9781911717317

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Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

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ALSO BY ROBERT DOUGLAS- FAIRHURST

Victorian Afterlives: The Shaping of Influence in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist

The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland

The Turning Point: A Year that Changed Dickens and the World Metamorphosis: A Life in Pieces

ROBERT DOUGLAS- FAIRHURST Look Closer

How to Get More Out of Reading

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For my students

How

Find Your Way

Keep Your

Prologue

Learning to Read

IT IS EARLY IN the evening and my bedroom is full of rabbits. I’m probably four or five years old, and in my hands is a copy of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit that my mother is helping me to read. I’ve already experienced a familiar jumble of emotions that includes curiosity, confusion and the quiet glee that comes from knowing not everyone is safely tucked up in bed with a well-thumbed picture book. Now I turn the page and my pulse quickens as the story takes a darker turn. Peter Rabbit is in trouble.

After entering a kitchen garden, he has gorged on lettuces, French beans and radishes until he feels sick, but finally his luck appears to have run out. Trying to escape from Mr McGregor, who is shown angrily waving a rake and has a beard that makes him look a bit like my father, Peter has got tangled up in a net of some kind, snagged by the shiny brass buttons on his new blue jacket.

I have a lot of sympathy for Peter, especially when I try to make out the words that sit alongside the book’s soft-edged illustrations, because already his story is turning out to be as full of snares and booby traps as any imaginary garden. Now I stumble my way through another sentence, half deciphering it and half remembering what happened last time we went on this

particular adventure: ‘P-ee-ter, Peter, g-ave, gave, h-im-self, himself, up for l-oft, oh, l-ost, lost, and sh-ed, shed (is there a shed because they’re in the garden?), big t-e-ars, tears (has he torn his coat?), oh, tears . . . ’ I am still finding it hard to organise the letters into meaningful clumps of sound, and occasionally I watch in frustration as some of the words squirm away from me or play a game of hide-and-seek on the page. Even when I have carefully spelt them out, there are sentences that remain as mysterious as messages written in code, like the friendly sparrows who fly down to Peter and ‘implored him to exert himself’. I have no idea what this means.

What will happen next? I’m fairly confident Peter will escape, slipping out of his jacket and running home to his mother, because that’s what he’s always done when we’ve read this story before, but I can’t be absolutely sure he’ll pull off the same trick again. Perhaps someone sneaked into the book when I was asleep last night and rearranged the words on the final page, like the contents of the doll’s house that Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca turn upside down in The Tale of Two Bad Mice. There’s always a chance that The Tale of Peter Rabbit will behave like its hero and succeed in wriggling free.

It seems that not everyone shared my early struggles with reading. Indeed, some writers claim to have acquired what Patrick Leigh Fermor describes as ‘the miracle of literacy’ with the mysterious speed of a magic spell. Doris Lessing recalls how she ‘began reading at seven, off a cigarette packet, and almost at once progressed to the books in my parents’ bookcase’. Growing up in pre-war Berlin, Judith Kerr used to point to ‘shop signs, posters, anything with letters on it’, asking her mother ‘What does that say?’, until ‘one day something must have clicked, and I found I could read’. Suddenly a previously mute world had come alive and was talking to her.

It’s tempting to think that these writers’ memories may have confused learning to read with the sudden transformations that many children enjoy reading about, from Kipling’s Just So Stories (‘How the camel got his hump’, ‘How the elephant got his trunk’) to superhero comics in which a teenage boy can acquire a spider’s web-slinging powers, or a female lawyer can receive a blood transfusion that turns her into a muscle-bound green giant capable of smashing up her surroundings. Actually, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

Studies of how children learn to read have drawn attention to the multiple cognitive processes involved, and in particular to the new neuronal pathways that are gradually formed in the brain until it can recognise a word like ‘rabbit’ and know that it refers to a furry creature with a tail like a puff of cotton wool, rather than to a type of biscuit or a brand of hairdryer. A few milliseconds of reading time results in an astonishingly complex set of connections being made between the different areas of the brain that deal with vision, memory, information processing, thought and feeling: billions of neurons dancing to the sound of a single word. These specialised adaptations of the brain’s basic physical structures are also involved in some important stages of behavioural development, as the child’s growing ability to enter into the consciousness of a fictional character like Peter Rabbit or Mr McGregor encourages them to discover who they are, and who they can imagine being, through the ongoing process of compare and contrast that occurs whenever we read about figures who are like us in some ways and unlike us in others.

