The poetry of the paperclip

At the earnest suggestion of a rep, who's been handing out proof copies with evangelical zeal, I've just read The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. The book is being published in September by Gallic, who were set up last year by a couple of former Random House staffers with the sanguine aim of introducing the instinctively parochial British public to some of the best of contemporary French literature.

And it is indubitably French. The principal standpoint is that of Renée, or more usually to the other characters Madame Michel, the concierge at an apartment block which our other narrator, a twelve year-old of intimidating precocity called Paloma, would describe as irredeemably bourgeois.

At the outset, Renée lurks in her loge, the television tuned interminably to some populist channel, in an effort to convince the affluent flat owners that her proletarian life is predictably mindless, while she curls up undisturbed in an armchair reading Tolstoy and Kant. Meanwhile, Paloma also tries to secrete herself away, carefully recording her 'Profound Thoughts' and making entries in her 'Journal of of the Movement of the World', all informed by a misanthropy of Cartesian design.

The two circle each other warily, until one of the flats changes hands, bought by Monsieur Ozu, a cosmopolitan man of impeccable aesthetic sensibilities. When Ozu and the concierge first meet, she expects the usual supercilious indifference exhibited by those whom she serves but finds herself floundering when the usual conversational platitudes seem inappropriately inadequate. Instead, she mutters the first part of the dichotomous maxim which begins Anna Karenina and is startled to hear its counterpart in response from Ozu, the twinkling in whose eyes confirms she has betrayed her nature.

Paloma's disgust at the values of her family, and at empty life she feels has been mapped out for her, convinces her that she must kill herself, and do so by immolating herself in the apartment block which represents all that she loathes. But she also recognises a kindred spirit in Ozu and, as the three bond, Renée and Paloma believe they have found friendship for the first time.

The only secondary character with any apparent humanity is an acquaintance of Renée, a cleaning lady called Manuela. Her bustling practicality is complimented by a carpe diem joie de vivre and it is only belatedly that Renée's understands that Manuela is smart as well. Renée has imprisoned her intellect to punish herself of being borne of such inadequate breeding that she is unworthy of it, yet Manuela has accepted that the satiation of her intellect must be occasional, but no less a joy for that.

Paloma is perhaps rather less credible a character. The self-discipline and, particularly, the sophistication of her thoughts don't ring true. The fixed glare with which she commonly disdains her family always seems more indicative of adolescent contrariness than of due condescension.

There is a moment when a fallen rosebud is a epiphany for her:

"Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death."

Even her acknowledgment that the thought was originally Pierre de Ronsard's doesn't make her seem much more than a representation of Renée's lost potential. A handful of instances of more childish tastes aren't enough to create a plausible twelve year-old, no matter how austere.

The plot of the book is very much subservient to and an illustration of its philosophical dialogue. Questions of pace and plausibility are of limited relevance, which most British readers - and I acknowledge my own shortcoming here - would consider wilfully unconventional. We are most comfortable with storyline and protagonistic empathy; they are books whose contents we can observe. A challenge to the very cultural context of our perceptions cannot be engaged with passively, so a book such as this may seem forbidding in its demands upon us.

It would simply be false to infer that narrative fiction is inferior. A great book may defined just as much by a great story as well as by its concept or its language. But plot may be negligible and nugatory, as it is in that disappointingly generally uncherished Booker winner, The Sea, yet its glorious prose, so reminiscent of Nabokov, is resonantly sublime.

L'Élègance du Hérisson has sold over 800,000 copies in France alone in 2007 and found favour in several other European markets, but I suspect its impact will be slight over here. Like our relative indifference towards the short story, our tastes may too often be restricted by our perceptual insularity and our cultural inhibition.

Hérisson, incidentally, has a delightfully poetic second meaning of 'chimney brush'. It doesn't quite supersede my favourite French word, which is trombone: as well as indicating the same instrument in English, it also means 'paperclip', adding an elegant whimsy to the French stationery cupboard. Like our current literary tastes, the English approach seems uninspired and utilitarian by comparison.

Meanwhile, in the shop, I field my first ever enquiry as to whether we sell "funny little hats".

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.

The obligatory Harry Potter post

(Originally published on 22nd July 2007)

So, Harry Potter. It's all over. The boy has become a man. Marvellous.

This isn't going to be a rant about Harry Potter. I'm not a fan - I have the read the first of them, as I felt it my duty as bookmonger, and was reminded of the pleasure I got from Roald Dahl as a child - but I'm happy enough for people, young and old, to enjoy them. In a way, I wish I were a fan, getting caught up in the all the anticipation, excitement and attendant persiflage.

