How to Read?

Writing in the Daily Telegraph last month Nick Hornby argued that "we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits," lamenting the way we tend to separate published fiction into "the trashy and the worthwhile", because "we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good." This is an anti-elitist position that would resonate with John Carey.

Good books can be "pretty awful sometimes" Hornby confesses. I've also found myself struggling to enjoy a novel simply because I felt I ought to. Perhaps the most recent example being Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, cited by many of the Latin American greats as highly influential. It has many brilliant passages, but overall felt rather stodgy for such a short novel. Another key precursor for the magical realism boom was El Señor Presidente by Asturias, a book I can lastingly love, while at the same time loathing it for its wanton opacity.

I recently read an article by Ursula Le Guin in which she described how she had abandoned Blindness on the first attempt. "Faced with pages of run-on sentences and unparagraphed dialogue without quotation marks, I soon quit, snarling about literary affectations." I took Saramago's masterwork with me to a beach in Cornwall in 2003 and felt a similar urge to quit. Yet I kept going, and like Le Guin, found that with time Saramago's style becomes ever more buoyant to the point where you stop thrashing around and simply start to swim.

Would Hornby really have us toss aside such books at the first hint of difficulty?

When I was at Cambridge there was a 'worthwhile' series of public lectures on Communication, featuring eminent speakers like Noam Chomsky and Dr Jonathan Miller, whose 'performance' on non-verbal communication was one of the highlights. Less enjoyable was Alexander Goehr's seemingly interminable contribution, on Music as Communication, a harsh polemic against accessibility as it turned out − in effect the polar opposite of Hornby's argument, and similarly flawed.

At the time I was going through a musical education myself, expanding my taste out of the classical repertoire into more modernist material, some of which took time to appreciate. It's not hard to understand why it is easier to love Mozart's piano sonatas than Prokofiev's, but that doesn't mean that it isn't worth broadening (and progressing) your tastes, or at least your understanding, even if you never get to enjoy a single dissonant note composed by Sir Alexander.

I suppose Hornby might counter that while self-education can be a lifelong exercise, it doesn't have to be. Some people are just not made for the esoteric and are best advised to stick to what they know. Such an argument, if he made it, would sound altogether less anti-elitist however.

I do share some of Hornby's prejudices against "contemporary literary fiction", yet I suspect that the problem may be worse in the English-writing world. It must be far better to work as a novelist in countries where hardly anyone reads. The anglophone book market actually functions as a market, and has created two powerful economic attractors which distort its fictional output: the bloated middlebrow and the precious highbrow. Faced with setting themselves apart from those that cherish Captain Corelli's Mandolin and Birdsong as modern literary classics, the latter group are usually disinclined to offer their own readers "a relatively clear pane of glass" through which to observe their characters.