The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (21 page)

The town where I live now has, for the time being, a bookshop, a record shop and a library too: use them or lose them, as the phrase goes. Of course, technology, cuts and big-box stores will ensure we lose all three eventually but we carry on using them regardless. The bookshop is a good one, the record shop can order what I want and although the library is more like a drop-in centre than a
sanctum sanctorum
, at least it is there, serving the community and its children. In Croydon, at the time of writing, to save a bit of money the local authority is trying to shut permanently the branches where my love of books flourished. If they succeed, presumably the council will heave the remaining stock into a dumpster and take a hammer to the precious parquet flooring, which they can then sell off block-by-block to incurable nostalgics like me. I do not want any of this to happen but life flows on, within you and without you.

My son likes books and we indulge him just as much as my parents indulged me. It is easy to do when you have a child who loves reading and when there are so many amazing new books out there: Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson and
Wimpy Kid
; the absurd adventures of Mr Gum;
Harry Potter
and
His Dark Materials
; Varjak Paw, the mystic warrior cat; Patrick Ness and Philip Reeve; and the series I would have adored as a child, the morbid, hilarious and linguistically punctilious
A Series of Unfortunate Events
by Lemony Snicket. Let's not be snotty about the gleeful boogerism of
Captain Underpants
or the fighting fantasy heroics of
Beast Quest
either. Alex polishes off each new instalment in the never-ending saga like I polished off
Doctor Who
books, stretched out on the bed or sitting in the back seat of the car while Mum and Dad go about their grown-up drudgeries. And, overlooking the part it played in her son's downfall, his grandmother has enrolled him in the rejuvenated Puffin Club, who will be delighted to receive yet another plug in a book that is not even published by Penguin.
¹⁷

Fig. 12: ‘From the library of Alex Miller': Puffin Club bookplate, circa 2012.

(birthday card from Julian Cope)

As a child, reading is something you do while you are waiting for life to begin. As a parent, however, if you are lucky and you seize your chance, you can be part of it too. Last summer, while his mum was ill, Alex and I read
The Hobbit
together. Sometimes he read to me, mostly I read to him. I did Gandalf as Sir Ian McKellen and Bilbo as a sort of bouncy

Roy Kinnear. My Gollum was a whispered triumph,
my precious - ss - ss
, while the dwarves seemed to hail from somewhere near Bristol via
Treasure Island
– it was difficult to pinpoint. And Smaug, the terrible dragon under the Lonely Mountain, the Great Worm coiled on his dragon-hoard of gold, spoke loudly and languorously in the unmistakable, rich baritone of the best Doctor Who, Tom Baker: ‘
I am armoured above and below with iron scales and hard gems. No blade can pierce me.
'

Thus, while it lasted, we held the world at bay. And we were sorry when it had to come to an end.

‘Mais ne lisez pas, comme les enfants lisent, pour vous amuser, ni comme les ambitieux lisent, pour vous instruire. Non, lisez pour vivre.'

‘But do not read, as children read, for fun, or like the ambitious read, for training purposes. No, read for your life.'

Gustave Flaubert, letter to Mademoiselle Leroyer de Chantepie, June 1857

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding'

Beyond Black
by Hilary Mantel

The Diary of a Nobody
by George and Weedon Grossmith

The Mystery of Edwin Drood
by Charles Dickens

‘April 27.–Painted the bath red, and was delighted with the result. Sorry to say Carrie was not, in fact we had a few words about it. She said I ought to have consulted her, and she had never heard of such a thing as a bath being painted red. I replied: “It's merely a matter of taste.”'

The Diary of a Nobody

‘Nutmeg graters. Toby jugs. Decorative pincushions with all the pins still in. She had a coffee table with a glass top and a repeat motif of The Beatles underneath, printed on wallpaper – it must have been an heirloom. She had original Pyrex oven dishes with pictures of carrots and onions on the side. She had a Spanish lady with a flouncy skirt that you sat on top of your spare loo roll. I used to run to her house when I wanted to go to the toilet because there was always some bloke wanking in ours.'

Beyond Black

‘“I have no objection to discuss it. I trust, my dear, I am always open to discussion.” There was a vibration in the old lady's cap, as though she internally added: “and I should like to see the discussion that would change
my
mind!”'

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

On a beautiful day in late June, the sun sparkling on the lively breakers of Viking Bay, my companions and I followed the Grand Parade from the Pierremont War Memorial to Victoria Gardens on the seafront. Ahead of us strolled Little Nell, Oliver Twist, Mister Micawber and a fierce-looking dog in an England football shirt, for this was the gala opening of the annual Broadstairs Dickens Festival and all were welcome.

According to my souvenir programme, Dickens visited Broadstairs regularly from 1837 until his extended stay in 1851 when he christened the town ‘Our English Watering Place'. In 1936, the centenary of
The Pickwick Papers
, an adaptation of ‘Pickwick' was staged by local residents. The following year, 1937, it was repeated as the centrepiece of a small festival celebrating the centenary of Dickens' first visit to the town. ‘
Under the guidance of Gladys Waterer and Dora Tattam who lived in Dickens House
,' continued my programme, ‘
the Festival grew and with the exception of the war years has been held annually ever since. In the 1950s costumed Dickensians around the town added colour to the Festival
.' Now football-shirted dogs had been admitted to the Grand Parade, as they have been to all public events in England in the twenty-first century, lining up beside the Queen at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday and, memorably, in 2012, carrying the Olympic Torch on the final leg of its journey, like a juicy, flaming bone. This is what Gladys Waterer and Dora Tattam might have wanted, and if they didn't, they should have done. All right?!

