Emily Rhodes

When novels kill

If we accept that literature can heal, we have to admit that it can harm, too

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Who can forget the terrible climax of Howards End, when Leonard Bast is killed by a deluge of books? Death by books holds a horrible irony for poor Bast, as he had thought they were his salvation, seeking to escape ‘the abyss’ of poverty by reading Ruskin in the evening and trying to impress the middle-class Schlegel sisters by listing his favourite titles. Try as he might, he can only fail, as E.M. Forster shows books to be extremely treacherous: they don’t save Leonard Bast, they kill him.

The power of books is all too often lauded as a healing force, rather than something potentially lethal. The University of Warwick has just launched a free online course, ‘Reading for Wellbeing’, to explore ‘how poems, plays and novels can help us cope with times of deep emotional strain’. Rachel Kelly wrote movingly about ‘how words healed me’ — how poetry eased her depression — in her memoir Black Rainbow. At Alain de Botton’s School of Life, a ‘bibliotherapist’ will prescribe you a ‘novel cure’ to ease any ailment. But if we are to consider books as medicine, we must consider them as poison too.

When Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774, more than 2,000 young male readers reportedly committed suicide, inspired by the protagonist’s example. So extreme was this mania that 200 years later, an American sociologist coined ‘The Werther Effect’ to describe the way that suicide can be contagious, if it is dramatically and widely publicised. The world’s second most popular suicide location is Japan’s Aokigahara Forest, where a young lover commits suicide in the novel Kuroi Jukai (‘The Black Sea of Trees’) by Seicho Matsumoto.

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