Desert Island Books

Talking about books is one of life’s great pleasures. So occasionally, is destroying one. Back in 1982 I wrote abook called Letters to Alice, on First Reading Jane Austen. It was a book about reading and writing, and is still in print. It is even on the6th Form syllabus of the New South Wales Education Board and an enraged student, male, 17 or so,burned iton U-Tube the other year.

I had every sympathy with him. It’s just not a book likely toengageyoung Australian males, and a book should be able to give rise tostrong opinions. It did however have a list at the back of novels which I thought any well educated young reader should be able to talk about, and I stand by it. But times move on: here are a few more up-to-date recommendations.

Three dystopias: Aldous Huxley’sBrave New World and Orwell’s 1984 are well-enough known,but I will add another: C.S.Lewis’That HideousStrengthwhich, like 1984, was written in 1948.The three together give a pretty goodaccount of today’s world: its dependency on anti-depressants, the presence of the thought police, and in the Lewis the rule of the acronym in modern oppression: totalitarianism is imposed procedurally by an ostensibly a-political NGO called the N.I.C.E. The second half of this book is less convincing (he could not write women),but the first half is pretty remarkable. My own recent dystopia, Chalcot Crescent, I cannot resist pointing out, is at least alleviated with jokes.

Julian Clary’s Briefs Encountered is one of the most cheerful, most imaginative, most intelligent and most touchingnovels I have read for ages. A ghostly Noel Coward lives in the house next door, scandals and agonies and all, in parallel with Julian Clary himself. You laugh, you cry with both of them, and adoreJulian’s literary skill and inventiveness.

I’ve been reading Edith Wharton’s short stories. I’ve long read and loved the novels, but hadn’t come across these until recently. They are strong, dramatic, and alive: not in the least wispy, as are so many contemporary short stories. It may be that they include death as afactor as important as life, written in an age whenthe living wore mourning for so much of their lives. They seem to me to be a kind of precursor of Scott Fitzgerald’s stories: the power, the pathos and the truth.

I’ve just been on a literary platform at Dartington with excellent and amiableRichard Davenport Hines. He’s just had his book Titanic Lives published: the most readable, informative and compassionate book about that otherwise obsessively iconised disaster. We were coupled together to talk about ‘Class’, since I have a new novel out, Habits of the House, which is a love story set in Belgrave Square in 1899. The truly posh feature greatly in it, not that they can help the accident of birth any more than the servants can. I think it is the sheer unfairness of our beginnings that so obsesses us as readers and viewers. We scorn the rich while being unwilling to give all we have to the poor.

Love and Mr Lewisham, a rather obscure novel by H.G Wells, is well worth reading. It’s the first thing he wrote(in the 1880s), and stayed unpublished for twenty five years. It’sa young man’s novel, about the dashing of hope: the youth who like Hardy’s Jude dreams of greatness, and is brought back to earth by grim reality. If I seem pre-ococcupied with fin de siècleliterature it is because I am, inevitably, at the moment sinceHabits of the House has become a trilogy. My next titled heroine, orphaned and fallen on hard times, becomes involved with a charlatan medium as does young Mr Lewisham. But there we are: love in all ages and in all classes has its pains as well as its pleasures, and ‘research’ leads one to all kinds of unexpected literary joys. And I’ve also been reading by grandfather Edgar Jepson’s 1904 novel, The Garden at No 19, recently re-published. The Great God Pan was still at it back then, and gaining fans.

To balance things out let me take you centuries into the future with Philip K. Dick’s Clans ofthe Alphane Moon. Dickis the great sci-fi prophet of our times; he died poor but after his death came into great wealth ashis stories became films:Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, and so on – but this novella is the one for readers who don’t usually go for science fiction: a diverting account of how a planet, populated by inhabitants of an abandonedinsane asylum,develops into a relatively well-organised, functioning and cheerful society. So there is hope for us yet?

FAY WELDON

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