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.

This year, I was asked by one of my colleagues if I could give her students a seminar on essay writing. She teaches history and SPS – Social and Political Sciences to give it its proper name, or silly, pointless studies as it tends to be informally called. And I thought it would be rather fun to try out a group exercise, as an hour of conversation with new students who don’t feel they owe you anything can be remarkably hard going. So I wracked my mind for something that would convey the difficulties of university-level essay writing, the mass of information to be dealt with, the problems of structuring a response, the complexities of reaching a conclusion. In the end, I decided to let golden age crime help me out. I concocted a whole list of factual statements about a supposed crime, rather in the way a detective might in the closing stages of a criminal investigation just before the denouement is reached, and decided to let the students solve the mystery.

A brief outline of the information I gave the students is as follows: It was 1950, and the Major had been shot in his study at 9.30, his body discovered an hour later by his butler and time of death established by the local doctor. His wife supposedly went to bed early and took a sleeping pill, missing the whole thing. His son was working in his artist’s studio all evening and also heard nothing. Earlier that day, the Major had had an upsetting conversation with the vicar, whom he suspected of fiddling the parish accounts. He was also on bad terms with his son, having discovered he was a homosexual, and was threatening to disinherit him. His wife was having an affair with the local doctor, who was becoming increasingly unhappy at the thought of being involved in a scandal with a married woman. Also in the village was a war veteran who had been involved in a disastrous mission with the Major that had caused him post-traumatic stress disorder. He was under care of the local doctor, suffering from blackouts that could last for several hours. I added a whole lot of other details – muddy footprints at the French windows, a blackmailing past for the butler, cigarette butts in the ashtray, available guns stashed about the house, any number of clues, suppositions and red herrings. What I would ask the students to do was to recreate the crime and denounce the murderer and, along the way, to build up a case for one other suspect which they would then dismiss en route to their conclusion.

The whole point of this was that any of the protagonists could have committed the crime; the effort called for from the students was to piece the necessary information together, present it logically and tidily and come to a reasoned conclusion.

So, last Friday I set out with my photocopied sheets to a pre-booked seminar room in the newly-opened Corfield Court. This courtyard is just outside the main precincts of my college, tucked away behind the old school of divinity and in the midst of a maze of buildings. Someone involved in the design has clearly gone mad on the security issue as there are gates barring the two entrances (which come out on opposite sides of the courtyard onto different streets) and even an internal gate whose purpose is there solely to confuse. It took me forever to find the part of the building housing the seminar rooms and once inside nothing was intuitive. Somewhat rattled, I tried to hold open a heavy internal fire door with one foot while searching for the light switch to the stairs on the wall behind me and ended up wrenching my shoulder. Finally in the room, itself triangular with no place for the lecturer to sit down, I felt flustered, sore and late. Fortunately, the students had even more trouble finding the place than I did, and were even later.

Teaching adolescents is like teaching toddlers with surprisingly good motor skills. Barely had they all sat down than one girl asked if she may be excused; she was receiving texts from a friend headed to this seminar who was lost – could she go and rescue him? I said she could, and kept on explaining. A few moments later, both returned, but not for long. It soon transpired that the latest arrival had somehow contrived to lose his wallet whilst searching for us – could he go and find it? This was a particularly restless group but I adhered to my usual policy of transcending all minor disruptions. I split them into two groups and gave them the exercise, instructing them to designate one member as a witness to the process they were engaged in. The boy returned sooner with his wallet than I had feared and quite quickly they settled down to business. Despite the fidgety start they soon were completely into the task.

I do love watching groups at work, seeing who emerges as the main spokesperson, watching the interplay between the strong characters and the mild ones. After a while I went and spoke to each group in turn, to see how they were getting on. Group A was working with order and harmony. One boy, with a lively aureole of curly brown hair, was the naturally ‘loud’ member, but he was quite ready to balance his presence out with that of the two girls, who were quiet but tenacious contributors. They had written out a list of the suspect’s names and were eliminating them one by one. ‘Don’t forget that there are several people who could have committed the crime,’ I told them. ‘That might make it easier for you.’ The other group was falling into an acrimonious dispute. There were four members of this group and two were quite headstrong. One young woman, dark, pretty, clever, had taken a natural, early leadership, but this was being continually challenged by a boy, the kind of slightly plump, unsporty boy (but clearly very bright), who had found a way to subvert the usual typecasting by setting up as devil’s advocate to his peers and gaining attention and respect from his alternative viewpoint. He was maintaining that the murderer was Nigel, the war veteran with the blackouts and he was unwilling to let go of his idea until it had been acknowledged by the rest of the group. This was something that the dark girl was stubbornly refusing to do, insisting his solution was perverse and only chosen as a provocation. ‘Do remember that any number of people could have committed the crime,’ I said. ‘See if you can make a case out for all the suspects who appeal to you, and then decide which one looks the most convincing.’ They unwillingly went along with that, and shortly afterwards the impasse seemed to have been breached.