Yet the physiological and intellectual changes that happen when we read don’t stop when we are no longer children. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, the adult human brain continues to be altered by the same means. ‘Much of how we think and what we think about’, she writes, ‘is based on insights and associations generated from what we read.’ Her conclusion?

‘Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.’ And like anything else that involves practice, such as playing a musical instrument or perfecting a new golf swing, the more we read the better we are likely to get at it. We might be tempted to think that reading is a skill we acquire once and then perform almost automatically, like learning how to ride a bicycle or tie a pair of shoelaces, but as the literary critic I. A. Richards pointed out in 1942, the truth is that ‘We are all of us learning to read all the time.’

That certainly matches my own experience. As far back as I can remember, books have formed some of the most important stepping stones of my life. I still vividly recall scrambling on board the Puffin Club boat that was moored in Greenwich for Roald Dahl to sign my newly purchased copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), an encounter that for a seven-year-old boy with thick glasses and a greedy imagination felt a bit like meeting Father Christmas. Many years later, as a graduate student in America, there was the summer I spent sitting on the hot paving slabs outside Princeton’s Firestone Library, reading Proust and feeling like a stranger in two countries at once. Books have shown me how to fall in (and out of) love and how to examine the world around me with more curious, searching eyes; they have helped me to think more clearly and feel more deeply.

I have also been lucky enough to turn a lifelong passion into a career. For more than twenty years, I have taught some of the world’s greatest literature to some of the world’s brightest students at the University of Oxford, and if you walked into my office today you would see books everywhere: tatty paperbacks on shelves that reach from wall to wall and floor to ceiling; chunky hardbacks piled up on the carpet like stalagmites. I sometimes think that if you cut into me I would bleed ink, rather as the scholar Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) is described as being so obsessed with his work that if

you put a drop of his blood under a magnifying glass it would be ‘all semicolons and parentheses’. Yet I still experience each new book I open as a fresh challenge to my literary assumptions. Even as I am trying to teach my students how to be better readers, I am learning how to do the same thing myself.

Why should this matter? There are as many answers to that question as there are readers in the world, but when we consider what reading does to help people get through life –  whether by glossing it with pleasure or sharpening it with extra meaning –  some common factors emerge. That’s particularly true when it comes to our reading of imaginative works like novels, short stories, poems and plays, which can act like lenses to refocus the world around us or kaleidoscopes to twist it into bright new patterns. ‘Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body’, Joseph Addison claimed at the start of an essay he wrote for his periodical The Tatler in 1709, and anyone who has followed the adventures of fictional protagonists like Isabel Archer or Holden Caulfield will know exactly what he meant. When we feel involved in a story, we do more than merely observe its characters from a distance. We are invited to get inside their heads and have a look around; we work out where their thoughts end and our own begin. And when we finally close the book, we are likely to know more about ourselves as well as about these imaginary people made from paper and ink.

For many readers this is a process that begins early. I remember the same thing happening when I had outgrown Beatrix Potter and moved onto slightly more challenging authors like A. A. Milne (who was the first to make me realise that books were allowed to be funny) and Enid Blyton (who wasn’t always easy to love but was almost impossible to escape). Walking to my local library and taking a book off the shelf felt like picking up a bottle that had washed up on the shore, and discovering a message that someone had put there especially for me to find.

Reading the book helped me to understand this other person, while feeling that I too was understood.

This is also why psychologists continue to stress the importance of reading for adults. Even if we think we know who we are, reading a piece of imaginative literature can temporarily release us from the invisible constraints of selfhood. It can give us new personalities to try on and new worlds to try out, allowing us to be simultaneously ourselves and someone else, or to be living here (this bedroom, this train, this waiting room), and elsewhere (New York, Narnia, The Ocean at the End of the Lane) without having to move a muscle.

