The Secret Joy of Reading Read online

  * * *

  A feature of middle-class life was the Readers’ Union book-club. This issued a wide variety of titles, fiction and otherwise, a year or two after first publication. Our household had a sizable collection of these, together with many other books haphazardly acquired. War-yarns featured quite often, bestsellers about PoW camps in which our stoical, pipe-smoking chaps baited the “goons” and devised ingenious escape-plans. Officers only: the camps were segregated. It all seemed rather jolly, an adult, more spartan version of Billy Bunter’s Greyfriars, with the Kommandant as Quelch. The Hun were beastly, of course, but laboured under the handicap of foreignness and so were more to be pitied than condemned. I saw myself at Stalag Luft III, digging away under the wooden horse or releasing sandy soil down my trouser-leg as I sauntered about the compound. I dodged machine-gun fire from the guard towers and fled into the nocturnal fir-forest, then slept in ditches, stole a bicycle, was given food by a tender lass who discovered me dozing in her father’s straw; risking her life (the unspoken mutual attraction passing high above my head), she conducted me to a contact in the resistance who helped me on my way to neutral Sweden, there to board ship and return to my squadron at Tangmere. This was a step up from Blyton, to be sure, and I believed every word. Bare facts about the despair of captivity were supplied: I sensed that it had been, at bottom, a serious business, but didn’t twig that understatement had been one of the traits that had let my country endure till the Japanese brought the Americans in. I was unwittingly absorbing cues about the national psyche, and because the books were so well written and edited I was also absorbing a feel for technique – narrative flow, felicity, vocabulary. These I took for granted every bit as much as I had the remarkable lessons I had received from Miss Lucas.

  Narrative flow – storytelling – has two components, the expected and the unexpected. By the “expected” I mean those elements of the story with which the reader will be familiar before he starts. These are of two broad sorts: the background or setting, which persuades him that the unexpected is believable; and conventions of story-telling, such as the linearity of time, or certain actions having predictable consequences, or an ascending plot-structure that leads to an emotional payoff.

  The “unexpected”, or “unfamiliar”, comprises, first, those parts of the background that are new (e.g. descriptions of a place the reader previously knew nothing about) and, secondly, the motivations and consequent deeds of the characters – some of which may actually be “familiar”, inasmuch as he has already experienced something comparable himself, whether first-hand or otherwise. As he reads any particular story, its unfamiliar is transformed into the familiar, and as he grows older and reads more and more stories, his gathered experience makes him familiar with elements of new stories that a novice will find “unfamiliar”.

  When small children insist on hearing, yet again, a tale they know by heart, it is because the familiar is comforting. The familiar confirms us in who we are. It helps us to integrate with our social group, whatever that may be – family at first, then class, nationality, and, if we persist, the human race as a whole. The familiar is the oldest element of story, the cohesive force that kept our ancestors enthralled as they sat listening to the shaman’s tales.

  The performances of modern actors vary a little from one evening to the next. I’m sure the shaman varied his performances too. He would have done it to stop himself from getting bored, or for the sheer fun of making things up – the feeling of power the fabulist has over his rapt listeners. As the audience grew more sophisticated they would have begun to delight in this novelty also. New stories would have emerged from new experiences for the clan, and what had been strange or frightening would have been assimilated into lore.

  We love to gossip and hear the news. This has obvious survival value for a social animal: that may well be its origin. Gossip, the news, non-fiction in general, is also a kind of narrative, entertaining or informative in its way, but unreliable. The reporter may only have had partial access to the facts, or be influenced by commercial pressure or a political belief that causes bias. Paradoxically, fiction is often more truthful than non-fiction, and sincere fiction is the most truthful narrative of all.