After a few more moments I called on them for their solutions. Both groups had done a very good job. Group A had decided that Tristan, the Major’s son was the murderer, arguing that he had been afraid of being disinherited and needed money to fund his actor partner’s drug habit. The alternative solution had been the Major’s wife, but they discounted her on the grounds she would have feared the blackmailing butler. Group B were running with the theory of Nigel, the shell shocked war veteran as the culprit, but they plumped in the end for the Major’s wife, claiming the need to protect her son, as well as avoid a divorce provided her with the strongest motive. Instantly an argument broke out between the groups over the strength of the threat posed by the blackmailing butler, but once that had subsided, there was only one thing they wanted to know.

‘Who did it?’ they cried. ‘Who was the real murderer?’

‘Well I did tell you at the start,’ I replied. ‘There is no single solution. Any of the cast list could have done it. The point was for you to assemble evidence and argue a case.’

At this there was a notable outcry.

‘But this is how it is to write an essay,’ I pointed out. ‘There is never one final conclusion or one right answer, no matter how much you may want there to be, or how strongly you feel about any one argument.’

There were still grumblings but they died down for the moment.

‘So,’ I said, ‘what did you learn from the process of doing this?’

‘That everybody hates me,’ said the plump boy, partly out of mischief, partly out of genuine wounded feelings.

There was much laughter, a few protests, and the danger of the old argument starting up again.

‘Opposition is a useful thing to think about,’ I said. ‘When you write an essay, you have to think of yourself as a diplomat, ensuring that all sides of any argument get heard, even when you don’t agree with them. Also, there will always be conflicting evidence and opinions and you’ll have to think about how to deal with them, how to incorporate the most significant elements of each into your own exposition. Anything else?’ When they were quiet I added. ‘You did well, you know, to handle all that mass of information and emerge from it with strong, coherent arguments and well-argued alternatives. You dealt with your uncertainties and conflicts and you can be proud of what you put together.’ This went down with far less cheerful receptiveness than compliments usually do. I looked at their mournful, resistant little faces and knew what was wrong.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You really, really wanted there to be one murderer, didn’t you?’

‘Well who do YOU think did it?’ burst out the boy with the curly hair.

‘I told you there isn’t a solution,’ I said. ‘But… oh I don’t know. I suppose the Major’s wife and Nigel have perhaps the best claims to the murderer’s role.’

‘No!! It was Tristan!’ wailed Group A. ‘It had to be Tristan!’

And so it went on. Ever since I’ve been doing study support I’ve been increasingly intrigued about what people can hear. I told them all at least twice that there was no one solution to the puzzle and yet it never made the least impact on their comprehension of the task. Which makes me wonder whether I should alter the scenario for next year and turn it into a soap opera script whose outcome they can decide upon. The principle of finding a logical route through a mass of information would be the same. And yet, and yet…  I sort of cling to this overturning of their desire for clear cut answers, even in the places where we most expect and desire for them to be. To accept complexity, lack of resolution, ambiguity and the absence of closure, is difficult to do, but it is a step towards genuine learning and mental growth.

4.02 pm. This week I have received not one, but two copies of Robert Rowland Smith’s book of popular philosophy, Breakfast with Socrates. So I thought I’d better have a look at it. And it occurred to me it might be entertaining to read the opening sections and blog about them in real time. So neat! So contained! I am accompanied here by a cup of white tea with pomegranate and my cat, Hilly, who is performing her usual trick of prowling clumsily in the small amount of space beside me, doing her utmost to dip the tip of her tail in my mug. This practice she varies with rolling on her back, her paws tucked under her chin, to present me with her delectable white tummy. This is a shameless tease, which we both know she has no intention of seeing through.

4.12. Cat momentarily subdued, I turn to the first line of the introduction. It is not promising. ‘Given that Socrates was assassinated by poison, you might think twice before accepting his invitation to breakfast.’ Well, hmmm. You might not want to have breakfast with Socrates’ enemies, if you thought they didn’t like you much either. And you might not want to eat with Socrates if his enemies were there, too. But so long as you didn’t share the contents of his plate, chances are you’d be okay – Socrates was the victim here, after all, and not of poor food hygiene.

