The perfect author-reading

Not quite there yet

Alerted by Nate Hoffelder’s blog to the ingenious Text Clock by Ross Goodwin, I next had a peek at Mr Goodwin’s blog and noticed that he has devised and made public a fiction generator.

Of course I tried it out, feeding in some character-names and adjusting the “depravity” slider leftwards (I’m a prude like that). Then I hit “Generate”. The machine did its thing, drank some coffee, smoked a cigarette, did its thing some more, guzzled a bit of whiskey (or so it claimed), and came up with a shiny new novel, all 209,687 words of it.

Here is the opening paragraph:

Chapter 1

Other Scrapovitch?”

, a comprehensible ship, no more than a manageable handful could be sur- veyed in two glances; Iona looked, and was where Iona was and what to do. But in this liner Seara for an able master. In that ship Anaia could see at once way to take unless Kamil had a good memory. No understood could not see where Iona was, and would never know which designed with a cunning informed by ages of sea-lore to move came to Jett in that hall of a measured and shapely body, non-irritant skin permitted to stand there to afford man an New York’s skyscrapers, which this planet’s occasionally daring. But with the knowledge that this wall must be apparent reason to be gratified with Iona’s own capacity and that little opened in Anaia’s altitude, Iona found Iona in afloat there came no sense of security when, went through, for Iona was puzzled as to direction. Iona’s last ship a spacious decorated interior which hinted nothing of a ship.

(I did not input any of these character-names, though the ones I did suggest occur later.)

While this may not make the New York Times bestsellers lists, one can see clear evidence of phrasing and sentence-structure. There is only one spelling mistake and (with a few trivial exceptions) there is no problem with the punctuation. It is an impressive feat, several steps on from the poetry generators (like this one) that take advantage of the free form and, frankly, pretentiousness of much modern poetry. Prose is less elastic than poetry and demands less effort on the reader’s part.

As a means of understanding language and our response to it, trying to write a fiction generator is an interesting and useful project. It also reminds us how advanced and amazing – in the true sense of that word – are the abilities of the human brain, for Nature and education have gifted us not only countless thousands of quirky and unique fiction-generators but millions upon millions of equally complicated fiction-interpreters.

Leave it out

Part of the story-teller’s craft is knowing what not to describe. Omitting an inessential scene has two benefits: the flow of the narrative is improved and the reader is drawn in deeper. Besides inviting him to create images from the words before him, you make him fill in the gap. This is done by providing him beforehand with the building-blocks to construct – in any way he sees fit – the missing material for himself. His vision can be modified later with references to what happened during, or arose from, the absent scene. Correctly handled, this technique may cause the reader to believe, once he has finished the story, that he has actually read what isn’t there.

(Omitting whole scenes is analogous to the excision of unnecessary words, particularly descriptors. Parsimony with descriptors leads the author to search for the right noun or verb, improving the flow still further.)

A writer can get into trouble if he doesn’t understand that some of what he has imagined should not be exposed. Sooner or later his ploughshare will hit a rock.

I got stuck like this with The Tide Mill, which is set in the 13th century. The story opens with the arrival of the economic-refugee protagonist, aged nine. I was satisfied with the first chapter and in the next continued with an account of the nine-year-old’s new life, but after a thousand words of that I came to a halt and didn’t know why. I assumed the problem was in the first chapter and rewrote it several times, even changing from third-person to first-person narrative. In the end I gave up.

Months later I was listening to a radio adaptation of a novel and noticed that the author had, without ado, jumped his narrative forward by a number of years. I finally realized that the next significant event in my hero’s life required him to be older and more independent, so I junked what I had written of Chapter 2 and started it again, three years along from the end of Chapter 1. That second chapter is one of the easiest I have ever written.

Eliding those three years indicates that they are of little interest and brings the spotlight to bear on the central event of Chapter 2, which determines everything that follows. Moreover, the reader’s perception of the missing years is enriched as the story unfolds and he learns more about the setting and the local way of life.

I believe that writer’s block is usually caused by an instinctive or subconscious awareness of a technical fault. Sometimes the fault is huge – the whole idea of the story is unbelievable – while at other times it can be trivial. In this case I got blocked because the first version of Chapter 2 lacked momentum. Like a shark, a story must keep moving forward. If there is excess baggage the narrative will be slowed down and made less readable. If the baggage proves too cumbersome, the story may even be impossible to write.

