Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (14 page)

The stimulus of old-age reading is the realization that taste and response do not atrophy: you are always finding yourself enthusiastic about something you had not expected to like, warming to some writer hitherto right off the radar. But, that said, there is by now that medicine chest of works to which you return time and again. And, if I had to whittle that down from a chest to a slim stash – the desert island books – there are three titles that I would pick, because, for me, they are perhaps the ones that have most elegantly demonstrated what the novel can do, when the form is pushed to its limits. And these are: Henry James’s
What Maisie Knew
, William Golding’s
The Inheritors
, Ford Madox Ford’s
The Good Soldier
.

What Maisie Knew
is a brilliant exercise in narrative technique, in which an entire tale of adult betrayal and duplicity is seen through the uncomprehending eyes of a child, a fictional discussion of evil and innocence in which the reader is eerily and uncomfortably aligned with the forces of darkness because recognizing the corruption which the child’s vision simply records without the insight of experience.
The Inheritors
is a novel of ideas in which the ideas and the discussion of human nature are so effectively subsumed within the story that each new reading of it points up another layer, or shifts the emphasis. It is also the saddest novel I know. And
The Good Soldier
is another marvelous narrative tour de force in which the truth behind a pattern of relationships is revealed with such subtlety and guile that while the reader is never deliberately deceived, each new release of information changes the view of what has happened. All of these are books in which the apparently straightforward business of telling a story about some characters has been refined to its most delicate and allusive but at the same time to its most powerful. You are left with a feeling of astonishment, and of involvement, because part of the skill has been to draw the reader into the book, to make the reader a participant by inviting judgment and complicity. The reader becomes a confidant, as it were, and, like a confidant, may find that there has been an ambivalence. You are left with an insight into human behavior, into your own.

Just as importantly, the signposts were starting to wave where nonfiction was concerned – they were dancing up and down, indeed. They pointed me toward landscape history, toward archaeology. “Oh, there’s a book you’d like . . .” said Jack one day, offhand – he was an academic political theorist, by trade, but seemed to have read everything and anything – “. . . W. G. Hoskins –
The Making of the English Landscape
.” I read, and my way of seeing the world was changed.
The Making of the English Landscape
was first published in 1955; I read it in around 1965, when we were living in Church Hanborough, a few miles outside Oxford. I devoured the book, put on my rain boots and walked out in search of ridge and furrow, lost medieval villages, drove roads – all of which could be found within a radius of ten miles or so. Hoskins makes you see the physical landscape as a palimpsest, layers of time inviting interpretation; he lets you see it also as a challenging medley, where everything exists at once – today, yesterday and long ago all juxtaposed. For me, this vision was to become a driver for fiction – the presence of the past, whether in an Oxfordshire field or in someone’s life. We are all of us palimpsests; we carry the past around, it comes surging up whether or not we want it, it is an albatross, and a crutch.

The Hoskins approach to landscape history has come under criticism as “Romantic” – harking back to the Wordsworthian tradition of landscape appreciation – and also too heavily weighted in favor of historical evidence rather than the archaeological record. The New Archaeology of the 1950s – processual archaeology – considered that the survival of a landscape in the present cannot and should not be used to infer past processes: Hoskins’s interpretations had sometimes done precisely this. That said, those working in the field who have reservations about his approach readily admit that he has been an inspiration, to them and to many others.

“You might try Norman Cohn –
The Pursuit of the Millennium
,” said Jack. “And Frances Yates –
The Art of Memory
.” I did, I did. I was finding the kind of history that had not been on offer during my three undergraduate years at Oxford. Not that I am ungrateful for that induction; those three years created a climate of mind, I am certain – they did not make me into a novelist but they determined the kind of novels that I would eventually write. But now, through with Stubbs Charters and the
Oxford History of England
, I could spread wings, discover different history. In 1971 Keith Thomas published his magisterial
Religion and the Decline of Magic
. I was enthralled – here was the history I had been wanting, without knowing that I did. And there was more of it around: Peter Laslett, Christopher Hill, Alan Macfarlane. Jack had been a historian as an undergraduate, but had focused on the history of ideas for his postgraduate work, and thence became a political theorist. He had been unfashionable on the history scene, in the early 1950s, when the Namier school still dominated – the insistence that the course of events is directed by politics and personalities. But the Namierites and their study of ruling elites were soon to be shunted aside in favor of social history, the emphasis on people and how they have lived, behaved and thought. And, where Jack was concerned, the history of ideas had come in from the cold.

