of heat and cold, and the unbroken cycle of contemplation, prayer, and back-breaking toil they seek, by taking the sins of others onto their own shoulders, to lighten the burden of mankind.’ I was struck by this, by its nobility and dedication, and yet felt sure that such an undertaking would be open to all kinds of misinterpretation in the modern, fundamentally self-oriented world. Leigh Fermor’s account of monastic existence is always steeped in serenity and gentleness, whilst admiration colours his experience of these holy places, and there seems to be a genuine balm in the quiet laying to one side of the rigors of selfhood. By contrast, Maitland’s account is about getting ever deeper into herself, using silence to extricate an experience and a selfhood that are threatened by noise and external demands. Which is curious in a way, as she didn’t strike me at all as a retiring or shy sort of person.

Maitland’s book is full of fascinating information and lively accounts of her experiences but it seems very noisy in its fulsome support of silence. I would have been happier with a more balanced approach, one that fully took on board the difficulties associated with silence (there is a chapter on ‘the dark side’, but even here, disadvantages are regarded with great neutrality). Patrick Leigh Fermor’s slim volume was for me the better read, exquisitely written and broad in its interest and tone, despite its brevity. I am undoubtedly on the side of silence, contemplation and retreat, but even I think it must inevitably be balanced by speech, loving relationships or profound spirituality. But I should finish the Maitland – she may yet say what it is I want to hear from her, if I could only work out what that is.

How many times have you put a book down because its content was too disturbing, or thrown it against a wall in anger? Just recently I started reading a novel by J M G Le Clezio, last year’s Nobel prize winner, entitled Étoile errante, or Wandering Star. The essence of a Nobel prize winner is, I think, to produce fiction that fearlessly addresses issues and ideas that most writers don’t wish to elaborate upon, probably for fear of being uncommercial or elitist or too damn depressing to please their editors. I tend to think of them as being the authors who deserve a prize for getting their work published despite its subject matter and who continue to grind their axes, regardless of the small circulation of their works, and the dismissive comments from reviewers who think things really can’t be that bad. (And this is why Americans, with their positivity and their tendency to eschew abstract ideas-driven novels don’t win so very often.)

Anyhow, Le Clezio fits right into this category. The story concerns Esther, initially known as Hélène, since she is living in the south of France in 1943 just before the Nazis invaded. The first section of the novel sees her fleeing over the mountains to Italy with her mother and the rest of the Jewish community who can make it, a physically demanding, emotionally traumatic exile that also finds her losing her father to resistance activities. The war ends, but there is no peace for Esther and her mother, who, penniless and grieving still, decide to make the trip to Palestine in the hope of finding a homeland. But the mentality of exile and abandonment has now seeped into the narrative, and the journey abroad is fraught with uncertainty and discomfort, Esther forced into a premature adulthood by her mother’s deteriorating mental condition.

Around about now, I started skipping ahead and found that two-thirds of the way through Esther was in another refugee camp, this one in the grip of a cholera outbreak and that she was being offered the possibility of escape, knowing that to do so would mean leaving friends behind her to die.

At this point, I put the book down and walked away from it. I felt the most terrific wimp, because I’ve always maintained that this kind of literature must exist. That we have to represent and read the stories of the marginalized, the dispossessed, the tormented, to save ourselves from complacency and easy self-righteousness, to open our minds to the plight of others and to remember the lessons of history in their bleak, uncompromising detail. And Le Clezio is a beautiful stylist. His writing is elegant and expressive, and he simply presents the story without sentimentality or sensationalism. I ought to have finished it but, even though I was reading in French, which helps with distance sometimes, I could not.

