The Secret Joy of Reading Page 2

would be unlivable. For the artists among us, however, things are a little different. By creating an artefact, the artist (author, painter, sculptor, whatever) is left with something tangible to ponder. A conscious mind is able to survey a product of its subconscious and can try to understand some of its complexities.

  My last book, The Drowning, came together almost magically. I had the feeling that it was writing itself. The choice of start-date for the main narrative, July 1965, was arrived at pretty much by chance, but yielded a rich field of circumstance (e.g. the timing of the civil war in Nigeria) which in turn suggested the mechanics of the story. This was the first time I had attempted a full-length novel without a synopsis, and I was pleased by the integrity of the structure that finally emerged.

  At this remove, six months after finishing the first draft, I am no longer wholly sure what the book is about. It explores Buddhist ideas about the quest for release from suffering, and compares Buddhist and Christian notions of morality. But under the surface (quite literally, in some respects) more is going on. The opening scene describes a man’s escape from a ruined submarine. In a closely following chapter the agnostic protagonist is sitting in a cathedral; rather against his will, he overhears a reading from the Book of Jonah. My choice of this text did not arise from an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Old Testament: instead I opened a Bible at random and, having turned a few pages, lighted on the opening of that book. Something told me to use it. I was unaware, then, of the congruence between an escape from a submarine and being disgorged by a big fish.

  The Book of Jonah is about anger and redemption. An evil deed arising from the escape of the submariner blights the lives of several of the principal characters, especially the heroine’s mother and in consequence the heroine, Elspeth, herself. Elspeth is a Buddhist. Through a selfless adherence to Buddhist morality, she quashes the repercussions of that evil deed and prevents them from doing further damage. It is hinted that, like the proverbial dewdrop slipping into the shining sea, she thereby clears the final hurdle and achieves nirvana.

  An influential scene comes early in the book. Elspeth, her sister and younger brother, together with the protagonist (her brother’s tutor) visit the seaside for a day’s bathing. The metaphors there are obvious; what is not so obvious is the choice of Selsey for their picnic.

  Selsey is a resort in West Sussex that I know well. However, it is an improbably long way from Winchester, which, somewhat remodelled, and renamed “Alincester”, is the city where Elspeth’s family live. A more obvious choice would have been a resort further west, such as Southbourne. Crucially, though, Selsey has a lifeboat station.

  Only when partway through writing the Selsey sequence did I remember that fact. A visit to the lifeboat station fitted in beautifully with the theme of shipwreck and suggested in turn a further tightening of the plot, yet my choice of Selsey as the picnic venue had been directed merely by a vague feeling that it would be right.

  Ablution, especially in the form of showers, features unusually often in the story. I only realized this once I had finished, but these are of course a metaphor for baptism, absolution, submersion, and all the rest of it. I describe a shower taken by Elspeth’s bridegroom, shortly before the newlyweds move to Nigeria. While showering he is thinking about his coming job in Lagos. Oil has recently been discovered in the Niger Delta.

  Even without the oil, it would have been instructive to be on hand to follow Nigeria’s political development. With it, conditions had become as explosive as the methane now flaring in the skies above the mangrove swamps.

  Charles turned off the shower valve and stepped from the enclosure.

  Thus the oil – its potential for igniting a civil war – is drawn into the general theme. Fire is the opposite of water. Moreover, turning the valve temporarily cuts the flow, raising the pressure in the pipes: Charles has been having misgivings about his bride. Elspeth in turn feels, at heart, that her wedding was a mistake.

  When she arrives in Lagos she has a horrible time. Before she rises above it, she also takes a shower.

  The club was air-conditioned, the bungalow also, but the car-ride back made her crave another shower. While standing under the lukewarm sprinkles, she noticed that the bottom of the plastic curtain, where it rested against the tub, had started to go mouldy. The curtain had been new only a fortnight ago.

  For “curtain” in the last sentence, read “marriage”. In the last few months I have uncovered more of such stuff, but the foregoing gives you the general idea.

