Old books, old friends

“A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Nabokov 

New books pile on my bedside enticing with their shiny smooth pages and covers. They lie in “save to cart” on Amazon and haunt the shelves of my library. I pull out one, read, and most of them are great books, which I know I shall go back to them.  But after weeks and months of reading the new and noteworthy, my eyes, as if pulled by a familiar hand land on the tattered and battered pages of books loved and read several times over the course of my life. They are “ toolkits that you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart.” 

Returning to a book you’ve read multiple times can feel like chatting with an old friend. There’s a welcome familiarity — but also a feeling that time has changed you both. But books don’t change, people do. We change as we grow and experience life. With each rereading the worlds in these books morph and shift bringing fresh insights and  interpretations The best books are the ones that open  layer by layer of loveliness and wisdom and that’s what makes the act of rereading so rich and transformative. Anne Bogel advocates for rereading favourite books again and again – “A good book, when we return to it, will always have something new to say. It’s not the same book, and we’re not the same reader.” 

As a child I reread books with the same delight and frisson –  they lost none of the wonderful power and the fabulousness with which they first overwhelmed me – only  now with the added comfort of knowing that though the twins at St. Clare’s have been punished for midnight feasts by the irascible Ma’mezelle or Fatty and Beth and Pip and Daisy are locked up in Banshee Towers, all will turn out well for the heroes and heroines. Life even in the good old days was not without its share of the  oh -not – so – pleasant – strict parents, threatening teachers, boring  must visit relatives – and the comforting predictability of rereading provided a reassurances,  a certainty that as in books so in life – all will be well.

Paper ships, books allow me to time travel into world of my childhood, my own history.

As a collector of children’s books I believe they  are often among the finest books ever written, gifts of timeless joy for the eternal child living in each of us.

And so I join again in the escapades of the Owl of the Remove. That portly and bespectacled Billy Bunter – the jam-sodden embodiment of greed, laziness and stupidity – who is always waiting for his postal order, always stealing other boys’ tuck, always being caned by the stern Mr Quelch for howlers of  Latin translations and emitting, from time to time, a characteristic cry of “Yarooooh!” Public school settings meant that adults could be dispensed with, aside from the presence of the odd teacher.

With Enid Blyton, Billy Bunter books were among the first books that I read after lights-out, under the covers with a torch, braving the wrath of parents; inserted them between the covers of my geometry  book and read them in class until I was discovered, punished and the book confiscated.

Would the Fat Owl of the Remove be caned for failing to ‘swot’ the translations of Aeneid ? Would Stephen Price of the Fifth manage to get his bet on for the two-thirty races?  Who would win the  showdown between plucky form captain Harry Wharton and Herbert Vernon-Smith, cocky son of a millionaire stockbroker, the legendary “Bounder”  and of course,  Huree Jamset Ramsingh, a prince from India affectionately called Inky, with his quirky English, and part of the famous gang,  who is shielded from “colour prejudice” of their American classmate Fisher T. Fish. Billy Bunter of Greyfriars may be loaded with political incorrect language. But, there was no indignation; I never felt that hot singe racism or body shaming. They were humans, no matter  the colour of their skin or the shape and size of their bodies. The Billy Bunter stories serialised in Gem and The Magnet, were instead all about fair play, decency, teamwork, respect and discipline, groups of like-minded chums whose  thrilling exploits never included smoking and gambling. Laughing out aloud, delighting in the hapless Bunter’s silliness, I learnt more about the power of friendship, values of truthfulness, courage and living by a certain code of honour, than any books of moral science.

Many of the books read in my childhood still retain their magic when revisited decades later with my children. You can still find us, my husband (also an avid reader of Bunter), my children and I reading them together – at the dining table, on holidays and there is always a scramble to grab some of the favourites. 

“Pigs Have Wings” is a classic laugh – out – loud P.G. Wodehouse. A bitter rivalry between two lords: Lord Emsworth and Sir Gregory Parsloe. A devoted butler with poor nerves. The practical joker and noble Gally. And most of all, about a thrilling contest between the most important characters – the Two Pigs; the Empress of Blandings and Pride of Matchingham. The beauty of Wodehouse’s novels is the joy you  feel despite their absurdity and simplicity. Reading about a butler and his absent minded employer, Lord Emsworth, whose pastime is reading about pigs and avoiding his bossy sister, has a childlike ridiculousness to it. And yet, taking a break to read something absolutely ridiculous is both refreshing and sometimes necessary. 

Filled with dry, British wit, lyricist, playwright, and novelist, P.G. Wodehouse’s novels  make sure you laugh uproariously every few pages. The essence of humour is after all, providing relief and joy in times of strife. All the plots in the Jeeves and Wooster books are fundamentally the same, and that is a large part of their charm. You know exactly what to expect and Wodehouse never fails to deliver. He repeats jokes from book to book, and yet they seem fresh every time because he’s such a master of the witty turn of phrase and his use of language is delicious. Style and content achieve a perfect union in his tales.