Subsequent reading – the reading of a lifetime – has been this marriage of the fortuitous and the deliberate, with the random, the maverick choices tipping the scale and serving up, invariably, the prompts for what would next be written. Books begetting books; intertextuality, of a kind. It has never felt like that – more that something read has sparked off a story idea that is owed to that subject but will eventually have nothing much to do with it. But if I had not read that book, the story might never have arrived, or not in that particular form. Elizabeth Bowen, whom I admire and regularly reread – no falling in and out of favor there – has a short story called “Mysterious Kor” in which a pair of lovers wander the nighttime streets of blitzed London. Years after writing it, she herself wrote that her description of that moonlit, ruined cityscape must have been prompted, subliminally, by a memory of reading Rider Haggard’s
She
in childhood – the eerie, imagined city in that novel. In that instance, a half-forgotten reading experience inspired and informed a story, decades later.

It has not been fiction so much, for me, but the random discoveries. Sometime in the 1970s I came across William Stukeley, probably in Stuart Piggott’s biography; Stukeley, along with my abiding fascination with archaeology, would inspire
Treasures of Time
, a novel concerned indeed with archaeology, but that is also a love story and a take on the attitudes of the 1970s, and the title came of course from Sir Thomas Browne’s
Urne-Buriall
– “The treasures of time lie high, in Urnes, Coynes and Monuments . . .,” a text that Jack had pointed me toward, long before, something that he had read in his voracious teenage reading years and returned to whenever he wanted to remind himself of the glories of seventeenth-century English prose-writing.

A decade or so later, the popular science writing of the day brought me Stephen Jay Gould’s
Wonderful Life
and the lightning struck once more; his account of the Cambrian fossils of the Burgess Shale, most of them evolutionary dead-ends except for the one from which we are descended, was the fuel for a novel about the apposition between choice and contingency,
Cleopatra’s Sister
. A while later, the chance acquisition in Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum of a booklet about Martin Frobisher, the Elizabethan seaman, would be the trigger for a London novel,
City of the Mind
, a novel about time and the eloquence of place – and a further love story. And, later still, a rereading of Frances Yates’s
The Art of Memory
made me see how I could make a house – my grandmother’s house – speak for the century by way of its contents, a piece of nonfiction this time:
A House Unlocked
.

None of these books would have been written, or written in the way that they were, if I had not come across something that in some mysterious symbiosis inspired and wound in with what I was already thinking about, in a vague and inconclusive way. These readings lit a fuse. And from the point when first I recognized what was happening I have known that I have to read – mostly undirected, unstructured reading. Those of us who write fiction write out of much – out of what we have seen, and done, and heard, and thought, out of every aspect of experience – but as far as I am concerned books are a central part of that experience, the driver, quite as much as my own life as lived, with all its inevitable limitations and restrictions.

These have been books that were prompts, that triggered work of my own. But when I look along the nonfiction shelves there leaps to the eye a collection of titles that seem to be saying something about a need, a taste – no, something more than that, a pursuit, a cultivated hunger. They are fingered, reread. Here is Barry Lopez’s
Arctic Dreams
, Hugh Brody’s
The Other Side of Eden
and
Maps and Dreams
. And Colin Turnbull’s
The Forest People
and
The Mountain People
, equally reading-worn. What are the Arctic and the Congo to me? Travel books? But these are not travel books; there is indeed a travel section, but these are something apart, with something in common. There is Peter Matthiessen’s
The Snow Leopard
, and everything by Robert Macfarlane, and a row of Redmond O’Hanlon titles.

