I Murdered My Library (Kindle Single) (4 page)

Once
surrendered, everything is out of your hands. The published font is nothing to
do with me; even the cover only allows me power of veto. I don’t design it. On
my brand-new Kindle, Galgut’s words were identical in their meaning to the ones
that appeared in the paper product. As a work of literature, it was the same
act of imagination as when he had originally typed it. The cover, paper,
binding and font were extraneous. I had the peculiar sensation on my Kindle of
mainlining directly into Galgut’s brain, without the intervening medium of the
book’s aesthetics.

As I
began to buy more ebooks, I felt a sense of surprise and delight and wonder
that I could carry around a library in my pocket. It
is
a library,
arranged alphabetically or, if I like, in order of buying, and nothing shelved
in the wrong place. The relationship with my library on a Kindle feels more
intimate, like a shelled animal carrying its home on its back. Wherever I am,
there is always something to read.

Then,
on a four-hour flight home from Moscow two months later, we ascended bumpily
through the December clouds, the fasten-seatbelt sign went off, I turned on my
Kindle, and it was irretrievably stuck. Nothing would open it. The only thing I
had to read was the British Airways in-flight magazine.

Amazon
replaced it. How kind. But the argument against the electronic device had been
strengthened. An electronic device
could
let you down in the way that
its critics had warned. The advantages to the Kindle – its portability, the
quick ease of buying a book and reading it moments later, the mutable font size
– evaporate when you are holding in your hand a dormant or dead piece of flat
grey plastic.

I had
not stopped buying physical books, but I noticed I was buying fewer of them. In
its heyday, Prospero’s, my local bookshop, was managed by a woman called Mary
who had worked at the original Penguin bookshop in Kensington. She had a
delightful side-kick called Stephen, a doleful young man who would glare at
books he thought customers should not buy. Once, returning from a few months
abroad, I began to pick up from the pile on the counter a copy of
Schott’s
Miscellany
, a publishing sensation in my absence, when he said with a loud
sigh, ‘Oh,
don’t
.’

When
I read a long review by Margaret Drabble in the
Guardian
of the
Collected
Stories
of the murdered Soviet writer Isaac Babel, I put down the paper,
walked to the shop and asked if they had a copy of this £25 hardback.

‘Mary
ordered two,’ Stephen said. ‘She said, Linda Grant will buy one and someone
else will buy the other.’ And he took ‘my’ copy from behind the counter and
handed it to me.

But
Mary retired and young Stephen left to train to be a teacher. The new staff
failed to build the relationships with their customers that the old regime had
sustained for so long. And then, of course, they never discounted. You had to
pay full price. Still, it seemed that our bookshop was part of our built
environment; it was us, it defined the kind of place where we lived, one in
which there were few high-street chains but lots of slightly quirky
independents, some of many decades’ standing. And our bookshop had a prominent
position directly opposite a closed-down Woolworths which was about to become a
branch of the upmarket supermarket chain Waitrose.

We
knew it had been struggling. We knew the owners had put it up for sale but so
far there were no buyers. Then on Christmas Eve, a couple of months after I
bought my first Kindle, it finally closed down.

The
reasons were entirely economic. It was a victim of high commercial rents and
business rates, and non-customers coming in to browse stock and then go and
order online.

The
closure of Prospero’s Books was a catastrophe for the neighbourhood. For years
we had worried that a branch of Waterstones would open and annihilate our small
independent, but no Waterstones ever arrived. Instead, we got a remainder
bookshop and an Oxfam bookshop selling second-hand books. Neither of these
deliver any royalties to authors. The lease for Prospero’s was taken over by a
man who had bailed out of the City and opened an ice-cream parlour.

The
loss of our bookshop (there were two when I first moved there in 1994) was a
major blow to the idea of what kind of neighbourhood we were. Prospero’s had
been in a prime location. We were a north London community of smart
middle-class shops that couldn’t even support a bookstore. We had become a
territory of cafés and estate agents, but the life of the mind had no physical
presence on the high street. And the place is stuffed full of writers! Not just
me, but Andrea Levy and Romesh Gunesekera and Caitlin Moran.

