A Great Reade

“Not a day passes over the earth, but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great words, and suffer noble sorrows.”

The book that begins thus was one of the greatest reading experiences of my life, but it is comparatively little known today. It is The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade. I read it perhaps eight to ten years ago, and no book since (and possibly no book before Fiction Books ) has involved me so deeply with its characters, or made me care so much about their fate. I can think of no higher recommendation for any work of fiction.

Next year The Cloister and the Hearth will be 150 years old, and in many ways it shows its age; it’s too long, mostly due to the fact that the plot wanders all over the place, and Reade’s use of language might be a barrier for the modern reader (though clearly not for this reader!). The book is an extended demonstration that the strictures in regard to a normal family life imposed on clerics by the Catholic faith are inhuman and unworkable, but this never gets in the way of the most important thing in the story (in any story) – the portrayal of the people. That is all that’s needed to make it a success in my eyes; it is a book to awaken and educate the heart (beside which Sir Walter Scott considered everything else as "moonshine").

Reade wrote other books, Fiction Books the most notable being It’s Never Too Late To Mend. I haven’t read any of them, but I will, someday, return to The Cloister and the Hearth. I recommend giving it a go; and if 775 pages (in the 1912 Chatto edition I have) seems like a lot to get through (unless, like me, you happen to prefer big books), I would also add it is lightened by sly flashes of unexpected humour:
“…it was an age in which artists sought out and loved one another [C & H is set in the 15th Century]. Should this last statement stagger a writer or painter of our day, let me remind him that even Christians loved one another at first starting.”

If anyone does manage to get around to it, I’d be interested to hear what you think…

Make it count

Writing is a luxury. Reading is a luxury. Curious things for a writer to say? Stories may go back to the Palaeolithic campfires, but when they were told then the day’s work was done; any crisis was past. That is no longer the case. A tragedy or a triumph, if it is of sufficient magnitude, is all around the world in minutes. Famine, disease, crime, war: we know, we can see, that these things afflict real living people every moment of every day. And this is without even mentioning that the ecosystem is in a state of potentially disastrous flux. Everywhere there is suffering, every week brings a new crisis.

And we sit and write, we lounge and read. Is there anything we can say to ourselves that justifies such self-indulgence, such apparently wilful negligence of real problems?

I don’t know the answer to that. I have 1700 books in one room, more than I can ever read in the time I have left to live—if I want to actually live as well. Averaging out their value, every single one of those books could provide money to save a human life, somewhere in the world. (Let’s not even go near the DVD box sets…) How can I even hesitate, if I can pick up a collected volume of comics and know that it’s worth four or five human lives?

Stories are part of our human makeup, it could be retorted; literature is a treasury of the human spirit, a repository of inspirational dreams and salutary nightmares. We require myths, ancient and modern, in order to better understand the world and ourselves. We need fiction: even the lightest, most superficial works provide relief from the harpies and furies of the world, giving our hearts and minds essential rest before we plunge back in. And writers need to nourish their work; we need the stories of others to stoke the fires of our own inspiration. Fiction Books

Perhaps this is the crux. I look around at the books I have collected and know that at the time each one seemed essential, served a purpose, if only for some tangential aspect of research. If I am to justify these acquisitions, it must be through the work that they support. In an age when people starve almost literally in front of my eyes, if I can break away from my desk to get a biscuit, I had better be fucking certain that what I write when I come back to that desk (too busy usually to even attend properly to the taste of the food) is worth the effort. Dig deep, mine the very depths of your experience and your imagination, write true, make it good—make it count.

Raymond Chandler said we’re competing for beer money, so we have a duty to make our work gripping, entertaining. If we write with our eye on everything the world is, everything about it that demands our attention, we have a duty to do much, much more.

Fiction Books