The books with Aunt Dahlia are my favourites. In “Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen” Bertie Wooster has been overdoing metropolitan life, and the doctor orders fresh air in the country. But after moving with Jeeves to his cottage at Maiden Eggesford, Bertie soon finds himself surrounded by aunts – not only his redoubtable Aunt Dahlia but an aunt of Jeeves’s too. Add a hyper-sensitive racehorse, deeply attached to the rival’s cat, and a  bossy fiancée – all the ingredients  present for a plot in which aunts can exert their terrible authority. But Jeeves, of course, can cope with everything – even aunts.

A more brilliant example of  literary escapism would be hard to find. Not only does he weave together many of his best characters and themes around the old plot of a Wodehouse heroine, Florence Craye and her matrimonial designs upon Bertie -“She was one of those intellectual girls, steeped to the gills in serious purpose, who are unable to see a male soul without wanting to get behind it and shove” -Wodehouse’s  capacity to conjure laughter and light out of airy nothing,  delights me every time I read his books.

 Wodehouse, in his words, preferred to spread “sweetness and light” and the titles of his books – Nothing Serious, Laughing Gas, Joy in the Morning speak volumes. With every sparkling joke, every farcical tussle with angry swans, pigs and pet Pekingese, every tangled situation Bertie finds himself and where every time he is extricated by the unflappable Jeeves, spark joy (to use a cliched modern Mary Kondo phrase). Writing about being a humourist in his autobiography ‘Over Seventy’,  Wodehouse quoted two people in the Talmud who had earnt their place in Heaven: “We are merrymakers. When we see a person who is downhearted, we cheer him up.” Some authors may want to expose the world’s injustices, or elevate us with their psychological insights, but Wodehouse in Evelyn Waugh’s immortal and prophetic words, “ will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own.” 

Agatha Christie is not just an unparalleled mystery writer, she’s the best-selling novelist of all time. Her books have been published in more editions, and in more languages, than those of any other author except Shakespeare. In 2004 Christie’s detectives appeared in Japanese anima versions, and in 2007 Euro Comics India began a series of graphic comic adaptations. Thirty years after her death, Agatha Christie remains central to both  detective fiction and holiday entertainment genres.

Christie writes simple, straightforward prose with a focus on plot and dialogue. They are not procedurals, since they rarely focus on a professional police officer or detective – even Poirot is a former detective. Instead, the clues are collected from conversations and plot twists. The sheer ingenuity of plotting in books like ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ or ‘Then There Were None’ has left me wonderstruck on countless occasions. Bodies pile up, seeping blood on carpets of stately homes, in trains and planes, on a steamer the on Nile, in Mesopotamia on an archaeological dig and even in Egypt under the Pharaohs (Death Comes at the End).  She creates detection defying puzzles, able to deceive the reader, while supplying the necessary clues to solve the mystery. To carry out this deception Christie depended on large groups of characters who share motive, opportunity and dark secrets; country vicars and doctors, retired colonels and spiteful spinsters, angry young men and spirited young women are all suspects in grisly murders.

And her two iconic detectives! No adaptation of her works on screen has been able to capture that little Belgian detective Hercule Poirot – best known for his iconic twirling moustaches, his love for tisanes and patent leather shoes,  an egg-shaped head, often tilted to one side, and eyes that shine green when he’s excited. And  his “little grey cells”  that he uses to solve the most puzzling cases. Often accompanied by Captain Arthur Hastings, Watson to his Holmes, he loves to gather all the suspects and slowly explain how he’s solved the case. While some detectives scrabble around on the floor searching for clues, Poirot uses psychology and his extensive knowledge of human nature to weed out  criminals. He will of course take physical evidence into account, but more often than not his combination of order, method and his little grey cells does the trick. Blood and brains!   Poirot’s cases are invariably finished with a typical, dramatic denouement, in a grand study of a stately manor house, confirming to all that he is truly “the greatest mind in Europe.”

“There is a great deal of wickedness in village life.”

Wrapped in a pink fuzzy woollen shawl, Miss Marple is the most unexpected of detectives in crime fiction. What makes  this  busybody and everybody’s favourite grandmother  ( Christie acknowledged that her grandmother had been a huge influence on the character) so effective,  is her ability to blend into the background, an unsentimental understanding of human nature and her shrewd intelligence, all hidden behind her love of knitting, gardening and gossip; unassuming and often overlooked, she has the freedom to pursue the truth  unhindered. Criminals and murderers fail to realise “that with every stitch she is not only making a cardigan, but solving a crime.”  

Although suspense is the first thing to die on a reread, the reader familiar with the story, the plot on rails, can relax, look around. Even when I remembered ‘whodunit’, it is amazing how many other details I find the second or third time, indeed, sometimes the fifth or sixth time.  

Reading books again and again, feels like returning to an old friend and  like our best human friends they promise  great conversation, comfort and loads of fun sprinkled with nostalgia. Why wouldn’t you go back to something good? I return to these novels for the same reason I spend time with old friends. 

Some stories become better and sweeter over time and these books of yesteryears are keepers on my library shelves.