Prose on the underground

(Originally posted on 8th October 2007)

I travel to work by Underground. My point of origin is sufficiently suburban that I get a good half an hour’s reading in to ease me into the day and I find a cosy mental cocoon is the best way to endure commuting.

Short stories seem to be the obvious choice for a short journey, suitably brief and self-contained. But they’re never the right length, of course. It’s, say, two and half stories or just the two and then a twiddling of the thumbs for the last few stops. Besides, short stories aren’t really my thing: oblique, smug little things, far too many of them.

The great writers, the ones whose every sentence cries out to be given its own module on the National Curriculum, are too rich to be digested when queasy from abrupt braking and other people’s sweat. And I can’t, for example, be swept away on an elegiac tide by John Banville in twice-daily fragments over a fortnight. Conversely, something with a bit of pace has its flair rather dampened by the need to nip up an escalator every other chapter.

Non-fiction has to be chosen carefully. It’s no use having one’s elucidation on the matter of quantum physics bisected by eight hours of emails and meetings. My fragile thread of understanding would perish in the meantime. Biographies don’t really suit brief episodes, unless one is prepared to draw up a crib sheet to recall a labyrinth of unfamiliar – as appropriate – aunties or astronauts or Albanian ambassadors.

Of course, there’s also the risk of being sat adjacent to someone with a particularly intrusive personal stereo. I’ve never quite summoned up the cojones to start singing along, but I also find it difficult to concentrate on a book when being buzzed by the treble end of Snow Patrol.

A friend of mine says she uses one herself to blot out whatever anyone else might be listening to, but I can’t see that working for me. I’m as precious about what I listen to as what I read, so I don’t want to employ my music as some sort of noise-cancelling device. My favourite albums would be reduced to the consistency of muzak.

So all I can do is undertake the aural equivalent of holding my breath. Besides, as Gandhi so nearly put it, an iPod for iPod and the whole world goes deaf.

The most recent significant impact on the reading habits of Londoners has been proliferation of free newspapers, flocks of which billow around the carriages with Hitchcockian menace only to settle beguilingly onto the laps of weary commuters with their come hither headlines and double-page spreads of photos sourced from Heat magazine’s dustbins. Before them, most people reading on trains read books. Admittedly though, we had got to the stage where everyone who wasn’t reading Dan Brown was poring over Sudoku puzzles like a student in the Union bar hoping to appear irresistibly intellectual.

I think free newspapers are a great idea. If everyone gets to vote, I’d like think that we should all have at least a basic awareness of the issues of the day. But alarm bells rang when one of them announced its arrival with the claim that it would feature all that one might find in a conventional newspaper but wouldn’t feature too much news as it was felt that young people tend to find that a bit hard going.

Frankly, I wouldn’t wrap my chips in them. Any publication which derives the majority of its correspondence from text messages is unlikely to encourage particularly trenchant debate on any topic.

It’s a great pity that this is what has replaced book reading for a huge number of commuters. Whatever my own dilemmas about suitable book choices for the tube, the capacity in books to show us what critic Samuel Hayakawa called “as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish” is their principle wonder. I never go anywhere without a book – who knows when I’ll be stuck in a queue? – and so I’m more sanguine than most when faced with a monopoly on trains to Edgware at the expense of anything remotely imminent to High Barnet. It’s not the destination that matters, you see, it’s the journey.