Of course, the problem was not Middlemarch. Despite my surprise conquest of The Master and Margarita, and the blast of confidence it gave me, I quickly knew I had overreached myself. The Master and Margarita had been an obstacle course; Middlemarch, on the other hand, gave every indication of being a 688-page punishment beating. Once upon a time, I had been in the habit of reading this kind of elaborate, circumlocutory prose. But that was when I was a student, full of piss and vinegar and blithe ignorance. Two decades on, I was gravely out of condition, short of breath, barely limping along. It was too much, too soon, too old.
In those days, as an English literature undergraduate at a self-consciously progressive university, it was possible to read a couple of classics every week – unlikely, almost unheard of, but possible. In contrast, an audit of my current week’s reading would look something like this:
200 emails (approx.)
Discarded copies of Metro
The NME and monthly music magazines
Excel spreadsheets
The review pages of Sunday newspapers
Business proposals
Bills, bank statements, junk mail, etc.
CD liner notes
Crosswords, Sudoku puzzles, etc.
Ready-meal heating guidelines
The occasional postcard
And a lot of piddling about on the Internet
Of these, the Sudoku was the most inexplicable to me. What a waste of time! I loathed it. Yet I could pass a whole train journey wrestling with one small grid, a long hour that brought me little or no pleasure, even on the rare occasions it ended in success. The shelves of WHSmith at Victoria station were packed with competing Oriental number tortures: Sudoku, Sun Doku, Code Doku, Killer Sudoku … As a former student acquaintance had written in the concluding sentence of a 10,000-word dissertation on mechanical engineering: ‘It doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s all a load of shit.’fn4
fn4. Our university may have considered itself progressive but these eleven words earned him an F (for TELLING THE TRUTH).
So, accepting I was in no fit state even to complete an Evening Standard ‘brainteaser’ – Grade: Beginner – why had I felt compelled to attempt Middlemarch, one of the high peaks of the English novel?
As I approached my mid-thirties, before our son was born, while he was still a Nice Idea In The Not Too Distant Future, I started getting the first pangs of a feeling which soon grew acute. The feeling was this: one day soon, I am going to die. Previously, I had enjoyed brooding on my own mortality, because I was young and death was never going to happen to me. Now, however, like many people on the threshold of middle-age, out there in the jungle somewhere I could discern a disconcerting drumbeat; and I realised that at some point in the aforementioned Not Too Distant Future, closer now, the drumming would cease, leaving a terrible silence in its wake. And that would be it for me.
Immediately, we produced a child. But if anything, this only made things worse.
I had heard that other people dealt with this sort of problem by having ill-advised affairs with schoolgirls, or dyeing their hair a ‘fun’ colour, or plunging into a gruelling round of charity marathon running, ‘to put something back’. But I did not want to do any of that; I just wanted to be left alone. My sadness for things undone was smaller and duller, yet maybe more undignified. It seemed to fix itself on minor letdowns, everyday stuff I had been meaning to do but somehow, in half a lifetime, had not got round to. I was still unable to play the guitar. I had never been to New York. I did not know how to drive a car or roast a chicken. Roasting a chicken – the impossible dream! Even my mid-life crisis was a disappointment.
I told myself I had a lot to be thankful for. I had a loving family, lived by the sea in a house which in thirty years I might own, had written a couple of books, knew Paris via its arrondissements, could ride a bike, play the piano and bake a potato on demand. Yet I was not satisfied.
One of the certainties I found myself questioning was my belief in art. For as long as I could remember, from childhood on, I never doubted that ‘great’ books or ‘fantastic’ singles or ‘brilliant’ films were the prerequisites of a balanced and full existence. Their presence in my life as an adolescent and a young adult was constant and their absence unimaginable. If I needed to go without food so I could buy an important record or novel, I went without food – the hungry consumer. But lately I had begun to ask myself whether this loyalty had amounted to anything more than a shed-load of stuff; two shed-loads in fact, one at the bottom of the garden in a bona fide shed and the other in a storage unit up the road.
However meagre my spiritual beliefs, however much I toed the modern secular line, my faith in art had never faltered. Culture could come in many forms, high, low or somewhere in-between: Mozart, The Muppet Show, Ian McEwan.fn5 Very little of it was truly great and much of it would always be bad, but all of it was necessary to live, to be fully alive, to frame the endless, numbered days and make sense of them.fn6
fn5. If one were to plot a graph where the ‘x’ axis is ‘high culture’ and the ‘y’ axis is ‘low culture’, with Mozart at the top of the former and The Muppet Show at the far end of the latter, Ian McEwan’s corpus would perfectly bisect the two – the Bonne Maman Conserve in a Wonderloaf baguette.
fn6. In a neat QED, I have stolen the phrase ‘endless, numbered days’ from the title of the best Iron & Wine album Our Endless Numbered Days.
Lately, though, I had been feeling like a sucker. As I contemplated the stacks of CDs and VHS tapes, old theatre programmes and superhero comics, wearing a fading t-shirt for some group that had probably split up, they seemed to represent the opposite of the enlightenment they had originally promised. Like me, they were nudging obsolescence. I saw I had got it wrong. I had confused ‘art’ with ‘shopping’.
Books, for instance. I had a lot of those. There they all were, on the shelves and on the floor, piled up by the bed and falling out of boxes. Moby-Dick, Possession, Remembrance of Things Past, the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Psychotic Reactions and Carburettor Dung, a few Pevsners, that Jim Thompson omnibus, The Child in Time, six more Ian McEwan novels or novellas, two volumes of his short stories … These books did furnish the room, but they also got in the way. And there were too many I was aware I had not actually read. As Schopenhauer noted a hundred and fifty years ago, ‘It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.’fn7
fn7. From ‘On Reading and Books’. Though it was written a hundred and fifty years ago, this essay by Schopenhaeur still has much to tell us. Also, for nineteenth-century German philosophy, it is significantly funnier than you might expect.
These books became the focus of a need to do something. They were a reproach – wasted money, squandered time, muddled priorities. I shall make a list, I thought. It will name the books I am most ashamed not to have read – difficult ones, classics, a few outstanding entries in the deceitful Miller library – and then I shall read them. I was thirty-five years old. Ten books maybe, ten books before my fortieth birthday. Yes, ten books in five years; one book every six months; that seemed like an easily achievable goal and vaguely decadent when you held down a full-time job and were still unable to drive to the supermarket to buy a chicken you didn’t know how to cook, because you’d learned to do neither, because you’d been too busy shopping. Excellent! Books first, driving lessons later.
For the next couple of years I did nothing with this plan except congratulate myself on it. I thought about the list a little and talked about it a lot. In the pub, at parties, over lunch,