The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life (4 page)

Berlioz vanished from sight under the tramcar and a round, dark object rolled across the cobbles, over the kerbstone and bounced along the pavement.

It was a severed head.'

Google tells me the Komsomol was the popular name for the youth wing of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and not the Moscow municipal tram network. But it's academic: I'm in.

Right here is where my life changes direction. This is the moment I resolve to finish this book – a severed head bouncing across the cobblestones. Life must be held at bay, just for a few days, if for no reason other than to prove it can be done. I need to know what happens next.

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891 and died in Moscow in 1940 and at no point in-between, as far as I can establish, did he ever visit Broadstairs – never toured the Dickens Museum on a drizzly afternoon, never ordered a milkshake at Morelli's. But let's pretend he did. Imagine he manifested himself in the Albion Bookshop on Albion Street and discovered, as I had done, a copy of something called
The Master and Margarita
, with his name on the spine and cover. For a number of reasons, he would be astonished.

Macтep и Mapгapитa, usually translated as
The Master and Margarita
, was unpublished at the time of Bulgakov's death – unpublished and, in one sense, unpublishable. For many years, it was available only as
samizdat
(written down and circulated in secret); to be found in possession of a copy was to risk imprisonment. Even its first official appearance in the journal
Moskva
in 1966 was censored; the first complete version was not published until 1973. Yet here it is in Broadstairs, available to purchase and in English to boot. ‘Бoжe мoй!'
⁹

Another reason Bulgakov might be astounded to find his novel, in English, in a small Kent bookshop, might stagger out onto the pavement to catch his breath and, with a trembling hand, light a cigarette – ‘Я нyждaюcь в дымe!'
¹⁰
– is that back when he died, the book remained unfinished. The first draft was tossed into a stove in 1930, after Bulgakov learned that his play,
Cabal of Sanctimonious Hypocrites,
had been banned by the Soviet authorities (who, unsurprisingly, did not care for the title). After five years' work, he abandoned a second draft in 1936. He commenced a third draft the same year and chiselled away at it, making corrections and additions, until April 1940, when illness forced him to abandon his labours. A few weeks later, Bulgakov expired, exasperated. Macтep и Mapгapитa was completed by his widow, Elena Sergeevna; and it was she who spent the next twenty-five years trying to get it published. (‘Eлeнa, мoя любoвь, ecть кoe-чтo, чтo мы дoлжны oбcyдить . . .'
¹¹
)

Have you read
The Master and Margarita
? It cannot be denied that the early part of the book is often inscrutable, a barrage of in-jokes savaging institutions and individuals of the early Soviet era which only an antique Muscovite or an authority on early twentieth-century Russian history would recognise or find amusing. And then there is the business with Rome and Pontius Pilate. Essentially, it is a book one has to stick with and trust.

Here are the bare bones of the plot. The Devil lands in Moscow, disguised as a magician. With Him is an infernal entourage: a witch, a valet, a violent henchman with a single protruding fang, and an enormous talking cat called Behemoth, a tabby as big as a tiger. The diabolic gang leave a trail of panic and destruction across the literary and governmental Moscow landscape. Sometimes this is grotesquely amusing, at others terrifying; frequently it is both. In a lunatic asylum we are introduced to the master, a disillusioned author whose novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate (ah, I see!) has been rejected for seemingly petty reasons. His response has been to burn the manuscript and shut out the world, even turning away his lover, Margarita, who ardently believes in his work.

Of course, I only appreciated the autobiographical significance of this in retrospect and the communistic targets of the satire remained obscure to me. In terms of the story itself, the promise of the severed head was slow to be realised. Had it not been for the half-forgotten kick of reading a book at all, I probably would not have carried on; for the first couple of days, I was compelled to do so by little more than my own stubbornness. This is only a book; I like reading books; this one will not get the better of me. But the more I read, the more I understood – or rather, understood that I did not need to understand. If I let it, the book would carry me instead.

