COMFORT READING
When the going gets tough, Alexander McCall Smith heads to his library to retrieve well-thumbed favourites
When life gives you lemons, take a leaf from Alexander McCall Smith's book and head for the library
In troubled times – and there will be few who will be inclined to dispute that description of this egregiously trying year – where do we turn for consolation? To the hills, as the psalm suggests? Unto Munros will I lift up mine eyes… Religion might do for some; for others yoga, or mindfulness. Perhaps pilates might help to numb the pain. Tidying the garage might boost the spirits, as might mastering a difficult language (apparently sales of Finnish grammars have gone through the roof).
Long walks in the countryside are undoubtedly therapeutic, as are sessions on the exercise bike. But the greatest of these anodynes is the comfort reading, something over which we have been conditioned to feel slightly apologetic. This is exactly the time to go back to the books you have loved and to read them again; they may not be the sort of books your book club approves of, but there is a lot of posturing in book clubs, and what members of your book club think about the books you like to read should not discourage you. Every book club has at least one intellectual snob in it, who will look down his or her nose at any book that is readable, intelligible, and vaguely comforting.
There is, of course, a simple and effective way of dealing with these difficult book club people, and that is by quoting Proust. Proust is a wonderful writer. He goes on and on, and then on again. As Alain de Botton pointed out in How Proust Can Change Your Life, the longest sentence in À la recherche du temps perdu, if printed out in standard-size type, can be wrapped round a wine bottle seventeen times. That is no mean achievement. And these lengthy sentences contain references to all sorts of irrelevant detail, stacked away in the narrator’s elephantine memory.
Quote some of these things at the difficult member of the book club and watch uncertainty blossom out into consternation. A quotation from Proust silences people because nobody likes to confess to not have read Proust – just about everybody has thought about reading him, but few have translated that into actual reading. Stop them in their tracks, right there, by saying: ‘Of course, Proust believed that steamships insulted the dignity of distance.’ That works without fail.
The opinionated party will look momentarily blank before saying, ‘Of course’, but that ‘of course’ will sound uncertain. And then you have the advantage. Clausewitz would probably say ‘press the attack’ with Proust’s views on Giotto. With any luck, the opinionated party will think that is a cheese rather than an artist, and may say, ‘Do they sell that at Valvona & Crolla?’ Game set and match if that is the reponse. Cadit quaestio. Victory.
So don’t be ashamed of your comfort reads and the books you turn to when the world seems grim. At every stage of my life I have had one or two books with which I have been in love.
The first of these, my earliest intellectual love affair, was with a book I was given when I was five, or thereabouts. It was a small blue book and its title was The Boy’s Book of Merchant Shipping. It was a book of outstanding dullness, and consisted of pictures of merchant ships, with details of their tonnage and routes. But I loved it so much I slept with it under my pillow. It was my vademecum. Looking back on that infatuation, I am put in mind of Auden’s wise words on love and the surprising objects of love: Love requires an object,/But this varies so much,/Almost, I imagine,/Anything will do./When I was a child, I/Loved a pumping-engine,/Thought it every bit as/Beautiful as you…
Tastes mature. Now, at times when the contemplation of the woes of this world threatens equanimity, I go back to E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books or to Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. I have read these books time and time again, and know them virtually word for word. Lucia’s exposure as a non-speaker of Italian never fails to amuse me, just as I am always delighted by her sitting down with Georgie Pilson to play a Mozart duet on the piano. ‘Uno, due, tre’ Lucia says before they start, and we smile at the joke, as we have smiled countless times before. Or in the grave moments of Waugh’s masterpiece, as when Guy Crouchback, having just heard of the death of his estranged and unworthy wife, speaks in Latin to a priest with whom he shares no other common language, I find myself somehow transported from the present into a time of altogether greater challenge – and that puts things in perspective, even if I remind myself that my late father-inlaw, a perceptive psychiatrist, once wrote: the contemplation of another’s toothache hardly helps one’s own.
Some authors are comfort reads on an ocean-going scale. Patrick O’Brian is one such: his twenty Jack Aubrey novels will see you through any adversity. If the world of our times is strident, painful or full of disharmony, immerse yourself in the world of the Jack Aubrey and his surgeon friend, Stephen Maturin. These are tales of the sea, and places on the edge of the sea. They are also the story of a great friendship, another of this life’s consolations – something that can transform the least of lives, and make them glorious.
Our current ordeal drags on. But there are places of light, well-lit rooms into which books of this nature invite us, take our hand, make us feel a whole lot better.
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Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey novels will see you through any adversity