ReReading 1: Festivals (and Salman Rushdie)

“Coming up, after the news on Radio 4,” the clipped, reserved tones sounded out over the torrential rain sweeping between the regular swooshing of the wiper-blades, “why nobody over thirty-five should go to a music festival.” I switched the radio off as I parked outside our flat.   I didn’t want to know the reasons why people of a certain age should be prevented from doing something they enjoy.  I am not over thirty-five, but it won’t be long now, and two days after the broadcast I was going to Latitude.

Latitude is hardly focussed on the young.  There’s a distinct lack of a decadent maelstrom encompassing whirling nudity, class A drugs, unscheduled performance art or a last night on earth mentality.  Its nickname of Latte-tude descirbes the middle-class, middle-aged Guardian reading kid friendly sensible music with a smattering of poetry and cabaret that fills its fields is well earned.  I saw toddlers wandering around calling for their lost companion (“Ed-waaaard”) and a couple of early-twenty somethings in the crowd concerned that Sebastian had wondered off on his own.  Again.  Donington Park it ain’t, instead the Southwold festival is all-ages friendly, upwards and downwards, giving people aged around thirty-five the opportunity to revisit their youth and to indoctrinate their youngsters, in a sanitised and safe environment, the pleasures of soggy camping whilst discovering random bands you’d never heard of before or getting lost amongst a city of identically battered tents looking for the skull and crossbones tied to the back of a jeep you originally pitched up next to.

I think, no matter the opinion of Radio 4, that it’s important to revisit one’s life as one advances through the years.  Your past is behind you, but it also helps to make who you are and re-evaluating the bands, the movies and the books which contribute to defining that psyche is an important form of self-awareness.  So it is for this reason, plus the pure enjoyment, that I re-read novels fairly frequently.

When we first moved in together, my girlfriend was somewhat staggered at the volume of books I owned.  Even more so when I revealed that there are – still - several more boxes worth in my Dad’s store space in the Warwickshire countryside.

“But are you actually going read any of them again?”

“Of course,” I replied, although even if it wasn’t true, I’d have fibbed.

“All of them?”

We then proceeded to examine the contents of a randomly chosen shelf, which, as it turned out held a surprisingly high quota of relatively poor books.  Still, I argued, reading and understanding rubbish books can be an important part of breaking apart literature, of figuring out how it works and for who.  Besides, it may well be that I’m just reading them at the wrong time for me.  I might yet grow into them.

After I refused to actually discard any novels, my girlfriend suggested an one-in, one-out policy.  Something I am currently succeeding in ignoring, but felt that a demonstration of my own commitment to retaining the books was necessary and have therefore spent much of the past year with my nose buried in old, yellowing, damp creased, ink smudged, fustily smelling books.

Rereading is an important part of truly getting inside a novel, it can also be intensely pleasurable in its own right.  Whilst the element of narrative surprise or the world-spinning exhilaration of the perfectly executed twist is lost, even if after many years small components parts have been forgotten to be remembered again as you make your way through the pages, this does leave the readers’ concentration free to focus on other nuances.  The balance of the sentence, the construction of a character, the pacing, the way little nuggets of repetition weave their way through the chapters.  And still there can be that heart-warming delight, the moment when you feel at one with the fictional constructs on the page that lifts literature out of the imagination and, for a fleeting moment, it is there, real, next to you on the sofa, in the bed, on the bus.

As a teenager, I used to reread all the time.  Partly, a limited book buying budget meant that I was restricted in what I could buy, but partly also because the hormone crazed human body is ripe for those moments of emotional wonderment.  We are primed to be sucked in, desperately looking anywhere for someone who truly understands us, since no-one who we see on a daily basis appears to do so.  When we find it, be it in a novel, a film or a song, we keep trying to repeat the experience, looking for that second hit.  Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes it’s like a kiss so wrong it is gone forever, sometimes like hand held on a winter’s evening it lingers forever.  Of course, I’ve always been  a touch of obsessive and was less aware of how socially unacceptable it was to have such utter fixations at fifteen than I am now.

But it got to a point, especially with graphic novels because they were quicker to read and therefore to read again, that I could virtually recite bits of Alan Moore’s or Grant Morrison’s work.  In the way that some people know the lines of movies and sit there in the corner reciting it out loud about three seconds before the actor speaks, like a dubiously done lip-synch.  Or with songs where we know every lyric without consciously trying to remember them, but then it’s easier to absorb songs by osmosis.  You can’t really be running or cooking or driving, whist reading a book or watching a movie. 

The odd thing was that even knowing every faucet didn’t stop me enjoying it fresh again and again.  If anything, it enhanced the experience.

