Books

I have always read books. I can’t remember what the name of the first one was, but no doubt it was one of the collections of fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. I can’t recall who wrote which today, but among my favourites were Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling. I also had a book of Aesop’s Fables which I loved, these clever little morality tales like the boy who called wolf too often. This always turned out to be false but one day when the real wolf appeared, nobody believed him.

When I was 7 years of age we moved from a flat in Rathmines to a new house in Raheny where I was to live till my early twenties. One of the first things my parents did was enrol me in the nearest library which was in Howth, about 5 miles away or a fourpenny bus ride. Every week I would take the bus out to the library to get another book, and sometimes twice a week, as being a junior member of the library I could only take one book at a time. Here I found books of every hue and I remember particularly liking the ones dealing with the great mythical heroes of Rome and Greece such as Hercules and Achilles. I took my first dip into non-fiction here with books on astronomy. There I learned about space, the planets and stars. Of course in those days we hadn’t sent probes to the Moon or Mars or Jupiter and many speculated about the possibility of Mars being inhabited by intelligent beings. I got a comic weekly called The Knockout which made great use of this ignorance to weave great tales of evil aliens inhabiting not only Mars but also Jupiter. The Jovian Whip was the weapon of choice on Jupiter I recall. I had often looked up at the night sky from our back garden and wondered what the stars were. Now I was beginning to learn a little. However my favourite books from those times were the Billy Bunter series by Frank Richards. Probably horrendously non politically correct today, but who cares, I loved them. Billy the “fat owl of the remove” as his so called friends nicknamed him, romped through about 30 or 40 books getting up to all sorts of mischief in Greyfriars School. Great stuff.

There were, of course, other books like Biggles or Just William, but by the time I was fourteen, when I could join the adult library, I was tiring of these. I can’t recall exactly what I started reading then, probably stuff like Kidnapped and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, both great tales, and I was also getting into science fiction which my father disapproved of. In fact I remember him writing to my English teacher at the time and asking him for a list of suitable books for young teenagers and I guess Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal was not what he was thinking of. I read this load of garbage when I was 20, more proud of the fact that I managed to buy it in Holy Catholic Ireland before the censor banned it than for its literary prowess. All about a sex change if you must know. Then one day in class, Shakespeare, as we had nicknamed this particular master, came over to me surreptitiously and quickly drew an envelope out of his pocket and gave it to me. “Give that to your father,” he whispered. This was the letter with the list of suitable books. I can’t recall what it contained now, except Desert Island by Daniel Defoe which I didn’t much like. It was pretty boring stuff or at least it was to me then. Maybe I’d think differently today.

Talking about books I like and don’t like, I remember when I was in my early twenties and reading Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger. This charted a few days in the life of the central character, a teenage Holden Caulfield trying to come to terms with life and everything. I thought it was a great book. About 10 years later I read it again and thought it was childish and silly and couldn’t understand what I’d seen in it in the first place. The strange thing is that I read it again on a whim about 5 years ago and once again thought it was a great book. Maybe books change as you yourself change throughout life.

Anyway, shortly after I left school at 18 and getting my first job as a printer, I wanted to find out what all the great books were that I should read. I came across a volume The History of Western Literature by J B Priestley. At least I thought that was the name of it, but can only find a reference to a book by the same author, Literature and Western Man. I assume it is the same book, but no matter. This book discussed all the great works of Western literature, everything from Cervantes to Dostoyevsky. I read it from cover to cover, noting down most of the volumes mentioned. I then commenced to buy many of them and thus began a marathon session of classic reading. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, Confessions by Rousseau, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. There were many others too but I can’t mention them all otherwise this article would go on for ever. I liked most of them but some I found difficult and didn’t like at all, like Rousseau and Mann.

One of the classics which I particularly liked was Germinal by Emile Zola. This novel dealt with the exploitation of coal mining workers in a small French town. One of the most moving parts was the description of the old horse who had worked all his life in the mine and would die in the mine. He even knew the number of journeys he had to make every day in the pit and once that number was reached he would do no more and would have to be led back to his stable. And he would think of where he was born surrounded by large fields with something bright in the sky. In his old age he now had great difficulty recalling exactly what the sun looked like. For some reason I never forgot that description.

