Adventures in Reading

I was listening to some show recently, coming to me from who-knows-where, or on what media platform. All I can say is that I identified with the speaker who shared an experience I had also gone through a long time ago. Imagine, if you will, a gangly, weird looking kid who reads more than is good for him. It is his first week of the two-year exam cycle. Fresh smelling books peek out from a heavy school bag. He is seated among forty acne covered fourteen-year-old students, wondering what his well-meaning teacher has on her mind. She tells them to take out the novel they are going to read for their exam, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

I must own up here to the fact that I was late to the whole notion of reading, just didn’t see the point as a busy boy who found roaming around town far more interesting than sitting still to unlock the secrets held within the many dark, hard covered volumes strewn around our house. It didn’t help that the nuns who were entrusted with hammering an alphabet into me, or even basic sums, were more interested in preparing me to receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ than fulfilling their basic contract with the state to teach me something useful. Whatever levels of pedagogic expertise they may ever have possessed were suspiciously missing by the time my friends and I turned up looking for basic reading skills. Signs on it. When my class turned up in big boy school a panicked teacher called in half the parents from my year and broke the news, we were technically illiterate.  Ask any eight-year-old boy and he will confirm that while being illiterate poses no problems for him, his parents knowing this, and demanding he become a reader overnight, is one big pain in the butt. For a while, at least until I was capable of getting through a few Jack and Jane (or possibly Peter and Somebody) Ladybird books, it looked as though my parents had me totally in their sights and that if I strayed off their newly chosen path for me, I would be shot. Now, I had a life that needed living, there were walls to be climbed, apples to be stolen, conkers to be attached to strings, battles to be fought, streams to fall into and a world to be misunderstood as only a boy can misunderstand it. I was anxious to return to this life as quickly as possible, but the signals I received from all around me screamed that normal activities were cancelled until further notice.

The world of Jack and Jane (or possibly Peter and Somebody) was odd at the very least, bazaar by modern standards, or heaven if you are a MAGA fan who wants to turn the clock back to year zero. If you have ever visited there on a student visa you will understand what I mean. Stereotyping aside, (I bet Dad went to work every day dressed in a suit, while Mammy stayed at home and swallowed handfuls of amphetamines. The books were full of era-appropriate, saturated colours, but were populated by very clean, white looking kids. It didn’t help that I was eight and the books were aimed at four-year-olds. I mean, I demanded more from story characters than was to be found between the covers of these books. While Jack, for instance, played with a ball, for some reason, he never sent it through a window, climbed over a neighbour’s fence to retrieve it, or let the air out of it, just to hear the hiss as it deflated. As for Jane, I had little or no interest in her. The uniformed girls in my sister’s comic books were far more captivating, though why I thought so, still harbouring a boy’s loathing for girls, would require a shrink to unravel. And I can’t say with any certainty what it was that Jane kicked around, dolls perhaps, or possibly Jack, I had sisters, knew what they were capable of. What I mean to say, is that if Jack was dull, Jane was a designer-grey character who travelled completely under my radar. I was caught between the two of them and my parents, trapped in a literary quagmire which threatened to destroy my creative soul. Thankfully, I eventually excavated enough words from the pages of these books to please my anxious parents and was finally free to drag myself from the emotional quicksand that was the world of Jack and Jane (or whoever they were.)

To this day I cannot say if my parents lost complete interest in project Jim at this stage, or thought their work was done. All I know, is that while textbooks still hurt me physically just to look at, and induced yawns when opened, Jack and Jane had sparked an interest in other books; ones without pictures, ones where the boys were boys and the girls, in my mind’s eye, looked something like the neatly sketched characters in my sister’s Judy comic books. In these books, ones with plots, ones where kids lived dangerously, where balls broke windows, where children discovered secret caves, where parents left the field of play for most of the book, I found salvation. My younger sister now became a co-conspirator in my literary journey. Together we joined the library and took out every Secret Seven book we could find, quickly followed by the Famous Five. We took it in turn to read aloud to each other, me one page, she, the next, or the next two when my pace was too tardy for her tastes. Being British, these books, though they had an engaging story, induced a feeling of culture shock that offended my Irish soul. There was simply not enough chaos in their worlds for me to give credence to the paper-thin characters. Huck Finn was more to my liking, he, I could identify with, and Just William offered a feet-in-the-air, howl-out-loud experience. My sister and I quickly worked our way through the children’s section of the library and boy was it a relief to get my first adult library card.  

What happened next might explain where I was as a reader by the time I joined my Inter Certificate class and was presented with Great Expectations to read. Books happened to me. By twelve I had my adult library card and an English school book featuring stories by Frank O’Connor. Reading these led me to pick up a full collection of his stories which was hanging around the house and they impressed me enormously. But while Frank O’Connor was good, clean fun, the next book, one discovered mouldering away in a wardrobe at home, was by Guy (or, as we were told, Gee) De Maupassant. Now, here was the real deal; a dark pessimism pervaded, toxic twists were invariably delivered, and morbidity dripped from every tale. A severed hand adorned a mantelpiece, a pearl necklace was not what it seemed to be, and everybody paid a heavy price for whatever flaw they had. Even today, I imagine these stories as film outlines and am not surprised that so many of them made it onto the big screen.  Soon, I graduated to the longer format of the novel. Nevil Shute came to me in the form of On the Beach. We lived in scary, cold-war times and this book captured the mood of the period. The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West was an easier read. I also had time for Fredick Forsyth, Dick Francis, PG Wodehouse and anybody who told a cracking good yarn.

