The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (29 page)

Throughout the year of Betterment, Tina had supported and helped me. During the week, I could get most of the reading done on the way to or from the office. But on a Saturday or Sunday, with food to gather in and – yuck – ‘play-dates' to organise, she had only occasionally grudged me the space I needed to accomplish that day's fifty pages. I would disappear to the town library or the shelter on the seafront, maybe bringing back a pint of milk and some Jaffa Cakes when I had finished, while Alex and one of his small-but-devastatingly-effective chums laid waste to the house.
⁵
I knew I was
behaving like the crap dads and cowardly blokes I disliked so much – those garden-shed poltroons – but Tina seemed to realise that this was not an attempt to escape my responsibilities but to come to terms with them; and when I told her I wanted to leave a steady job and, worse than that, put the whole family through the wringer of writing another book, her response was sanguine.

‘It'll be fine,' she said later that evening. ‘Besides, I don't want Alex growing up with a dad who is angry the whole time.'

I kissed her.

‘Wait right there,' I said. ‘I still haven't wrapped up your present.'

I had been reading alone for much of that year; my excursions into the real world – the book group, the blog – had been distractions. However, as
War and Peace
grew closer, I thought how good it might be to finish this journey in the company of someone I liked and whose opinions I respected even when I did not agree with them. At no point did I give serious consideration to how long
War and Peace
is, how drawn-out and complex, how dauntingly vast; nor did I contemplate how time-consuming such a book might be for two working people with a young child. I was thinking only of the haunting radiance of
Anna Karenina
, its colour and light, and also the relish with which Tina had demolished Antony Beevor's
Stalingrad
– as I have said, not a girly girl. I was confident she would find
War and Peace
irresistible, so confident that I had bought two copies and thrown away the receipt.

And so it proved. Together, we completed
War and Peace
in about five weeks. Tina adored it. I suppose I could tell you that we had to support one another in this endeavour, that we assisted one another through the tough patches, that one or both of us had a crisis of confidence and needed to draw on the other's strength in order to put one foot in front of the other until we both arrived at the same summit and beheld the wide plain where our persistent selves had been. But I can't tell you that because that's not how it happened. This is going to sound smug but here it is:
War and Peace
was
easy
.

Middlemarch
is a difficult novel.
Moby-Dick
,
The Unnamable
,
Under the Volcano
: all hard work.
The Dice Man
is a fiendishly difficult read, in so far as one's eyes are constantly rebelling against the preposterous badness of what they are being asked to look at.
War and Peace
, in contrast, is merely very, very, very long. Fortunately, it is also every bit as good.

Here is Tina's five-point plan for anyone thinking of taking on, in her words, ‘the only book you will ever need':

• Read fifty pages a day.
  
• Utilise the list of principal characters at the front.
  
• Pay attention! Soon you'll discover that Tolstoy is doing the heavy lifting for you.
  
• Don't fret if you are not enjoying the Peace, there will be a bit of War along shortly.
  
• When you get to the end, read it again.
  

Hang on a moment, Tina, you may be thinking. I haven't got time to read effing
War and Peace
, I need to pick the kids up from swimming and then take this top to the dry cleaners. Besides, I haven't even read
We Need to Talk about Kevin
yet, and Gok Wan says it's amazing. Furthermore, I am actually a man, which may come as a surprise, so just the idea of reading serious fiction makes me nervous; I don't want other lads to laugh at me and call me a puff. I tell you what, I'll wait for the app. Ok?

We all lead busy lives, replies Tina. Make room for
War and Peace
; you will be grateful you did. Fifty pages a day –
that's like two episodes of
Flog It!
or one of
How to Look Good Naked
, which you can always watch on catch-up later; if
We Need to Talk about Kevin
is as important as everyone says, people will still be reading it a hundred and fifty years from now. Ignore those other boys, they are idiots. And that top just needs a dab of Vanish.

But Tina, you snivel,
why
should I read
War and Peace
? It is such a long book and my time is so precious. Why should I ever do anything difficult ever?

Because you don't have to be a lightweight your whole life, she says. Before Andy and I became parents, we were booklovers.
War and Peace
showed us we could be both. That's all. I no longer wish to discuss the matter.

Tolstoy's estate at Yasnaya Polyana lies a hundred miles or so south of Moscow. Pilgrims to the Tolstoy house have been known to remark on its unlikely similarity to Graceland. Everything has been preserved largely as it was when the sitting tenant died; and the rooms of the mansion are surprisingly poky. How could this little realm have enclosed a king?

Tolstoy's library at Yasnaya Polyana contains more than 22,000 books and periodicals, covering all manner of disciplines. There is literature from around the globe, signed and dedicated to Tolstoy by the great writers of the day: Gorky, Galsworthy, Stead, Bernard Shaw and many others. There are also numerous volumes of philosophy, religion, the history of art, science, geography and education. ‘
There is something almost bohemian about all these books in this cosy house with its creaking wooden floors
,' observed one visitor in 2010, the centenary of Tolstoy's death. There are even books about jujitsu and the clandestine influence of extraterrestrials in human development, so Elvis would have felt at home here.

It is said that Tolstoy had a prodigious memory for what he read. Did he work his way through all 22,000 books on his shelves from cover to cover? Of course not; Tolstoy preferred to skim each volume, establishing if it was worthy of his full attention, perhaps marking the passages that might prove useful to him later on. Did he acquire more books than he could ever hope to read? Certainly; Tolstoy spoke fifteen languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Hebrew and Ancient Greek, but his library holds entries in a further twenty-five: Swahili, Sanskrit, Esperanto. After Tolstoy's death, a secretary called Bulgakov – not the same one, sadly – began the process of cataloguing this huge and historically significant collection; so enormous was the task that, a century later, his successors are still at it, editing ‘Periodicals in Foreign Languages' and ‘Music and Manuscripts', volumes four and five, respectively, of the massive
Biblioteka L. N. Tolstogo v Yasnoi Polyana
; books about books about books.

