A book about a drunk’s last day is not a good manual for life
I believed for along time that I was inexplicably absent on the day they issued my contemporaries the instruction book for life.
As a child, I was aware that my schoolmates and friends appeared to know not only how to get by at school but also how to deal in the proper way with adults and to interact with what I regarded as the adult world. This wasn’t about being polite or taking punishment stoically but about being able to read signs that I had no way to decipher.
Later, as an adult, this sense of disconnection grew stronger, especially when it came to emotional demands within relationships.
It is no wonder that I turned early to books.
Yesterday, I was asked by an acquaintance at the shared office space I inhabit in London to name my favourite book. We were talking novels specifically, so I immediately told him Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry.
This is a book I first read forty years ago. It is as powerful in my memory now as it was then. There is a great backstory to the book, too, involving the author and his life and the struggles he had not only to write the novel but to get it published. Lowry’s work was published in the Penguin Modern Classics series for many years but I don’t think there has been a new printing for a decade or more. I may be wrong but I suspect Lowry’s star is diminished at the moment.
As a life manual, Volcano is not a wise choice. In short, it involves alcoholism and a brutal death. Most of my reading as a late teen and early adult was ill suited to be a template for living. Not that the books were intended as such, of course. I was simply desperate and thought great writers had a skeleton key to the locks that barred my way.
It has taken me most of the forty years since first reading Lowry to recognise that no single volume can contain the information I need — or thought I needed. It has taken me those same forty years to realise that the great majority of people have no manual; they simply learn as they go. I simply wanted the knowledge without earning it, I guess.
I read as much as ever but I no longer expect answers. Insights, yes, to specific corners of life. My reading is wider now, too. Less fiction and more history and politics and some spiritual stuff — mostly Buddhist. And because I don’t see each book as some sort of arcane set of instructions for piecing together the Ikea flat-pack of my life, I am rewarded with a strangely counter-intuitive bonus.
I now have a recognition of how individual lives develop and how it is the very awareness — and acceptance — of the fear and anxiety that lies at the existential heart of us that makes us reach out to others and to grow strong enough to take life one day at a time.
And, coincidentally enough, the main action in Under The Volcano takes place over a single day. Maybe there was a lesson there, after all.