4.16. The follow up sentence is no better. ‘Yet what got him killed is exactly what would make him an excellent breakfast companion – his curiosity. He was silenced for asking too many questions, getting up too many people’s noses.’ Now I don’t know about you, but I am not particularly thrilled about being asked a lot of questions at breakfast. My personal idea of an excellent morning companion is someone who maintains a respectful silence and doesn’t clatter the crockery too much. Five lines in and I am in opposition to the author and experiencing a fair amount of sympathy for Socrates’ murderer. Not good.

4.20. A brief pause to consider the implications of reading a book on philosophy by an author whose causality I am already fearing to be screwed. Decide it’s not fair to judge on the opening lines (which are always devils to write) and press on.

4.25. Okay, so the idea is that philosophers per se might be interesting companions to have around because much of their thinking had implications for daily events. Socrates’s line ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ makes an appearance, as does the pun ‘the same would apply if you were to have a bagel with Hegel or eggs with Bacon.’ Cannot decide whether I like this or find it excruciating.

4.30. ‘Socrates would be just as interested in how much to tip the waiter for serving you the toast and muffins as in whether God exists.’ Feel the urge rising up in me to quibble with this on several counts. Firmly squash it. My inner pedant is clearly out of hand today.

4.32. ‘Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst, becomes your personal shopper and, as you gaze into the fitting-room mirror, let’s you in on the perils of narcissism. While you’re at work, Karl Marx whispers in your ear about how to stop being a wage slave.’ This seems to be a prevalent rhetorical device in contemporary books, the ushering in of famous figures in a virtual reality conjured up by reading. Caroline Goyder’s book of a couple of days ago repeatedly said things like, ‘Here’s Ewan Macgregor to tell you how to remove your inhibitions,’ or some such, and every time it took me a couple of moments to get over the disappointment of registering that actually, he wasn’t here removing my inhibitions at all. I draw the line at Karl Marx whispering in my ear though – that BEARD! Sends a cold shudder down my spine at the thought of its scratchy, yicky, tickly-ness.

4.40. Find I have suddenly lost five minutes in checking my emails, which I didn’t even know I had the intention of doing. Fascinatingly, had a letter from a friend as an attachment because his computer isn’t working, and the letter stopped midway through a sentence. This must be due to the computer glitch but I had to read it a couple of times before it registered that there was no more. Why do these things take time to sink it? Why isn’t it immediately apparent? Where’s Socrates to explain this for me? Must get back to this introduction.

4.42. So we get the picture, big, heavy philosophers, not widely known for their accessibility are plundered for the most user-friendly elements of their theories which are then applied to everyday situations with a fair dose of whimsy. This could be a delight or it could be cringingly twee.

4.46. First chapter: ‘Waking up’. Waking up (until we remember what we’ve woken up to) is always a bit of a delightful surprise, Rowland Smith argues. He considers the act in its widest abstract conception as the dawning of consciousness, with its attendant phenomena of thinking, feeling, sensing, choosing, doing, etc. He also raises the classic philosophical problem of how you know you are awake, as opposed to dreaming. And he has a quick trot through Descartes cogito sum – the realization Descartes came to that if you think, you must exist. This is all quite dancingly done, a sort of shuffle and slide over the top of much philosophical thin ice.

4.53. ‘you become aware of traffic outside your window: perhaps a pneumatic drill decides to join the chorus, or the recycling truck comes by and the clash of broken glass keeps shattering the peace. You curse the noise and sink back into your pillows.’ There’s an awful lot of second person singular in this narrative. You do this…. You do that…. It’s an odd device and one that demands a lot of imaginative compliance on the part of the reader. Whole academic books have been written about it, and I know this because one of my PhD authors, Marguerite Duras, wrote a slim little volume entirely in the second person singular. That book, however, was rather clever because it detailed a dark and sleazy sexual encounter in which ‘you’, the reader, played one of the main protagonists. So one becomes acutely aware of the device, the lure it holds out and one’s internal resistance. Oh no, please, I’m not doing that, the reader thinks. Followed by, oh gosh, well I seem to be doing it, regardless. Whatever will I do next?

5.01. Rowland Smith’s point here, with the traffic noise and all, is to demonstrate Kant’s distrust (Kant is sitting on the end of your bed, by the way) of collective consciousness. Which is to say, just because everybody thinks a thing, it doesn’t mean it’s so. It’s a good point, when group mind is used so heavily nowadays as a tool for decision-making. He cites Copernicus and his theoretical work that suggested the earth went round the sun, which absolutely no one had thought of before.  What, not even a tiny inkling in an astute, mathematically-minded Greek shepherd or two?