It is from his library that Tolstoy drew the learning and strength, over six gruelling years, to compose
War and Peace
. Often he felt uninspired and unsettled, but his passion for reading drove him on, as did his wife Sofya. ‘
He is full of ideas but when will he ever write them all down?
' she noted testily in her diary – shades of Casaubon and Dorothea.
⁶
Tolstoy ransacked his shelves for the social and historical background of the book, drawing on memoirs, histories and biographies, as well as his own letters and diaries, particularly those which recorded his experiences in the Crimean War, during which he had served as second lieutenant in an artillery regiment. But the one book which most affected the final shape of
War and Peace
was Schopenhauer's
The World as Will and Representation
; the German philosopher's most renowned work. ‘
Do you know what this summer has meant for me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I've never experienced before,
' wrote Tolstoy to a friend while he drafted the closing sections of his book; he openly acknowledged that the philosophical conclusions of
War and Peace
, especially the long passages concerning history and the will of the individual – the actions of so-called ‘great men' and those of the multitude of people – derived from Schopenhauer. The general gives the order to attack but the outcome of the battle is determined by forces over which the general has little control: this is how to understand history. In our day and age, entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates seek to impose their will upon the world for reasons of personal ambition, financial gain, ‘the vision thing' and
so forth; but the changes in society brought about by the widespread adoption of their technologies are the result of the actions of millions of people, not one or two. Tolstoy made history when he wrote
War and Peace
; history is rewritten, just a little, every time one of us reads it.

Though we enjoyed
War and Peace
together, we found different things to admire in it. Tina, who had never read Tolstoy before, was bowled over by his broad apprehension of human nature and the astonishing verisimilitude with which he depicted all the stages of life, just as I had been at Christmas when I read
Anna Karenina
. ‘
It is extremely comforting to know that these are universal human struggles and universal human resolutions
,' she declared in an email at the time, an assertion she refused to retract when I suggested, by return, that this was precisely the sort of thing people said about
How to Look Good Naked
. She considers the epic scenes at the battle of Austerlitz, during which Andrew Bolkónsky is badly injured (see the extract at the head of this chapter), to be amongst the most stirring and profound she has ever read.
You go, girlfriend!

For my part, I became fascinated with the tension in
War and Peace
between the stories Tolstoy had committed himself to telling – the saga of the fictitious Rostóv, Bolkónsky and Bezúkhov families; an accurate account of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1805–1812; a history of all classes of the Russian people during this same period – and his growing impatience with the form in which he was attempting to tell them, i.e. a novel. For, as he wrote
War and Peace
, Tolstoy became increasingly disenchanted with fiction itself. By the time he completed the book, he was sick of fiction; all he wanted to talk about were philosophical ideas inspired by Schopenhauer. His disruptions to the narrative grew more frequent until finally, in a fit of authorial intemperance, he brought the interweaving stories to a conclusion – magnificently – and rewarded himself, if not the reader, with a protracted epilogue in which he pedantically rehearsed his philosophies of history and free will. All of which, in my eyes, made
War and Peace
a contradictatorial masterpiece.

The question of whether, technically speaking,
War and Peace
is a novel at all is one which has vexed scholars ever since the book first appeared in print; it certainly vexed Tolstoy, who found it easier to define what it was not; ‘
not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle
', he stated unhelpfully. A few years later, he returned to
War and Peace
and dramatically revised it, taking out the second epilogue and all the later philosophical passages, with the intention of publishing them as a standalone volume. Shortly after completing
Anna Karenina
in 1877 – ‘my first novel', as he liked to call it – Tolstoy underwent the conversion to ascetic Christianity which led him to establish his own religious sect, declare himself its head – Farmer funky Leo, the Oligarch-drude – and renounce all fiction except that which contained a strong moral purpose. In 1886, Sofya, who by now was acting as her husband's editor, literary executor and representative on Planet Earth, restored
War and Peace
to its original form because, significantly, it was this less streamlined, more didactic version of the book that the public wanted to read. The general had issued his orders to no avail; the multitude defied him.

There is plenty of fiction in
War and Peace
but there is also history, folklore, philosophy, poetry, politics: the contents of the extraordinary library at Yasnaya Polyana. This may be why it is often said of
War and Peace
that it is the book that contains all other books and the reason its devotees, who count Tina amongst their number, come back to it again and again; to them, it is indeed ‘the only book you will ever need'. The List of Betterment had changed my life, gradually, slowly, through the turning of a year; book by book, the process itself had shown me another route to follow, a way forward. But here is the last-minute twist. A single book changed my wife's life decisively and forever. Almost overnight,
War and Peace
cured her of books. She has scarcely bought a new one from that day to this.

I must add immediately that I am talking about buying books rather than reading them; after
War and Peace
, Tina has probably read more, and across more genres and subjects, than she did before. She continues to give and receive books as gifts; she brings them home for Alex; she borrows them from friends and from the local library, where she takes Alex on Saturday mornings, as my parents used to take me. But the urge to acquire more books for the sake of it, to own and stockpile them, seems to have left her. I feel much the same. It is as though, having found a book with all other books within it, we looked around and asked ourselves: what do we need with all these other books?

‘I think you might have to send these magazines to the dump,' said Tina a few weeks after we finished
War and Peace
. We were standing in our garage, looking at the crates of old
NME
s and piles of paper that had accompanied us from London when we moved house two years earlier.