Judging the Booker prize has made me wonder how worthwhile it take second, and third, literary looks
I had an awkward moment during this year's deliberations over the Man Booker prize. We had just trudged through 151 novels (I actually read a few more than that – 183 in all to be precise – but that's a tale for a different time) and we began the process of re-reading the longlist. As I re-cracked a spine, like some kind of literary Bane, it struck me that I don't re-read that often. I re-read classics most: Scott and Dickens, Eliot and Woolf, Melville and Zola most often. I've read Ulysses more times than I can remember (but sometimes just sections), and Perec's Life: A User's Manual certainly more than thrice. But contemporary novels? It was an embarrassing blank. I've certainly read Midnight's Children more than once, and I've read Golding's Rites Of Passage and Byatt's Possession twice. Occasionally, with a cold, I've re-read The Mouse And His Child by Russell Hoban. I've dipped back into many books, from Finnegans Wake to The Recognitions by William Gaddis to Christine Brooke-Rose's Textermination. But actually re-reading? Less than a handful of modern novels.
The Man Booker judges are always in a strange situation, provided they do the work as assigned. We will have read the winner more frequently and more stringently than the so-called average reader. I should, for the record, say that no reader is average. Each has a unique engagement with a text, and every one of those responses is valid, if not right. But let's face it, not many of the slightly fictitious reading public are going to read any Man Booker winner three times.
When we came to re-re-read the shortlist, certain things became evident. A crime novel would have to be more than just a crime novel to survive the second "re". It might be impressive first time round, and the second time one could be impressed by the precision with which the solution had been placed and patterned. Third time? A comic novel will struggle too: is there any joke that's funny the third time you hear or read it? I loved Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, and have recommended it to many people, but haven't actually re-read it (even though bits of it, in memory alone, make me laugh).
Re-re-reading is odd: a book has to have a certain depth to survive multiple readings. That is not to say that a book which one races through, enjoys, and wouldn't return to is not without merit. There are pleasures other than profundity. A significant reason why the prize went to Eleanor Catton was that The Luminaries can, I think, be enjoyed on the surface level as a gripping story, a homage to Victorian sensation fiction, with opium dens, murders, extortion plots, séances and a supernatural vision. But every time, I re-read it (I'm on four now), I found more and more in it. Its elaborate, astrological structure asks purposeful questions about destiny and character. The halving is both an image of perfection (the Golden Section) and the law of diminishing returns, fitting neatly with the book's exploration of greed, accumulation and capital.
Serendipitously, I hared back to Scotland from the Guildhall for the Scottish Mental Health Association book festival which, in my capacity as creative programmer for Glasgow's Aye Write! book festival, I'd been asked to deliver. One of our guests was Ella Berthould, the co-author of The Novel Cure, an ingenious set of literary diagnoses for ailments. We got talking about re-reading, and she made the smart point that re-reading doesn't just take us back to the book, it creates a link with the person we were when we read the book before. It made me slightly melancholy to think of all those lost links to my own history I was missing by always looking to read the next, new thing.
I've only experienced this in a small way: reading books as an undergraduate I'd read as a schoolboy, and then dipping into them for reviews or books I was writing later on. Re-reading Moby-Dick or Middlemarch in my 40s is a far deeper experience than reading it as a callow youth. On the other hand, I'm fearful that re-reading some old favourites from that time of my life – Flann O'Brien, for example, or Anthony Burgess – might be dispiriting. What if it's not as good as I thought? Worse: what if it showed my earlier critical capacity to be gauche and easily-impressed by trickery? I think I might prefer for some books to be the memories of themselves, not a repeat performance.
That said, I have decided to make this my year of re-reading. Or if my reviewer's itch gets unbearable, to at least read minor works by the classic authors I've already read (I did binge on Trollope – Anthony, not Joanna - after the shortlist meeting. The Fixed Period and Ralph The Heir were very interesting indeed). I'm curious to hear readers' experiences of re-reading, re-re-reading, and indeed, whether or not there are many Man Booker winners they have gone back to time and again.
0 comments:
Post a Comment