But the Harry Potter phenomenon does concern me. And I think it's because it's become so much more than a way to show people what wonder can be found in the humblest of bookshops. Now anyone can, and apparently does, flog Harry Potter, even shops that don't normally stock books. Last Friday night certain clothes shops adjacent to bookshops dressed their staff up in all manner of thaumaturgical regalia to tap into the craze.

So I think what worries me is that people drawn to reading Harry Potter are going to expect this sort of glamour to attend the book trade generally. Hollywood tries to turn all its products into a relentless cavalcade of stars and CGI, all sound and fury signifying nothing, while the independent film industry continues its lonely decline, so it'll all be about making each release into an event. A film's success is determined in its first weekend's ticket sales.

The book industry is trying to ape that sort of business model, making authors, especially the media-savvy and photogenic, into stars, with the result that the general public's critical abilities are those which will suffice for 'watercooler' autopsies. But Harry Potter is a one-off. Anyone waiting for this kind of hullabaloo to show them what to read next isn't going to buying books again any time soon.

Back in January, when Stef Penney won the Costa Book of the Year (next year awarded alongside the Monster Munch Award for Contemporary Architecture), books made one of their occasional forays beyond the review supplements and into the news pages. But most journalists just wrote about Penney's agoraphobia and the supposed incongruity of this condition with her writing about the wilds of Canada, it not apparently occurring to any of them that having an imagination tends to be very much part of the job spec when it comes to writing fiction.

Reviews, sometimes even in the Sunday broadsheets, are often no more than a description of the plot. (I’d like to make an honourable mention here of Claire Allfree, who reviews for Metro, a publication not normally associated with intellect and insight; but both are abundant in the two and a half inches the newspaper is prepared to give her in lieu of more mobile phone ads and text messages from idiots.) It’s no wonder John Banville’s masterly Booker winner, The Sea, has sold so poorly in comparison with more prosaic winners, when nothing happens until 20 pages from the end, but after 80,000 words pieced together with such rare beauty. There are distressingly few of us who feel aggrieved that Jim Crace, England’s most stylish novelist, is not paraded through the streets of his home city of Birmingham in a streamer-festooned, open-top bus every time he publishes a new book.

Last week I was interviewed by a journalist from The Los Angeles Times about the then imminent Potter: she said she knew the films but not the books! They had no book readers up to the task? Books seem to have become a niche interest, a novelty, a hobby for the socially retiring. (The same day I also appeared on Al-Jazeera, in a piece on Alastair Campbell's diaries; my mother is now convinced I'm a prime terrorist target.)

There will always be word-of-mouth titles which skew the market - A Year in Provence, A Brief History of Time, Captain Corelli's Lousy Rotten Stinking Mandolin - and names, even at the literary end of the spectrum, who shift books no matter the quality of their latest (yes, I do mean you, Ian McEwan and Sebastian Faulks). And then of course there's The Da Vinci Code.

Now, anyone who's ever read a line of Nabokov or Conrad or Walcott will be able to tell from reading a single sentence from The Da Vinci Code that the publishers have made flesh the philosophical exercise involving an infinite number of monkeys and a similar number of typewriters (and no copy editors). The language in that book is so excruciatingly poor that the manuscript ought to have been so scored with blue pencil by its editor that one might have wondered if a young Picasso had been doodling on it. I'm sure the story is gripping, but one man's page-turner is this man's stomach-turner.

This total lack of analytical skills is why The Lord of the Rings gets voted the best book of all time, why students quote from Wikipedia in their essays, why the media's coverage of any political issue or scientific development is reported such starkly black and white terms that any debate is reduced to mindless sloganeering.

So, I hope all those waiting for Harry savoured every last word, but I hope that that you’ll pick up something that needs a bit of engagement some time soon. It doesn't matter that people read trash or watch trash or eat trash; it does matter when our minds, our palates, our expectations become so dulled that we don't want anything more, that we can’t even recognise something with real value, something worth treasuring.

I address that last adjuration to all those fans of G P Taylor, Jennifer Donnelly, Meg Rosoff, Philip Pullman and all the other children’s authors whom publishers are pushing on readers scared to pick up anything not first vetted by Richard & Judy. And that includes all of you out there who made The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time into a word-of-mouth bestseller and even voted it as a 'Vintage Future Classic'. Let's not be coy here: it may shed light on a previously relatively unreported condition, but it's a children's book. If you found the plot satisfying, then you have a reading age of nine and almost certainly read the book with a supply of Cheesestrings and Sunny D within easy reach.