Quick reads for slow starters
Lloyd Evans
Maybe you missed it but it was World Book Day on 2 March. I leapt for joy when I heard about this initiative. I assumed it meant the book trade was in such dire trouble that it had been forced into silly stunts. But no, they’re hatching a sinister plot. Those of us who call ourselves literate have borne the industry’s burblesome outpourings with patience and fortitude for many years. But our loyal support appears not to be enough. A new, lush and unspoilt realm heaves into view. The illiterate are to be annexed to the empire of books. I can see the commercial temptation here, but this project strikes me as thoroughly debauched. The illiterate should be left in illiterate bliss. Spare them the vanity, the false airs, the self-aggrandising intellectual snobbery that blight those of us who ‘read for pleasure’. Let’s face it, reading is a source of evil. It isolates man from man. It fosters the illusion that scanning evidence of other people’s triumphs and disasters is as good as getting out there and trying things ourselves. It spreads untruths and fairytales, not least the myth that literacy leads to success. Jesus couldn’t read and he did all right. Homer couldn’t. William the Conqueror. The list goes on. Spartacus. Genghis Khan. Richard Branson. He didn’t start reading till he was 50 (owing to childhood dyslexia) and he’s worth billions. I, by contrast, can read (tongue out of mouth, finger along the line) and I’m scraping by writing reviews. See? It’s a hoax.
The opening salvo in this scheme to drag the illiterate down to our level is a new collection of short stories by best-selling authors. It seems odd to tempt new readers with the short story, which, as everyone knows, is the least satisfactory of all literary forms. But the sponsors of the campaign seem to assume the illiterate are weak and fickle, and without instant gratification they’ll run away and hide in their X-Boxes. They’ve replaced the term ‘short story’ with the McDonalds-ish ‘quick reads’ (all of which are paperbacks priced at £2.99).
My first ‘quick read’ was Patrick Augustus’s Don’t Make Me Laugh (Xpress, pp. 78). It didn’t. It made me scratch my head. I gave up on page 10, mystified by a tale about identical twins, one black and one white, who steal each other’s girlfriends. Hang on. One black, one white? And they’re identical? The combined intellects of Sherlock Holmes and Bertrand Russell couldn’t work that one out. I turned instead to Joanna Trollope’s The Book Boy (Bloomsbury, pp. 94) about a poor, oppressed housewife with a bolshy son and a bullying plumber for a husband. All her troubles stem from her inability to read. She bribes a local boy with a Kawasaki and he teaches her the alphabet. She starts to read and buy books and her problems are over. The end. The story is well handled and the characters, though flimsy, are entertaining to follow. But I can’t agree with Trollope’s conclusion. The housewife’s problems aren’t over. They’re just beginning. Next she’ll join a book club and find herself drawn to some sensitive, poetic type and they’ll start an affair and her jealous husband will track them down and kill them with a lead pipe. The end.
Matthew Reilly’s Hell Island (Pan, pp. 115) is a laddish fantasy about the US military being attacked by an army of genetically modified gorillas. It feels like a truncated novel. Minette Walters’s Chickenfeed (Pan, pp. 117) is better suited to the short form. Walters has produced a gripping account of a true-life romance between a needy office girl and a chapel-going farm boy. With admirable assurance she even discloses the ending on the opening page. The office girl kills herself. The farm boy, accused of her murder, swings. Highly enjoyable. Rowan Coleman’s Woman Walks into a Bar (Random House, pp. 115) is a classic piece of chicklit. A young mum struggles to put her troubled past behind her and find a decent man. Light relief is provided by mum’s 12-year-old daughter who offers such confidence-boosters as, ‘It’s about time you got a boyfriend while you’re still quite thin.’ This is the most successful of the ‘quick reads’ because it achieves a perfect synthesis between its subject, its treatment and its target market. Coleman tells her story with bundles of warmth and humour.
The series rounds off with two self-help books. John Bird, in How to Change Your Life in 7 Steps (Ebury Press, pp. 84), says the key to self-transformation lies in picking up dropped banana skins and congratulating yourself after brushing your teeth. He’s right. I’ve done both today and already I feel like a completely different person. An idiot. Screw It, Let’s Do It (Virgin Books, pp. 106), is a how-to guide by Richard Branson (him again). The book is aimed at people like me who haven’t yet built up a global business empire. ‘That job you hate,’ he tells me, ‘is it really your only option?’ No, but I think I can live with it. ‘Start a new business from home,’ he suggests. ‘Wash windows, walk dogs, take in ironing.’ Good idea. Maybe I could knock off a self-help book in between the shirts. What Branson and Bird fail to grasp is that no one really wants to read top tips from top people. It’s the top people who are desperate to write the top tips. Authoring one of these Drag-Yourself-up-fromthe-Gutter books is rather like formulating a plan to rescue Africa. It’s a successindicator. It shows you’ve arrived.
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