Scribbles in the Margins Read online

  For a few pounds or dollars we can visit places we are curious about, but not curious enough to part with hundreds more. Better still if they are places nigh on impossible to visit – travel books smash international protocols, defy dictator decrees and etch new lines on the map. The author is a martyr, heaping troubles upon his or her shoulders so that we never need encounter them, and a courier, delivering entire continents to our doors. Airports need not be suffered, nor searing heat or glacial cold. He or she risks death in the Urals so we can know that Ukrainian rock pools harbour murky water, gobbles 17 shots of Albanian raki to inform us of its likeness to paraffin, and delivers into our nostrils the knowledge that smalltown Tunisian pillows whiff of tobacco. The writer becomes hopelessly, petrifyingly lost in a neighbourhood of staring natives and rabid stray hounds; we turn the page, gripped by the peril, elated when sanctuary is found.

  This delight is enhanced if the travel book is an old one. Here, the places encountered are completely impossible to visit. Characters the author helps us shake hands and laugh with are long dead, their dialects departed and their streets folded into the ground. Perhaps even the country itself has slipped away behind war, revolution and aftermath. In this case, not only is the book allowing geographical movement – we are indulging in time travel.

  Travel is permanently entertaining and occasionally exhilarating when we don’t have to be there. To be taken across the world like this is to swallow a globe. Places we have never been within five thousand miles of are known intimately. We can hold a conversation about them, becoming an actor, that book a script from the vaults. A country is ticked off and then placed back on the shelf. Here is a guidebook without the hassle of identifying and being underwhelmed by recommended restaurants. We have eavesdropped on an entire nation while still lying in bed.

  14

  Feeling bereft having finished a book

  There should be a word for it – something lyrical, and probably Gaelic or ancient Greek. Only such languages could withstand the complexity involved, because the emptiness a reader encounters having completed a loved book is not one of profound sadness alone. That book has given joy that will linger and spark blissful reminiscing. There is a sense of loss, but also knowledge that in recent days and weeks we have been enriched by its pages. Perhaps, too, the type of person who invests so much in reading finds this soft grief not altogether uncomfortable.

  This doleful pleasure works to a routine. The wedge of paper in one’s right hand thins, from brick to chocolate bar to pamphlet. (What horror, incidentally, on those occasions when a fanned-flick forwards shows that what you thought were leafs of storyline are blanks or adverts for other titles; but what glee when the last page is not final, when an afterword jumps in front of the back door and greets you merrily. Endings within endings, physical twists changing book and feeling.)

  Back in your hands page numbers climb, grains of sand trickling through an hourglass. The plot rises and bubbles, swirling towards satisfaction and resolution. You are simultaneously overtaken by involvement in the story (how on earth can this end well?) and creeping horror about real life (no other book can ever be as good as this one). The clock ticks towards THE END and you are lost, enraptured. Beneath the anguish, there exists a core of vindication that books still elicit this response in you, still make you feel as happy and sad, as black and white, as they did in childhood and adolescence. They remain a typeset whirlwind.

  Soon, there is no more. Those characters you have spent time with – have shown patience towards, have shared moments tender, droll and wretched with, have thought (worried, even) about during your real life hours – are gone. Your guests have left the house.

  While the book is being read, it is alive. Then it is slapped shut with a yearning sigh, and ruefully shelved. The first page giveth life, the last taketh it away. Now starts the search for something good enough to help us wallow in our bereavement all over again.

  15

  Scribbles in the margins

  There are a protective few who see writing in a book as sinful. The very act of taking ink or lead to the page is desecration and vandalism, graffiti splattered across a sacred monument. Handwritten squiggles irritate and even offend. These delights are not all universal.

  Perhaps your own views float somewhere between such militancy and complete leniency. Library books should be left alone – ‘This book must be treated with care,’ as school lending lists, glued to inside covers, used to read – and pens quarantined during reading. However, stumbling across gentle pencil etchings scribbled in the margins can raise the spirits like a free toy in breakfast cereals used to. Just as gifts buried deep in Ricicles meant the day started on the crest of a wave, lead markings cropping up early in a book can immediately enamour you to it. To shut them out in a fit of belligerence would be to snuff bonus life from a book.

  By its nature, this pleasure springs from a pre-owned title. During an early breeze through its pages, such scribbles jump from the margin as if standing on tiptoes to be seen. They quickly transfix, leaving the printed text a few steps behind them, and may offer insight or conversely drip-feed enigma – perceptive interpretations or apparently random squiggles and words.

  Scribbles take us briefly into the lives of unknown readers gone before. The fumes of revision angst and fleeting dedication to a work are trapped within. In a classic American novel, words conveying colours and textures are circled. A poetry anthology is pocked with technical terms which rest against the start of lines declaring ‘simile’ and ‘metaphor’. Bubbly handwriting asserts that, ‘He is saying here not what the line says but that his relationship with his dad is troubled.’ In the pages of a play, prosaic names like Nigel and Barbara are scrawled next to ‘Estragon’ or ‘Juliet’. Such jottings move through the years – the snooty certainties of academia, the aspiring author placing a star by impressive imagery, a lovelorn reader finding their own feelings perfectly encapsulated in one line, the tiny question marks of a grandma thriving through distance learning.