5.09. From here we go into a lengthy passage on Christianity and the resurrection. Including a description of Stanley Spencer’s picture of an English village, in which the inhabitants are getting out of their graves in their nightclothes, as if just waking. Good image choice there. My cat returns at this point, surprising me, as I had not realized she’d gone away. She indulges herself in a little cat yoga, then, lost to some mental game, charges off as if ferociously pursued. If I had to make deductions from appearances, I’d say that cats have remarkably little distinction between waking and dreaming, fantasy and reality, and it is nothing to be proud of.

5.16. My attention is wandering somewhat. Rowlands Smith moves from Christianity to Hegel and makes a sophisticated analogy between the three steps of Jesus’s transformation into Christ (alive, dead, reborn) and Hegel’s three-step dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis, only he doesn’t use these terms) to show how the ‘truth’ is most compelling if it comes in three steps and represents a return to something thought lost. It’s well done in its way, but this is all huge blocks of thought and the pedantic part of me wonders what he’s doing with them. But, then again, this is just history of ideas and for most people, they will be ideas they’ve never come into contact with before. It strikes me that all the thinkers and theories referred to so far have been familiar to me, which is both magnificent and sort of tragic. How many hours, weeks, years, have I spent reading in order to reach this point? Best not to calculate it. I bumped into my neighbour yesterday, who has just started an MA in the history of print. She said she was struggling with an uber-theoretical lecturer who was wearying her mind with talk of works of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. ‘Oh, Walter Benjamin,’ I said, recognizing the theory. ‘I never liked him much.’ Benjamin is one of those theorists whose writing is always two steps to the left of intelligibility. ‘I might have known you’d know him,’ my neighbour said. ‘But frankly, the lecturer is the kind of man who could be reading Bob The Builder to me and still make it go over my head.’ That made us both laugh.

5.26. I finish the chapter and decide to call it a day. The last point was actually a very good one. Rowlands Smith suggests that the world we live in has become one that never really sleeps because of two new deities – economic growth and technological innovation. But he surprised me by pointing out how the motivation for this was not just financial, but moral, too. The Protestant work ethic, that insists we be awake and industrious rather than asleep and lazy, does much good but has what he calls ‘unintended consequences’ which he’ll be going on to discuss. Well, that’s a good hook and it will certainly bring me back for another chapter. Given the amount of synthesis that he’s having to do, I’m gently impressed with the book. It’s an easy read, despite the weightiness of the ideas, and the format (whilst a little whimsical for my tastes) provides an unusual take on philosophy and one that promises a bit of fun and interest whatever your level of theoretical knowledge. Real-time blogging is fun, too, although does nothing for my concision. And now I need tea! Snacks! Litlove’s cogito sum: I think, therefore I am constantly distracted by implausible hunger.

(Must acknowledge that I was inspired in part by Jenny’s hilarious post to write this!)

About a year ago, my husband was sitting quietly reading the newspapers one weekend when he suddenly exclaimed, ‘Good Lord, my cousin has written a book!’ Now, you should know that he comes from a very large family – he has about 27 cousins in all – and there’s quite a tradition for enterprise and unusual occupations. We often hear through the grapevine that cousin x has headed off to Uzbekistan to do volunteer work, or cousin y is taking a year out to form a chamber group. I don’t think I have ever met this particular cousin face to face, but was aware she trained actors at a drama school in London, and now, according to my husband, was writing a book about stage fright.

In fact, Caroline Goyder’s book The Star Qualities is about transferring the skills of acting into everyday situations where a performance of some kind might be necessary. In the same way that fiction has a great deal of insight on the nature of reality, so actors are obliged to delve deeply into the nature of identity, and this book uses their advice and tricks of the trade to bolster the confidence of ordinary folk who find themselves required to step into the limelight. Some chapters discuss demanding social situations, such as parties, interviews and public speaking, whilst others speak to more nebulous but equally taxing concerns, like the desire to stand out from the crowd, to become more empathetic with others, or to bounce back from rejection. The book is studded throughout with interviews with famous actors – Kate Winslet, Ewan McGregor, Minnie Driver (who is particularly good, I thought), Helen Mirren and Sarah Jessica Parker among others. What’s particularly charming is the way these ‘celebrities’ come across as down to earth, humane, compassionate types. They are quick to share the worst parts of their experience, no strangers to distress, anxiety, shyness and vulnerability, and more than ready to admit that overcoming awkwardness means time spent on the gentle art of incorporating difficult experiences of life into our souls, rather than rejecting them out of hand.

