A Dreadful Confession

Okay here goes: I don't always finish reading novels. Sometimes, (shuffles feet, tries not to look shifty), I get sick of them. Occasionally (well, quite often actually), I read a hundred pages and then I give them up. Am I alone in this appalling habit? In my neighbourhood, it seems to be viewed as some kind of disgusting social crime, (mostly by people who don't actually begin reading novels, let alone get as far as finishing them - which reminds me of my friend's husband who announced he'd never set foot in a church again if women priests were ordained, when he hasn't actually set foot in a church for thirty years even as things stand.) Anyway, my argument is that life's too short to waste reading rubbish.

And I should explain that I don't take the decision to abandon a novel lightly - it's not done on a mere caprice. I don't give up suddenly, hurling the book across the room, narrowly missing passing cats or husbands. It's a much slower process. First, I start having doubts, but I try to plough on. Then, if things don't improve (and they usually don't), I find I can't resist the temptation to riffle a little further forward, to see if the part I'm in is going to get better or at least finish quite quickly. If I decide it isn't, I riffle a bit further still. Then, if it seems to me that the whole thing is simply getting worse as each new page succeeds the one before it, I give up. It is only at that point that I go to the last page, read it, and then make my way back through the body of the novel, skimming odd passages, until I've worked out the general drift of what I was going to find out, if I'd bothered to continue, and checking that nothing exciting happens and that no spaceship suddenly lands in the middle of Christmas Dinner, bringing green visitors from Mars.

And, in my defence, I should point out I've never done it with a decent novel. That is to say, I've never done it with novels written more than a hundred years ago. This is not a policy I've formulated; it's just the truth. Novels written more than a hundred years ago don't betray their readers - or, to be accurate, novels that have stood the test of time and are still available after a hundred years don't betray their readers. Most importantly, novels written more than a hundred years ago - at least all the ones I've come across - don't leave their readers adrift in an amoral universe, in the company of characters who are all equally contemptible, irredeemable and hideously flawed (now what can I be thinking of here?). Writers more than a hundred years ago seem, on the whole, to have understood a basic but fairly important point: a reader has to have a reason to keep on reading. Reading is not like breathing; it's a choice and there are other books to be chosen and other things to do.

And, most importantly, and contrary to much of the current advice from those who purport to teach 'creative writing', having a plot is not enough to keep a reader reading. Plot is what Agatha Christie was good at - and if there is one single writer more than any other who set me on the road to the sin of not finishing books, Agatha Christie is that writer. While she does persuade me to want to know who has done it, she has never convinced me that any of her characters is worth caring about or indeed that they actually exist. She is all plot, and she props plot up with stock figures - the military man, the maid servant, the damaged young artist back from the war - and no insight into the human predicament at all.

Mind you, a writer whose only insight into the human predicament is that no-one in the affluent Western world - which, in their view, is horrid anyway, because the cult of individualism is no longer tempered by any kind of moral structure - is anything more than a collection of self-serving impulses and Freudian reactions, (still can't imagine who I'm referring to) makes it very hard for the reader to sit up night after night, holding his 500-page product and dragging their eyes over those funny little black squiggles that are commonly known as words.

And writing a spectacularly brilliant opening isn't going to improve things, if, after the first sixty pages, your prose sputters out with the disappointing hopelessness of those Catherine wheels that fail each Bonfire Night after a moment or two of dazzling fire.  The promise that is created by a captivating opening only makes the reader's dismay and disillusion greater when the whole structure grinds to a dreary halt. It is no good creating a showy first section that flares up brightly, if it turns out that the brightness you've conjured is just the kind of empty brightness you get when you make a fire from scrunched up paper. If there is no real substance behind the inferno, if the whole thing doesn't keep going, the reader experiences a real sense of let down. A book like Freedom, (just to pick a completely random example) begins in a blaze of splendid writing but the flames from that blaze subside all too rapidly, revealing that there is nothing solid at their heart. This creates enormous disappointment in readers. And disappointed readers soon become angry readers, distrustful readers and ultimately, like me, impatient readers who lose heart when a book seems to be drifting and slip into bad habits, abandoning more and more novels before they reach their end.