Meat and drink for the imagination
After those early certainties, we are on our own. Reading, notes Spufford, allows us to construct ourselves out of the environment, the family, and silence:
By the time I reached The Hobbit's last page . . . writing had softened, and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster, until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts.He is a self-confessed 'fiction-eater', who doesn't really 'get' non-fiction. Fiction comforted him during an unhappy childhood, and wrapping himself up in a nice warm novel is clearly a reassurance still. This limited his adolescent reading. He found adult books difficult - they didn't tell you what to think, whereas he 'thought that reading was intrinsically a bargain in which you turned off your own powers of judgment'. Even book-titles could not be trusted. Was The Centaur about a centaur? It was not: 'it turned out to be just some bloody metaphor'. This limitation makes the latter part of his book less sympathetic - instead of moving on to Dickens, or Waugh, or even Graham Greene, Spufford plateaued at science fiction. He puts up a good argument for genre, but genre doesn't need an argument: genre is there for readers who are too tired to read. It soothes and it consoles, but it doesn't excite or enlighten.
But apart from this, I am with Spufford all the way in his elegant, imaginative exploration of the mind of the reading child.
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