This phenomenon helps illustrate the mysterious and wonderful collaboration between reader and writer. The reader finds unnecessary prose tiresome; if there is too much of it for his taste he will lay the book aside – as will the author himself, temporarily or not.

Sequence in storytelling

Image: canonsnapper

The structure of a satisfying story is well known: it has a beginning, a middle and an end. That is the broad pattern, but the whole narrative is like a fractal. The beginning itself has a beginning, middle and end; likewise the middle and likewise the end. And if you increase the magnification you will see that everything conforms to a sequence. If this is broken at any point, the story becomes less satisfying.

Let us turn the magnification up to maximum and examine the smallest element of a story, the word. A word must be spelled or pronounced a certain way or it will not be drenustdoo … er, understood. Once the first letter of the first word has been laid down, the subsequent letters must obey the law of sequence or the story will go awry.

The second word is in thrall to the first; the third is even more constrained, because it must follow both the first and the second.

The first sentence has a beginning, middle and end. So do the first paragraph and the first chapter.

As element succeeds element each becomes more constrained, until, in a well constructed story, the final element is inevitable. It will hit the emotional sweet-spot and the reader or listener will be completely satisfied.

Although a born storyteller has an intuitive grasp of this idea, when he is building a complicated story his intuition can be inadequate. Elements of the tale vie with one another for precedence. If one element takes his fancy, he may introduce it too soon and thereby cause a structural problem that leads to writer’s block. Or it may not even belong in the narrative at all, causing an even more severe blockage, especially if he is enamoured of the way he has already presented it.

The law of sequence is ruthless. Any diversion causes reader dissatisfaction. It may appear to the storyteller that he is free to take the narrative in whatever direction he chooses, but this is a fallacy. I have said elsewhere on this blog that, in writing fiction, the subconscious is king, and it is the subconscious that is the final arbiter of sequence. The notion that certain characters take on a life of their own is also fallacious: what really happens is that the conscious mind is surprised by the manifestation of a form that was already present in the subconscious. Equally wrong is the illusion of freedom. The only freedom a storyteller enjoys is to disrupt the sequence and subject himself to the torture of writer’s block.

We can see now why the first line of a novel is so important, and why writers spend so long agonizing over and polishing it. Have a look at these. You will see that its first line contains the very germ of a book, however subtle and compressed it may be.

Correctly used, flashbacks have their proper place in the sequence, which is to provide information needed for subsequent development of the story. When incorrectly used, they annoy and may even exasperate the reader. One of the worst offenders in my reading experience is Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, of which a reviewer says: “Very enjoyable to read, but when I finished I was temped to rip out each chapter and arrange them in chronological order. Written in epistolary and non-sequential style, this novel can be as confusing at times as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.” I felt just the same, but wrote the chapter-numbers down in chronological order, then re-read the book that way, whereupon I understood and appreciated it better.

If, as a writer, you find yourself blocked, go back to the start of your story and check that the sequence flows freely. And if, as a reader, you like the style of a book but become dissatisfied with the story, ask yourself whether the sequence is correct. A poor sequence may reveal further weaknesses in the author’s technique, such as an over-reliance on the conscious mind and/or a lack of sincerity. By such means you refine your critical faculties and earn your place in the ranks of the good and great readers, and if this little post helps you in that it will have been well worth its composition.

The Secret Joy of Reading

Just in time for the holidays I have released a collection of ten non-fiction pieces, all but one from this blog:

My First Fountain Pen
Kathleen
The Subconscious in Fiction
Nausea
The Good and Great Reader
Feminism
Politics and Fiction
The Super Panther
Fuzzy Computing
The Secret Joy of Reading

Please help yourself to a free copy from Smashwords. It is also available from Amazon in a specially formatted Kindle edition, currently priced at the minimum (99 cents), and should soon appear for nothing at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Diesel and Sony.

