The Winter Journey is a story by Georges Perec, in which a man examining the library of a French country house stumbles across a previously unknown book, also called The Winter Journey. Its contents appear to be faint echoes of various major developments in French literature, until the main character checks his dates, and discovers that in each case, it narrowly precedes the work it had seemed to imitate. Literary history, he concludes, will have to be rewritten. But it is September 1939: other events intervene, and nobody ever sees the book again. You do not need that magic Perecian volume to experience what might be called the Winter Journey effect. All that is required is a book good enough to revise, downwards, your opinion of other, similar books.
I suffered an episode of this recently when I got around to reading Leadville (2000), Edward Platt's "biography" of the A40 in west London. Leadville examines the impact of place and planning on a series of lives, and the idea of suburbia, with a compassion and a lack of assumed grandeur that made me reflect rather more sourly on a bunch of subsequent "psychogeographical" writing. I am thinking in particular of James Attlee's Isolarion (2007), which is extremely proud of its courage in tackling a much more superficially interesting stretch of street: the Cowley Road in Oxford. Excesses that I was inclined to indulge seem less excusable now that I know comparable effects can be achieved without them. The later book shows little evidence of borrowing from the earlier. Their aims and their sensibilities differ significantly. But the earlier's existence has put the later through a Winter Journey in my imagination.
The change feels like a loss, but is it? Most of the pleasure in reading comes as you read, so most of my pleasure in Isolarion has already gone; it was a thing of the moment, and cannot be altered. My memory of Isolarion is diminished, I suppose, but then there is the new memory of Leadville to supplement and replace it. No – the damage is to my readerly pride. What hurts is the slight sense of having been taken in. And losing a bit of pride is rarely a bad thing.