Another favourite was Wilkie Collins. I read two of his novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. The latter is regarded as the precursor to modern detective novels and a darn good tale it was too, all about the stealing and eventual recovery of a precious diamond. The former tells the story of a young man meeting a strange woman in white one evening who appears to be in distress. He helps her but it turns out she had escaped from a mental asylum. The next day he travels to a household who have appointed him as a teacher where he finds one of the inhabitants bears a remarkable likeness to the women in white of the night before. The mystery gathers pace from there. I enjoyed the quaintness of the language of both these books setting them apart from the modern day thrillers and yet lending them an old fashioned sense of adventure. Page turners both of them.

Science fiction was a genre I was never really interested in because I found that these were the usual cowboy, thriller, fairy stories simply translated to outer space. However, there are a few imaginative writers for which this is certainly not true and who I would like to mention. I admired Isaac Asimov immensely. He wrote one of my favourite short stories The Last Question. Here two computer operatives, suitably bored, fed a question to their computer which basically asked how to prevent the universe running out of energy at the end of time. The computer comes back with the reply that there was insufficient data for a meaningful answer. Of course as time went on and computers became more and more powerful, eventually with one supercomputer controlling the whole world, then the whole galaxy, the reply was always the same. Eventually the energy in the universe wound down, man disappeared and all that was left was this super-duper computer sitting in hyperspace with nothing to do but churn over in its memory circuits the question of how to prevent the universe from dying. At last it had the answer and simply said “Let there be light!” That was some story, I can tell you. Asimov wrote much else in this class of fiction, including the famous I, Robot series of stories. This examined some of the eternal questions such as who or what made man. This took the form of one of the robots, who had intelligence built into them, asking who had made robots and decided that it was an almighty God robot. He wouldn’t believe, even when shown the factories where the robots were made, that they were made by humans. Of course Asimov wrote many other types of fiction, as well as science fact and many of his books on science contributed to my love of this subject.

Another such writer was Arthur C Clarke. His Childhood’s End was a stunning scenario of the end of our world. Here alien ships appeared in the skies of Earth, and as in so many other stories of this type, were not out to conquer us, but to help us make the transition between our “childhood” and our ascent into more superior beings. I recall with pleasure the scene where during a bullfight the whole audience felt the pain of the fatal sword thrust into the animal. These aliens were very much against cruelty to all animals whether man or beast and rightly so.

We mustn’t forget H G Wells. Even though he was writing during the first half of the 20th century he produced some marvellously inventive works, including The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. This last was made into a radio show by the great film director Orsen Welles and broadcast in America in the 1930s. This was so well done and had such an effect that many people tuning in after the programme had begun and missing the announcement that it was only a radio play, actually thought that New Jersey was under attack by alien forces. A certain amount of panic ensued but was not as bad as some news reports of the time would have us believe.

And then there was the great book Contact by Carl Sagan, a planetary specialist and physicist which made an attempt to relay a very factually, science based narrative about first contact with an extra-terrestrial intelligent civilisation. Gone were the ridiculous scenarios of aliens arriving on Earth in an attempt to exterminate all human life or worse. In fact, the chances of UFO’s being alien craft is practically zero considering the banality of the reports people make on this subject and the fact that the incredible distances required to be crossed through interstellar space present such a formidable challenge that only a very advanced technological race could even consider the prospect. And as far as I’m concerned a sufficiently advanced race would long ago have given up the illusion of conquering inferior races. No, Contact dealt with the more realistic possibility of an alien probe left in orbit around the star Vega whose radio communication is picked up on Earth.

Other science fiction books I liked were Brave New World by Aldous Huxley which considers a possible future Earth where everybody is bred for a certain standard of living and live “perfect” lives under the influence of drugs and are thereby controlled so that nothing gets out of hand. Outside this environment and completely detached from it live the uncontrolled humans or savages. Of course the whole thing goes terribly wrong and whereas on the face of it, things seems ideal, in reality they are not and shows how much freedom itself means to mankind. The other great futuristic novel is 1984 by George Orwell. This is indeed a very bleak society with most people being ruled over by Big Brother. All information is tightly controlled and histories are changed and records altered as Big Brother decides. It is total mind control and not a society where anybody would ever wish to be. And it would be remiss of me not to mention that other great book by George Orwell, Animal Farm. This is told as an allegory with farm animals being the main characters. They decide to set up a communist system and eventually it is shown up for the sham that it is with some animals “more equal than others”. It implies that communist societies are little more than dictatorships which is very true.