The secret joy of reading

Image: Mr Absurd

I was lucky enough to be taught to read in the era before television: well, it was being broadcast in the mid 1950s, but our set was like a wardrobe with a tiny, round-cornered rectangle of bluish screen that took at least two minutes to “warm up” and, as now, the programmes were hardly worth watching anyway. My school was called Cassiobury JMI, “Junior Mixed Infants”. For a long time I couldn’t understand the adjectives. Infants are junior by definition, and while we were certainly mixed I didn’t see any need to rub that in. Later I realized it was two schools in one, for Infants (5-7 years) and Juniors (8-11 years), and we were Mixed by virtue of having boys and girls together.

We had staff of both genders. Ferocious (she was a sweetie underneath) Miss Buckley was contrasted with the indulgent Mr Hazell, who wore a tweed jacket and came to school by bicycle. We were afraid of Mrs Manders, another soft-hearted dragon with nobler goals than personal popularity. Gentle, pretty Miss Lucas reaped the benefit of that.

By the time I reached her class I had already got the basics and, like my peers, could read pretty fluently. Her lessons included “comprehension”, which meant analysing a few paragraphs by one of our Better Authors. The chosen text was usually descriptive and contained nothing much to puzzle unduly, and nothing whatever to disturb, an innocent mind. We had to pick up hints (“how do we know the season is autumn?”) and note the correct use of number and tense. The aptness and necessity of any qualifiers would be discussed. If there were a semi-colon, say, Miss Lucas would explain why that had been used rather than some other stop. Most of all, we were exposed, silently and otherwise, to the rhythm and harmony of expert writing: language as music, as thought-flow, as sacred paint to illuminate the mind, as something that has the power to collapse history and make us see the world through the eyes of another.

Then there was Mr Hazell. I recall him becoming lost in reciting Tennyson to us, mostly from memory, awaking, almost, with a start after the final line. Hazel also was his hair, as were his eyes, and what with the tweed jacket and his twill trousers and polished brown brogues, not to mention his moss-green bike, it was as if he belonged more to nature than the streets of man. By another teacher we were taken on occasional rambles through the adjacent countryside, so that ready images (a bosky riverbank, sunlight on the water, waving tresses of water-crowfoot, bronzing bracken) were available to create a notion of whither he might return each afternoon once he’d put his clips on. It all seemed to be one, poetry and nature, maybe because of his taste in verse, but then everything seemed to be one, that unknown territory beyond childhood.

Reading was a safe way to explore it. I derived a modicum of boyish pleasure in the classroom:

The Eagle

A FRAGMENT

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1851

yet reading at school was different from the other, freestyle kind. None of us would have dreamt of trying a Better Author for pleasure. That was “work”. In our leisure time we boys read comics – the Beano, Beezer and Dandy. The Eagle, which featured a square-jawed space adventurer and his interstellar struggles with the Mekon, was for older brothers, the sort who played with Meccano and assembled plastic construction kits of Spitfires and Wellington bombers. The girls had their own, fluffy comics, Jackie, I think, was one: it probably had a sparkly bracelet taped to the cover one week, a flimsy alice-band the next, whereas the Beano never needed such inducements and relied on Dennis the Menace to keep us coming back for more.

We ate them up, the comics, not realizing our enjoyment depended on the skills given us by Miss Lucas and her colleagues. An odd page or two was devoted to fictive prose. Such pages helped wean us off the flat and fixed and onto the three-dimensional and imaginative. We were slyly indoctrinated in the idea that words on their own could be fun.

Like a liquorice curl or a pink sugary shrimp, an issue of the Beano was soon disposed of, and in the week before the next one appeared we had to make do with other material. In 1957 my family were not well off and had taken a lodger, a frail German lady, a nonagenarian invalid whom we called “Auntie”, erstwhile nanny of a family friend – herself elderly now, the daughter of a wealthy family who had lost everything in the 1930s and fled to England. Auntie sported a glass ear-trumpet and rimless spectacles, wore voluminous black chenille and a black choker, and seemed to have a limitless supply of lady-finger biscuits. Even today the taste of these has a Proustian effect on my memory, and an essential part of that is her copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book in a rust-coloured binding with Kipling’s swastika peace-device gilded on the front cover. Top-right on the flyleaf, with a fountain pen, she had inscribed her name and added the year: 1897. The book was published by Macmillan. Auntie’s copy may even have been a first edition. She gave it to my elder brother, and in turn I opened it myself.