The
transformations in the world of books, from the ending of the Net Book
Agreement in the nineties which allowed bookshops to sell at any price they
liked, to online shopping, and finally to the arrival of the ereader, was a
process I was aware of. But this particular battle was being fought inside me.
The writer and the reader were at war with each other.

The
lower the price at which the book was sold, the smaller the royalty the author
receives. Without either a bestseller or a literary prize, the writer’s income
is depressed. Readers ask why an ebook, with no printing costs, should cost not
a great deal less than the paper version. Readers have begun to expect that a
book should be priced more cheaply than a cup of coffee.

And I
have found myself torn in two by this argument. Without a bookshop five minutes’
walk away, I began to buy fewer paper books; those I did purchase I tended to
order online instead of getting the bus up the hill to the next neighbourhood,
where there still stands a ramshackle bookshop whose continuing survival seems
in doubt.

Then
it reached the point at which, in my demand for instant gratification, if a
book wasn’t available to download at once, I didn’t buy it at all.

During
this period, I wouldn’t say I felt any guilt, though perhaps I felt some shame.
I experienced the sense that I was making my library partly invisible. Without
a physical presence on the shelves, the Kindle books seemed slightly
insubstantial. There was no equivalent of the satisfying cracked spine. There
was nothing to bequeath to the next generation, nothing to sell on to live a
new life in someone else’s library. But at least the torrent of books that kept
arriving had slowed down and there was space to walk up the stairs.

I was
being freed from the burden of all those bloody books.

What
happened next was a tragic transfer, from the old reality to the new, harsh
one.

The
hundreds of books I had bought from Prospero’s in the two decades since I had moved
into my flat came down from the shelves and were picked up by Chris, the
manager of the Oxfam bookshop, in three carloads.

This
act, this murder, had its accomplices – my nephew and his wife, who ferried the
rejects from the various floors down to the hall.

They
don’t read. They don’t read books. They have no books.

My
nephew’s wife took a suitcase full of the fashion monographs, but nothing else
tempted them. The idea that I was building a library to bequeath to the next
generation is one of the greatest fallacies of my life. The next generation
don’t want old books – they don’t seem to want books at all.

This
is very painful to me.

Something
came over me then, a rage of dismissal, because what began as the careful
consideration of the question of literary merit at the top of a set of library
steps ended in a kind of conflagration, but without the fire. I pruned
ruthlessly and remorselessly. I began an orgy of getting-rid-of. I became the
book-dealer in the Tel Aviv apartment, flinging to the floor.

Once
all the donated books had gone, and there was some comfort in the thought that
they would begin life again in someone else’s hands, I looked around at my
bookcases in shock. There were massive gaps, whole empty rows.

When
the removal company came round to give me an estimate, we discussed the matter
of the books, and of the bookcases. I had decided to take four of the latter with
me. ‘Are they built in?’ Yes, they are built in. ‘Then you’ll have to get
someone to come and unattach them from the walls because I can’t see how they
are fixed.’

I got
in a handyman called Paul. It cost me £110 for him to work out how Crispin had
built in the shelves and unscrew them. Then they wouldn’t move because they
were screwed to each other and bound further together by paint.

On
the day I moved, the Polish removal men wrenched the bookcases from the walls,
where they released with an ominous cracking sound. They were so old-school
they had been built from plywood, not modern MDF. The ones I wasn’t taking with
me were moved outside for collection by the bin men.

Looking
at my study, I saw the patterns of the old paint pre-Crispin. I saw the sagging
old telephone cable that had been threaded around the back, I saw terrible
amounts of dirt and dust. The room was completely filthy.

Then
I shut the door for the last time and took the keys to the estate agent,
collected the next set of keys, and began another life.