  In those elements of a story that are pure invention, the storyteller makes no claim to factual accuracy. On the contrary: for fear of libel, he may even announce that his characters “bear no resemblance to any person living or dead”. Accuracy is only claimed for the familiar, the “research” that serves to make the unfamiliar convincing. A reader who finds a mistake in the research becomes impatient with the whole story. A mistake pricks the bubble of suspended disbelief and calls into question the competence of the author. In written stories, the familiar also encompasses the rules that have accreted around spelling, etc., and the bubble will be pricked by mistakes there too.

  The familiar has to be scrupulously correct. It is the launch-platform for the unfamiliar. The more solid and reliable the familiar, the more fanciful can be the unfamiliar. That is why successful science fiction casts an everyman as hero. The reader finds it easier to identify with such a character, enabling the author to get away with less familiarity in the setting: although even here, if examined, the setting will be found to have much about it that is familiar. Think of the beginning of Nineteen Eighty-four. The clock strikes thirteen, but then Winston Smith is confronted with the smell of boiled cabbage. Throughout that narrative, George Orwell again and again demonstrates his masterly skill in weaving the familiar with the unfamiliar. Aided by his flawless English, he builds such a convincing platform that when we come to the climax – when Winston cries “Do it to Julia!” – we are completely engaged and profoundly moved.

  Fiction like that is overtly truthful, because a sincere author does his best to build a persuasive version of the familiar. In so doing he reveals a lot about himself. The reader enlarges his knowledge of the world partly by means of the various representations of reality he encounters in his progress. This is, perhaps, almost as rewarding as the psychological insight offered by the most advanced aspect of the unfamiliar: authors’ recombination of elements of their own lives.

  Both the familiar and the unfamiliar tell the reader about the writer, but in different ways. In Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Kipling is careful to provide his young, middle-class audience with a young, middle-class protagonist, made yet more identifiable by his conventional relationship to his conventional family. The author can then risk the exotic setting (Bihar) essential to the story of a mongoose (Rikki, the goody) in his struggle to defend the family from a pair of malevolent cobras (Nag and Nagina, the baddies). The story itself is necessarily conventional, with the expected (i.e. familiar) happy ending.

  The more exotic the setting, the less exotic should be the plot, and vice versa. Stories with exotic characters, setting and plot are usually dismissed as unbelievable, because the reader cannot get a handle on them: there is nothing familiar. In Rikki-Tikki-Tavi much of the setting, together with the cast of animals and birds, comprises the unfamiliar; the rest, including the plot, is familiar. Kipling would have been aware of this. He was a sublime craftsman, but did he know exactly what he was doing? I don’t think so. Was he sincere? Most likely. The piece educates us about the Raj but inadvertently also tells us about the author, his world-view, and the society in which he grew up. Nag plans to kill the family, to rid the house of the whites, so that the cobras can again hold sway. For Nag and Nagina, read “the misguided, resentful, nationalistic Indians”; for Rikki, read “a valiant, enlightened Indian, grateful for the benefits of British rule and content to be treated as a family pet”. It is not just a tale for children, but a subtle (and, I believe, almost entirely unconscious) exercise in jingoism. Perusal of his other works reveals that Kipling was indeed jingoistic, or patriotic, as doubtless he would have preferred to be called. He was a man of his time and of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen. Gone now, but that little mongoose gives an insight into the mindset that enab
led it to flourish. (In Russia in 1966, at the height of the Cold War, an animated version of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was released, directed by Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaya. This notably substitutes a native family for the whites. The storyline was strong enough to survive, but not the politics.)

  When I was a small boy Britain still had an empire, though it was shrinking, and most of the adults around me agreed with its values. Kipling’s assumptions would have reinforced my world-view, such as it was. The same with Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, which depicted an ideal society of well-adjusted children, responsible parents, and marginalized “crooks” who always got caught in the end: propaganda, in other words, but disseminated with the best of intentions by its author, publisher, and everyone else in the chain between Blyton’s desk and my torchlit cave. We consume such books partly for reassurance, confirmation of who we are, but not all of us are content to go on consuming them indefinitely. Even in the children’s version, Moby-Dick is far more challenging than Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Again the author is careful to provide a sympathetic