So I was intrigued to come across a recent post at The Reading Experience, in which this question of self-protection in reading is raised. Dan is arguing against another blogger, Rebecca Wells Jopling at OnFiction who suggests that ‘Perhaps strong feelings of rejection toward a story and the resulting strategies for distancing oneself arise because readers somehow know that continuing to read may leave them walking around holding beliefs that they do not want to hold, having thoughts that they do not want to have, and re-experiencing images that they do not want to re-experience.’ For Dan, this doesn’t compute, and he counters that ‘Unless the authors […] are confining themselves to the most naive and most unadventurous of readers, it’s very difficult to accept that the fear of alien thoughts, images, or beliefs motivates many readers’ responses to aesthetically credible novels, or any works of narrative art, for that matter. The very need to “distance ourselves” in the emotionally immediate way described in this post only really testifies to a flawed, unreflective way of reading fiction.’

I always want to weigh in on this kind of argument, which risks degenerating into two camps, one of which yells to the other ‘You can’t make me do what I don’t want to do,’ whilst the other yells back, ‘Sissies!’ I think that the question of what we let in and what we close down to, in the intimate and challenging business of reading is, in fact, a complex and delicate question, and one that goes to the heart of the reading process. I think that every single reader has a cherished ideology, a system of beliefs and preferences, that is opened up to challenge and risk through the act of reading. How we respond to the books we read tells us as much about ourselves as it does about the book we are reading, if we care to listen to the information. In my time I have read just about everything on the spectrum for my work, books that feature all kinds of violence, all forms of mental and emotional breakdown, all sorts of traumas and tragedies. But I read those books for work. I read them with all the tools of my trade at my disposal that made me pay as much attention to the style and the preoccupations of the author, as it did to the horrors of the page. And precisely because I was going to allow these books in to mess with my head, I needed protective strategies against them. It struck me forcibly that trying to read Le Clezio when I was not about to teach it made it a process that simply impinged in a distressing way on my tender heart. The ‘unreflective’ way of reading that Dan mentions here is the way most people read, if they have not had the benefit of a literary training; it is the way that I found myself reading, when I had no pressing need to reflect.

Challenging our own beliefs is perhaps one of the hardest but most necessary things we ever do. We underestimate how difficult it is to think beyond our comfort zones, to consider outside of our personal convictions. If we manage to let books in that shake up and rearrange our ideas, then we deserve credit for listening, and we must bow down before the extraordinary ability of reading to open us up and shine daylight into the locked down zones of our minds. It is the most important thing reading does, and the fundamental reason why we should read at all. But we might have to read a hundred books, two hundred, before we arrive at the right book, and the right context, to have that one experience of epiphany. The fact remains that however educated or not we are, however liberal and open we think ourselves to be, we still have frozen, blind areas. Dan’s post focused exclusively on reading fiction, but if we argue that reading is reading is reading, whatever the subject matter, then we might see that his statement ‘That I would try to actively resist the work’s effects–emotional, psychological, or formal–seems antithetical to my understanding of what a “reading experience” has to offer’ is itself quite a forceful act of protection over a cherished, but limited and entirely subjective, belief. We can attempt to dictate to people on many issues, but one thing we cannot tell each other is what an experience should feel like or what it must offer.

There is a quirky coda to my sorry tale of Le Clezio, in that shortly after putting this novel down, I agreed to work with a student on a literary dissertation for the first time in four years. I was thrilled by the idea of working with books again and the student in question is a delight. And the project? The Holocaust. I’m finding that even with the shield of work firmly in place, these are deeply distressing, uncomfortable, disquieting books, as indeed they would have to be. I can sympathise with any reader who would want to put them down, or throw them against the wall and it is only the ‘distancing’ search for meaning in them, the possibility of creating something true and real and perceptive about them that gets me through the reading at all.

On Halloween, it’s interesting to wonder what exactly it is that makes things scary. The Slaves of Golconda have read The Woman in Black this month and it is a classic ghost story that combines all the usual elements – a lonely, isolated house linked to the mainland by a causeway over marshes that flood, local villagers who refuse to speak of the place, tragedies of the past recounted in a bundle of letters, and a ghostly figure in black with a ravaged, wasted face who is out to seek evil revenge. It’s well known territory but sometimes even the most reliable of literary codes and conventions can fail. My son saw the West End production of The Woman in Black on a school trip and I asked him how it was. ‘It was good, and quite scary in parts,’ he said. ‘But there was one moment when the characters were supposed to be saving a dog from quicksand, and there were only these two actors on stage, and no real dog, so watching them trying to pull an invisible dog to safety was quite funny really.’ It’s a terrible bit in the book, one that has real dramatic tension, but I could quite see how it would take some acting skills to express the peril of a drowning dog on a London stage with no dog in sight. Fear, like pain, relies enormously on the power of the imagination to anticipate consequences. But unlike pain, which is best evoked by the instrument that will inflict it, fear needs a dose of the unknown to be effective. We have to not know what will happen next, to be radically uncertain, before fear can really take hold.

