Victims unmindful of their doom
You're the kind of writer who'll be famous after you're dead,' said a friend the other day. Since she is old enough to have had lunch cooked for her by D. H. Lawrence (the main dish appears to have been a sort of simplified polio alla cacciato- ra), I was not inclined to jib at such cold comfort. A smidgen or two of fame might indeed be nice, even if enjoyed from beyond the grave. Celebrity, however, scarcely guarantees devoted readers. We've all heard of Chaucer, but when did you last open The Boke of the Duches, and how well thumbed is your copy of The Parlement of Foules? Even the Knight, the Miller or the Wife of Bath seldom stray beyond the con- fines of an exam syllabus or an undergradu- ate course module. So, coddled by houris and cherubim, or from my vantage point amid the personified abstracts on a rococo ceiling — 'The Apotheosis of Keates' by Sebastiano Ricci sounds just the ticket — I shall gaze down anxiously in search of even the smallest number of genuinely engaged readers. Vain speculation of this sort is encouraged by the official announcement of a National Year of Reading, designed, according to government publicity, 'to engage the whole community in a national effort to raise standards of literacy and cre- ate a more literate nation'. Everyone from the scriptwriters of TV soaps and The Big Breakfast to the directors of Walker's Crisps and the apparatchiks at Mr Smith's Culture Club is being cajoled or dragooned into egging on the page-turners, assisted by the Department of Education's £750,000 douceur, known in civil-servantspeak as 'pump-priming'.
Mockery of this initiative has already begun, in that ageless tradition of English cynicism which maintains that freedom from popery and wooden shoes is best expressed by hooting with derision at any- thing a government appears to take seri- ously. We snigger at the illustrations in the DOE promotional pamphlet for seeming to suggest that only primary-school pupils and grannies actually read books, and we guf- faw outright at the notion of Grant Mitchell ostentatiously leaving a copy of Crime and Punishment on the Queen Vic bar or the errant Sally Webster of Corona- tion Street using Madame Boyar); to plot her next moves with calculating loverboy Greg.
Pooh-poohing wizard wheezes for getting the British to read seems mean and short- sighted, even among those for whom in principle a Labour administration ought never to be acknowledged as capable of doing right. The idea that in a year's time a far wider and less predictable constituency of the bookish will emerge from the whole exercise is attractive, especially to us scrib- blers, whose noses are tickled as we lie asleep by dreams of royalty statements and public-lending rights. Cheering, too, is the prospect of the printed word being enabled, albeit with pump-priming from a mere beggarly 250 k, to fight back against the empire of Sega and Nintendo and the Internet's siren distractions.
It's not the enterprise itself that worries me, for all its wackier, Walker's Crispier aspects, but the concept it embodies of a suddenly erupting crisis, a sort of BSE of literacy, on which the government can be seen to be acting with the appropriate parade of bustle and decisiveness. The sce- nario we are required to envisage is that operatic nemesis of polite learning in which `universal darkness buries all' at the close of Pope's The Dunciad. Read or perish, implies the campaign.
The truth of the matter, at least among the young, at whose redemption National Reading Year seems principally directed, is closer to that famous definition of Austria- Hungary on the eve of the Great War as a nation where things were hopeless but not serious. Very well, spelling and punctuation are no better than average (with embar- rassing knock-on effects currently visible in journalism everywhere), the days of elegant handwriting are more or less vanished, while over-reliance on computers means that exam candidates are flummoxed by the very thought of having to write their names at the head of the paper.
The average child's experience of words, what is more, seems to have undergone an alarming contraction in recent years. Set- tling down to accompany my fifth-formers on their plod through Siegfried's Sassoon's 'Attack' poem included in the anthology prescribed for next year's GCSE, I naively assumed that the opening line, 'At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun,' must present no problems. We spent, as it turned out, ten precious minutes unscram- bling the significance of the five most important words. Nobody knew what 'massed' meant, and, as for 'dun', everyone had apparently forgotten last term's assault on Macbeth with Lady M's eerie summons to 'pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell'. Several boys stumbled over the ridge, and there was much brow-furrowing as to why exactly it should be emerging at dawn. The mere fact that Major Sassoon was so deuced ungentlemanly as to turn the whole thing into a poem had prompted an instant intellectual retreat into that state of abject incapacity known nowadays as `denial'.
Yet the mysterious fact remains that for all our tut-tutting, hand-wringing and loud- ly voiced pedagogical nostalgia for pinafores and slate pencils our young bar- barians continue to embrace the concept of reading for pleasure as a desirable refuge from the more exacting impositions devised by adults to perplex their waking lives. I watch, often with a lump in the throat, a class of 12-year-olds disappear onto that miraculous plane of silent absorption which only a solitary engagement with the printed word guarantees. The implied act of faith reassures me enough not to worry over- much that the book in question is yet another voyage to Planet Fractiousness by Terry Pratchett or the umpteenth saga of adventuring rodents from the pen of Brian Jacques.
`Alas, unmindful of their doom, the little victims play.' Reading, I suggest, is less endangered than the readers themselves, encouraged by an insidious contemporary culture of control and overwork to aban- don this beguiling amalgam of entertain- ment, curiosity and vicarious experience as a mere guilt-inducing time-waster. What chance have books, beyond the exam room, in an adolescence and young adulthood clogged with parental expectations, wrung dry through incessant testing and made submissive and unadventurous by the spec- tre of imminent joblessness? Now here comes the unappealing figure of the Edu- cation Minister Baroness Blackstone, like some grim-visaged, cane-flexing Victorian governess, threatening more exams, with their attendant fog of neurosis and bureau- cracy. A National Reading Year is a nice thought, Tessa, but how about giving read- ers a little extra time? Otherwise we authors, ma'am, may well find ourselves out of a job.
Jonathan Keates
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