So, I found myself perusing the shelves wondering where to start when my fingers paused.  SalmanRushdie’s the Satanic Verses.  Aged twenty-one at the end of Sheffield, I’d loved this book.  I found a copy, an American import published when it was difficult to get a copy in a second hand shop.  It felt, in 1999, faintly seditious buying it.  Reading it’s reinterpretation of myth laced with humanity, mysterious diversions of cipheric supporting characters and a finale reminiscent of the grandest fantasy, I was bewitched.  I loved it and was utterly swept up in the narrative from the first morning, hung-over as per usual, that I propped myself up in the single bed, in the small dampish room, with the early summer breaking through the thin curtains, tea at hand, and read of men plummeting through the clouds.  At some point though I ran out of steam.  There were exams and then some serious drinking to be done and whilst I raced through the first four-fifths, or thereabouts, I didn’t finish it until sometime later, back in Birmingham, late one evening after completing a pub shift.  Maybe my mindset had shifted too far from the safe and light of university, thrust suddenly into the real world with no plan or direction or maybe I had simply forgotten everything that went before, but I remember the final fifty or so pages being intensely disappointing.  Re-reading it has been on my to-do list ever since, but only twelve years later do I finally get around to it.

Sufficient time has passed and reading those opening pages again for me to be filled with both a sense of familiarity, but not one overladen with nostalgia or a sense of merely recapping.  The plot was familiar, but the way it’s put together, the couplings of the words were not.

The first thing I noticed is how funny it is.  I think I must have presumed, as a younger man, that it must be a serious book.  After all, serious things had happened to its author.  It, surely, couldn’t be that a man’s life became so hunted for so long for the sake of a joke.  But now, when Rushdie is more a ridiculous than tragic figure (I’m thinking of the appearance in Bridget Jones, the girls, the dramatically plummeting quality of the literature) I find it, not so much a joke, but infused with a lyrical playfulness.  The language zings along with a sense of fun that makes the fatwa even more absurd. 

This time though, older as I am, when the horns start appearing on heads and the more faerie elements barge their way forwards I struggle to keep going.  I am not as in thrall to Neil Gaiman as I once was and so I find it wearisome.  Magic realism is, in many ways, a young man’s game.  The ability to suspend belief for the mystical, to just have faith that the bullet turn to butterflies because the fiction commands it, works less the more my naivety is chipped away at by life.  I want to understand why.  I am looking in fiction for the truth, perhaps.  Maybe I am still just looking for someone or something who understands me, maybe I have never grown up, or maybe that was only ever about looking for the truth I just didn’t realise it at the time.

Curiously, I got bogged down and distracted at more or less exactly the same point as before.  Whilst last time it was just post the big battle scene, this time I stalled just before and so while it is only a matter of days rather than months the result is the same.  When I came back to it I’d lost my care for the characters, the finale needs the reader to be gripped, to be rooting for someone, something, whilst I was merely mildly bored and grinding on so that I didn’t feel obliged to return and read it again for a couple of decades.

I’m still not letting my copy go though.

I never did listen as to why people over thirty-five shouldn’t be allowed to attend to festival, but I can take some guesses:  likely to stand no more than two thirds of the way into the crowd, arms folded nodding along appreciatively to the music, but not fully getting the wild abandon of it; likely to scowl at the ridiculous fancy dress parade trooping past, caked in mud; more likely to slope off to bed once the headliners have finished rather than get lost in some murky part of the encampment; likely to be worried about their possessions yet at the same time wandering around with bags of supplies, from wet wipes to ponchos, not just in a pair of shorts and flip-flops; alarmed at how youthful some of the other visitors look; declining of drugs in preference for the obscenely priced alcohol, too much of which will make them an embarrassment or on a permanent trip to the bathrooms; anxious about the toilets in general; anxious about the weather; anxious about where everyone else went; skirting around the mud slogs in a vain effort to keep clean; grouchy when it gets busy.  All these things are true, and despite my best efforts I saw it coming clearly.  At two in the morning, in a random dance tent amongst the Suffolk forest, I firstly didn’t know any of the tunes the kids whooed to when the drop kicked in, but I was also far more concerned about the swelling bulge caused by the deluge of rain.  The canvas looked as though it was about to burst as spurts of water broke through the seams in arcing, glistening curves.  In the end it held, those directly underneath got extremely wet and I was glad to be far enough away to escape unscathed. 

Like my reading of Rushdie, this is a perfect example of where I have had too much life, too much knowledge, to let myself go with the magic of it all.  An inevitable effect of age or just me being unconvinced by the word because it is told or wanting to get soaked through to the skin?