My favourite story was Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Immersed in its pages, I lived in the heat and danger of Sugauli; looking up, refocusing, I was returned to the dull, temperate familiarity of a residential road in England. Next, I seem to recall, and simply because it was in the house, I read my brother’s Moby-Dick, bowdlerized for children. One of our local cinemas showed second-run films, and there I saw John Huston’s 1956 version. My little eyes widened at the scene with St Elmo’s fire, and positively saucered as Ahab, harpoon-roped to the White Whale’s wounded back, was borne away from the wreckage of the Pequod. That hadn’t happened in the book: that had been Fedallah’s fate, and he’d been left on the cutting-room floor. Even as the credits rolled I felt the novel, the movie it had made in my head, was better – less simplistic, more detailed and enthralling.

By now I was an addict. My parents were readers too: sometimes our early-evening meal would be designated a “read tea” and, flouting etiquette, we would all have a book open at the table. I joined the local library and was issued with four tickets, valid for the junior section only, most of which I disregarded, since it was crammed with picture-books. I was impatient to access the grown-ups’ shelves. Every paragraph I read educated me for more, but I was very far from being discerning.

It was just the stories – the action – I liked. I would read, legitimately, in bed before lights-out (I had my own little room), and then under a tented sheet with a Woolworth torch. This criminality in a simulated cave, or priest-hole, or chalky tunnel, fitted well with the adventures of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, all of which I devoured, cursing my yellowing bulb and hoping it would last for just one more chapter. It was then that I first knew the sense of loss caused by a dwindling pile of pages. I proceeded more slowly as the end approached, regretting my earlier headlong dash. I consulted the list of books “By the same author”, to see how many treats were left in store; but I also became vaguely aware that Miss Blyton’s talent didn’t quite match up to Mr Melville’s, however clumsily he may have been abridged.

* * *

A feature of middle-class life was the Readers’ Union book-club. This issued a wide variety of titles, fiction and otherwise, a year or two after first publication. Our household had a sizable collection of these, together with many other books haphazardly acquired. War-yarns featured quite often, bestsellers about PoW camps in which our stoical, pipe-smoking chaps baited the “goons” and devised ingenious escape-plans. Officers only: the camps were segregated. It all seemed rather jolly, an adult, more spartan version of Billy Bunter’s Greyfriars, with the Kommandant as Quelch. The Hun were beastly, of course, but laboured under the handicap of foreignness and so were more to be pitied than condemned. I saw myself at Stalag Luft III, digging away under the wooden horse or releasing sandy soil down my trouser-leg as I sauntered about the compound. I dodged machine-gun fire from the guard towers and fled into the nocturnal fir-forest, then slept in ditches, stole a bicycle, was given food by a tender lass who discovered me dozing in her father’s straw; risking her life (the unspoken mutual attraction passing high above my head), she conducted me to a contact in the resistance who helped me on my way to neutral Sweden, there to board ship and return to my squadron at Tangmere. This was a step up from Blyton, to be sure, and I believed every word. Bare facts about the despair of captivity were supplied: I sensed that it had been, at bottom, a serious business, but didn’t twig that understatement had been one of the traits that had let my country endure till the Japanese brought the Americans in. I was unwittingly absorbing cues about the national psyche, and because the books were so well written and edited I was also absorbing a feel for technique – narrative flow, felicity, vocabulary. These I took for granted every bit as much as I had the remarkable lessons I had received from Miss Lucas.

Narrative flow – storytelling – has two components, the expected and the unexpected. By the “expected” I mean those elements of the story with which the reader will be familiar before he starts. These are of two broad sorts: the background or setting, which persuades him that the unexpected is believable; and conventions of story-telling, such as the linearity of time, or certain actions having predictable consequences, or an ascending plot-structure that leads to an emotional payoff in the form of a happy ending.

The “unexpected”, or “unfamiliar”, comprises, first, those parts of the background that are new (e.g. descriptions of a place the reader previously knew nothing about) and, secondly, the motivations and consequent deeds of the characters – some of which may actually be “familiar”, inasmuch as he has already experienced something comparable himself, whether first-hand or otherwise. As he reads any particular story, its unfamiliar is transformed into the familiar, and as he grows older and reads more and more stories, his gathered experience makes him familiar with elements of new stories that a novice will find “unfamiliar”.

