The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (27 page)

Was it wrong to find even this amusing? I don't mean to suggest that
Atomised
was
only
funny – it was shocking and cerebral and heart-breaking and all the things I said above – nor that it was
merely
funny. For someone approaching his fortieth birthday, it was a far from reassuring read. Every character in the novel who had achieved their fifth decade was either depressed, alienated, sexually tormented, haunted by the sense of their own encroaching obsolescence, riddled with cancer or dead. But the view of modern life it proposed, and the manner in which you expressed it, seemed so truthful to me, so fastidious and brave, I could only laugh in grateful recognition. It was existence broken down to its elementary particles: work, desire, ageing, death and the Monoprix's Gourmet range of ready-meals. On that particular day in the Archway Tavern, however, with a pint of Guinness in front of me and The Kinks on the jukebox,
Atomised
did not feel like the sequel or prelude to other books. It felt like life.

You know Neil Young and Crazy Horse's 1979 album
Rust Never Sleeps
? You must do; in an email to Bernard-Henri Lévy, you write: ‘
If there is an idea, a single idea that runs through all of my novels, it is the
absolute irreversibility of all processes of decay
once they have begun
.' Why use three words when thirty will do, eh Michel? Now I have read your other work, the novels, the poetry, watched the movies you've directed, even listened to
Présence humaine
, the CD you recorded with Bertrand Burgalat – you know I love you but, sorry, it's shit – I can confirm the veracity of this statement. But I admire the repetition in your books: the assiduous cataloguing of correct brand names, the references to film and music which, unlike most literary novelists,
you get right
, the recurring portrait of a society in which everything is commodified. I'm not bothered by the ridiculous amounts of sex your characters have or the sub-porno scenarios you describe; they are of a piece with the minutiae of package holiday
arrangements in
Platform
, the mechanics of the cartographic process in
The Map and the Territory
and, for that matter, the vocabulary of science, those long chains of genetic code whose effect in
Atomised
is mesmerising to the point of boredom. It is the method by which you interrogate, over and over, that single, recurring idea of irreversible decay. Or, to quote the toiling Neil Young once more, from his fifth live album
Year of the Horse
: ‘It's all one song.'

Where were we? Oh yes.

Here at the British Library – which, if you recall, is where I have been writing this letter today – people around me are shutting down their laptops and disconnecting their electric toothbrushes. Rare Books & Music will be closing soon and I need to pack up and go home too. But I have enjoyed sitting here, Michel, talking to you like this. It's been a lot of fun.

I am lying, of course. It's not been fun; I am not even in the British Library. In reality, I left Desk 294 over a week ago, shortly after comparing
Against Nature
and
Beloved
to a couple of obscure Neil Young albums thinking, what the hell, I can always take that out later. This letter, which will never be sent, has taken days of work: on the train, in my office, in a café, on the sofa while watching multiple episodes of
Oggy et les Cafards
with my son. Currently I am at home at my desk, thinking about what to eat for lunch. However, to sustain the beautiful illusion a while longer, let us pretend that,
after writing more than 4000 words in a day, ha ha ha ha
, I have quit the British Library and am once again sitting in the Archway Tavern with a pint, bashing this out on a phone or something. Yeah, that sounds plausible.

When I was a kid, my first literary hero was Douglas Adams. There were other writers whose books I loved in childhood, of course, but Adams was the first one who I thought of as a writer, sitting in front of his word processor, being spontaneously clever and hilarious, coming up with the goods. Even when he wasn't coming up with the goods, which was often, he was an inspiration: heroic accounts of missed deadlines, long baths and Bovril sandwiches. At the age of twelve, I remember being terribly impressed by the dedication from
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
: ‘
To the Paul Simon album
One-Trick Pony
which I played incessantly while writing this book. Five years is far too long.
' Wow. Here was an occupation that allowed you to stay at home, eat sandwiches and listen to records as much as you liked. In my experience, these remain the chief perks of the job; the work itself, as you note, brings scant relief.

An imaginary sip of Guinness to accompany this unimaginative ham sandwich.