  Then, the marks tail off and a book’s main text is finally alone. Perhaps the pencil editor despaired and gave up, or saw nothing else worthy of action or feeling. Each scrawl, doodle and annotation is an amiable prisoner, sleeping in pages for years until released. They are dispatches from another world, adding texture and coupling readers across time. The pencil is a mighty thing.

  16

  Losing an afternoon organising bookshelves

  It can start with a sudden need to find a particular title, or when edging into place the recently read. Among the shelves, concentration immediately departs for another room. Books are shuffled and stroked, pulled from their berths to leave gaps in the shelf’s gums, and dangerous thoughts begin: shouldn’t this be over there, with his others? Surely all poetry should be together? Why are travelogues mixed in with travel guides? What was I thinking?

  Some shifting begins. The odd errant, half-read masterpiece of a biography is retrieved from its horizontal mooring by atlases and dictionaries, turned upright, and placed among a small muster of other life stories across the room. That would be that, except your eyes have fallen upon a bygone title, which must now be grabbed and encountered. Everything is I forgot I had this! and Where the hell’s the sequel gone?, the latter stirring a search. In that one act of rehousing a biography, you have become a chess piece moved around by a hundred Grand Masters of paper, ink and card.

  The chain continues. Lost and found, connections made, serendipitous rediscoveries. Books are held and considered reverentially almost as if they may at any point begin to speak. Their maturing can be observed: dusty scents, amber leafs, warps and bows, and the many niggles and nobbles of advancing age. Blurbs and back covers are scanned once more, their persuasive ways charming anew, and throwing a wave back to the you that bought and read this book in times and places long ago. The typeface, chapter headings, characters, illustrations or mere feel of the object momentarily bring not only the book back to life, but the person w
ho read it. And then you spot something else.

  Time has, most likely, ceased to matter. Hours become irrelevant. Surrounding you on the floor are book piles that resemble rock formations, crumbling Roman pillars and staircases to nowhere. Deliberately or not, it appears that the shelves are being reorganised. The chaotic librarian in you proceeds. A system is concocted: half-alphabet, half-oh-that’ll-fit-there; nothing too foolproof, nothing that will prevent this shambolic bliss from occurring again in a few years’ time. Volumes are escorted to their new lodgings, clacking like clogs on cobbles as they land.

  Finally, after this house clearance in reverse, the job is done. Now comes the moment to sit surveying your multicoloured army of straight-backed soldiers, and the moment to realise that you never did find the book you were searching for.

  17

  When a novel makes you snivel

  We think we’re fine and then we’re gone. Among the paragraphs a burn rises in the throat and holding it down with a gulp is like trying to extinguish a bonfire with a pipette. The heart rises, and then a single line momentarily tears it in two.

  This is not wild bawling, and it doesn’t last long. In any case, if a book has got us once, it will soon have us again. It is, in fact, controlled and measured snivelling – a shot of outward breath, a quickfire sniff or two, and at a push a sigh that comes as a surprise. Yet it retains meaning and significance, and best of all sates a reader’s need for on-page sadness. As the bad news is delivered, the coffin is lowered or the justice miscarried, we can bask in luxurious melancholy and blubber at the travesty of it all.

  It takes craft for an author to gather this storm, whether making a child feel deeply involved with a wronged witch, or a cynical adult become stirred by thwarted romance. That writer pulls emotion from within the reader unexpectedly, a benign hand conducting tears for their cathartic qualities. It feels good to sob, and it is difficult to forget a book that makes us do so.

  There is a singular comfort in crying because of a book. It is a private outpouring of hidden emotion. It is intense and individual, and completely spontaneous, where tears in the cinema are shared and contagious. It feels easier than crying inside the real world, as if a book cover is a veil behind which repressed sensations can be aired and released.

  18

  Not ‘getting’ a book people rave about

  ‘Stunning,’ says one jacket quote. ‘An instant classic,’ splashes another. Newspaper reviews gush over a month of Sundays, bestowing words such as ‘masterpiece’ and ‘extraordinary’, and cataloguing exactly why this book could well change everything we thought we knew. There on a railway station wall is its cover, swollen to barn-door size; there it is again, preening from the frazzled pages of a free newspaper discarded on a train seat. The book is talked about on the radio, and even on television. A film version, goes the rumour, is already in production. Every author’s dream is coming true.

  All of this can be wilfully resisted, though it is a shame not to read a book just because it has begun to behave like an invading army. What is harder to avoid is a friend’s recommendation and, worse still, their foisting a copy upon you. ‘It’s brilliant,’ they say, ‘you’ll love it.’

  It can only be avoided for so long. Like ironing or a difficult conversation at work, it must be tackled. And so you begin. The first line jars, the second grates. The dialogue makes you wince. When your eyes scan that certain characters are about to appear, your stomach plummets as if they are making their approach in real life. You feel like ripping their names from the page. Or perhaps the writing, you acknowledge, is noble enough; it is simply the story which riles you, whether in its general bearing or because the topic is unsettling. An angry head is shaken and an incredulous thought given to its readers and devotees: what’s wrong with these people?