When small children insist on hearing, yet again, a tale they know by heart, it is because the familiar is comforting. The familiar confirms us in who we are. It helps us to integrate with our social group, whatever that may be – family at first, then class, nationality, and, if we persist, the human race as a whole. The familiar is the oldest element of story, the cohesive force that kept our ancestors enthralled as they sat listening to the shaman’s tales.

The performances of modern actors vary a little from one evening to the next. I’m sure the shaman varied his performances too. He would have done it to stop himself from getting bored, or for the sheer fun of making things up – the feeling of power the fabulist has over his rapt listeners. As the audience grew more sophisticated they would have begun to delight in this novelty also. New stories would have emerged from new experiences for the clan, and what had been strange or frightening would have been assimilated into lore.

We love to gossip and hear the news. This has obvious survival value for a social animal: that may well be its origin. Gossip, the news, non-fiction in general, is also a kind of narrative, entertaining or informative in its way, but unreliable. The reporter may only have had partial access to the facts, or be influenced by commercial pressure or a political belief that causes bias. Paradoxically, fiction is often more truthful than non-fiction, and sincere fiction is the most truthful narrative of all.

In those elements of a story that are pure invention, the storyteller makes no claim to factual accuracy. On the contrary: for fear of libel, he may even announce that his characters “bear no resemblance to any person living or dead”. Accuracy is only claimed for the familiar, the “research” that serves to make the unfamiliar convincing. A reader who finds a mistake in the research becomes impatient with the whole story. A mistake pricks the bubble of suspended disbelief and calls into question the competence of the author. In written stories, the familiar also encompasses the rules that have accreted around spelling, etc., and the bubble will be pricked by mistakes there too.

The familiar has to be scrupulously correct. It is the launch-platform for the unfamiliar. The more solid and reliable the familiar, the more fanciful can be the unfamiliar. That is why successful science fiction casts an everyman as hero. The reader finds it easier to identify with such a character, enabling the author to get away with less familiarity in the setting: although even here, if examined, the setting will be found to have much about it that is familiar. Think of the beginning of Ninety Eighty-four. The clock strikes thirteen, but then Winston Smith is confronted with the smell of boiled cabbage. Throughout that narrative, George Orwell again and again demonstrates his masterly skill in weaving the familiar with the unfamiliar. Aided by his flawless English, he builds such a convincing platform that when we come to the climax – when Winston cries “Do it to Julia!” – we are completely engaged and profoundly moved.

Fiction like that is overtly truthful, because a sincere author does his best to build a persuasive version of the familiar. In so doing he reveals a lot about himself. The reader enlarges his knowledge of the world partly by means of the various representations of reality he encounters in his progress. This is, perhaps, almost as rewarding as the psychological insight offered by the most advanced aspect of the unfamiliar: authors’ recombination of elements of their own lives.

Both the familiar and the unfamiliar tell the reader about the writer, but in different ways. In Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, Kipling is careful to provide his young, middle-class audience with a young, middle-class protagonist, made yet more identifiable by his conventional relationship to his conventional family. The author can then risk the exotic setting (Bihar) essential to the story of a mongoose (Rikki, the goody) in his struggle to defend the family from a pair of malevolent cobras (Nag and Nagina, the baddies). The story itself is necessarily conventional, with the expected (i.e. familiar) happy ending.

The more exotic the setting, the less exotic should be the plot, and vice versa. Stories with exotic characters, setting and plot are usually dismissed as unbelievable, because the reader cannot get a handle on them: there is nothing familiar. In Rikki-Tikki-Tavi much of the setting, together with the cast of animals and birds, comprises the unfamiliar; the rest, including the plot, is familiar. Kipling would have been aware of this. He was a sublime craftsman, but did he know exactly what he was doing? I don’t think so. Was he sincere? Most likely. The piece educates us about the Raj but inadvertently also tells us about the author, his world-view, and the society in which he grew up. Nag plans to kill the family, to rid the house of the whites, so that the cobras can again hold sway. For Nag and Nagina, read “the misguided, resentful, nationalistic Indians”; for Rikki, read “a valiant, enlightened Indian, grateful for the benefits of British rule and content to be treated as a family pet”. It is not just a tale for children, but a subtle (and, I believe, almost entirely unconscious) exercise in jingoism. Perusal of his other works reveals that Kipling was indeed jingoistic, or patriotic, as doubtless he would have preferred to be called. He was a man of his time and of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen. Gone now, but that little mongoose gives an insight into the mindset that enabled it to flourish. (In Russia in 1966, at the height of the Cold War, an animated version of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was released, directed by Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaya. This notably substitutes a native family for the whites. The storyline was strong enough to survive, but not the politics.)