In my late teens I got into the horror book. Besides reading the popular Pan Books of Horror which contained short ghoulish stories, some good, some bad, I also got hooked on Dennis Wheatley. His The Devil Rides Out is a classic tale of Satanism. Although somewhat dated today, it was a page turner at the time and very risqué. However, much better than that were the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe: The Pit and the pendulum, Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death to mention but a very few. These tales were superbly crafted and I loved the Gothic sense of old buildings from a bygone age which seemed to penetrate them.

Dracula by our own Bram Stoker was a story of evil told mostly through letters and diaries and popularised the undead vampire in literature. It’s a book well worth reading and dispels the myth that the vampire was a sexually driven creature as Hollywood wanted to portray. He was, as Stoker intended, an evil monster who preyed on both men and women to satisfy his blood lust. The Witching Hour by Anne Rice must be mentioned here. Her vampire novels pale into insignificance in comparison. Here was a great big book set in New Orleans about a family of witches. Not only is it a narrative set in the modern day city, but it is a history of this particular witch family stretching back to Scotland in the 16th century, narrated like a history of a royal family through the generations. Finally my favourite book in this oeuvre has to be The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. I must have read it at least six times over the years and what I liked most about this novel was its doubt by the Jesuit priest in diabolic possession and his attempts to explain it in terms of modern day science. Ultimately in the fiction itself the devil is real and the possession is real, but its attempts to put a modern psychological interpretation on this phenomenon makes the story far more realistic in so far as it can go.

One genre of writing which I never really liked were detective novels. I found Agatha Christie confusing and all over the place. However, one writer of such books was Arthur Conan Doyle whose famous creation Sherlock Holmes captivated me. I enjoyed his attention to detail and the way Holmes could tell almost the impossible from a stranger. This was quickly explained in logical detail by the author making it fairly obvious in hindsight. One of my favourite sayings of Sherlock Holmes was “All things being equal, when you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever is left must be the truth”. A great pity some of our physicists today wouldn’t take a leaf out of this book. It always struck me as strange that such an insightful man as Conan Doyle could have been so taken in by two young girls who faked photographs of fairies in their back garden in Cottingley.

Another favourite book, this time moving to court trials, was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This is about the serious issue of rape and racial inequality and is set in Alabama. Basically a black man is accused of raping a young white girl and the lawyer who defends him is the father of the child through whose eyes the story is related. A wonderful courtroom drama showing up the ignorance and bigotry of racists.

Over the years I’ve become very interested in history, something which no doubt would have horrified me in my teens as I had no love for it in school. But maybe that was because of the way they taught it. My inter cert years were learning the stuff by rote while my leaving cert years were crashingly boring. I particularly like church history, because after all most western European history is tied irrevocably to it. I hasten to add that I’m not leaving out the rest of the world, but this just happens to be the area of history I like. Although I usually read factual history books, a very powerful novel is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. It is actually a murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the 14th century with the lead character, a Franciscan friar by the name of William of Baskerville, playing a sort of Sherlock Holmes in his efforts to solve the crimes. It is full of historical facts relating in great detail one of the great debates of the time, did Jesus Christ own his own clothes. While these matters may seem trivial, they are in fact deep questions. Because the Franciscans owned nothing following their leader St Francis of Assisi, a rich man who gave everything he owned away in order to follow Christ, their situation was the total opposite of the pope and cardinals of the church who lived in sumptuous luxury. Indeed the monks in the monastery itself lived a much better life than the peasants who lived in abject poverty in the surrounding countryside often depending on the charity of the monastery to get their daily food. And of course the Inquisition arrives at the monastery to liven thing up somewhat.

Another book which deals in a historical fictional sort of way is The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Set in England in the years leading up to the second world war, it tells the story of a head butler and how he runs the house with a whole hierarchy of maids, housekeepers, under servants, under butlers, cooks and others. In parallel we have the owner of the house, Lord Darlington, who believes in pacifying the Nazis and does not recognise the evil they are about to unleash on the world. What draws me to the book is the insight it gives into the two class society where the servant class knew their place and kept to it, the rich knew theirs and all accepted this sorry state of affairs as if it had been ordained by God himself, which many believed it was.