***

The
flat I moved to has a second bedroom 12 feet by six feet, a sort of corridor,
occupied by a child’s cot when I came to view. This would be my office.

This
flat has no landings – just a narrow entrance hall, which its previous owners
used to house their only bookcase, filling the single space where there is room
for one. The building is on a ridge in north London looking down on the city.
Through this study window, in a gap between two sinister mansion blocks
opposite – the repository (I hope) of several novels’ worth of speculative
day-dreaming – the sharp pyramid of the Shard is framed, and at the back the
kitchen overlooks a row of gardens. Like James Stewart in
Rear Window
,
his leg raised in a cast, here I sit, hopeful that the mansion blocks will
sooner or later yield a murder. So far all I’ve seen are people washing up and
people staring at the screen of a computer. No-one is playing the piano or
conducting an affair. But I will sit and wait it out until they do.

A
sense of light and space and other people’s lives to feed my voyeurism is
terribly important to me; spending so much time at home, I must have something
to look at out of the window. That’s why I bought the place. I didn’t think
about my books, my soon-to-be dead children, my murdered soul-mates for which
there would not be enough room.

The
two bookcases in the office had to stay in the middle of the 12-foot-by-six-foot
room for several days until the electrician came to install two new power
sockets under the desk by the window, using the socket from the other side of
the room as a spur.

Two
bookcases went into the living room, to the left of the fireplace alcove. The
third took up its place in the hall where the previous owners’ single bookcase
had stood.

The
books could not be unpacked for several weeks. First, a fifties monstrosity of
a fireplace made out of shiny liver-coloured tiles had to be taken out, exuding
suffocating concrete dust, then a new floor was laid over the gappy boards, and
finally redecoration was undertaken. The boxes of books moved around from one
place to another, stubborn in their massiveness and heaviness and
inconvenience. Here, there, all about and everywhere, the boxes of books were
the last remaining items to be unpacked.

It
dawned on me at this stage that I should have paid to put them in storage until
the work was finished. At one point, while the hall floor was being laid, the
books were piled around my bed, under the dressing table and in front of most
of the wardrobe. They triumphantly limited even what I could wear. You could
see it as an unusual form of library installation, but a bedroom, the site of
rest and retreat, is not the place to surround yourself with dust and heavy
things.

All
this time, my Kindle lay on the bedside table, serenely containing its own
library. It said nothing, but it didn’t have to. It sometimes sighed,
whispered, died and came to life again when it was connected to the charger.
Then I lost the charger. (I found it yesterday.)

When
the last paintbrush had been put away and the books finally came to rest on the
newly painted shelves (not in any order at all, that is for later), there was
something immediately wrong.

In my
fear of not having enough room in my new flat for my books, I had got rid of
far too many. The truth was, I now had empty shelves. Fewer books than space
for them. The shame.

I am
a person who does not have enough books.

My
library is denuded. It doesn’t seem like a library. It feels . . . like the
house of a person who reads, but not the house of a person for whom books have
been everything.

For
the tension is that I no longer want books to do
all
the furnishing of
my rooms. I want décor. I could have had bookcases on either side of the wall
that formerly held the fireplace, but it seemed to me, after looking at so many
properties – er –
cluttered
. Oppressive.

I’m
not going to re-read these books before I die. I am just bequeathing my nephew
and his wife the heavy task of removing them at a later date. They will not
call in the antiquarian book-dealer. The books will go straight to . . .

It is
death that we’re talking about. Death is the subject.

The
death of the book, but also my death. Because I am kidding myself if I think
that I am going to re-read a fraction of the books I have brought with me, or finish
a fraction of those I have never got round to reading.

In my
youth, I imagined old age and retirement as the time when one sat back,
relaxed, and read. There would be all the time in the world for reading. 60 was
so far away, and 80 stretching out so far into a future not imaginable that you
might as well be talking about living forever.