On the surface this appears as a light, frothy sort of book, but in fact it has admirable depth. There was a great deal of good advice that I ended up noting for future reference. For instance, if you want to really listen properly to someone, make sure to rest the tip of your tongue at the base of your mouth. Apparently, when we’re busy thinking out our next conversational sally our tongues make tiny ‘talking’ movements – a sign of internal distraction. I’m also fascinated now by checking out whether people are behaving as if they are high status or low status. High status types exude leader-of-the-pack power, low status compliant types exude humility. It’s the difference between ‘Keep away, I bite’ and ‘Keep away, I’m not worth biting’. Become aware of the power dynamics in the situations that surround you, Caroline suggests, if you want to be effective. Also extremely interesting was the information that ‘every time you experience your fear, and the memory that triggered it, you open the ‘file’ exactly as you last stored it. How you feel about the memory depends on whether you modified it the last time you looked at it.’ If you want to lessen your fear when heading into situations that scare you, you have to return to your previous memories and insert a little flexibility, soften them up, tone them down.

There were great lines from the actors, too. Salma Hayek, discussing how to make your dreams come true suggested it was very important to distinguish between the dreams you held for yourself, and those assumed (however unconsciously) to please or appease others. ‘If you enjoy the process, it’s your dream. If you are enduring the process, just desperate for the result, it’s someone else’s dream.’ And I particularly liked Glenda Jackson’s advice for tackling the difficult moment of walking into a party. To get you to breathe in the right place, and therefore access your calm, she said that a friend from the Royal Ballet told her ‘Display your diamonds, display your diamonds.’ Imagine you have a gorgeous necklace on and you want to show it off. I do hope the male readers of this blog are enjoying this tip also; gentlemen, you may wish to think medals rather than medallions.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on public speaking as it was an experience I was familiar with and made me feel that the advice in the book is spot on. I remember vividly the first lecture I ever gave at the university. I’d been scheduled for a slot in Easter term, shortly before the exams began, and was speaking on Colette, a little-studied author back then. You may imagine that I went through all the usual terrors in anticipation – I don’t think that any public speaker ever finds a way to outwit them entirely. But when I finally walked up to the podium, I realized there were only seven people in the audience. Seven people! I wondered what on earth I had been so worried about. And then I felt overwhelming gratitude for the students who had put aside their revision to attend a lecture on an author they would be unlikely to prepare in time for the exam. When I was a student I rarely attended lectures because most were a waste of time. I was determined that anyone who came to mine should have an experience worth the trouble they’d taken. I must have done something right because the following week, when I gave my second lecture, there were more students than before. Over the years I’ve spoken to packed halls and to small groups, but I’ve always wanted every person to have a good time, and been grateful for their presence. And the point of  lecturing to them was to talk about some fabulous author whose work I really wanted them to enjoy; the more I forgot myself in the desire to communicate, the better it all went. Caroline’s chapter in her book says much the same thing – prepare well, think about your audience, see them as your friends, get out of your own line of vision. I can agree that it makes all the difference.

So my feeling overall by the end of the book was that it had some seriously valuable advice, presented in such a way as to make it possible for anyone to improve their social interactions. The inclusion of acting stars was fun and entertaining, but actually, I felt that Caroline’s firm, guiding voice and her pertinent research were the real stars of the show. In some ways, I would have been more intrigued to read about her coaching of struggling actors, politicians and broadcasters, as on some levels their stories would have been rather fascinating. But that would have made it a very different kind of book. If you have any interest in self-help, or indeed in acting, then I would warmly recommend this. It has a lot to say in an entertaining and highly accessible manner.

William Dean Howells was one of the stalwart gentlemen of American 19th century letters. Best friends with Mark Twain and Henry James, a champion of the work of Emily Dickenson and Stephen Crane among others, he was a wholly self-educated man who began life as a reporter and worked his way up to the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly before retiring to devote himself to fiction. Not that many of his thirty-six novels remain in print, and reading the delightful and inconsequential Indian Summer, it’s possible to see why. It’s rare that gentle, comic literature lasts through the ages, unless you’re Jane Austen. Howells called himself a realist, but he had his own particular take on the term; he didn’t mean realist as a number of late 19th century authors like Dreiser and Zola do, which is to say darkly depressing and in constant touch with a kind of kitchen sink grimness, bringing to the educated public’s attention the reality of poverty, strife and ignorance. What he meant was that he wanted his characters to be honest, ordinary people, as he might find in his strata of society, flawed and well-meaning, good-hearted and self-effacing, bound by the conventions and the restrictions of their day but quietly dreaming of a little local heroism in their souls. These kind of people don’t make it into literature much because they are not the sort to have a great deal happen to them, and Howells was aware of this; but their sorrows and joys were as valid and valuable as anyone else’s, and his treatment of their lives was, if Indian Summer is exemplary, compassionate, sensitive and laconically humourous.