Having read so many other wonderful reviews of the book (and just click over to the site if you want to see them), I felt I should do something different and think about what it is that lies beneath the figure of the ghost in literature. The word ‘ghost’ itself originates in the German Geist, which is defined as a spirit, an inspiring principle. To be human is to have a spirit or a soul, and the difficulty of confronting our mortality often leads to the belief that what must remain after death is this very spirit. But ghosts in stories show themselves to be more than just any old human spirit, hanging around still once the party is over. Ghosts are always in limbo, and they induce anxiety or they set tasks for those still living. Literary criticism borrows the mathematical term ‘the indivisible remainder’ to talk about them – it means the bit that gets left over, the small, niggling element that remains when every other part of the equation is finished, after all the other numbers have neatly folded in on themselves and disappeared. Ghosts represent the indivisible remainder of life; problems unresolved, and emotions of fear, rage, horror, distress, that are too big for the grave to swallow them up. The neat and tidy borderline between life and death becomes blurred by the appearance of the ghost, as does the boundary between what is real and what is fantastic. They are there to trouble what ought to be most certain to human life by suggesting that something will always elude co-option into the clear-cut or the fenced-in. It’s one reason why ghost stories so often begin with a scene of exquisite comfort – roaring fires, a happy, assembled company, houses locked up tight against the winter chill. Even, maybe especially, in the most secure environment, fear and horror and grief can find its way in, seeping through the cracks and chinks in the best domestic armour.

But the appearance of the ghost is not always understood as an intrusive threat to mental and emotional serenity. The experience of being haunted is usually described as being indistinguishable from the experience of mental anguish, and associated with melancholia, alienation and anxiety. (Arthur Kipps in The Woman in Black has to be on his own, in the dark and cold, cut off from the possibility of rescue and invaded by a sense of despair for the black fear to really take a hold on him). But this is often only as an imperative to action. Many ghosts come to awaken an ethical imperative in the haunted, to ensure justice for the future as well as appeasement for the past. Whatever has been left undone, whatever cannot be subsumed into family or social history, becomes the burden of the next generation. The Gothic genre is particularly keen on this ambivalence between horror and justice. The vindictive, chain-rattling ghosts of its tales haunt family homes in order to indicate the presence of a terrible secret, usually one that threatens the legitimate transfer of an inheritance.  If there’s one thing the Victorians were really afraid of, it’s that the family bloodline would be corrupted, the money diverted and the house passed on to the undeserving.

So most ghost stories, of whatever kind, press for resolution and closure. For uncovering secrets, healing old wounds and tidying up the essential human boundaries. And they derive their fear factor from the great nebulous unknown that surrounds human anguish and the unexplained pull of the past. What we don’t know DOES hurt us, often in surprising ways.

Only posting a couple of times a week means I get very behind in my reviews. Several weeks ago now I read a very good psychological thriller, Ghost Song, by Sarah Rayne, who was a new author to me. It was one of those books that gets off to a cracking start and manages to hold your attention easily, even though it was quite long (471 pages) and involved a number of intertwined story lines crossing over from the past into the present. The story revolves around an old music hall in London, the Tarleton, which has been kept shut up and closed down since the start of the First World War, with no sign of a renaissance in sight. The book opens with surveyor, Robert Fallon, making the annual report on the building and visiting it for the first time. He falls into a kind of fascination with the place, despite, or maybe because of, its eerie nature, the rustlings of ghostly presences, and the clumsily built brick wall that cuts off half the understage area and cannot be penetrated. It is obvious that the theatre has a secret deep in its unlit and unlovely depths. We then get transported back to May 1914 with the Tarleton a lively going concern, run by singer songwriter Toby Chance and owned by his parents, the unlikely but devoted combination of a former showgirl and a government minister. Already the theatre is haunted, but it’s Toby’s very present liaison with a high society woman that will lead him into terrible danger. From now on the book works to bring the past forward and to take the present backwards until the mystery is solved.