Moving on to factual history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer is a massive tome of 1400 pages. When I read it in my late teens it was the biggest book I’d read to date. It was the first factual history book I’d ever read, other than the ones from school, and I wasn’t sure if I’d get through it. To my surprise it was extremely easy to read and was so interesting that I found it hard to put down and I completed it in no time. It certainly opened my eyes to the evils of Hitler and Nazi Germany.

While I’ve read a lot of modern history I particularly like to go back to the original sources. Hence I thoroughly enjoyed The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede. He was a monk living in an Northumbrian monastery who wrote his history in the 8th century. Besides the history he relates, the book gives an insight into the people and their beliefs of the time. He charmingly mixes in miracles with his narrative as if they were commonplace and the most natural thing in the world, but his actual history is regarded as fairly solid. Another writer in the same vein is Eusebius who wrote Church History. He was the bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and was writing in the 4th century. The work is the first surviving history of the Christian church covering the period from Christ himself to Eusebius’ own time. Once again it gives a clue into the methods and beliefs of people in that era. Interestingly it is written from a very personal point of view as the early church was only beginning to get its act together and hadn’t dealt sufficiently with many of the doctrines which would later define it, and Eusebius was getting his own point of view across. In fact a later historian of the 19th century would call Eusebius dishonest. For all that, and taking into account that early historians were not as fastidious as most of our modern ones, it is still a fascinating read.

There used to be a programme on BBC radio called Desert Island Discs. A well-known person from the world of the arts was interviewed and asked which eight records he or she would take with them if they were to be stranded on a desert island. The presenter at the time, Roy Plomley, would always ask at the end of the show what book they would bring, besides Shakespeare and the bible. It always amused me that Shakespeare and the bible were givens. In those days I would have taken neither. Today however I’d be happy enough with the bible.

It really is an incredible book. However, I’d take one of the more modern translations rather than the famous King James Version. This version has beautiful language, but like Shakespeare, unless you are familiar with it, it’s difficult going. The book itself is divided into the old and new testaments. The old begins with the book of Genesis, the account of the creation of the world, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. If you read it carefully you’ll find two creation stories which differ considerably. Not only is the order of creation different, in the first story there isn’t even mention of God’s command not to eat of the tree of life. In the mid-19th century a manuscript was discovered called the Epic of Gilgamesh which has a flood story remarkably akin to the version in Genesis with Noah. It turns out that there are many flood stories from ancient times, so it seems to have been a common thread between ancient peoples. The second book in the old testament is Exodus which tells of the escape of the Israelites from Egypt, the plagues sent by God to convince the Pharaoh to allow his people to leave, Moses, the ten commandments, the building of the ark of the covenant. More books follow, Leviticus, a book of the law, Numbers, so called because it begins with a census, and Deuteronomy which contains more law. These first five books are together called the Pentateuch or the Torah. I admit some of these books are quite boring, but others contain great stories and would certainly while away some of the lonely days and nights of a desert island. The rest of the old testament contains books of prophets like Daniel and Isaiah, Psalms and Proverbs, and a very bloody Jewish history. The new testament contains the four gospels, Acts of the Apostles, various letters of St Paul and others and of course the film maker’s dream, The Book of Revelation. This last was written by St John on the island of Patmos and is full of wild imagery, messages for seven churches, the seven seals, the seven trumpets, the seven cups of the wrath of God, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the unleashing of Satan on earth, the final battle of Armageddon. They say Patmos is full of magic mushrooms and reading Revelation, I’d reckon St John must have had his fill.

The bible is a book which would certainly keep you going, a book of exciting tales and great wisdom, a lot of blood and tribulation, a book of hope. I resisted reading it for forty years, but once I took the plunge, it was a journey whose offshoots continue to this day.

I hope you have enjoyed my little trip through literature. I hasten to add that the books mentioned are my own choice and some of them people will love and others people will hate. There are many other books I could have mentioned, but there is not the space nor the time. And now with modern technology on us, maybe the day of the book is over. Maybe we shall take our kindles or similar devices and read online. Maybe eventually our brains will be plugged into the internet and reading will be a thing of the past. But for an old timer like myself, I’m glad I was around when books were read.