BOOK OF THE DAY: JOHN S DOYLEreviews Howards End is on the LandingBy Susan Hill Profile Books 236pp, £12.99
OF MAKING many books there is no end. So the Bible says, and it still is news. This 37th, or possibly 38th, book by the English novelist Susan Hill is a book about books. It belongs to that thriving category which includes such erudite titles as A History of Reading and such list-based notions as the 1,000 books you have to read before you die (did I say I was unwell?).
Some of these lists turn up in newspapers too, as Susan Hill remarks: 100 books nobody has ever read; 50 books nobody ever finished reading. Many such lists are “a peg on which to hang a sneer”, she says, and always at the same books: Ulysses, War and Peace, Moby Dick ...
And while she admits that she can’t herself read Ulysses, or Proust, and has “a problem” with Canadian and Australian writing, Hill is not a sneerer; she makes the unfashionable point that if we have a problem with the classics the fault is not in the books but in ourselves.
She is a woman with a 16th-century cottage full of books, 60 years’ worth, and she gives the impression that reading these books has been the most important thing in her life.
Her starting point for the present volume was when she went to look on a certain shelf for a book she knew was there. It was not, but on the shelf she found a dozen books she realised she had never read.
Still looking, in other rooms, she came upon 200 books she had never read. Then she picked out a book she had read but had forgotten she owned. And then more of them.
“After that came the books I had read, knew I owned and realised that I wanted to read again.”
It was at this point that she decided to spend a year reading only books already on her shelves: to explore what she had accumulated over a lifetime; to curtail her use of the internet, and, though she had not planned it, to save money.
The result is a galloping course in English literature, the kind of book which appeals either to the very well-read person, or the not-at-all-read. The first will match Hill’s favourites against his own, the second will find thoughtfully chosen suggestions of where to start.
And any reader will find things to look out for, following her enthusiasm: David Cecil’s Library Looking Glass, FM Mayor, Elizabeth Bowen, for example. If reading her books has been the most important thing in her life, it is a compliment to the books, because, since starting out as a novelist at age 18 in the early 1960s Susan Hill has met and befriended the greats, and lets their names fall gracefully: TS Eliot, Charles Causley, Edith Sitwell, CP Snow, “Paddy” Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Benjamin Britten.
EM Forster dropped a book on her foot in the London Library. At a party WH Auden pulled her down to sit on the floor beside him. Hill’s ability finally to reduce, at least in her mind, her entire library down to 40 books that would do her for the rest of her life – or that she would rescue if the house were on fire – might also put some useful ideas into the heads of those whose houses are full of books, but, like Thomas Wentworth Higginson, see their unread books as “like fair maidens who smiled on him in their youth and then passed away”.
John S Doyle is a freelance journalist