Sunday Supplement: On Reading and Writing

I don't think I could ever be a novelist. Not a good one, not the sort I'd want to be, at least. For all my fandom makes me dream of vaulting the divide and becoming a creator, as well as consumer, of stories, I grow increasingly aware that I lack what I consider the most important in a novelist. Literature may have moved away somewhat from the notion that a novel is first and foremost about stories and characters, but if I had to chose (and thankfully I don't!), I'd take a solid character driven story from a Bronte (any of them, really!), or Daphne du Maurier, or Salman Rushdie or Haruki Murakami or Jeffrey Eugenides etc over clever post-modern narrative or lyrical prose or fabulous dreamscape description any day.They are my heroes of literature, the writers who take me out of my skin and place me in another, who let me see the world through another pair of eyes, or show me worlds I'm never likely to see. Yes, that's right, when I read I value escapism over all else. And that shouldn't be a dirty word.

Why couldn't I write that sort of fiction? I consider myself a capable wordsmith, and sometimes I even come up with ideas that I think could make good plots. (Sometimes, I even start to write them down - shhhh.)
But where I come up short is in basic human empathy. The simple truth is that I seem to lack empathy and self awareness and social awareness. That doesn't mean I don't have huge amounts of caring and sympathy for myself and others, simply that I don't know myself very well, and even more so I don't know other people. I find it impossible to put myself in another person's shoes. In writing, this results in weak, two dimensional characters that I fail to engage with. Ironically - is this ironic? I've never quite got to grips with the concept of irony and still misuse it regularly - I think I could possibly write the sort of idea heavy fiction, or even biography disguised loosely as fiction. Not very well, mind you! But I don't want to. I don't want to write something I wouldn't particularly want to read.

So, that is a long rambling overly confessional way of saying that I love reading fiction because it gives me something I don't have in my everyday life. I've been reading The Great Night by Chris Adrian this week and above all else I'm hugely impressed with his compassion, his understanding without judgement of human nature, his basic goodness. For a re-writing of A Midsummer Nights Dream - and therefore a book full of fairies - it is amazingly down to earth, a veritable feast of the mundane. Its not so much magical realism, as realist magic, using the mundane to explain our need for a sense of magic, rather than magic as a way of comprehending the everyday. It is a tour de force that every bit lives up to the praise that has been heaped upon it, one of those books I turned page after page after page compulsively, to find out what would happen to our portfolio of characters, and through them to learn more about myself and the world around me. For that is the great thing about escapism - like immigration - : we take with us some of our experiences and knowledge and discover new things that become part of us, expanding our horizons in ways we could not otherwise have dreamed. To be a bit hyperbolic (something I'm often guilty of!), I think fiction both entertains and makes me a better human being. Why would I chose to add mediocre work to the mounds already written, when I can wallow for years in the great work that others have slaved over? It is a lot better for me, that is for sure.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Read: May 2009

I seem to spend a lot of my time praising novels for aspects like their ingenuity, their intelligence, their sheer descriptive prowess. And these are all important qualities in a book. But what I like best is a good story. A good story which surrounds me so completely that the action becomes more vivid than the physical world around me. I like to be inundated by the words in such an immediate sense that I feel their breeze against my skin and believe that I am an unseen ghostly presence hovering somewhere between the full stop and the start of the next sentence.

What I like about each of the Bronte novels I have read so far – Jane Eyre and now Wuthering Heights – is that they are just this: stories. And proper thick as warm porridge drenched in honey stories too. Stories to listen to enraptured around a camp fire, stories to read huddled with a torch under the duvet at 3am because you cannot sleep for thinking about what is going to happen next. Everything that is great about each of them lies in the quality of the story, in the beguiling narrative and engaging characters. It seems to me that cut off as they were from the literary milieu of London the Bronte's wrote stories to entertain themselves rather than demonstrate their worth as writers, wild flights of fancy as adventurous and exciting as any Don Quixote type epic adventure could ever be.

Wuthering Heights is the story of two deeply flawed individuals, Catherine and Heathcliff, of their mutual obsession and the destruction it wreaks upon all who know them. I don't know who it was that first advanced the idea of theirs being a great love story but I doubt they had ever actually read the book. And if they had, and this is their idea of love, then I am glad I wasn't anywhere near them. The story of Catherine and Heathcliff is one of two wilful people who seem unable either to live either with or without each other. As Cathy explains early on, "...he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same...I AM Heathcliff." They love and hate each other as they do themselves. At times they can barely stand to be together and at others they claw and scratch at each other as though trying to find a way to actually open up their bodies and climb inside each other. I think Kate Bush captures this odd relationship best:

“Out on the wily, windy moors
Wed roll and fall in green.
You had a temper like my jealousy:
Too hot, too greedy.
How could you leave me,
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you. I loved you, too.”

Wuthering Heights is a brooding psychological obsession/revenge/ghost story set against the domineering backdrop of the North York Moors. Plot, setting, and characters all have a sense of windswept wilderness to them. Heathcliff is the sort of libertine-esque highwayman who does what he likes in life knowing that no-one is going to stop him. The cold and calculating manner in which he enacts his vengeance makes for disturbing and uncomfortable reading. He is the bad man who gets away with it without remorse or shame. This lack of moral ambiguity makes him an enthralling character. And in her own histrionic, selfish, and spoiled way Catherine is just as bad. Wuthering Heights is the book I always wanted to read as a child, where roles are reversed and events don't follow the usual pattern of stories. The baddies not only capture the hero, but hang him mercilessly before escaping to hatch their next dastardly plan.

Emily Bronte doesn't care whether the reader likes her characters or not, makes no effort to justify or smooth their actions. The tale is merely placed on paper and left for the reader to make of it what they will. It is a masterpiece of controlled atmospheric storytelling and caustic characterisation. It is a wonderful read which I highly recommend to everyone.

9 out of 10

(There are many great reviews of Wuthering Heights out there. One of my favourites can be found here.)