It's a lovely opportunity for a writer to address some literary theme of their fancy with reference to current or recent events and one's own writing practice.
For a while at least you can listen to my latest effort on BBC I-Player here, between 10:03 and 14:05. My argument, as the producers pithily encapsulated it, was that 'unhappy books can help us have a Happy New Year.' And below is the text of my lesson.
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"You must change your life. Don’t you think? That’s the customary
message of New Year – that any pockets of dissatisfaction you’re carrying about
your person are not just ‘winter blues’ – but, rather, – a reminder that the
future is now; we have but one life; and the sands in the glass are running.
I imagine all of us who love books also look to them, at
times, for help and advice – with our resolutions, our indecisions and
predicaments. Every publishing year ends with the round-ups of ‘best new books.’
But come the New Year it’s usually old books that are on my mind – old and
trusted friends I’ve come to count on.
In publishing terms, the notion of a book that’s ‘good for
you’ is vested mainly in the non-fiction genre of ‘self-help’ – or ‘positive psychology’,
since ‘the positive’ is what these books want to accentuate. I’ve never read Dr
Thomas A. Harris’s I’m OK, You’re OK,
or Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do it.
But that’s not to say they wouldn’t do me the power of good.
A few years ago the Reading Agency actually persuaded GPs to
offer ‘books on prescription’: an approved set of self-help titles for people experiencing
various mental health issues. Sometimes a bestseller addresses a similar readership:
like Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive, a
layperson’s testament to how the ordinary problem of depression might be confronted.
Of course, depression is not easily dispelled by an £8.99
paperback, however insightful. I suspect a lot of self-help titles are targeted
not at sufferers per se so much as interested
readers who want some idea of how to prepare themselves for the worst. But then,
good fiction gives us that, too.
The Reading Agency also recommends a number of fictional
works it describes as ‘mood-boosting’ and ‘uplifting’ – from Poldark to Winnie the Pooh. But what really makes a book ‘uplifting’? ‘The
good ends happily, the bad unhappily’ – that’s the famous definition proposed
by Oscar Wilde’s Miss Prism. But I was reminded of old Prism recently when a
poet friend told me that he just can’t be bothered with ‘gloomy’ literature –
that poetry, for him, is all about making clear that life is good and the world
is beautiful.
I do endorse those feelings; but there’s more than one way
to relish what it means to be alive. A book that brings solace is not
necessarily one that tries to tell us that everything’s OK. Kafka speaks to
many when he writes that books, rather than cheering us up, ought to ‘wake us
up with a blow to the head’ and ‘affect us like a disaster.’
For the characters in my novels, things tend to end
disastrously. If I’m honest, I plan it that way. Life is good, yes, but one
or two of the ineluctable truths of life are tragic. And as a reader I feel braced – uplifted – when a book shows me that these
things just have to be faced. ‘Death,’ as Saul Bellow writes in Humboldt's Gift, ‘is the dark backing a
mirror needs if we are to see anything.’
We should all take our uplift where we can, whether it’s Bridget
Jones or Jeeves and Wooster or whatever. But there’s a lot to be said, too, for
the Kafkas and Becketts, the supposed merchants of gloom. I’m not saying that Waiting for Godot is a feel-good night
out, but in the midst of its desolation is a huge moment of uplift, when Vladimir
cries out: ‘Let us do something, while we have the chance!’ I accept that King Lear is widely felt to be a bleak sort
of a play – all its wisest words coming too late to save the characters from their
evil fates. But I can think of few more mood-boosting moments in literature
than the stoicism of Cordelia when she’s facing the end. ‘We are not the first
/ Who, with best meaning, have incurr'd the worst.’
This is 2017, and it’s dark out there – cold, too – and it
will be that way for a while. But we’ve faced it all before, and we’ll just have
to face it again. On that score, the great books never lie to us."
