in reality, though, I had to stay awake. I read in fifteen- or twenty-minute bursts, in lunch breaks or during Tikkabilla. It wasn’t a good way to go about it. To engage with this book when there were tasks to be performed, emails to be sent, ham sandwiches to be packed, or a purple dragon singing a song about being friends, was hard. It required sacrifices. Wine, TV and conversation were all postponed. It also required selfishness and cunning. ‘Just off to the Post Office,’ I would announce at the busiest hour of the day, ‘I won’t be long.’ And in the gloriously slow-moving queue, I would turn a few more pages.
At the beginning of the second half of the novel, Margarita is transformed into a witch at the Devil’s command. She accepts an invitation to His great Spring Ball. This is when both Margarita – and The Master and Margarita – take flight. She soars naked across Mother Russia – across the cities and mountains and rivers – transformed, ecstatic and free. And as she does, borne aloft on Bulgakov’s impassioned words, I felt the dizzying force of books again, lifting me off the 6.44, out of myself, away from Mrs Atrixo and her hands. How had I lived without this?
The Master and Margarita is a novel about many things, some obscure, others less so. To me, at this point in my life, it seems to be a book about books; and I love books. But I seem to have lost the knack of reading them.
After the ball, Margarita is granted a wish by the Devil. She asks only that the master be restored to her from the asylum. And then: ‘Please send us back to his basement in that street near the Arbat, light the lamp again and make everything as it was before.’
‘An hour later Margarita was sitting, softly weeping from shock and happiness, in the basement of the little house in one of the sidestreets off the Arbat. In the master’s study all was as it had been before that terrible autumn night of the year before. On the table, covered with a velvet cloth, stood a vase of lily-of-the-valley and a shaded lamp. The charred manuscript-book lay in front of her, beside it a pile of undamaged copies. The house was silent. Next door on a divan, covered by his hospital dressing-gown, the master lay in a deep sleep, his regular breathing inaudible from the next room … She smoothed the manuscript tenderly as one does a favourite cat and turning it over in her hands she inspected it from every angle, stopping now on the title page, now on the end.’
But of course an arrangement with the Devil has its price. Life cannot stay the same. For the master and Margarita to live forever, their old selves must die. She will stay at the Devil’s side, he will be free to roam the cosmos:
‘“But the novel, the novel!” she shouted at the master, “take the novel with you, wherever you may be going!”
“No need,” replied the master. “I can remember it all by heart.”
“But you … you won’t forget a word?” asked Margarita, embracing her lover and wiping the blood from his bruised forehead.
“Don’t worry. I shall never forget anything again,” he answered.’
It took me a little over five days to finish The Master and Margarita, but its enchantment lasted far longer. In death, the master and his book become as one. The book is no longer a passive object, a bundle of charred paper, but the thing which lives within his heart, which he personifies, which allows him to travel wherever and whenever he likes. The deal Margarita makes with the Devil gives him eternity. And this is how The Master and Margarita had made its journey down a century, from reader to reader, to a Broadstairs bookshop. Some part of that book, of Bulgakov himself, now lived on in me. The secret of The Master and Margarita, which seems to speak to countless people who know nothing about the bureaucratic machinations of the early Stalinist dictatorship or the agony of the novel’s gestation: words are our transport, our flight and our homecoming in one.
Which you don’t get from Dan Brown.
So began a year of reading dangerously. The Master and Margarita had brought me back to life. Now, if I could discover the gaps in the daily grind – or make the gaps – I knew I could stay there. Could I keep that spark alive in the real world, I wondered? Yes! Because to do so would truly be to never forget anything again. All I needed was another book; that was the deal. This was not reading for pleasure, it was reading for dear life. But, looking back, perhaps I should have stopped to think. With whom, exactly, had the deal been struck?
‘The master, intoxicated in advance by the thought of the ride to come, threw a book from the bookcase on to the table, thrust its leaves into the burning tablecloth and the book burst merrily into flame.’
Middlemarch by George Eliot
‘He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.’
Middlemarch, Book 2, ‘Old and Young’
There is a classic episode of the television comedy Hancockfn1 called ‘The Bedsitter’, in which Tony Hancock, in a characteristically vain attempt at self-improvement, decides to ‘have a go’ at Bertrand Russell’s Human Knowledge: Its Limits and Scope.fn2 Every few sentences – few words even – he has to put the book down and consult the large dictionary on his bedside table (‘Well, if that’s what they mean, why don’t they say so?’). Soon, frustration gets the better of him:
fn1. Formerly Hancock’s Half Hour. The title changed in 1961 after the departure of Sid James.
fn2. A knowing transposition? The correct title of Russell’s book is Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits.
‘No, it’s him. It’s him that’s at fault, he’s a rotten writer. A good writer should be able to put down his thoughts clearly in the simplest terms understandable to everybody. It’s him. He’s a bad writer. Not going to waste my time reading him.’ (Drops Human Knowledge: Its Limits and Scope on the floor and picks up another book.) ‘Ah, that’s more like it – Lady Don’t Fall Backwards.’
Fifty years later, a similar scene was being played out in our house. I lay on the bed with a nice new copy of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and tried to silence my inner Hancock.
Eliot (from the ‘Prelude’): Who cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time …
Hancock (from ‘The Bedsitter’): No, no, I should know. It’s in English, I should know what he’s talking about.fn3
fn3. George Eliot was a woman, real name Mary Ann Evans. For minor comic effect, however, I have left Hancock’s words unaltered, thus giving you, the reader, the impression that he, Hancock, thinks George Eliot is a man. Ha ha! Sorry for these nit-picking footnotes, by the way, I know they disrupt the flow, but fans of George Eliot, Tony Hancock, Bertrand Russell et al. are an unforgiving lot and it is necessary to reassure them that what they are reading is unimpeachably correct, to the extent that I have compromised, even ruined, the opening of this chapter in order to secure their trust, solely to prevent the wholesale dismissal of a book it has taken me almost five years to write, simply because they, the so-called experts, might mistakenly assume that I don’t realise George Eliot was a woman. Of course George Eliot was a woman! But where experts are concerned, it goes without saying that nothing goes without saying.
Eliot: Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women …
Hancock: He’s a human being the same as me, using words, English words, available to us all. Now, concentrate.
I succeeded in reading the ‘Prelude’ in its entirety. (‘Yes, it’s hard graft