Has anyone ever told you how much your work reminds them of
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
? I shouldn't think they have. If there were two words inscribed on the cover of
Atomised
, they wouldn't be
DON'T PANIC
. But hear me out. You and Douglas Adams both weave stories out of high-concept scientific theory and philosophy. You portray the individual at the mercy of an absurd and hostile universe. The futuristic neo-humans who figure in
Atomised
and
The Possibility of an Island
regard their forebears in much the same way Zaphod Beeblebrox regards the hapless Arthur Dent: a talking monkey. And there is the sense of humour, of course, though obviously yours is blacker and more savage than Adams'. I have no idea whether you would be flattered or appalled by this comparison but I lay it before you like a cat dropping a dead bird at its owner's feet.

In
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
, Adams invented the Total Perspective Vortex, an infernal machine which extrapolates the whole of existence from a small piece of fairy cake: ‘
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here”
.' I must have read this sentence a thousand times over the last thirty years; it never fails to make me smile. Your hero H.P. Lovecraft built his supernatural horror stories on a similar concept – the struggle of the human mind to comprehend what he called ‘
the terrifying vistas of reality
'. Eliot's famous line from ‘Burnt Norton' frames the same notion as poetry: ‘
human kind cannot bear very much reality
'. What I see in your books, Michel, is a combination of all three approaches – the comedy, the horror and the poetry of our day-to-day existence. And what Adams once meant to me, I now see in you. Enjoy your bird.

When I was seventeen, my father died. One morning, before getting up to go to work in London, he had a massive heart attack. I watched as it happened. The ambulance took him away, then I went to school; he died in
hospital a few days later. He was alone when he died. Over a number of years, I either got over the shock or I didn't – it's still too soon to say. But it seems to have frozen my reaction to culture at that dramatic, bittersweet moment, forming an unquenchable emotional need to regain that
intensity of feeling
; as an adult, I am still not sure how else to do it. Isn't there something inescapably adolescent about this desire even in middle-age for heroes, about still seeking the encouragement and guidance of people we have never met and, with any luck, never will? Yet you have never abandoned yours – not just Lovecraft and Neil Young but Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Pascal, Schopenhauer; the Great Texts of pessimism to which you refer again and again in your books. You and I turn to our heroes for the same reason: they will always tell us the truth.

I met Douglas Adams several times, four IIRC. My hero came face to face with me and vice versa. The details of these regrettable encounters will have to wait for another occasion though. They are calling last orders at the Archway Tavern – HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT'S TIME! – and I have a train to catch or something. I reach out and drain my imaginary pint.

Two final anecdotes before I go. A few months ago I happened to be in New York when Neil Young played a couple of dates at Madison Square Garden. We had tickets for the opening night, way back in an upper balcony. As the house lights dimmed, two guys in the seats in front of us whooped and raised their paper cups of beer in salutation. Neil and his band launched at full tilt into a succession of his greatest, loudest songs: ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)', ‘Powderfinger', ‘Cinnamon Girl', ‘Cortez the Killer' . . . It was like they were getting the encores out of the way first – which, as it transpired, they were. Looking across to bassist Rick Rosas and drummer Chad Cromwell, the author of
Ragged Glory
and
Comes a Time
nodded his head and the band ploughed into a brand new song, a song no one other than the musicians on stage had ever heard before. When it finished, few in the crowd seemed impressed; the new song was greeted with the wettest smatter of applause. After three further unfamiliar songs, the two guys in front of us grew restless. ‘HEY NEIL!' shouted one. ‘PLAY SOMETHING WE FUCKIN' KNOW!' His buddy, who was wearing a Neil Young t-shirt he had just bought from the merchandise stand, agreed. ‘YEAH NEIL, YOU FUCKIN' ASSHOLE!' he yelled. ‘NO MORE NEW CRAP!' At this, Neil
approached the microphone and cleared his throat. ‘Hey,' he said. ‘We're auditioning for our old record company. The president, the CEO, they're all here tonight, Madison Square Garden. So when you hear those new songs, you make a shitload of noise whether you like 'em or not. OK?' And with that, he counted off another brand new disappointing song. ‘ASSHOLE!' screamed our neighbours. Everyone was happy.