When I was a small boy Britain still had an empire, though it was shrinking, and most of the adults around me agreed with its values. Kipling’s assumptions would have reinforced my world-view, such as it was. The same with Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, which depicted an ideal society of well-adjusted children, responsible parents, and marginalized “crooks” who always got caught in the end: propaganda, in other words, but disseminated with the best of intentions by its author, publisher, and everyone else in the chain between Blyton’s desk and my torchlit cave. We consume such books partly for reassurance, confirmation of who we are, but not all of us are content to go on consuming them indefinitely.

Rudyard Kipling

Even in the children’s version, Moby-Dick is far more challenging than Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Again the author is careful to provide a sympathetic and readily identifiable lead, although Ishmael turns out to be little more than a bland narrator: the protagonist is Ahab, the deuteragonist the whale. In the opening pages we learn to like and trust Ishmael. We flatter ourselves that he resembles us, an ordinary person doing his best, though sorely afflicted with the wanderlust that lurks in us all. The familiar continues when he arrives at the inn. Just as we would be, he is disgruntled to learn that he must share a bed with a stranger. But when Queequeg appears, things start to get interesting. He could hardly be less familiar, a hideously tattooed cannibal carrying a lethal harpoon and worshipping a homunculus. Ishmael is terrified. Then, slowly, as Queequeg’s admirable personality emerges, Ishmael’s prejudice evaporates and the two men become friends.

Melville transforms Queequeg into part of the familiar. We come to like him just as much as we like Ishmael, or even more; and a little of our own adamantine prejudice is thus wafted away. This is clever writing, for it also solves a technical problem. Queequeg’s transformation prepares us for the easy absorption of further extreme unfamiliarity. Before we know what has happened we feel at home aboard the Pequod. We are of the crew. Our own fate is bound up with Ahab’s obsession.

Just as Queequeg was transformed, so now is much of the unfamiliar in Moby-Dick. Ahab’s thirst for revenge is allowed to dominate, while the setting and the supporting cast become familiar, accepted, relegated to the background. Everything and everyone on board are subordinate to and focused upon the captain’s monomania, so that when the whale is finally engaged what results is a clash of two incomprehensible titans. It is a wonderful story, adumbrating mysteries of morality that have no name. These mysteries cannot be retrieved from the realm of the unfamiliar, so cause us to reflect on them once we have finished the book.

Herman Melville

In its unexpurgated version Moby-Dick is a highly sophisticated work, revelling in the joys of language and in knowledge for its own sake. An extended vocabulary is another benefit for the persistent reader. He is further enriched by an awareness of literary tropes and allusions, but a more important side of his progress is his growing ability to see into another’s mind.

In the whole field of art, I can think of no rival to literature in its capacity to let us share someone else’s psyche. A story is superficially divided into the familiar and the unfamiliar; its composition is divided into the conscious and subconscious. The subconscious part, like Kipling’s assumptions in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, is usually the more interesting. Unlike most human discourse, including the conscious part of an author’s output, it is entirely free of deceit. After Animal Farm or Nineteen-eighty Four, we know more about George Orwell than his biography can ever tell us. He was a professed man of the Left, but so fastidiously honest and self-effacing (this is borne out by the transparency of his prose) that he could make no apology for the failures of socialism. We see through the tribal Labour Party badge: we see the humanitarian underneath, and our world-view – whatever our political beliefs – is ameliorated as a result.

Those two novels are an exercise in polemic, preserved – elevated – from that dreary genre only by Orwell’s ability as a storyteller. Moby-Dick is higher, towering, inspired, transcendent. Huston’s film threw nearly all of that away. The script was written by Ray Bradbury, who disliked the novel and didn’t get on with his autocratic director. What remains is little more than a time-passing thriller, exciting enough in the communal atmosphere of an auditorium, but ultimately unsatisfying.

