Like many bookworms, once or twice a year I am struck down with reading doldrums. Then the stash of paperbacks on my bedside table seems less a collection of future delights than a useless repository of dust. Nothing pleases. This disgruntlement generally passes of its own accord, but sometimes it takes the recommendation of a friend or a trusted reviewer to restore the pleasure of reading. Susan Hill’s lovely anthology is just the thing to rejuvenate the appetite of a jaded bibliophile. It is a tonic in paper form.
Books and Company was a delightful little magazine, founded, edited and published by Susan Hill, which ran quarterly from 1997 until 2001. Unlike the books pages of most papers and periodicals, the contents of the magazine were not market-driven: contributors could write pretty much what they liked about whatever they liked, so long as it was to do with the world of books. Often there were pieces about forgotten authors, or books that were out of print.
The 25 pieces reprinted in this book touch on such universal favourites as David Copperfield and Heart of Darkness. Andrew Taylor makes a spirited case for Enid Blyton’s Noddy series, including the scurrilous suggestion that PC Plod may have been smoking dope. There are essays on the Brontës and Sir Walter Scott and the ghost stories of M. R. James. But many of the entries, as was the case with the magazine, praise obscurer work. William Maxwell, known in America but less widely read here; the marvellously named Edith de Born (I picture a lesbian in an aviatrix’s cap, wrongly no doubt); Rider Haggard’s daughter Lilias (another name resembling the heroine of a novel by Radclyffe Hall). Francis King’s essay is stuffed with interesting sounding writers I’d never heard of, among them L. P. Hartley’s contemporary C. H. B. Kitchin. The Book of Life by Kitchin is, King suggests, as good as The Go-Between and addresses a similar theme.
Alain de Botton, Penelope Lively, Juliet Nicolson and Jane Gardam are among the contributors, along with Ronald Blythe, Roger Scruton and my pin-up, William Trevor. Trevor is among the most reticent of writers, rarely divulging anything more personal than that he was born in Ireland and now lives in Devon. Here he tells us that he loves The Good Soldier, A Handful of Dust, The Diary of a Nobody and Carson McCullers’ masterpiece, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Finding out that Trevor enjoys all these adds something to the experience of reading his own books, especially the novels.
Some of the essays are not about specific volumes or their authors, but concern the more general experience of reading. Juliet Nicolson describes childhood reading as being the key to a wonderful secret garden. Jeanette Winterson, too, talks about what childhood books meant to her: not escapism, but freedom, the freedom to enter other worlds, other possibilities. Winterson’s list of what stories give us ought to be pinned up in classrooms, as an enticement. Her passionate advocacy of reading is irresistible. Roger Scruton writes about his rapturous youthful discoveries in the local library, a piece with added poignancy now that public libraries, like white rhinos, are on the verge of extinction: in Susan Hill’s native Gloucestershire alone, 11 libraries face the chop.
In a brief Foreword, Hill says she has no desire to bring back Books and Company. I wish she could be persuaded to change her mind. Perhaps some of the contributors to this indispensable volume would volunteer to guest-edit an issue each.
Comments