Consider the puffin. I was reading an article the other day about them being added to the endangered species list due to climate change. Apparently they’re Britain’s most popular sea bird, though I don’t know how many people have ever laid eyes on one. Heavy rain on the Farne Islands off the coast of Northumberland has flooded their breeding burrows and cut the number of fledged chicks in half. Eighty-five per cent of French puffins were killed by oil from the Torrey Canyon when the tanker ran aground in 1967. My eye snagged on the French puffins. It was early in the morning and my dozy mind conjured up an image of a puffin in a beret, smoking a Gauloise with a copy of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness tucked under its wing.
The article was full of fascinating information about climate change, but I couldn’t get away from the French puffin and its existential crisis. This is, you might say, because I have an over-active imagination, or because my brain has gone soft from reading too many novels. I am all for the puffin now, which appeared in profile on the spine of so many of my children’s books. I am in empathy with puffins.
This week Barack Obama told novelist Marilynne Robinson that reading had taught him how to be a citizen, which was to do “with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of greys, but there’s still truth there to be found ... And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”
It is not difficult to feel empathetic towards a puffin, one of nature’s cutest birds, with its bonkers multicoloured beak. Perhaps it is harder to feel empathy with a runaway blimp that caused power cuts in central Pennsylvania, but the journalist Bryan Appleyard managed it, asking on Twitter: “Am I alone in being moved by this hollow ghost floating over Pennsylvania in search of its interiority? Probably yes.” Reading fiction gives you an ability to get inside even something that has no insides. And then people will say that they don’t read novels because, as Noel Gallagher once told an interviewer: “I mean, novels are just a waste of fucking time … I can’t suspend belief in reality … I just end up thinking, ‘This isn’t fucking true.’” We know what they want: Facts, Mr Gradgrind, facts.
The first printed words children experience, being read to them and later reading themselves, are stories. There was no hungry caterpillar, Gallagher is right, it isn’t fucking true. There’s no such person as Harry Potter, there are no wizards or Death Eaters, it’s Muggles all the way. Children, nonetheless, seem to thrive on stories, perhaps because they are not yet aware that they are reading whopping lies. A friend’s daughter asked what would happen if she got the letter from Hogwarts; her mother said they weren’t keen on boarding schools and the matter was dropped until the penny did a few years later. By the time you get to the end of the Harry Potter books, or for many, long before you get there, you are starting to feel some sympathy for the poor, tortured Snape. Rowling’s skill with this character is to leave you permanently unsure of his motives, and the greater the uncertainty, the more one wants to know him.
There’s been a bit of craze in recent years, fuelled by book groups and online reviews, for “likable characters you can root for”, which is to cut off the foundations of fiction and leave it suspended in gauzy fantasyland. The real world is full of nasty types you’d wish dead. Who is to say that the good and the moral should have all the stories written about them? As we know, the devil tends to have the best tunes, and as Obama understands, getting to grips with the warped mind of Lady Macbeth lets a light shine on the parts of ourselves we wish to suppress. The novelist Amos Oz told his readers not to ask if the novel they were reading was autobiographical about the author, but autobiographical about themselves.
Yet there seems to be a point when fiction readers close the book on fiction. A novelist who had suffered terrible grief when her mother died told me she was just so bereft that her mind couldn’t cope with reading, couldn’t concentrate, and that losing the ability to read felt like a double bereavement. When she was able to read again, it was non-fiction because, she suggested, it didn’t require any creative or emotional input: she had none of that, or empathy, to spare. When she was able to read a novel again, it was a familiar and much-read Agatha Christie in which the mind is simply trying to solve a puzzle.
In later life some people, including novelists themselves, simply stop reading fiction. Aged 78, Philip Roth said he’d “wised up” and was now only reading books that told him how the world worked (why the puffins are dying). Other writers have said that as they grow older they have less patience with the novel. Is it that being aged 70 and older, we no longer want to experience the world, but need to have it explained to us before it’s too late? When your friends are dying, when you’re sick, when the big dreams of your youth have come to not much, you may feel you have enough on your plate without the trials and tribulations of people who don’t even exist. You don’t want to escape from the world you know into the lives of others, but to hang on to the one you now fully understand you have for only a limited period.
The great fiction editor Diana Athill, now in her 90s, pointed out that too many of today’s novels focused on “the love lives of the kind of women I see around me all the time [and] that means I am bored by a large proportion of available fiction”. One might expect old age to be more introspective, but that seems to be the preserve of the young and uncertain. Once identity is solidified, perhaps the attention turns to what you don’t know about the world you’re shortly leaving, such as the sudden realisation that you really must go to India before it’s too late instead of lounging around in your pyjamas reading Amitav Ghosh.
And yet there are many people who get through their entire lives without ever reading a novel apart from school assignments. They take their fiction from TV, from the immense popularity of the box set; others still watch nothing but documentaries and the news. A photojournalist I know who has only read two novels, both with the word “catch” in the title and only watches current affairs on television, said: “Wouldn’t you rather read a book on how the mafia works than a Mario Puzo novel?” But as Oz said, a thriller can be about a Mossad agent; literary fiction is what a Mossad agent does on the first day of their retirement. The novel tells us who people are as well as what they do; their tensions, flaws, frailties, insecurities and wants, what they’re thinking at 4am and what they recognise of themselves in a stranger’s eyes.
