A book, they say, is like a river. You just have to jump in and start swimming. That said, not all books are exactly the same river. There are times when I’ve leapt into ‘the river’, so to speak, and have found the current too strong.
I remember, in my 20s, an age when one is prone to pretentiousness, trying to read Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past! It was like trying to swim through concrete, honestly — and this, I hasten to add, has more to do with me than with Proust. Each phrase seemed to be encased in lead and before I’d ‘stroked’ my way past the first 20 pages, I could feel a sense of drowning, literarily of course.
People often joke and say, “That went completely over my head.” Well, that was my experience with dear Marcel who, had we lived in the same age and time, I’d have begged forgiveness from. Alas, that was not to be.
This abortive attempt, needless to say, had a huge turnaround. Turnaround in the sense that I experienced something of the ‘swing factor’ one often hears psephologists talk about at election time. That is, I went from Proust to James Hadley Chase in one swift move.
And did I regret it? Not a bit. I know this to be true for I devoured every one of Chase’s books that was available in the local lending library. And I think the library pretty much stocked everything Chase had written.
“Yes, stick to something simple,” I remember one of the elders saying to me, jeeringly, with half an eye on the cast-aside Proust. And stick to it I did. For many years. Going from Chase to Frederick Forsyth and Alistair Maclean, Colin Forbes, Ken Follett and pretty any other author who could tell a story simply, but with the pace of Dennis Lillee. Or Jeff Thomson. Or the both combined. In fact, I took to comparing writers of these genres to the fast bowlers of the time. Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner.
Then one day someone placed in my hands a book titled, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
“Le Carre, I must warn you, is very slow. His plots creep,” warned the same elder, hoping, I think, to revive in me the nearly-forgotten trauma of trying to make some sense of Proust. “He is deathly slow,” he added, for emphasis, watching with interest as I grappled with doubt: Should I set off on this journey, jump into this ‘river’ and see where it takes me?
Luckily for me, I think, I did. And I have to say the steady nature of the plot in no way hindered me from swimming smoothly to the finish. I think, in large measure, that was owing to Le Carre’s brilliant prose. I found he wrote in such a way and with such a wonderful turn of expression that it hardly mattered if he was telling a story or not, or if the story had a plot at all. I just wanted to read and read and read. And so Le Carre took his place in the queue of my reading life and, in his own way, guided me towards others: The Man Booker shortlists, the winners and, in between, all the classics, from Jane Austen and Conan Doyle to Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.
In many ways, I had to find my own way and discover writers that I liked and wanted to read more of. And all of this was brought to me full force, recently, at a large book fair. There amongst the vast number of people, as I browsed, I spotted just off my elbow, a mother and her grown son. He could have been very late teens or early 20s. They were both in discussion and she was giving him 15 reasons why he ought to buy Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.
I wished I’d had an elder like that, more helpful, less off-putting.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