Bringing together past and present is the Harlequin Society, specialists and consultants on nineteenth-century theatre who have custody of the Tarleton. Researcher Hilary Bryant is determined to uncover its secrets and joins forces with Robert Fallon, whose professional desire to find out what lies behind the wall becomes inseparable from compelling curiosity. Ranged against them, however, is Hilary’s boss, Shona Seymour, who has her own reasons for wanting the theatre to be left untouched, its ghosts undisturbed. Shona’s story develops until it takes equal prominence with that of the music hall, and the deftness with which Sarah Rayne weaves her tales together is really admirable. Shona has grown up in a grim family environment, with a harshly authoritarian grandfather, a mother turning to drink, and a father who is never mentioned. Her one most persistent childhood memory, which returns to her in nightmares, is of mother and grandfather burying a body in the cellar of their cold and comfortless house in Scotland. The parallel that the story sets up here, between cellars, bodies and concealing walls that never quite manage to do their job well enough is, I think, enticingly explored.

Reading the book, it struck me that the essence of the psychological thriller is repetition. There is nothing we fear so much as the mere thought of what was traumatic and troubling in the past occurring once again in the present. Freud termed it Nachträglichkeit, a process in which one’s warning systems become wise after the event and exist forever more on a hair trigger, anticipating wildly at the first indication that similar events may arise. So Hilary and Robert may well be spooked by ghosts and naturally fearful at digging about (literally) in bricked up underground caverns, but it is Shona, who has been here before in a terrifying and unresolved way, who suffers extreme anxiety and blinding panic at the mere thought of the mysterious theatre wall. The psychological thriller pits its protagonists against their deepest fears, and provides overwhelming compulsions as to why they should confront them – certainly they would not do so otherwise. And the reader can sympathise with the fears evoked, with the vulnerability of the protagonists, but also perhaps with the courage they show or else with the certainty that the story will provide a satisfying resolution. But what seemed to strike me most forcibly was how powerful the past is, how tightly it clings and how difficult it is to shake it off. Our entire adult lives are spent wrestling with the ghosts of unresolved things, of nameless fears and unexplained distress, as well as with the direct consequences of our choices and actions.

The ghosts in Ghost Song arise out of all levels of past and present, and they are both malevolent and benign. What I most appreciated about this book was its richness of theme and its clever use of the multi-stand plot. There were a number of twists and turns I didn’t see coming (although I should in all fairness say here that I am quite dense about plot and fairly easily surprised), but all the different stories were gripping in their way and well balanced. And the resolution that arises out of them, the way they interconnect at the conclusion, was most satisfying. This isn’t great literature, but that isn’t always what a person wants to read. I found this an extremely good example of its genre, pacy, engaging, quite spooky at times and very well structured. Is it enough to say I went to amazon afterwards and bought two more books by the same author?

So, yesterday saw me heading into town for a literary day at the college of my dear friend, Rosy Thornton. A number of talks and workshops had been organized and we were heading up a session on online writing resources, which promised to be fun. It was my first chance to discuss the business of blogging and I’d been looking forward to it. It was a mucky sort of autumn day, wet and windy and warm, and the town was clogged with traffic. For some reason my usual route to the front car park was completely congested, so I ended up arriving late and sneaking in the back of the hall for the talk that preceded our session. When faced with closed double doors, it takes a bit of nerve to open them; one never knows whether a walk of shame across the front of the discussion panel will be the only pathway to a seat. But fortunately I found myself at the top and back of a horseshoe shaped auditorium and could unobtrusively take a seat in what would have been called the ‘gods’ in a theatre.