So, the story focuses on Theodore Colville, a 41-year-old American recently deposed from the position of newspaper editor in his home town of Des Vaches after a failed stab at a political career. Not sure what to do with himself, Colville has travelled to Florence where he intends to spend some time resurrecting a youthful dream of becoming an architect. But his memories of Florence are bittersweet; he visited first in his twenties and had his heart broken by a young American woman who dallied with his affections and moved on. We get the impression that, hurt as he was, Colville has used it as an excuse to avoid romantic entanglements ever since.

All that’s about to come to a sticky end, however, as he happens by chance upon a former acquaintance – the widowed Lina Bowen, who used to be the best friend of the woman who broke his heart, her small daughter, Effie, and her youthful, exquisitely beautiful charge, Imogene Graham, who is ‘doing’ Europe under her care. Colville is drawn to his countrywomen and they are delighted by his witty social charm. He’s a minor king of small talk, is Colville, most often ready with an amusing rejoinder to all superficial polite remarks. Little Effie recognises prime father figure material when she sees it and bonds with him. Imogene Graham is seduced by the sad story of his lost romantic attachment and invests a great deal more in the mission of saving him from his solitude than is wise. And as for Lina Bowen, well, there’s the sense of a missed encounter from their first time around in Florence that might be subject to a miraculous reprieve, if only pride, uncertainty and confusion don’t get too much in the way.

There’s another character with a significant role to play, the elderly Mr Waters, a former minister also from America, come to end his days in spiritual contemplation. He’s reached the age where he is both wise and disinclined to meddle in the lives of others, and so his role is to transcend the emotional flurry that surrounds Colville and his women, and to comment upon it from the vast distance of contented, elderly renunciation. ‘The young suffer terribly,’ Mr Waters admits. ‘But they recover. Afterward we don’t suffer so much, but we don’t recover.’ This is a novel that is profoundly concerned with the different stages of humankind, as Colville struggles for most of its length with a midlife crisis, no less real for the lightness with which he attempts to treat it. This is what makes him dangerously susceptible to the dramatic overtures of Imogene Graham, despite the fact that he knows better than to take them seriously. She insists that the question of age is irrelevant between them, when it is evidently a source of great awkwardness. ‘You had better make the most of me as a lost youth,’ Colville advises her. ‘I’m old enough to be two of them.’ But if Colville is at his most easy with little Effie, it’s because something in him is still immature; playing with her, he’s in a comfort zone. The verbal dexterity and wit which make him such an amiable literary protagonist, is what holds the deeper, serious world at bay. Colville has used duty, convention and affability to guard against soul searching and profound emotional disarray, and now, caught up in a romantic muddle with Mrs Bowen and Imogene, he is distinctly out of his depth.

As a romance, it’s quite unromantic, and as a comedy, it’s not laugh out loud funny; but it is rather sweet and touching and frustrating on the way that polite people with nice manners can disclaim responsibility for themselves. Imogene is determined to sacrifice herself in a grand and noble gesture, refusing to attend to what she feels because that would be small-minded and selfish; Mrs Bowen rather got on my nerves, I’m sorry to say, by endlessly telling everyone she utterly and completely refused to instruct them on what to do while emanating ferocious waves of disapproval and tragic despair, and Colville gets stuck between his ladies, wanting to please them all and quite incapable of pleasing either in what he knows is a false situation. They have all abdicated their will for the sake of another who doesn’t want it, and the plot is delicately balanced; it could easily end in lives of bitter but disguised renunciation. The spirit of Colville infuses the book, however, and is, I suspect, highly reminiscent of its author, and so despite the seemingly hopeless tangles of the characters, a happy ending is neatly and satisfyingly brought about. I read this while suffering still from a cold, and feeling unequal to anything demanding or depressing, and it was just the right book for the circumstances. It is gentle and light and kind, a good companion of a novel in times of exile from the thick of life.