The young Melville’s seafaring adventures provided the ideas for some fairly conventional stories, like Typee and Omoo. They were commercially successful; his later books were not. His declining sales warred with the urge to satisfy his muse, and he must have seen how far short, in that respect, he fell compared with his friend Hawthorne. Moby-Dick was published in 1851, when he was thirty-two. For the next forty years his writing became increasingly mystical and, at the last, impenetrable.

The secret joy of reading, its greatest pleasure, is this: by merging our psyche with an author’s, we keep our grip on reality while temporarily renouncing what eastern philosophy terms “the self”. In quiet solitude we open our heart and join the commonalty of mankind. Queequeg becomes a brother whose death we mourn. Fiction may entertain and even educate, but above all it is a tool to help us grow. That is why we leave Enid Blyton behind and long for our tickets to the grown-ups’ library, and that is why we are drawn to the unresolved mysteries of the unfamiliar in fiction, for these are the very mysteries of existence itself.

The good and great reader

“We read to know we are not alone,” said C. S. Lewis, which is one widely quoted viewpoint, but readers read for many reasons, including mere diversion, as trivial as watching TV.

Sometimes readers read because they are alone. A book is company. The act of reading invites the reader to participate in the construction of the narrative. He imagines scenes, notices things, wonders where the story is heading, and identifies, perhaps, with one or more of the characters. The book engages him. While he is turning the pages he is less lonely.

Such a reader is already at Base Camp, but above him rises the difficult, intensely rewarding peak which only the good and great reader can hope to attempt.

Of course, no matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. “To take upon us the mystery of things” – what King Lear so wistfully says for himself and for Cordelia – this is also my suggestion for everyone who takes art seriously. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat (Gogol’s “The Greatcoat”, or more correctly “The Carrick”); another poor fellow is turned into a beetle (Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”) – so what? There is no rational answer to “so what.” We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss. Beauty plus pity – that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual. If Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers.

— Vladimir Nabokov

Writing good fiction is difficult. The physical means of producing it are so easily acquired, and self-delusion is so widespread, that many people fancy themselves skilled when they are not. In the same way, reading appears to be simple. You are taught at school how to decipher the marks on a page and fancy yourself a reader, but unless you develop your technique you will never even get near the foothills. That’s fair enough, if diversion is all you seek, if you are prepared to forgo the panorama awaiting you at the summit.

At the core of reading technique is discernment. First you must discern whether what you are reading is sincere. Has it been written from the heart?

Next: does the author know his job? You cannot construct a piece of furniture if you know nothing about carpentry. Watch out for an inadequate vocabulary, an absence of poetry, an ignorance of flow – and by “flow” I mean the ability to present meanings in the correct order, which is the key to storytelling. Does the author have a clear idea of what he’s up to? If he doesn’t, you certainly won’t, and he is wasting unique and precious hours of your life, hours you can never get back.

By practising discernment you improve your taste. You graduate to better work, and as you graduate the act of reading becomes more and more involving. Your mental eyesight becomes keener. You appreciate an artist when you find one and understand what he is doing, and then you begin to plug into his mind.

I have said elsewhere on this blog that writing fiction is primarily a function of the subconscious: the ability to share someone else’s inmost feelings is one of the most exciting rewards for the good and great reader. While reading a good and great book, the good and great reader’s mind merges with that of the author, is exercised, enlarged, and made stronger. The chances are he will read the rest of the author’s oeuvre. He will do this in order to clarify and expand what he has already gained, to check that the experience was authentic, and to see how the author’s sensibilities have changed over the years.

There is, however, more than that to reading a good and great book. The prose itself will be beautiful. Its aptness and rhythm will give you delight. Its vocabulary will enrich your own, allowing you to express yourself more clearly and make closer contact with your fellow humans. That alone is worth the price of admission.

But it gets better. Literature offers an infinity of alternative worlds. The reader inhabits them in complete safety. He can learn from the mistakes the characters make; he can admire and try to emulate their generosity or wisdom. By so doing, he grows spiritually. He takes upon himself “the mystery of things”.

The deepest mystery is an understanding of other people, and that, I feel, is what C. S. Lewis had in mind.