Down below was a panel of five representatives of the publishing industry, two agents, a first time author, an independent publisher (I think) and the chairman whose role I never did discern. This was an altogether cheerier panel than the one I saw at the Cambridge wordfest back in the spring, mostly due to the resilient good nature of the chairman, and the cool sense of one of the agents. When I arrived the ebook was up for discussion, although interestingly enough, no one had very much initially to say about it. Yes, ebooks were going to be a fixture but the take up of them so far had been very small, only a tiny percentage of the market. The first time author didn’t read ebooks, didn’t know anything about them but was vaguely glad they might exist. The agent provided what I felt was the best comment. She said that the physical object that is the book was still, and would remain, perennially popular as a gift and as a possession. Ebooks were great for educational purposes or for traveling, or for people who wanted to read five crime novels a week and throw them away afterwards. But for other situations the book would remain desirable and viable and in the future she could see that design would become increasingly important (think Persephone books, for instance). Now that seemed to me to be good common sense, as I do despair of a publishing industry that can only think in terms of either/or, thus condemning itself to miss the opportunities of diversification or lose loyal consumers of print. The agent had a very good quote that she thought summed up the book trade from Gramsci, who called for ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. Gramsci saw a balance here between the spur to action and the belief in positive change, but I felt it summed up the pessimism of publishing houses, overthinking their situation in unproductive ways, coming up against the stubborn determination of the writing masses to get published regardless.

After this it was time for our session. We had about twenty attendees and they were a good crowd – quite lively and ready to speak out and contribute. A very mixed range of experience on the internet made it tricky to pitch our information – we might have been talking outer Mongolian for half of the audience whereas the other half were well versed and must have found the explanations dull. But we had a good discussion, I felt. Two things struck me particularly about the way the internet is viewed. The first was that people attribute it with far more power than I believe it yet possesses. One man asked whether I had had difficulty with my institution objecting to information I put in blog posts. Seeing as the whole idea of the blog is quite probably a complete irrelevance for the majority of lecturers and apparatchiks at my university, none of whom would be interested in what I had to say (beyond wishing maybe to dispute a point in a conceptual argument), I had to say no. One of the ex-students attending to help us out said afterwards that he had once written something truly mean about Heather Mills on one of his blog posts and wondered about it, but I said that her PR representatives were hardly likely to say, forget The Mirror, forget The News of the World, we’re suing that guy with the blog because what he wrote was well out of order. I understand that some man somewhere was sacked by his firm because of an anonymous and offensive blog post. But, for me, that’s primarily a story about the man and his relationship to his firm, the internet is just the incidental circumstance.

The other thing I noticed was an odd relationship in people’s minds between the internet and use of time. ‘I can’t be bothered to mess about on the internet looking for what I want,’ one man roundly declared. ‘I don’t have time for that. I want to be given the information I want from a reputable authority.’ Now, this is a common stance but not a truly logical one. At the best this presupposes time spent reading a book (if not several books), which of course one may be lucky enough to have in one’s possession, but which must probably be sought from a library, at a substantial cost of time and effort. The question of reputable authority is a highly vexed one, too, but for me authority has to be earned and is not simply given by the fact that the ‘expert’ is called a journalist or an author. There are plenty of deluded ones in both camps out there. And thus trustworthy information requires thought and effort regardless of the media in which it is sought. So this is, I think, a form of resistance against the difficulty of a new learning process. The same person also wanted to know how I could build up an audience, how I got people to link to my blog, this time with the implication of requiring instant gratification. ‘I have to write a decent post,’ I said ‘I have to build up a reputation, over time, the way that any author would and I think that’s just as it should be.’ It is strange how the perceived immediacy of the internet, which IS quick in certain aspects of its functioning, should be then imagined to grant instant celebrity (see back to question of power). As increasing numbers of people get online, the internet is good at reflecting back waves of feeling generated by both real and virtual events, but at the same time it shows how fickle and transient those feelings are. Groupmind can be provoked fast (otherwise known as ‘jumping on the bandwagon’) and I think we are a little bedazzled by that process at the moment. But there is no reason to suspect that what comes out of it has the staying power of wisdom.