Imagine, therefore, what I did when presented with Great Expectations as the prescribed novel for my Intermediate Certificate course on that first week back at school. I opened it on the Friday night and returned on Monday having read it. Only, seemingly, this was not what I was supposed to do. One was supposed to read it in the classroom, one paragraph at a time, underlining sentences as you went. But of course, by now, I had no interest in the book. It held no mystery for me, Miss Haversham was dead, Magwitch too, and Estella was finally free of her abusive husband. A painstaking trawl through the book was not for me, I did not care about heavy handed symbolism, metaphors were for other people to worry about, and memorising lines, to regurgitate in exam essays later, seemed like a waste of time. Maybe I was missing the point of literary analysis, but then, a class of boys who have no interest in reading the prescribed book on their syllabus can hardly be considered the best environment to inspire future critics. Our teacher seemed to understand this and decided that rote responses would work best for most of us in an exam situation and so we were shown sample essays guaranteed to impress a state examiner. There was no mention in any of her classes of character verses characterisation, story structure, or even a nod to what constitutes a dilemma in fiction. There was merely an obsession with symbolism and metaphors, which for me were of no interest whatsoever. Symbolism for most writers comes a distant second place to sales; publishers like their books to sell. They love number one bestsellers best of all, because they are in the business of making a profit. A writer more interested in metaphors than profit has failed to grasp the point. Stories sell. Dickens sold. He still sells, mainly because he told great stories. And while he may have worried about word count, you can be sure he did not stress out over the phallic symbolism in the prepubescent life of Great Expectations’ main character Pip. A good story will not only sell, but it will also last the test of time. Though, there are exceptions to this rule of thumb. Moby Dick, for instance, should be declared a form of torture and be banned under the Geneva Convention from any classroom. As for something like Normal People, it is neither soporific enough to put you to sleep, enlightening enough to be given credence to, nor entertaining enough to be worth reading. And what did I think of Charles Dickens back then, I found him a melodramatic fart who overwrote because he was paid by the word. This was not the kind of opinion examiners awarded an A+ for, which would put me at a disadvantage in any exam situation. However, by week two of my Inter Cert program I had lost complete interest in Dickens and put his novel down as an also read. As a result of this attitude, I looked forward to endless hours of boredom as we made our may through the book, one paragraph at a time, while sitting in seats far too small for my gangly frame. There was nothing else for me to do than endure the drudgery and to sit there dreaming of girls while waiting for a bell to set me free. Once out of class I could go home, curl up on the sofa, and get on with my own reading. I only gave Great Expectations any consideration again two years later, when faced with questions on an exam paper which I felt no compulsion to answer.

At least I now know that mine was not a once-off experience. There are others out there who believe that a better way to handle literature in the classroom must exist. Giving forty students copies of a book they don’t want to open and then force-reading it to them over a two-year period does not a scholar make. You may as well force feed chickens genetically modified grain in the hope of turning them into university professors, as do this, in the hope of transforming an average group of teens into literary critics. It is no wonder that I spent two years sitting glassy eyed in class, my mind on other things. Against that, with no hand on my literary rudder, I was free to steer a path through Uris, Ludum, Mc Donald and so many other story tellers from that period, all under my own steam. And what I learned was that while many of these writers could be easily dismissed for their clunky prose, they all understood the importance of a well-structured story. The other thing I learned, was that some people simply don’t read. It’s not a fault. It’s not a reason to pity them, any more than you would pity an Olympic, gold-medal winning weightlifter because he can barely waddle a hundred meters in less than thirty seconds. For the non-reader, Shakespeare is shite, poetry for the birds, and as for literature…

However, if you want to ignite the very same people’s passion, ask them about snooker, darts, socker, hurling, cars, or milk quotas. Unfortunately, their enthusiasm stops at the classroom door, making any English class they are part of hell. And as for any reading enthusiast who strays into their orbit, they get to understand the torture a troubled genius like Alen Turing might have gone through, sitting in a basic maths class, observing those around him stumble through mathematical foothills while he, in his mind, was halfway up the face of Everest. Not that I was capable of such lofty thoughts back then, puberty had struck, hormones kicked in, and any pity I possessed was saved for myself alone. A teen’s life is a difficult one, at least in their own minds! But that aside, I was story curious. Not willing to come out, but curious. To me, Shakespeare’s insults were mind bogglingly good, Austin’s comic reflections, hilarious, Wilde’s plays, fun, and O’Casey’s plays tragic. But when dissected, one stuttering sentence at a time… Oh boy… So, to all the kids settling into a new academic cycle, setting out to understand literature; these could be the best of times, these could be the worst of times. And always remember, your parents marched through this hell before you did and suffering the boredom of it all may give you more in common with them than closely matching DNA ever will.