The Master and Margarita
begins as a waking nightmare. It has the relentlessness of a nightmare, the same persistent illogic one finds in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
, but nastier, crueller – dead eyes, derision, severed heads, a cat whose mischievous grin betokens only black magic. Once in train, it is pitiless. But for the nightmare to take hold, the reader must fall asleep and wake up somewhere else.

Back in reality, though, I had to stay awake. I read in fifteen- or twenty-minute bursts, in lunch breaks or during
Yo Gabba Gabba!
It wasn't a good way to go about it. To engage with this book when there were tasks to be performed, emails to be sent, ham sandwiches to be packed, or a purple dragon singing a song about being friends, was hard. It required sacrifices. Wine, TV and conversation were all postponed. It also required selfishness and cunning. ‘Just off to the Post Office,' I would announce at the busiest hour of the day, ‘I won't be long.' And in the gloriously slow-moving queue, I would turn a few more pages.

At the beginning of the second half of the novel, Margarita is transformed into a witch at the Devil's command. She accepts an invitation to His great Spring Ball. This is when both Margarita – and
The Master and Margarita –
take flight. She soars naked across Mother Russia – across the cities and mountains and rivers – transformed, ecstatic and free. And as she does, borne aloft on Bulgakov's impassioned words, I felt the dizzying force of books again, lifting me off the 6.44, out of myself, away from Mrs Atrixo and her hands. How had I lived without this?

The Master and Margarita
is a novel about many things, some obscure, others less so. To me, at this point in my life, it seems to be a book about books; and I love books. But I seem to have lost the knack of reading them.

After the ball, Margarita is granted a wish by the Devil. She asks only that the master be restored to her from the asylum. And then: ‘
Please send us back to his basement in that street near the Arbat, light the lamp again and make everything as it was before
.'

‘An hour later Margarita was sitting, softly weeping from shock and happiness, in the basement of the little house in one of the sidestreets off the Arbat. In the master's study all was as it had been before that terrible autumn night of the year before. On the table, covered with a velvet cloth, stood a vase of lily-of-the-valley and a shaded lamp. The charred manuscript-book lay in front of her, beside it a pile of undamaged copies. The house was silent. Next door on a divan, covered by his hospital dressing-gown, the master lay in a deep sleep, his regular breathing inaudible from the next room . . . She smoothed the manuscript tenderly as one does a favourite cat and turning it over in her hands she inspected it from every angle, stopping now on the title page, now on the end.'

But of course an arrangement with the Devil has its price. Life cannot stay the same. For the master and Margarita to live forever, their old selves must die. She will stay at the Devil's side, he will be free to roam the cosmos:

‘“But the novel, the novel!” she shouted at the master, “take the novel with you, wherever you may be going!”

“No need,” replied the master. “I can remember it all by heart.”

“But you . . . you won't forget a word?” asked Margarita, embracing her lover and wiping the blood from his bruised forehead.

“Don't worry. I shall never forget anything again,” he answered.'

It took me a little over five days to finish
The Master and Margarita,
but its enchantment lasted far longer. In death, the master and his book become as one. The book is no longer a passive object, a bundle of charred paper, but the thing which lives within his heart, which he personifies, which allows him to travel wherever and whenever he likes. The deal Margarita makes with the Devil gives him eternity. And this is how
The Master and Margarita
had made its journey down a century, from reader to reader, to a Broadstairs bookshop. Some part of that book, of Bulgakov himself, now lived on in me. The secret of
The Master and Margarita
, which seems to speak to countless people who know nothing about the bureaucratic machinations of the early Stalinist dictatorship or the agony of the novel's gestation: words are our transport, our flight and our homecoming in one.

Which you don't get from Dan Brown.