  Your dislike is so thorough that you can no longer suspend your disbelief, and you find yourself muttering the sacrilegious phrase, ‘That would never happen.’ You simply don’t get it. This book is the Emperor’s New Clothes but with a spin-off range of t-shirts. It makes you question first your own judgement, then the world’s, and then, worst of all, your recommending friend’s.

  What a heretic you are . . . and isn’t it wonderful? It takes courage to dissent, to risk accusations of contrariness and to prick the bubble of received wisdom. For something so small, a book can make the meekest person bold and raging. There is delight in that, and in tossing the acclaimed novel into a corner, knowing that you are right.

  19

  When film and TV adaptations get it right

  A novel’s character strides off the page and straight into your imagination. In a flash he or she has become a physical entity, even if at first in silhouette. The character has a style of clothes, a walk, a voice – perhaps a face. Even if an author uses ample description to build a picture, much remains subject to a reader’s interpretation. They score the dots and then you join them.

  The same goes for a book’s locations. Your brain is a set designer, cladding the walls, rolling the carpets and deciding how much casual mess to clutter the scene in. The conceiving of entire streets is left partially to you, and physical journeys are projected behind your eyes. As if to emphasise how personal such imaginings are, no two readers envisage people or places in exactly the same way. Police-style facial composites drawn from their descriptions of a character would likely turn out two very different Wanted posters.

  Your perception of that character becomes sacrosanct, definitive and dear to you. Then, anxious tidings – there is to be a screen version of the book. How can whatever and whoever makes it to film match the comfort and perfection inside your head? Fears rumble, nervousness creeps: a miscast actor could usurp the finely crafted character you currently picture, ruining your mind’s eye – ‘that’s not how he speaks’; the whole book could be badly adapted, or worse still used as mere ‘source material’; you may actually have to share this story, your story, with millions of people. Your inclination, then, could be to avoid entirely the television or cinema adaptation. Therein sits a snobbish form of pleasure that is a cousin to schadenfreude.

  If such petty internal squabbles can be set aside, however, a far more exuberant kind of pleasure is possible. Those tidings of a motion picture or Sunday night series inspire excitement. Castings are announced, and, oh yes, isn’t she perfect for Dickens, or isn’t he an ideal Stephen King villain? There are advertisements on the television or trailers at the cinema, making your heart race. The programme is scheduled or a release date is set and anticipation turns into light-headed giddiness. It is as if the beloved book is being re-released with a fresh coating of bliss. The time comes and you demand silence in the front room, or scold the popcorn-rattler at ten paces. Your body is a tangle of butterflies and hopes. Then, the metaphorical curtain rises and with a theme tune’s early notes or a first glance of a title card, exultancy springs. It is as if you are finally meeting a friend you have only ever known before via Skype or email.

  A world only previously encountered on paper and inside your head is suddenly 3D, HD and Technicolor. It is like strolling into a dream. Amusements beyond the series or film itself are many. You behold characters and spot locations, comparing them with prose descriptions and your own interpretations, and reflect upon how well rendered they are. There is glee in thinking forwards to dialogue or storylines still to come, elements you cherished in print, and intrigue in wondering how they will be interpreted. Spotting nuances or identifying missing parts gives a cosy, ‘insider’ form of contentment.

  What amasses beyond these singular, personal diversions is an overall gratification that this adaptation just feels right. The very noises it makes, the texture and colour of it, are perfect. Indeed, this version may even complement the original, its characters and worlds everything you dreamed of. Watching a childhood favourite now in screen form brings you even closer to the magic that wisped around the treasured author’s typewriter.

  Perhaps afterwards you remain abl
e to separate book and adaptation, and now have a pair of versions to revel in, as if watching is like listening to a wonderful album of cover songs. The two only come together tangibly in a new edition of the book, now replete with ‘As seen on TV’ etchings or a fresh cover featuring a still shot from the cinema version. Or, and whisper this for it is akin to swearing in church, the adaptation, you reflect, may even be better than the book.

  20

  Smells of books, old or new

  An hour spent inhaling books among their shelves (with the curtains closed) can summon any of the following: wet woodchips in the play-park, primary-school chairs, jumble-sale trousers, garden mud, aeroplane-cabin fumes, rubber bands, sawdust, polluted seaweed, spreadable cheese, ice-cream cones, church furniture, continental hotel rooms upon arrival, farmyards, varnish and paint in a shed, rusty batteries, a chemistry classroom, burnt toast and old two-pence coins.

  Some of these scents must be worked for, some are instant. Not many are pleasant, and yet that doesn’t matter; they are distinctly book odours. Any other musty item would be dismissed to the washing machine or bin. On a book, mustiness equals charm and presence.

  The perfumes of the pages are wildly varied. An old hardback wears damp proudly; a new paperback is subtle and sweet. While each title’s aroma is distinctive there are general scents, which is of enormous comfort to the book lover. It makes for a settling feeling, like snatching a whiff of other people’s home-cooking while passing their houses. These pages may carry parts of our lives on them – the scent of a room from an old house, or a Grandad’s Lambert & Butlers. They catch our throats in more ways than one.