The Bookseller.com

30th August 2008

Martin Latham is manager of Waterstone's Canterbury.

Guilt free reading

04.04.08

In a playful new book, Pierre Bayard, a Parisian professor of French literature, has suggested that our reading is "tyrannised" by our need to be "cultured". We all have worthy books glaring at us at home, the books we ought to read. We feel a weight of unnecessary guilt.

This tyranny frightens people away from bookshops; people like the woman who last week asked nervously for us to recommend a book, as she had never read one. Until we accept that "greatness" in books is arbitrary, and does not imply readability, bookshops will alienate most people.

That quote about "the strange emotional power of cheap music" applies to books too. In 20 years of interviewing for booksellers, one much-loved book stands out: not Proust or old set-text Salinger, but The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. Again and again, slightly shamefacedly, people confess that this book touched them like no other. Clinical Ian McEwan and dreary Martin Amis have been memorably described as writing about "buggery among the architect classes". They don't involve people the way Blyton does and Enid will outlast them. Reputation is wayward: most of Hemingway now rarely sells, but Georgette Heyer remains hugely popular.

Amusingly, I detect that truly great writers themselves largely escape Bayard's cultural guilt. Dylan Thomas enjoyed reading westerns. Betjeman was a "Corrie" addict. I have it on good authority that Umberto Eco loves Spiderman comics. A S Byatt is devoted to Discworld novels.

Pratchett and Philip K Dick now merit grudging admiration from the literati, but the rest of sci-fi and fantasy, as well as Blyton, are ignored by them. H G Wells is the sole sci-fi writer in Penguin Classics.

The whole idea of a "classic" is a piece of fogey imperialism that keeps people from reading. This is bizarre, since concepts of "greatness" change over time: Dickens was seen as a "railway read" (i.e. airport read). Henry James dismissed Mrs Gaskell as "mere feminine cleverness", although über-serious Victorian critic Matthew Arnold was spotted blubbing over a Gaskell. Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming, once garish Pan paperbacks, are now Penguin Classics; The Da Vinci Code will probably join them. Conversely, over half of all Nobel Prize-winners in literature are in the same literary graveyard as Man Booker prize-winners Stanley Middleton and P H Newby.

We should all be as free of classic-angst as "Withnail" writer Bruce Robinson. Asked by a film-student audience for his favourite film, he unhesitatingly recommended "The Little Mermaid".

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