But if reading can be a form of escapism, helping to distract us from our lives, it can also work in the opposite direction, introducing us to aspects of experience that we were only half conscious of until we saw them being assembled and organised on the page. This is one of the reasons why people send each other love poems that were originally written for someone else, like Shakespeare’s ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ or Keats’s ‘Bright Star’. Here are pieces of writing that express feelings we recognise as our own but could not have formulated on our own. The same is true of larger literary works. They too can be read as instruction manuals or guidebooks for life, filtering the world to make it more understandable or encouraging us to look at it in new ways through a borrowed pair of eyes.

Yet as we get older, often we don’t read with the same level of attention we once devoted to books, or comics, or anything else that successfully held our attention as children. We are more easily distracted; when we are faced with blocks of print we are more likely to find ourselves skimming rather than lingering. There are simply more demands on our time, more things (and more people) that come between us and the words on the page.

This sense that we are reading with less concentration is partly a consequence of just how much printed matter now

exists and partly down to how much of it we become exposed to over the course of our lives. In 2006, the critic John Sutherland calculated that approximately half a million different novels were available to purchase online, which at a conservative estimate (he imagined spending three hours on each book, and working a forty-hour week for forty-six weeks of the year) would take roughly 163 lifetimes to get through. Since then the flood of print has risen even higher – and that’s before we factor in the potentially infinite offerings of the Internet.

In Douglas Adams’s most famous novel, we are introduced to a device that looks like ‘a largish electronic calculator’ featuring many flat buttons and ‘a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million “pages” could be summoned at a moment’s notice’. It’s known as ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, and it has the words ‘DON’T PANIC ’ printed in ‘large friendly letters’ on its plastic cover, chiefly in response to the head-spinning fact that ‘if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in’. When The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first published in 1979, this device would have seemed as laughably implausible as the earth being demolished by Vogons to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. Today it sounds perfectly reasonable. After all, it’s a device many people carry around with them in their pockets or handbags, and refer to as a mobile phone rather than a guide to the galaxy. Given that it can now be used to summon far more than a million ‘pages’ simply by pressing a few buttons –  including the complete works of Douglas Adams –  the original guide’s advice seems more relevant than ever. DON’T PANIC .

In 1926, Virginia Woolf gave a speech entitled ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ that pointed out how many novels, poems, memoirs and other kinds of writing ‘jostle each other’ for our

attention. ‘Where are we to begin?’ she asked. ‘How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?’ The following pages try to offer some answers.

I have divided my suggestions into a series of short chapters, each of which gives a cross section of the materials that writers use when building an imaginary world for us to inhabit. In each chapter, I also look closely at a single example that concentrates some broader ideas and literary techniques, a bit like applying a magnifying glass to a piece of embroidery to reveal how it is stitched together. (The English word ‘text’ comes from the same Latin root as ‘textile’, so this isn’t as far-fetched a comparison as it might sound.) Finally, I offer a few thoughts about how paying careful attention to these texts might also help us to become better readers of the world of words that surrounds us, from news stories to adverts and social media posts. And that’s because becoming a better reader isn’t only a question of reading more; it also means learning how to get more out of the writing we encounter every day.

There’s no assumption that you will already know the material I will be discussing, but hopefully the examples I’ve chosen will intrigue you enough to go and investigate their contexts. Unavoidably there are some plot spoilers, but I’ve tried to choose pieces of writing where knowing what happens won’t stop you wanting to learn more about how and why it happens. Many of these passages are drawn from short stories and novels, which tend to be the works most people choose to read in their spare time; some are from poetry; a few are from plays and other genres. Most of the time I refer to them all as ‘books’, which should be seen as a word that bundles together online texts, and in some cases audio recordings, in addition to traditional forms of publication. I should probably stress that they don’t form any sort of literary canon. As you’ll see from the fragments of autobiography

I’ve included, they reflect my own history as a reader and are also part of the jigsaw puzzle of experiences that have shaped my life outside the library. But I do think they all reward careful reading, or – if you already know them – rereading. What I won’t be spending much time on are fiddly metrical patterns, experimental narrative time schemes and all the other technical flourishes that critics sometimes treat as the real stars of the show. That’s partly because describing how such things work rarely helps us understand why they matter, but also because the best pieces of writing are always exceptions to the rules they have helped to form. When William Empson, then in his late sixties, was asked to contribute an essay to a book published in honour of the eighty-year-old I. A. Richards, one of his university teachers, he observed that the trouble with getting old is that everyone becomes the same age. Similarly, one danger with knowing what a form such as a Petrarchan sonnet should look like, and then spotting a few, is that they all become the same poem, whereas good writers are escapologists who are forever squeezing their way out of the forms that try to box them in. They might pretend to be Mr McGregors, but at heart they are all Peter Rabbits. That’s why I will mostly be dealing in literary examples rather than rules. It’s also why some readers may want to quarrel with my conclusions and substitute their own examples for mine. And that’s just as it should be. Criticism is neither pure art nor pure science but an ongoing conversation between the two, so it always relies on discussion, debate and dissent.