These books complement some adventurous streak in me? No. Rather, the opposite. I am not adventurous; I have enjoyed travel, but of the most cushioned kind. I relish the physical world, and liked to walk it, when the going was good, but knew only the well-trodden ways of my own country – Exmoor, the South Downs, Offa’s Dyke. What these books and their like have done for me is tap into some roaming tendency of the mind; I know that I could never have done what these writers have done, been where they have been, pursued the interests they have pursued, but I want to know what it is like. We go to fiction to extend experience, to get beyond our own. For me, this kind of nonfiction writer is furnishing the same need – taking me out of my own comfortable expectations and showing me how it might be elsewhere. Armchair travel? Not quite. I have never believed that travel broadens the mind, having known some well-traveled minds that were nicely atrophied. Rather, these are books – experiences – that encourage a leap of the imagination. Hugh Brody invites you into the life of the Inuit; Barry Lopez offers a glimpse of the Arctic, richer and more vivid by far than any television documentary. Colin Turnbull is describing existence at its most harsh, in Africa, and is also showing you human nature. Redmond O’Hanlon – well, I would be alarmed to go for a walk along the Thames towpath with Redmond O’Hanlon but I want to go with him vicariously up the Amazon, or to the Congo, or Borneo, or the North Atlantic. Equally, Robert Macfarlane takes me to the places I could never have known, and sets me off on all manner of inquiry in the process. And from where I am today, in the tiresome holding-pen of old age, that seems all the more valuable.

*

My Somerset grandmother – to whom I was devoted – had reservations about reading as an activity. Definitely not in the morning: “You should be out and about, my dear, not sitting there with a book.” Possibly after tea, a more relaxed time of day, but in moderation, always: “You’ll ruin your eyesight.” This was in the late 1940s, when Aldous Huxley’s method of treating poor eyesight was much in fashion. My London grandmother was keen on that; I was made to sit for a quarter of an hour twice a day, elbows on a cushion placed on a table in front of me and the heels of my palms pressed lightly against my eyes. You were supposed to “think black.” I had been wearing glasses since I was seven, but Huxley was apparently nearly blind, so one was tempted to say that the system clearly hadn’t done him much good.

One-sixth of the world’s population is myopic, but amongst readers the proportion is much higher – about a quarter. Habitual readers, that is – those who spend much time reading. Which raises the intriguing question of whether we book-addicted are thus because of some genetic conditioning or whether we have wrecked our eyesight through our addiction, as my grandmother would have claimed. Whichever, we are in distinguished company – Aristotle, Goethe, Keats, Wordsworth, Joyce. Samuel Johnson, shown in that iconic portrait both peering at a book and abusing it, wrenching the pages round the spine.

The ophthalmologist and writer Patrick Trevor-Roper looked at the way in which myopia may have affected writers and artists, citing as an instance the images in the poetry of Keats and of Shelley: short-sighted Keats often favored auditory subjects – the “Ode to a Nightingale,” the sonnet “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” – and his images tend to be within his focal range: the Grecian urn, the “beaded bubbles winking at the brim,” whereas Shelley, who had no sight problem, went in for the distant prospects of sky and mountain. And there is an identifiable myopic personality, it seems: myopic children don’t flourish in the playground or at sports – they can’t see what’s going on and they miss the ball; but reading and writing are not a problem – within their field of vision – so they focus on that and tend to do better academically than their peers, though they may not be more intelligent.

In the past, to be seriously myopic must have been crippling; you would have had problems with all daily activities, many trades would have been out of the question. And who ever heard of a myopic warrior? As for hunter-gathering, forget it. Today, we are well taken care of, with contact lenses and varifocals and competing high-street optometrists. Even the adage of my youth has rather lost its clout: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.” I gather they do, nowadays.