  Readers are turned off by symbolism. Allegory has long since gone out of fashion. Yet in constructing a plot, especially a flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants plot like this one, the author cannot help subconsciously building it in. He defers to his judgement, or taste, or whatever you want to call it, and lets it ensure all the arrows are pointing in the right direction.

  I submit that the reader’s subconscious picks up these signals. Unless the reader is a student of literature given the job of analysing a piece of prose, the signals usually escape the conscious mind, but they play an indispensable part in making a story satisfying.

  Yet it is fatal to the author, while writing, to be too aware of them himself. If that happens the work becomes portentous, its vitality snuffed out at the very start. What the writer needs to produce is an apparently realistic and unpretentious narrative. The conscious mind of the reader enjoys it because what happens is interesting, amusing, or identifiable.

  One need not understand why this book or that is satisfying or otherwise: the benefit from a well-made novel is derived silently, internally, moulds itself to the sensibility, and becomes thereby a part of one’s outlook on life – and that, I suggest, is the underlying purpose and value of fiction.

  Nausea

  As a landlubbing schoolboy, my first ocean trip was an occasion of interest and excitement. We were going on holiday to the Isles of Scilly, and the usual way to get there was on the RMV Scillonian, a flat-bottomed steamer. She had to be flat-bottomed because of the shallowness of her berth at the main island, St Mary’s.

  We departed from Penzance at mid morning. The month was August and the day sunny and warm, though a stiff south-westerly was blowing. I noticed that the stern was attended by an unusually large and eager crowd of gulls and, because of my interest in bird-watching, I left my family to their own devices and went to the rear of the vessel.

  We had only just got under way. The crew were busy with this and that, and not wishing to impede anyone I found myself a vacant spot near the rail before pulling out my binoculars. Behind me, set into the deck, I had noticed and then given no further thought to a curious metal construction, a sort of square funnel about three and a half feet high, furnished with an overhanging pipe – a bit like a drinking fountain. Partly surrounding it was a tangle of steel cabling.

  As we emerged from the lee and into deeper water, the number of gulls increased yet more, just as if they had been loitering all over the district, waiting for the ship to leave. Herring and great black-backed gulls predominated. Squawking, yelping or silent, they were fascinated by the broad, white, bubbling wake: and as we got yet further out and I realized we were at last on the open Atlantic, they were joined by gannets and fulmars. This was going to be good!

  The breeze had strengthened and there was a little spray, but not enough to cloud my lenses. What did make observation difficult was the growing swell. As I say, I had never been on a proper ship before and the sensation was new. … All the way up … all the way down … all the way up … all the way down … all the way up … Faithfully transmitted by the flat-bottomed hull, the regularity and amplitude were fascinating, caused as they were by moon-drawn combers which might have started in the tropics. A Manx shearwater appeared, and then two more. I took out my notebook.

  Most of the passengers were on deck; some, like my family, had taken cabins and gone below. In breaks from my gazing, I noticed that not a few of the passengers were looking increasingly unwell. Then a man bent himself
over the handrail and vomited.

  He had apparently committed some sort of solecism, because he was immediately approached by a crewman who gave him a plastic washing-up bowl from a short stack he was carrying in his left hand. The crewman, aged about thirty and shabbily attired, proceeded to hand bowls to anyone who wanted one, and when he had exhausted his stack he went and got some more.

  This poor wretch had the worst job in Cornwall, or England, or Britain, Europe even, or the world: when the bowls had been filled he had to carry them, two at a time, to the metal funnel and empty them. At the very first emptying the birds became even more animated. The overhanging pipe was by now pouring a stream of seawater into the funnel, flushing the contents down and, as I now realized, out, via a hatch a few feet above sea-level.

  The previous night we had been lucky, and prosperous, enough to stay at the Abbey, one of the best hotels, if not the best, in Penzance. Our breakfast had been sensible and delicious. At other hotels and guest-houses in the town this may not have been the case. There, perhaps, the ritual of the Full English Breakfast had been observed.

  The ritual unfurls as follows. Having entered the dining room, the communicant is greeted by any others who may be