So began a year of reading dangerously.
The Master and Margarita
had brought me back to life. Now, if I could discover the gaps in the daily grind – or make the gaps – I knew I could stay there. Could I keep that spark alive in the real world, I wondered? Yes! Because to do so would truly be to never forget anything again. All I needed was another book; that was the deal. This was not reading for pleasure, it was reading for dear life. But, looking back, perhaps I should have stopped to think. With whom, exactly, had the deal been struck?

‘The master, intoxicated in advance by the thought of the ride to come, threw a book from the bookcase on to the table, thrust its leaves into the burning tablecloth and the book burst merrily into flame.'

Middlemarch
by George Eliot

‘He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.'

Middlemarch
, Book 2, ‘Old and Young'

There is a classic episode of the British television comedy
Hancock
¹
called ‘The Bedsitter', in which Tony Hancock, in a characteristically vain attempt at self-improvement, decides to ‘have a go' at Bertrand Russell's
Human Knowledge: Its Limits and Scope
.
²
Every few sentences – few words even – he has to put the book down and consult the large dictionary on his bedside table (‘
Well, if that's what they mean, why don't they say so
?'). Soon, frustration gets the better of him:

‘No, it's him. It's him that's at fault, he's a rotten writer. A good writer should be able to put down his thoughts clearly in the simplest terms understandable to everybody. It's him. He's a bad writer. Not going to waste my time reading him.' (
Drops
Human Knowledge: Its Limits and Scope
on the floor and picks up another book
.) ‘Ah, that's more like it –
Lady Don't Fall Backwards
.'

Fifty years later, a similar scene was being played out in our house. I lay on the bed with a nice new copy of George Eliot's
Middlemarch
, and tried to silence my inner Hancock.

Eliot
(from the ‘Prelude'): Who cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time . . .

Hancock
(from ‘The Bedsitter'): No, no, I should know. It's in English, I should know what he's talking about.
³

Eliot
: Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women . . .

Hancock
: He's a human being the same as me, using words, English words, available to us all. Now, concentrate.

I succeeded in reading the ‘Prelude' in its entirety. (‘
Yes, it's hard graft for we intellectuals these days
.') Then I read it again. It was only three paragraphs long, so I took a quick turn round the room, and then read it a third time. No, it was no good. I could hardly understand a word. But, unlike Hancock, I had no
Lady Don't Fall Backwards
to fall back on.
Middlemarch
and I were going to have to get along.

Of course, the problem was not
Middlemarch
. Despite my surprise conquest of
The Master and Margarita
, and the blast of confidence it gave me, I quickly knew I had overreached myself.
The Master and Margarita
had been an obstacle course;
Middlemarch
, on the other hand, gave every indication of being a 688-page punishment beating. Once upon a time, I had been in the habit of reading this kind of elaborate, circumlocutory prose. But that was when I was a student, full of piss and vinegar and blithe ignorance. Two decades on, I was gravely out of condition, short of breath, barely limping along. It was too much, too soon, too old.

In those days, as an English literature undergraduate at a self-consciously progressive university, it was possible to read a couple of classics every week – unlikely, almost unheard of, but possible. In contrast, an audit of my current week's reading would look something like this:

200 emails (approx.)

Discarded copies of
Metro

The
NME
and monthly music magazines

Excel spreadsheets

The review pages of Sunday newspapers

Business proposals

Bills, bank statements, junk mail, etc.

CD liner notes

Crosswords, Sudoku puzzles, etc.

Ready-meal heating guidelines

The occasional postcard

And a lot of piddling about on the Internet

Of these, the Sudoku was the most inexplicable to me. What a waste of time! I loathed it. Yet I could pass a whole train journey wrestling with one small grid, a long hour that brought me little or no pleasure, even on the rare occasions it ended in success. The shelves of the bookstores at Victoria station were packed with competing Oriental number tortures: Sudoku, Sun Doku, Code Doku, Killer Sudoku . . . As a former student acquaintance had written in the concluding sentence of a 10,000-word dissertation on mechanical engineering: ‘
It doesn't matter anyway, because it's all a load of shit
.'
⁴