And each time somebody responded with a disbelieving: ‘You’ve never read The Master and Margarita / Pride and Prejudice / Middlemarch?!’, I would chortle at the effect my words had created, and thus pull a little further away from ever beginning the books in question. Better to speak volumes than to read them.
And so two and a half years passed. Our son arrived. I was halfway to forty and I had read precisely none of the books I could have read in that time, now lost. I hadn’t even drawn up the list. There was no list. It existed only in my head, occasionally summoned into being for an easy laugh, the contents of which could be reshuffled as circumstance or listener demanded. It didn’t matter anyway, because it was all a load of shit.
Then two things happened.
I was talking about the list yet again with an old friend from university, in that manner of ironic bluff and counter-bluff reserved for all men who were students in the 1980s, and in their hearts are students still.
‘Two and a half years gone,’ I said. ‘I’ve only got two and a half years left. I’ll never do it! I’ll never read Middlemarch!’
‘No,’ said my friend. ‘You won’t.’
He meant it. He was neither bluffing, nor calling my bluff. He knew I would not do it, was certain of it, based on his familiarity with my character, his understanding of my family and work commitments, and his appreciation of how tired we all seemed to be these days.
And I knew he was right.
(I should also add that, when we had first discussed this idea, my friend went out and bought Middlemarch, bought and read it and, for the record, enjoyed it. He may possibly have done this because I told him – falsely – that I had already bought, read and enjoyed it myself.)
The second thing that made me stir myself was the aforementioned Sudoku.
Somewhere near Gillingham on a dank November evening, stuck between stations, scratching digits into a box like a tin monkey, after a day at work doing much the same thing in Excel, I experienced an epiphany: Why was I wasting my life like this? Words were my passion, not numbers. And there suddenly rose before me, as if to holler, STOP!, the ghosts of all the printed matter I had consumed in the preceding weeks and months: culture supplements, heritage rock magazines, photocopies and blurbs, Private Eye and the Radio Times, prescriptions and descriptions, print-outs and spreadsheets and Sudoku, Sudoku, killer Sudoku.
Something had to change and I had to change it.
So when Alex and I went to Broadstairs the following day, the appearance of The Master and Margarita there on the shelf of the Albion Bookshop seemed providential. Here was my chance to make good. It was a wild and inspiring and faith-renewing ride and when it was over I wanted to try another one. Plus now I was someone who had read The Master and Margarita. I felt like I had put something back.
Middlemarch, then, was the book I chose to tackle next. But Middlemarch was a much bigger dipper than The Master and Margarita. If that had been a fairground ride, this was like a trip on Space Mountain™ – a formidable test of nerve, and one I wanted to get off way before the end.fn8
fn8. Not the sort of comparison F.R. Leavis would make, eh readers? Actually, Frank much preferred Nemesis™ at Alton Towers, which he described in a letter to friends as both ‘physically and conceptually rigorous in the Greek classical tradition’ and ‘wicked – I totally spilt my drink and crisps’.
If War and Peace is the most distinguished unread novel in Russian literature, and Remembrance of Things Past its even lengthier French counterpart, then Middlemarch has a modest claim to being the equivalent in English. (‘Middlemarch, twinned with Combray and Bald Hills. Number of visitors: Uncertain.’) It may not be as forbidding as Finnegans Wake or as epic as Clarissa, but it seems to occupy a special status as a book that sorts the heavyweights from the halfwits. For this reason alone, it had always been a fixture of the phantom list; and I suppose it was vaguely reprehensible that a graduate of English Literature should not have read what Virginia Woolf called ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’. I recall as a teenager watching Salman Rushdie on a BBC2 literary panel game – The Book Quiz, was it? – where Rushdie was able to identify some lines from a Bob Dylan song, but not from Middlemarch, which he confessed he had never read – cue much amusement amongst his fellow panel members. Was this, it suddenly occurs to me, where I first picked up the awful habit?fn9
fn9. ‘I made the mistake of going on a TV quiz show and admitting that I’d never read Middlemarch … and I don’t think I’ll ever live it down. When I saw I was in trouble I went out and bought it, and I’m planning to read it. I hear it’s good.’ Salman Rushdie to John Haffenden, 1983.
After a week and a hundred or so hard-won pages, I knew I was in trouble. I found there were plenty of other jobs I suddenly wanted to do – cleaning the oven, a spot of long overdue filing – anything other than pick up this torturous book. There seemed to be a problem. Who were all these various doctors and ladies and landlords and parsons and what on earth were they saying to one another? The whole experience did nothing but compound the sense of my own wretched floccinaucinihilipilification. Not only was I not enjoying Middlemarch, it left me feeling dejected. I was not up to a task others performed with apparent ease. Perhaps I had done little more than swap number puzzles for intellectual fakery – pseudoku. When it came down to it, perhaps I was a halfwit.
Fortunately, at this point Tina staged an intervention. Much as she wished the oven to be clean and the phone bills to be in tidy, chronological order – wished it with all her heart – she also recognised that what I was doing really mattered to me. She had watched as I struggled with The Master and Margarita, and so she reminded me that I needed to let the book do the work. So what if not every line made sense? The drift would do for now.
‘Have you actually read Middlemarch?’ I asked her. ‘There is no drift, there is only confusion. Or as the author would say, in the instance of this poor history, it would not be unfair to envisage a state of superlative driftlessness, and where driftlessness lies about us, there too – alas! – confusion may abide. Etc.’
‘Oh, stop being so melodramatic,’ she said. ‘Just do what I did. Read fifty pages a day and leave it at that.’
Do you perceive my wife’s brilliance? Is it plain to you, simple reader? It lay not in the essential nobility of her heart, or that she herself already stood atop Middlemarch and was gently beckoning her husband to join her. No. It was that she had a system. Fifty pages every day. It wasn’t exciting, in itself it did not elevate the spirit, but it worked. It allowed time for books and time for life to go on. It was the key both to all mythologies and a clean oven.
And so I accepted that the first few days of Middlemarch would be a chore. I started over, counting down each fifty-page segment like it was my homework. Gradually, however, the mists dissolved and the sun began to shine on a fictional corner of the West Midlands. The model for Middlemarch had been Coventry, so in the short term, some amusement was had from reading the highfalutin dialogue aloud with a regional twang (‘I am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect reader’) and speculating how close Middlemarch lay to Ambridge. Just as with The Master and Margarita though, there was something seductive about Middlemarch and I started to succumb; but whereas Bulgakov’s technique is conjuring and grand gestures, Eliot works an intellectual seduction, a slow game of pace and frustration. Sentences picked up as I became accustomed to the rhythms of the prose. The per diem fifty pages increased; I stopped mucking about with the voices. I shan’t pretend that I understood all the subtleties of issues pertaining to the Reform Bill of June 1832, around which the novel thematically revolves, but the layering of character and motive – and the moral issues the characters have to confront – seemed thrillingly ambitious and sophisticated. When the novel’s perspective switches from Dorothea to Casaubon at the start of Chapter 29 – ‘but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?’