One of the most obvious things that separates an experienced literary critic from other readers is speed : whereas someone who is reading a novel for pleasure might stop and start, pause over certain passages or flip back a few chapters to remind themselves of a key plot detail, someone who is assessing it with a more professional eye might power through it in less than half the time,

pinpointing familiar allusions and drawing fresh conclusions on every page. But if we are to get more out of books, one of the first things we may all need to do is s-l-o-w d-o-w-n.

A good deal has been written in recent years about the various movements that have emerged to help people get more out of life by taking it at a less frantic pace: slow food, slow work, slow parenting, slow travel, slow sex. Slow reading sounds rather different, the sort of thing that might evoke pity or scorn in anyone who associates it with stupidity, but it also has supporters who recognise that it can help to break the bad habit many of us have fallen into of reading texts only for information – on the page as well as online – in an uneven rhythm of scanning and skipping. By contrast, we might think of slow reading as a way of patiently allowing the words to do their work, or reveal their possibilities for play, in a fashion many of us still remember from the time we first encountered the world of print. No doubt this is what the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche meant when he described himself in his 1881 book Daybreak (Morgenröthe ) as ‘a teacher of slow reading’. In an age of work, he wrote, ‘that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is so eager to “get things done” ’, what is needed is an approach that will teach us ‘how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar’.

That’s what this book tries to offer: an approach to reading that recognises how, when we pick up a book, we aren’t only trying to lose ourselves in it. We might also find ourselves there, if we are willing to look closely enough and leave our mental doors ajar.

How to Begin

Chapter 1 Welcome

A FEW DAYS AGO YOU bought a book. It’s a second-hand copy of the fat nineteenth-century novel Paul Clifford, and it probably caught your eye because its title reminded you of many other stories you’ve enjoyed that were named after the central protagonist, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre to Stephen King’s Carrie, each of which made you feel that you were being introduced to a stranger who might became a good friend if only you were to spend enough time in their company. Since then it’s been waiting patiently on a bookshelf in your living room, but this afternoon you finally pick it up and settle down in your favourite armchair. It’s time to start reading.

Perhaps you have a cup of coffee and a plate of biscuits on the table next to you; perhaps there’s a cat snoozing on your lap.

The author, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, isn’t someone you know a great deal about, but you have heard that he was one of Dickens’s rivals and the inventor of popular phrases such as ‘the great unwashed’ and ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, so you’re feeling optimistic. This is probably his most famous novel, and it certainly sounds exciting, with its focus on a fashionable man about town who enjoys a secret double life as a highwayman. It sold out on publication day in 1830, and launched a whole new genre of crime fiction in which the hero moonlighted as a law-breaking rogue.

With a growing sense of anticipation, you find the first chapter, skip past a long verse epigraph, and begin:

It was a dark and stormy night;

Feeling a bit puzzled, you lift your eyes from the page. Aren’t most nights dark? Then you return to the opening sentence and discover that it goes on. And on.

the rain fell in torrents –  except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Again you lift your eyes from the page, and this time you decide not to return to it. Overwrought, under-thought, and emptily straining for significance, it’s a piece of writing that’s hard to read without your fingers itching to pick up an editor’s pencil and get to work. Disappointed, you reflect that Bulwer-Lytton’s style hasn’t aged well (posterity can be a cruel judge of talent), and add his novel to a pile destined for the charity shop.

Today Paul Clifford is commemorated by the annual BulwerLytton Fiction Contest, established in 1982 to celebrate the ‘best worst’ opening to an as yet unwritten novel. The 2021 Grand Prize was awarded to ‘A lecherous sunrise flaunted itself over a flatulent sea, ripping the obsidian bodice of night asunder with its rapacious fingers of gold, thus exposing her dusky bosom to the dawn’s ogling stare’, with a Dishonourable Mention for ‘It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in Torrance, but not in nearby Rancho Palos Verdes, which was unusual given the two towns’ proximity.’ All the entries are supposed to be funny, but when I first read about this contest I also experienced a more

serious tug of memory. And after looking through my surviving school notebooks, I discovered why.