‘
Come to Broadstairs
!' urged Dickens in letters to his friends. ‘
Come to Broadstairs! Come now
!' As Claire Tomalin makes clear in her recent biography, being a friend of Dickens could be exhausting. He was a demanding and irrepressible
host, perpetually summoning members of his entourage to dine alongside him, listen to him read, stage impromptu theatricals, play billiards till dawn, stride with him for miles across the Kentish fields, campaign vigorously for constitutional reform, tour the workhouses, inspect the morgues, laugh uproariously, weep unrestrainedly and, if they were still breathing, come to Broadstairs.

Broadstairs was still showing its gratitude 150 years later, not just for one week in June but all the year round, in the names of the shops and businesses which lined the route of the parade: the Dickens House Museum, of course, but also Peggoty's Café, Copperfields Restaurant, The Old Curiosity Shop (bric-a-brac), Plate Expectations (crockery), Tidy Tim (barber), Gamps (pre-school nursery) and Barnaby Fudge (fudge). We passed all these – all save the ones I have just made up – as the procession wound its way down the hill to the bandstand on the seafront. There we were heartily welcomed by a town crier and, on a makeshift stage in front of a marquee selling arts and crafts, treated to two short extracts from
Hard Times
, that year's Festival Play. And then a rather diffident ‘Charles Dickens' stood up from his writing desk at the side of the stage and asked if there was anyone here present from his various books, from
Great Expectations
or
A Christmas Carol or Nicholas Nickleby
, at which point ‘Miss Havisham' and ‘Jacob Marley's Ghost' and ‘Smike' made themselves known, each expressing a few words of appreciation to their creator, seemingly oblivious to the desperate lives or afterlives he had bestowed on them. The sun shone, the audience applauded, ice cream was endemic. It was the best of times.

It was hard to think of another author British people might celebrate in this manner; Shakespeare certainly, perhaps Austen or the Brontës, but that was about all. The British still love Dickens, even if they have never read him.
¹
No writer has ever produced such a cornucopia of archetypes and oddballs, so many of whom endure in the popular imagination. His characters are larger than life and so was he, to the extent that here in Broadstairs, it seemed natural for ‘Charles Dickens' to share a stage with Mr Pickwick, Scrooge, the Artful Dodger and all the rest. As a writer-celebrity, Charles Dickens was as much his own creation as they were, the hero of his own life and beyond, and the public cannot forget him.

Inevitably, however, some characters loom larger than others. There seemed to be no one in the crowd representing the less cherished works like
Martin Chuzzlewit or Barnaby Rudge
, and there was definitely nobody standing up for Dickens' final, unfinished novel
The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Unless you counted me. This was where Betterment had led me: back to Broadstairs and back to Boz. I was currently in the thick of
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
, the only Dickens novel I had never read. It was, as expected, fantastic.

Since the stumble over
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, Betterment had proceeded steadily and without serious incident. I had started keeping a blog, noting my thoughts and impressions of the books as I went. The decision to read
Drood
at this point was, I admit, partly inspired by forthcoming events in Broadstairs but also, having successfully completed thirty books, I wanted to try something more obscure by a writer I already liked and whose work I was fluent in. Dickens seemed an obvious candidate. I had read nearly all the major novels and had studied him at university. He was a local author. And I approved of his populist streak – no one will ever take to the streets of Hampstead dressed as their favourite character from Margaret Drabble.

(I say I had chosen
Drood
because it was the only Dickens novel I had never read. Of course, this is not entirely accurate. It was the only Dickens novel with which I was
entirely unfamiliar
. In truth, I could not remember if had read
Martin Chuzzlewit
and
Barnaby Rudge
or not; if I had, it was a long time ago; equally, the little I knew of those books might have been gleaned from academic hearsay or the Sunday teatime classic serial. But I definitely knew nothing of
Drood
, if only because, being unfinished, it defied easy TV adaptation.
²
So there was that. And although I felt confident I had never lied directly about having read
Drood
, at some point I had almost certainly expressed genuine enthusiasm for Dickens by claiming to have read ‘everything' by him, as one does – as one tries not to.)

The populism of Dickens – by which I mean not only his shameless playing to the gallery as a novelist and performer
but also the fact that he was so successful at it – has long represented a kind of barrier to his reputation as a first-rate writer. Can someone so populist
and
popular really be as good as all that? Certain critics cavil at his humour, his sentimentality, his didacticism, his grotesquerie, his ‘
chaste lovers and his puritanical heroines in their all-concealing draperies, sharing ethereal passions and just fluttering their eyelashes, blushing coyly, weeping for joy and holding hands
'.
³
Virginia Woolf, while acknowledging his greatness, classed him with Tolstoy as ‘the preachers and the teachers', in contrast to Austen and Turgenev, who were ‘the pure artists'. To some, Dickens represents something regrettably provincial, suburban and middlebrow in the English cultural identity. And certainly, the Broadstairs Dickens Festival could be regarded as all these things; but it was also sincere and welcoming and unpretentious. It was a world away from Bloomsbury.

The festivities were drawing to a close for the time being, so we decided to repair to the nearest public house, the Charles Dickens (
‘Visit us during Dickens Week and your “Great Expectations” will become reality!!'
). Inside, the Australian bar staff were all dressed up in period costume, bustles and stovepipe hats. They did not appear perturbed by this, probably because all Australians enjoy being hot.

‘What can I get ya?' asked a cheerful barman in gaiters and cardboard sideburns.