Anyway, after this we swapped around and Rosy was going to talk about online writing communities, only she was having all kinds of trouble with the internet reception. Someone Rosy knew from her college (I imagine she was a fellow, although I do not know) came over to try and help us out (I say ‘us’, but you may imagine how much use I could be!). While this was going on, I picked up the discussion threads again, until I realized that both women at my side were whispering ‘Move! Move!’ It turned out that my chair leg was atop the internet cable and I had been innocently but firmly cutting off the signal. And there, ladies and gentlemen, we see the true fragility of the miracle that is technology. We were reconnected and everything progressed very smoothly from that point on. Rosy gave a wonderful talk about sites like WriteWords and Litopia and I must say I had no idea that they offered such a well-organised and useful resource for aspiring writers. Litopia is particularly intriguing as it is run by a literary agent who will give you a webcam critique of your publishing submission (you have to clear a few hurdles first, including posting over 100 comments on the site). Rosy played us part of one (it was over twenty minutes in all), showing a close up of a bearded, bespectacled man (one attendee cried out, ‘It’s Shylock!’) in his messy study, being rather charmingly impudent about a fantasy YA novel, but impeded somewhat by a speech defect. Afterwards, I told Rosy that I felt oddly motivated to get a critique off this man. ‘I really want to hear him tell me I have to let my information ‘theep thwoo the text’,’ I said. ‘Poor Pete!’ Rosy replied, laughing. ‘It was only because he had his new teeth. He doesn’t normally lisp.’

And that, folks, was more or less it. Except that we went to tea after our session where I met the master of the college, a highly particular genus of late blooming academic known as the Absolute Sweetie, who presented me with a bottle of wine for having helped out, which I wasn’t expecting at all. And I chatted with a very nice man who had attended our session and was writing a novel. And I attempted to chat to the agent who had impressed me on the panel earlier, only the second I asked which agency she was at she started to make great protesting noises about how few clients she took on. Even telling her I had an agent already did not seem to dispel the impression I had obviously created of being an unpublished marauder, a kind of intellectual would-be mugger. This ruined the good impression I had originally held of her. So all in all, I had a very good day, and running the session with Rosy was just a delight, but I have yet to revise my low opinion of the publishing industry. To my mind, it’s a problem of culture – business culture. If publishers changed their attitude, sorted their aesthetics out from their accountancy, gained some common sense, became proud of their product, believed in books, stopped nitpicking with their pessimistic intellects, realistically assessed the market and sold to people who actually enjoy reading rather than some vague and vast masses, then and only then we might be getting somewhere.

What a garish, ugly, sardonic book this is, and yet it does grip in some unhealthy way. It is, however, the perfect book for critical commentary. It was hard to settle on a passage, as just about any would do, but I picked an almost unobtrusive one so that I would not be distracted by internal shrieks of horror at Humbert Humbert’s dastardly hi-jinks.

‘I decided to marry. It occurred to me that regular hours, home-cooked meals, all the conventions of marriage, the prophylactic routine of its bedroom activities and, who knows, the eventual flowering of certain moral values, of certain spiritual substitutes, might help me, if not to purge myself of my degrading and dangerous desires, at least to keep them under pacific control. A little money that had come my way after my father’s death (nothing very grand – the Mirana has been sold long before), in addition to my striking if somewhat brutal good looks, allowed me to enter upon my quest with equanimity. After considerable deliberation, my choice fell on the daughter of a Polish doctor: the good man happened to be treating me for spells of dizziness and tachycardia. We played chess: his daughter watched me from behind her easel, and inserted eyes or knuckles borrowed from me into the cubistic trash that accomplished misses then painted instead of lilacs and lambs. Let me repeat with quiet force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanour. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose; in fact, it had become quite a habit with me of not being too attentive to women lest they come toppling, bloodripe, into my cold lap.’