It turns out that when I was about twelve years old I was fond of writing equally tempestuous openings for my English homework assignments. One story begins ‘A bolt of lightning streaked through the sky, ripping open the heavens with a malicious CRACK !’ (The title I chose for this piece of look-at-me prose was ‘The Storm’.) Another begins ‘Outside the cave, the thunderstorm raged.’ (I called this one ‘The Cave’; clearly I was a rather literal-minded child.) I hadn’t yet heard of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, but I had certainly read the Peanuts comic strips in which would-be novelist Snoopy tries to show off his literary skill. In one he is seen typing ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ on top of his doghouse, and Linus responds, ‘Your novel has a very exciting beginning.’ (Snoopy looks suitably pleased with himself.) Then Linus hands back the manuscript: ‘Good luck with the second sentence.’ (Snoopy arches his eyebrows knowingly at the reader.) In another comic strip, Lucy tells Snoopy that ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ is a terrible opening to a story, and he should instead begin with ‘Once upon a time’. (Snoopy thinks for a moment, and then types ‘Once upon a time, it was a dark and stormy night.’) I don’t think I fully got these jokes at the time, but the impulse to write in a way that would satisfy my own readers was perfectly sincere. Even if I was trying to produce spine-melting, nerve-twanging horror stories, whenever anybody opened one I wanted them to feel at home. Many writers never outgrow this impulse. Martin Amis began his final book, the autobiographical novel Inside Story (2020), by telling his readers ‘Welcome! Do step on in’, before metaphorically taking their coats and offering them a drink. He recognised that on reading the first sentence of any story we cross a threshold, entering a world we may share with the author for several hours or more. There will probably be some house

rules to learn, and there will almost certainly be a few domestic quirks we will have to get used to, from the style of the building to how it has been furnished, but if we have an experienced host they will quickly help us to settle in.

Sometimes it takes only a sentence for us to work out how to occupy our temporary new home. Humbert Humbert, the charming but amoral narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), introduces himself with ‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins’, and already it is clear that he prefers to create a storybook version of the girl he will later abduct and rape, ignoring her real existence (her name is Dolores, not Lolita) so that he can attach her to a rickety romance plot like a butterfly pinned to a board. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817) offers us ‘No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine’ –  a description that mostly comes from a neutral narrator, but also dips into Catherine’s mind to reveal how she sees the world, as an unwritten story just waiting to arrange itself around her.

Although the title of Northanger Abbey seems to promise us a Gothic tale full of bleeding nuns and rattling chains, gradually we are shown that its physical setting is in fact a modern family home full of humdrum social problems such as stupidity and greed. And this is another common pattern in fiction, where the novelist performs a piece of narrative misdirection by making us think we are getting one kind of story and then giving us something quite different.

Take the opening paragraphs of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty­Four (1949):

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly

enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about fortyfive, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Where does a novel like Nineteen Eighty­Four begin? If we’re reading it as a traditional printed book, there’s quite a lot to get through before we reach that famous opening sentence. The cover of my old Penguin edition warns the reader what sort of fictional home they are about to enter, featuring an illustration of a shadowy helmeted figure speaking into a bright red megaphone, with a watchtower and razor wire lurking in the background. Opening this cover, the title page includes ‘a novel’ printed in small letters underneath ‘NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR’ in large block capitals, reassuring us that even though in the following pages Orwell will be keeping one foot in the world of plain chronological fact, he will be keeping the other in the more elastic world of fiction.

