An Irishman's Diary

AS PLANNED earlier in the year, I used my holidays to launch another attempt at reading War and Peace in time for the bicentenary of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. I’m only at page 300 yet – the start of Battle of Austerlitz – and it could still go either way. (My attempt to finish the book, I mean, not the battle. The outcome there is obvious.

Any damn fool can see that the Russians’ confidence is misplaced and that Napoleon is deliberately feigning weakness on his right flank to suck them into a doomed attack.) The fact is, reading War and Peace is the literary equivalent of running a marathon. Having just reached the five-mile marker, it’s still way too early to be sure I’ll complete the course. After all, the first time I tried, many years ago, I made it past 1,000 pages, from where the finishing line was in sight. Then, somehow, I hit “the wall”.

It may indeed have been a hydration problem. I was reading the book during school holidays, in a long hot summer. So if the temperatures didn’t sap my energy, they may at least have persuaded me to go outdoors and do the normal things teenagers did back then rather than being stuck in an endless book.

Until now, I didn’t go back to it. But if anything the distractions are even worse these days. In the age of Twitter, you’re all the more inclined to wonder if life’s too short for reading 600,000-word epics from the 19th century. And then there’s the philosophical question of what exactly reading a book means, anyway.

“Speed reading” is a respectable concept, even among committed literary types. But how much of a text can you skip or glide over and still be able to say you read the whole thing? Can you cut corners – the odd boring paragraph, or page – and still collect the commemorative T-shirt afterwards with a good conscience? And what if you plod through every line, mechanically, but find your mind wandering for long sections? Should you go over them again? I don’t know. But for now at least, I’m reading conscientiously. The important thing is not to force the pace early on and to try to establish a rhythm. If I can average 30 pages a day for the rest of August, without discouragement, I’ll think about a sprint finish in September.

MY APOLOGIESto readers if I've been overdoing the literary/athletic metaphor. I blame the New Yorker magazine, which is one of the distractions War and Peace has had to compete with lately, and in which, last week, the two ends of the metaphor collided.

Thus the August 6th issue carried a lengthy exposé of a US marathon runner called Kit Litton. A Michigan dentist (his name and day-job appear to be the only undisputed details of his story), he took up running in middle age. Since when, according to records, he has become a prolific and very competitive athlete.

After completing early marathons, including Boston’s, in the sub-three-hour-30 range – respectable for a fortysomething – he soon progressed to finishing races in under three hours. Then he set himself a goal of running sub-three-hour marathons in every US state, and so doing to raise money for charity.

Unfortunately for him, his increasingly competitive times put him in a position to win prizes in the overage sections of certain races.

This brought him to the attention of other prize winners in his category: an obsessive bunch who tend to know each other and were sometimes surprised to learn post-race that they had been overtaken by this phantom, who nobody had noticed, but whose micro-chipped race number had crossed the start and finish timing mats and (usually) any intermediate mats too.

Another problem for Litton was that, in latter-day marathons, most competitors tend be photographed at several points on the route. As the examinations of his record grew increasingly forensic, it emerged that he often changed clothes during a race, and that he sometimes walked parts of a course, with his number covered up.

The scale of the suspected mass deception increased with the discovery that a marathon he was listed as having won in “West Wyoming” had been a complete invention, boasting its own website and imaginary results.

Yet, even as the online posse closed in on him, Litton declared his intention to run in this year’s Boston Marathon, predicting a two hours 47 finish. In the event, he avoided that high-profile event, and the post-race interview the New Yorker had requested. So the reporter instead turned up at his dental surgery, where he was finally confronted.

It’s a strange story, wherein the deception – criss-crossing America, meticulously researching race routes, finding all the timing mats and somehow crossing them, while avoiding detection – seemed to require more energy than actually running the races fast would have done. And even after the NY’s epic expose, questions remain.

But to get back to the metaphor. In the same week the Litton essay was going to press, by ironic coincidence, a staff reporter with the New Yorker was being exposed for unethical behaviour.

Jonah Lehrer, a 31-year-old young man in a hurry, had previously been in trouble for taking short cuts with work. His sin on this occasion was that, in a new book about the creative process, he had fabricated quotations from – of all the excessively documented people in the world – Bob Dylan.

This is like taking a prize-winning short-cut in the Boston Marathon and hoping nobody in your age category noticed. Unfortunately for Lehrer, somebody did. The New Yorker promptly accepted his resignation and the book has since been withdrawn.