Similarly, in his short story ‘The Vane Sisters', Vladimir Nabokov – a virtuoso I gather you do not hold in high regard, Michel – plays a subtle game with the reader. He conceals a message from the eponymous girls, both deceased, as an acrostic puzzle, unpicked by taking the first letter of each word in the final paragraph to form a Ouija board-like communiqué from the hereafter. This is not cryptography for the sake of it. Nabokov wants to investigate how our view of the world is shaped and articulated by forces
beneath the surface
: memories, stories, games. But when he submitted ‘The Vane Sisters' to
The New Yorker
for publication, it was rejected for its elaborate obscurity. And when it finally appeared in
Encounter
eight years later, the magazine was obliged to tip off its readers to the story's veiled rationale because no one, including the author, was sure it could be deciphered otherwise. ‘
This particular trick can be tried only once in a thousand years of fiction,'
Nabokov later wrote.
‘Whether it has come off is another question
.'

Michel, as a concluding ‘thank you', I have incorporated a different sort of cryptographic puzzle into the closing stanzas of this letter. It is intended as a joke to be appreciated only by you and maybe a handful of others. Whether it has come off is another question.

Why do our heroes need us? To worship them? To foot their bills? To make a shitload of noise? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, should the tree be pulped to print a story no one can understand? If Neil Young plays new songs in a forest, are the squirrels entitled to throw acorns and squeak irately for ‘Rockin' in the Free World'? These are not easy questions to answer. But without heroes to point the way, we stumble around, lost in the fog, alone.

Time fades away, Neil once sang in that ‘unmanly' voice, ‘
un peu de la femme, du vieilliard ou d'enfant
'. We
journey through the past, searching for the two or three great and simple images in whose presence our heart first opened. We do not know where to look, only that we must keep looking; absolute stillness is death. We hear other voices, preachers, teachers, the pure artists, but they seem distant, indistinct. Yonder stands the sinner, speaking a truth others find unpalatable, and it stops us in our tracks. The voice may come to us from Moscow a hundred years ago or LA in the 70s or Paris not far from now or the Laurels, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. It speaks to us and we move towards it up the difficult and rocky road. We fall bloodied to our knees but it calls us on. Its message is an old one: keep love in mind; keep going; don't be denied. It is the bridge from their history to ours, the song that will accompany our future, the remainder of the journey, our last dance.

Michel, it doesn't matter anyway, because it's all a load of shit: here is the phrase with which I planned to end this letter. But now the moment has come, I find I can't do it. It might be funny, if only to me, but it would no longer be true. Your disgraceful books, for all their ridicule and despair, their disregard for contemporary society, their obsession with the inevitability of bodily decay, their ingrained and bitter pessimism, offered me what I now realise I had been searching for all along: hope. I could go on living in the world, as long as there were books like
Atomised
in it.

Please –
je vous en prie!
– have the last word:

‘It's the voice of a human being, with a naïve and important thing to tell us: the world will always be the way it is, that's its affair; it's not any reason for us to give up trying to make it better.'

Sincerely yours,

A. Miller

A Final Word of Explanation

Well, there it is. Don't say you weren't warned.

Readers who have made it this far may be curious as to the nature of the Nabokov-like ‘cryptographic puzzle' mentioned by the author on
page
. On the next page, please refer to the neighbouring paragraph beginning ‘
Time fades away, Neil once sang
. . .' Hidden within it are the names of all the songs on Neil Young's album
Time Fades Away
in the sequence in which they appear on the original LP: the title track, ‘Journey Through the Past', ‘Yonder Stands the Sinner', and so on. This passage also contains certain images and phrases from
The Year of Reading Dangerously
that it would be impossible for anyone except the author to recognise – anyone, perhaps, except the attentive reader of this book who hasn't already skipped ahead to
War and Peace
.