Our memories tend to work in a similar way –  every time we try to recall what happened to us in the past, we are part historian and part storyteller –  so it’s probably not surprising that whenever I open my battered paperback copy it reverberates with more personal echoes too. Nineteen Eighty ­Four was one of the first ‘serious’ books I was required to study at school, and I still find it impossible to read these opening paragraphs without overlaying them with memories of my fifteen-year- old self slouching up the concrete steps to a classroom that did indeed smell of boiled cabbage and old mats. Here we waited for our English teacher to step through the door: a man in his late twenties who had a beard as well as a thick moustache, and a booming voice that seemed capable of demolishing buildings at a hundred paces. We were all fascinated by him, but my feelings were a little more complicated than that. I feared and worshipped him in roughly equal proportions. He appeared to know everything about everyone –  including me –  and whenever I handed in my essays I vaguely understood that I hadn’t only been writing them for him. I had been writing them to him. They were critical love letters to a man I didn’t remotely fancy, but whose recognition and approval I craved. He was my very own Big Brother.

Writing about this novel at school was probably the first time I felt the stirring of a new critical appetite, so the clock striking thirteen marked a fresh start for me too. I had also recently discovered that Orwell faced an even more difficult challenge. In personal terms, when he wrote Nineteen Eighty­Four he was waiting for an end rather than a beginning. Suffering from the last stages of tuberculosis, he had already spent several months in a private sanatorium in the Cotswold hills, and in September 1949, three months after this novel was published, he moved to a private room at University College Hospital in London. Four months later a blood vessel in his lung ruptured and he rapidly

bled to death. He was just forty-six years old. Yet in creative terms, the question he had been forced to grapple with while he was still writing Nineteen Eighty­Four was the same one that all novelists must ask themselves, namely how far this novel (literally something new ) was going to be the literary equivalent of a fresh start.

‘Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning’, explains George Eliot in Daniel Deronda (1876), and her connection of ‘make-believe’ with ‘beginning’ reminds us how much we enjoy telling ourselves stories about being original and starting from scratch, and how likely these stories are to fall into well-established narrative grooves. Anyone who has made a New Year’s resolution (I will stop smoking! I will stop doom-scrolling through social media late at night!) will know how difficult it is to extricate yourself from old habits, and much the same is true of literary beginnings. As the critic Edward Said has observed, ‘a beginning immediately establishes relationships with works already existing, relationships of either continuity or antagonism or some mixture of both.’ Even the stock phrase ‘Once upon a time’ at the start of a fairy tale reminds us that we are entering a fictional realm where stories like this have already happened more than once.

Orwell was fully aware of how difficult it was to create something out of nothing. Almost everything he wrote between 1945 and 1946, the year he started working seriously on the first draft of Nineteen Eighty­Four, seemed to make its way into his novel in some form. This included his claim in an essay on ‘The Prevention of Literature’ that pieces of popular entertainment such as Disney cartoons were produced by a ‘conveyor-belt process’, thereby anticipating how the fiction department of the Ministry of Truth turns out romantic potboilers on a literary production line, and even his habit of borrowing specific words and phrases from himself. (The critic Dorian Lynskey, who has written

a detailed study of Orwell’s novel, points out that ‘he had no qualms about using a good line twice’.)

A familiarity with its fictional world is also something that the completed novel encourages us to build up in our minds as we read. For example, the clock striking thirteen is the first of many references to clocks and watches, alerting us to the fact that although the precise year is hazy –  when Winston Smith comes to write his diary, he realises that it may not even be 1984, because ‘it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two’ –  life in this future state is strictly timetabled, from the regular sessions of group participation known as the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ to the ‘ear-splitting whistle’ that comes out of office workers’ telescreens at 7.15 every morning to tell them it’s time to get up. But the reference to ‘thirteen’ also adds a sucker punch of strangeness to an otherwise perfectly ordinary sentence. Even twenty-four-hour clocks strike one rather than thirteen, which is a fact we both know and are asked to stop knowing, thereby giving us a little introduction to the Doublethink that lies at the heart of Winston’s world. That is, although the clocks striking thirteen is presented as just one unexceptional fact among many, it’s an early warning that in this novel ordinary life has become disturbingly warped. The time is out of joint.

In this context, a phrase in the second paragraph becomes especially significant: ‘best of times’. This is mostly an exasperated sigh about the unreliability of the lift in Winston’s building, but it also alludes to one of the most famous fictional openings ever written, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’, which is how Charles Dickens begins his 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities. Orwell never mentions the second half of Dickens’s sentence, but if we pick up on the allusion it offers a powerful warning about how most people experience life in this imagined future, like a shadow hanging over the rest of the story. So does

the idea that Nineteen Eighty­Four is also a tale of two cities, with the difference that in this novel the two cities occupy just one place: the London of 1949, when Orwell first published his novel during a grim post-war period of rationing and power cuts, and the London of an imagined future. This is significant, because the novel’s opening is littered with details that for British readers just after the Second World War would have sounded strangely familiar, from bad food to propaganda posters and the name of Winston (Churchill rather than Smith), although the unexpected twist Orwell gives to these details might have made his readers question how far they could trust their own understanding of the world around them.

