WHATBOOK..?

...are you reading now?

EREBUS by Michael Palin, as I’m interviewing him about it for a Penguin Podcast. I’m a fiction man, mainly, and I like stuff about people more than ships — but I very much fancied doing the chat with Michael.

And I’m glad I did, because it’s a great story about the first British expedition to the South Pole and the first time that men became heroes through battling the elements, rather than battling other men. It turns out anyway to be very much about people, all told in a very relaxed and sometimes — as you might expect — very funny Palin style.

...would you take to a desert island?

WELL, it should be Erebus, because it would help me survive, but actually, it would be the Rabbit books by John Updike, which is cheating a bit as it’s four-and-a-half books, but they are collected in one omnibus, called Rabbit.

Updike’s work — and particularly these chronicles of an ordinary American man — still, for me, represent the ultimate example of the novel digging deep into the human condition, but in the most readable, everyday way. Updike names the world anew in every sentence and yet never takes you out of the real and the recognisable.

...first gave you the reading bug?

I THINK it was the Billy Bunter books (pictured). That seems to make no sense, as they were written for children two generations earlier than me, but my mum was a collector of antique books (before she collected golfing memorabilia) and she kind of foisted them on me. I think for a lower middle-class boy from immigrant stock, the tales of these semi-aristocratic schoolboys and their adventures in a turreted, crumpetsover-log-fires universe felt impossibly romantic, in a pre-Hogwarts sort of way.

...left you cold?

I’VE tried hard with The Adventures Of Augie March by Saul Bellow, but never got through it. I’m a big lover of American post-war fiction, but I’ve always found Bellow, who many think of as the apex of that genre, a bit grating.

His prose isn’t as beautiful as Updike’s, and his comedy not as funny as Roth’s, and, crucially, his central characters are all professors and/or intellectuals and writers, which makes him, for me, not the artist of the everyday that — to say his name again — Updike is, but also Anne Tyler and Carol Shields and David Foster Wallace, and a whole host of other Americans I like.

Bellow always parachuted his version of himself into his novels, and while all novelists do that to some extent, his version of himself was always a self-consciously deep thinker in a way that feels to me like a literary cheat.