So let’s talk about that voice, a disquieting, troubling, silky menace of a voice if ever there was one. You have to concentrate to follow the sinuous verbal meanderings of the narrator, and by concentrating you are obliged to let Humbert Humbert into your mind, where he sits, like a viral contagion. This is a voice of icy chill and volcanic heat, of threatening darkness and yet spirited playfulness. It’s a voice that combines intelligence with vulgarity, cynicism and alienation. It’s the voice that could be beautiful, if it were not for something rotten at its core.

Look at the vocabulary here: prophylactic, pacific, equanimity, cubistic, demeanour, this is not a man who will use one syllable when three or four would suffice. And these are cold, hard-edged words, academic, distanced, intellectual words used to display the mental agility of their speaker against the tacky tedium of the world. But that vocabulary is continually undercut by words that come from other registers and dress themselves in violence – purge, brutal, trash, bloodripe. Our narrator becomes more implicitly dangerous because he coats his language with a veneer of intellectual control; we become aware of that most alarming proposition, that underneath something clever and polished, ugly drives lurk and threaten, pushing at the boundaries of language’s containment and liable to break out.

In fact the whole passage is written – as stupendously, every single passage in this novel is written – in a style that threatens but never reaches, linguistic exhaustion. I’ve never known an author make his sentences work so hard, stuff them so full of every possible pretension. This is bilious, overripe language, driven hard by intelligence, ravaged by pervasive, insidious emotion. We are given to understand, then, that it emanates from a man straining at his own internal leash. A man who suffers from dizziness and tachycardia – his body strained and overwrought. This passage is a good example of Humbert Humbert attempting to rein in his baser desires in such a way that we know from the outset he is doomed to failure. The reader is gripped by the painful anticipation of the limit being reached, the constraint being broken, the implosion or explosion being immanent.

And how do we know this? Well, look at the way he describes marriage, his voice dripping with sardonic disdain. This is not a man who believes in his self-prescribed cure. And look at the way he describes his bride-to-be: there is nothing in the least hopefully romantic about his tone here. Instead he sneers over her painting whilst she chops him into unappetizing body parts – a trick in fact that the narrator repeatedly uses at any moment of perceiving the female body. It’s a strategy for distancing the reality of a woman from her body, and it enables our narrator to lust or revile without troubling himself over the person behind the fleshly façade. The same strategy is used to slightly different effect when he contemplates himself. Physical appearance is everything of value in this novel, but Humbert hates himself. So his own ‘striking but brutal good looks’ are the subject of bitter irony. He could have any woman he wanted, only there are none who fail to disgust him. He shows us his attempt at decency, made by avoiding undesired heterosexual encounters, but his tone is too repellent for us to really gain sympathy with him.

So what do we have here? A man bent and twisted out of shape, forced into endless pretence and driven to the edge of distraction by desires that fall outside the legal limits of society. We have a man who is handsome and smart and learned, but who is physically disintegrating from the strength of repressed emotion. Some people would say we have here a sardonic and darkly comic representation of middling, trivial reality as seen from the perspective of a man relegated to its margins. It depends on how amusing you find the human condition, if we view it as an individual’s destiny to be full of emotion that is rarely matched or assuaged by life’s events. But I suppose I see it as the tragedy of a certain kind of passivity.  Humbert Humbert is so busy dealing with himself, so locked inside his unruly emotions, that he can never have respite from them. In this passage he is about to insert himself into marriage in the same way that his fiancée inserts his knuckles into her picture, and the result will be similarly successful. There is no engagement in what surrounds him, only the alienation of a heightened, hyper-sensitive perception. Humbert carts his suffering carcass of a body around, while his mind scorns and derides and plays clever verbal tricks with it all, and all he can do is wait for the circumstances around him to bring relief. And yet…the relentlessness of that highly particular voice tells us that nothing is going to change. In fact, I expect that things are only going to get worse.

I’m only forty pages in and already I’m not sure whether I can go on, but I seem to keep going. I’m finding it intellectually intriguing, but my soul cringes.