In his essay ‘Why I Write’, published shortly before he started to work on Nineteen Eighty­Four, Orwell argued that writers should try to describe this world without getting too much in the way: ‘Good prose is like a window pane.’ However, in these opening paragraphs his narrative voice shifts between looking through Winston’s eyes (‘It was no use trying the lift’ hints at the resigned shrug this character has learned to internalise rather than risk open dissent) and seeing life with the all-knowing authority of Big Brother. And as a result we are also left unsure how far we can we rely on what we are being told.

The best example of how Nineteen Eighty­Four disorientates us is also the easiest to miss. ‘It was a bright cold day’ – a far more restrained description than ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ – is presented as a straightforward statement of fact, just one tiny stitch in the larger fabric of Orwell’s narrative. It also establishes a key aspect of his style. The phrase ‘It was’ appears on more than 500 further occasions in Nineteen Eighty­Four – so often, in fact, that it simply disappears before our eyes, being as ordinary and invisible as little connecting words like ‘and’ or ‘but’. Even in the short second paragraph there are four more examples: ‘It was no use . . . it was seldom working . . . It was part of . . . It

was one of those . . . ’. Yet as Winston is gradually broken down by the political forces ranged against him, tortured and brainwashed until he accepts that ‘2+2 = 5’, the basic meaning of ‘It was’ is stretched so far that when we reach the end of the novel its repetition has become the final piece of evidence that he can no longer think for himself. ‘But it was all right’, we are told, ‘He loved Big Brother.’ It is like a grammatical acknowledgement of Winston’s recognition that he is doomed from the moment he chooses to rebel. ‘The end is contained in the beginning’, he resignedly thinks to himself.

The way we have been approaching these opening paragraphs of Orwell’s novel –  isolating individual words, thinking about their implications and seeing how the writer weaves them together into larger narrative patterns –  can be duplicated with almost anything else we might read. But such close attention is especially rewarded by literary beginnings, because these are the places that help us to organise our thoughts about how we will try to make sense of the pages to come. A beginning can be the first piece in a jigsaw puzzle, as is the case with a work of detective fiction, or a domino we push to start a toppling chain reaction, as is the case with a romantic comedy, but it’s also a seed. The author plants it and, sometimes visibly and sometimes out of sight, it starts to grow. And if we want to see how it does this, often the simplest way is to consider how often certain words or ideas are repeated.

To take another example, as we read this passage from Nineteen Eighty­Four our eyes may alight on a common word that will later be used in many other contexts. As a result it sets up shockwaves that reach forwards through the rest of the novel, but also backwards and sideways as it starts to establish a network of associations in our minds. Thus, the fact that it is ‘a bright cold day’ may sound as neutral as a weather forecast, but ‘bright’ will later be returned to when we encounter a woman who turns

‘bright pink’ with excitement during the Two Minutes Hate, the ‘bright red streak’ of blood caused by a bomb blowing off somebody’s hand, and one of Winston’s colleagues telling him how much he enjoys public hangings when he gets to see the victim’s tongue sticking out and ‘blue – a quite bright blue’.

We may not be consciously aware of these echoes as we read, but they set up subterranean connections in our mind between propaganda and violence like a smouldering fuse that occasionally bursts into life. Such connections also remind us of one of the great satisfactions of reading: an ability to join together isolated fragments of knowledge into a meaningful whole. For if life is where things happen, a book is where they usually happen for a purpose; events succeed one another in a way that replaces a loose ‘and then’ with a tighter and more controlled ‘because’. To open a novel like Nineteen Eighty­Four is to enter a world that willingly discloses its hidden patterns.

