ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

I said in my previous post about Damon Young’s The Art of Reading that I didn’t expect to read it straight through, all in one go, as I usually do – but I couldn’t resist the chapter on Patience.  I read it this morning over my Sunday morning mushrooms-on-toast, overlooking my back garden washed clean by the torrent of rain that came with a thunderstorm at three o’clock this morning.

I wrote that last sentence on purpose: did it provoke you to mutter ‘Oh, do get on’, as Henry James’s The Golden Bowl provokes QEII in Alan Bennett’s sly The Uncommon Reader?

(If you haven’t read An Uncommon Reader, I recommend it, even for ardent republicans.  QEII stumbles into a mobile library in pursuit of one of her corgis, and while not a reader, feels obliged to borrow a book.  She becomes hooked.  Reading transforms her. )

Any resemblance in my writing to that of Henry James can  only be in respect of requiring patience from the reader.   Young notes that it requires patience of the queen to read Henry James and others like him and deconstructs the investment.  It takes patience to read Xavier Herbert in Poor Fellow My Country, and half way through its 1443 pages I was beginning to wonder what I was getting out of my investment.  There are books like this, says Young, with protracted sentences and slow evasiveness, books which make us feel – especially as we age and feel our time is limited – that perhaps we are wasting our time.  And awareness of time is essential to reading:

… every word joins its remembered ancestors and imagined descendants.  It is because we recall previous paragraphs, and anticipate new ones, that the current phrases make sense.  It is because she learns about the Prince’s waywardness at the beginning of The Golden Bowl that the queen can envisage his later deception and subtle defeat.  (p. 52)

[This is why some readers get so irritated by authorial departures from chronological time.  They are disconcerted by time that isn’t sequential as they expect it to be: from the vantage of now, looking back into the past and expecting the future.]

But a book provokes boredom (Oh, do get on!) when it summons awareness of our own time passing, and then we need the patience to continue in defiance of the sense that our own time is running out.  We need patience when writers test our endurance with stray clumsiness, monotony or ugliness.  [With Xavier Herbert, I need patience to tolerate his preaching.]  We need patience to endure confronting scenes [a topic discussed here on this blog in the aftermath of Zola’s La Débâcle, where scenes of brutal human pain and animal suffering test the reader’s forbearance.]  With some books there is a price to pay for the illumination they offer.

I chuckled, however, when Young explored the kind of patience needed to deal with Dan Brown and his ilk.

What simplifies Brown’s pages is the lack of innovation and sympathy: the prose is almost wholly cliché and the characters rice-paper puppets.  The Da Vinci Code is pure plot, without the complications of Henry James’s language or psychological nuance.  It takes zero toil to move from scene to scene, puzzle to puzzle.  It is masterfully generic.  Brown’s bestselling story is perfect for mass audiences, with little in common but their gratitude for a brief escape.

But this is what also makes Dan Brown a strain.  From the first chapter, I cringe at the hackneyed metaphors, which have no particular signature of authorship. The ‘heavy fist pounded’.  Toes ‘sink deep’ into a carpet. Of course a bathrobe is ‘donned’.  These familiar verbs and adjectives are the equivalent of a grown-up lullaby: sung every day, consolingly, for generations. His hero, Robert Langdon, is a persona.  I never get past the mask into a mind.  The only player with some psychological complexity is Silas, the masochistic albino priest.  Because Brown’s prose is so commonplace, his characters so transparent, I keep stopping every few sentences.   (p. 57-8)

Because every now and again I find myself persuaded to read a book that my instincts warn is not for me, I recognise that same feeling when Young writes I want the novel to end – not for the climax but for the banality to stop.

[BTW lest you suspect that Young is a book snob, he reads Batman and he says that detective novels appeal to our sense that logic and reason will prevail.]

Age, and experience with books help us know when a book will be worth the forbearance.  Youth sometimes denies us the maturity to enjoy a more crowded human reality.  [This is why we see young readers at Goodreads hurling their one-star brickbats at great works of literature, especially if they have been made to read them at school.  If they persist with reading, they will one day be embarrassed by their younger selves, but we have all been there. I hated James Joyce’s Ulysses the first time I read it.  I thought Pride and Prejudice was a soppy romance when I read it at 14.  I am lucky that circumstances conspired to keep me reading and that I developed the patience that’s needed for much of great literature.]

Patience is not a sexy virtue, but it is prized because the benefits of reading are never instantaneous. (p. 59)

And so, back to Poor Fellow My Country.  I’m up to page 910…

Update: 5/5/16

The only advantage of having damaged my shoulder is that it confines me to barracks for much of the time and that gives me more time for reading.  Yesterday I took my mind off things by romping through the rest of The Art of Reading.  The chapters on ‘courage’ and ‘pride’ are a little dense with philosophical considerations of philosophers I don’t know well, but I loved the chapter on ‘Temperance’ because I am a glutton with books, and with its references to Virginia Woolf’s dismissal of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the chapter on ‘Justice’, I took note of the imperative to be fair in my judgements about books I don’t like.

I also really liked the last chapter called ‘The Lumber Room’ – not really a chapter but a different way of doing a Bibliography – because it’s a kind of canon for reading without really being a canon, and it explains why a certain edition is a particularly good one to have if you can find it.   All in all, this is a lovely, thoughtful and often amusing book for anyone who wants to be a serious reader.

Highly recommended.

Author: Damon Young
Title: The Art of Reading
Publisher: Melbourne University Press, 2016
ISBN: 9780522867602
Review copy courtesy of Melbourne University Press

Availability
Direct from Melbourne University Press,
Fishpond: The Art of Reading
or good bookstores everywhere.