Skimming the Pond of Literature

I have a guilty reading secret. No no, not Barbara Cartland. I tried that once, eager not to appear a book snob, but I was bored beyond belief within two pages. No, my guilty reading secret is that I skim read.  The last book I read, a light, emotive novel, well-enough written if not earth-shatteringly brilliant, only took me about a day.  Because of all the actual words on the page, I really read only about 60% of them.

I blame it all on Tolstoy. For I can date this appalling habit to a few weeks in the summer when I was 17.  I was reading, for the first time, War and Peace.  It was one of the books that all my contemporaries were reading that year – you couldn’t claim to be part of the gang if you didn’t read certain books, and I so desperately wanted to be part of the gang.  I don’t remember what the other books were – I think Franny & Zooey had come and gone by then. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth would be for the first year at college when earnest, socially important reading was the thing and would of course be accompanied by the doomed poets of World War I and the Bloomsbury set.

Anyway, back to War and Peace.  Hands up anyone who hasn’t skipped lazily over all those Russian patronymics and the detailed description of the battleplan for Borodino? Honestly now.

I don’t think it was the patronymics that did it in my case, for my favourite book before that was Gorky’s My Childhood.  I didn’t so much read that book as consume it, going back for second and even third helpings. My first real romance was coloured by the fact that I read Gorky continuously on the bus journeys to and from meetings with my beloved. The wintery streets of Stirling became windswept tundra and the bleak cafes with steamed up windows where we spent our days were transformed into Grandmother’s kitchen complete with a tiled stove in the corner.

I had never read a foreign author before unless you count Nevil Shute (!). A Town Like Alice made a big impression on me when I was in my early teens, although I didn’t grasp the essential fact that Alice referred to the town of Alice Springs until I’d read it several times. For me, it was simply a glorious love story with an added dash of The War. The film of it with a young Virginia McKenna and some ruggedly handsome chap only added to its appeal.

I had found, badly concealed at the back of a bookcase, my parents’ copy of The Victory Book. This book contained some pretty horrific photos of concentration camp victims, bomb-flattened Hiroshima and Mussolini hanging in the town square and it was obviously judged to be unsuitable reading for an impressionable teenager.  It may have been produced by Picture Post, to which my mother subscribed throughout the war and on into the ’50s.

My book diet in the years leading up to War and Peace was heavy on Daphne Du Maurier and Charles Dickens. There was an unspoken understanding that one should read at least one Dickens novel before reaching the age of majority.  Mine were Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, The Pickwick Papers and Great Expectations.  This was before Oliver Twist became Oliver, The Musical and The Pickwick Papers a Sunday teatime TV serial.  Alas, the wonderful 1946 film of Great Expectations, directed by David Lean, has proved more enduringly evocative than the book. Many years later, I prepared for the role of Miss Havisham in a contemporary opera called something like Miss Havisham’s Veil.  I was looking forward to yards and yards of decaying wedding frock and a magnificent dying scene. I don’t remember what became of that project – was the opera never staged or did they dump me from the title role? I’ve continued to read A Christmas Carol in the run-up to the festive season out of sentiment and because it crams quintessential Dickens into a manageable length.

Du Maurier was a favourite of the book clubs of the time and loved by Hollywood movie makers then and now. What teenage girl of my vintage couldn’t immediately identify the source of the opening line ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…’ It’s Rebecca of course. I identified strongly with the title character – she was wild and beautiful and her handkerchiefs were embroidered with an R, just like mine were. Mine came in packs of five from the Co-op of course, but that made not a jot of difference to me.

I’d never been anywhere near Cornwall, but I imagined it to be a slightly more romantic version of St Andrews with added pirate wrecks.  I bestrode those windlashed beaches with my faithful dog, dancing curls escaping from a headscarf carelessly donned and drank tea from a tin mug with some gnarled old sea dog who called me Miss Rachel.

But back at the ball with Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, his friend Pierre Bezukhov and the enchanting Natasha Rostov…  Prepare yourself, I’m going to be irreverant here about what is regarded as one of the world’s greatest novels.  Has this reputation anything to do with the fact that, superficially at least, it’s got something for the girls and something for the boys? Frocks and family in the sumptuously portrayed Petersburg of the Rostovs.  Shalkos and sabres at Austerlitz. I confess, though,  to slipping back into the spirit of the novel when dancing an onstage Polonaise in a ballgown of purple velvet (Eugene Onegin).

But somewhere in the pages of Tolstoy’s magnum opus, I began to weary of  the endless detail, the complicated cast of characters. I began checking the page numbers – still only p.345, that was bad news, P.R. was already on p.577 (he and I were competitive readers). Would Natasha ever find happiness? And exactly how long was a Russian winter? I quickened my reader’s step and found that if I skipped most of the paragraph relating to Maria Feodorovna’s lineage, it didn’t make much difference to the storyline. And who needed to know so much about Pierre’s exquisite pain and inner turmoil, for heavens’ sake?

The rest is history.  Since I began to read seriously (a precocious five to six year old) I’d savoured every word. Mind, there was a guilty episode of binge reading the entire Famous Five series while on holiday with a pal.  She went fishing in the burn for tadpoles and I sat on the front steps glued to my books – I was 9.  But with War and Peace I truly began to skim read. And the habit’s endured. It’s shameful, I tell you, shameful.  It has to be the reason that I rarely remember much of the piles of books I read. But I can’t stop myself. All those carefully crafted sentences that an author sweated blood over are left in the slipstream as I turn the page to find the important bit.  Rather than having the gravitas of a serious reader as I age, I’ve become a reading flibbertigibbet. I know for a fact that I’ll never read Proust now – why would I read someone who’s even more verbose than me  but with better vocabulary?

And War and Peace, the cause of my downfall? That weighty tome with its back cover half torn off (and pages 345-577 looking suspiciously unread) has been consigned to the bin. Count Leo never did manage to engage my passionate imagination and youthful reading fervour like good old Aleksey Maksimovich Peshkov, better known as Maxim Gorky.