Drawing more general conclusions from this specific example isn’t straightforward, because every work of literature operates in a particular way. Even a poem that is written in the same form as thousands of others is likely to have something that makes it distinct – a sharp turn of phrase here; a crafty rhyme there. This is what makes it something other than a photocopy. But it’s also why reading an author like Orwell can feel less like peering down a tunnel at events that were written about a long time ago, and more like a conversation between ourselves and the author, as he tells us what he is thinking and we respond in our heads with approving comments (‘beautifully put’, ‘I completely agree’) or criticisms (‘I’m not sure that’s the most elegant way of expressing it’, ‘oh come on ’). And paying him this sort of close attention, down to the level of discovering which words he is most drawn to, can help us to become even better listeners. This isn’t necessarily what we’re used to. Most of the time when we read we are simply trying to make sense of what is

presented to us, word by word and sentence by sentence, whereas the sort of close reading we’ve been attempting in this chapter does something rather different. As well as encouraging us to pay attention to individual words and think about their effectiveness, it reveals how the work as a whole is put together. Reading in this way is a bit like the experience many of us have when going on holiday. We make our way through the airport, inelegantly hopping as we remove our shoes for the security scanner, we drift through the duty-free shop spritzing ourselves with samples of perfume we have no intention of buying, and finally we board our plane and settle into our seat with a relieved sigh. Then, as the plane takes off, we look out of the window and see the world below us being transformed into an orderly collection of tiny buildings and neat lines of tarmac. Suddenly all those ground-level distractions are put into perspective.

So too, when we read a work like Nineteen Eighty­Four, we might start by noticing individual words –  their sounds, their shapes, their edges of meaning –  but eventually we come to see how they fall into certain patterns. And after we notice these, the work no longer seems to be made out of separate lines of words, but instead resembles something more like a giant spider’s web. Touch it at any point and the whole structure instantly quivers into life.

Chapter 2

It’s the Little Things

WE SAW IN THE LAST chapter that in his essay ‘Why I Write’ Orwell claimed that good prose should work like a windowpane, but – as we also saw – the closer we get to an author’s writing, the more their fingerprints on the glass start to show. In any piece of writing, certain details are likely to stand out. These can be small moments that reverberate far beyond their immediate context, such as the unexpected clang of ‘thirteen’ in the opening sentence of Nineteen Eighty ­Four, but there are a number of other words in the rest of the passage that are more quietly surprising. For example, when we read that the oversized poster of Big Brother tacked to the wall in Winston’s hallway ‘depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features’, the word ‘simply’ sticks out –  not only because it isn’t grammatically necessary (the sentence would make perfect sense without it), but also because it could be understood in several different ways. It tells us about the crude design of the poster, and it imagines the reactions someone like Winston might have towards it, ranging from awe (it is simply enormous ) to an impotent shrug (it is, simply, enormous), both of which are attitudes that Big Brother

seems keen to cultivate. (Later Winston thinks that ‘the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness’, and on three separate occasions we are told that anyone who went against the Party ‘simply disappeared’.) That is, the more carefully we read Orwell’s writing, the more aware we are that ‘simply’ can, somewhat paradoxically, become a complex word in his hands, touching on important ideas that ripple out into the rest of the novel. Knowing this, when we reread those opening paragraphs we may admire Orwell’s skill at recreating the textures of ordinary life –  gritty streets, cooking smells, the small indignities of middle age –  but as soon as we reach ‘simply’ the scene quietly rearranges itself in our heads around this one descriptive detail.

Sometimes our attention can be snagged by details that are so tiny we might not even notice them under normal circumstances. Consider a snowflake. We all know that snow changes the appearance of the world, cladding and confusing the outlines of familiar objects so that they look increasingly strange. My own awareness of this fact was thrown into sharp relief the same year I read Nineteen Eighty­Four, when I went on a school trip abroad for the first time. It was the opposite of a luxury holiday. We were going to stay in a youth hostel in a French ski resort, where every day we would be provided with a packed lunch consisting of a bread roll, a silver puck of soft cheese and two slices of vividly pink ham, and until we reached our destination everything was depressingly familiar. For more than twelve hours, fifty boys were packed into the wheezing school coach, where we filled the time by boasting about our (completely imaginary) sex lives or staring out of the window in an atmosphere that was thick with deodorant spray and stale farts. It felt a bit like being put in a day-long detention. Then we arrived, and everything changed. Cars and gateposts were reduced to soft-focus outlines,