Great Writing, Average Reading

As I had hoped to, I finished Tolstoy’s mighty Anna Karenin yesterday and made significant progress on Ackroyd’s mighty-in-a-different-kind-of-way London, The Biography. I’m over the halfway mark in the Ackroyd despite deliberately going quite slowly to savour the many joys of what I would regard as his most accessible work of non-fiction. In London he pulls off what I think is a calculated popularisation of his usual concerns. The darkness and mystery of the literary biographies seem somehow diffused in what is almost a cheerful, at times positively celebratory, book. You can sense Ackroyd’s relish as a new aspect of the city looms into view, with each chapter constituting a separate almost self-contained essay. If ever a text conveyed a feeling that the writer loved doing the (brilliant, detailed, illuminating) research, this is the one. If ever a text cried out to be dipped into over and over, with a relish on the part of the reader equal to that of its writer, ditto.

And to think I’ve had the pleasure of reading London whilst re-reading what I’m now convinced is one of the greatest novels ever written, if not the number one of all time. Yes, I know that using such terminology is silly and pointless, but there are moments when pointless superlatives seem to be the only way of dealing with the intensity of the experience of reading Anna Karenin and putting that experience into some sort of perspective.

It’s as if Tolstoy pulls off the impossible with such frequency that you are convinced he really is capable of magic. The ‘impossible’ I’m referring to is capturing what life is really like in the pages of a work of fiction. I don’t just mean giving you a vivid picture or impression of life, or a strong sense of the texture of lived experience, I mean actually getting down on paper the reality of life in a way that makes you say, yes, that’s exactly how it is, in a way that extends beyond the subjective. In other words, he shows you something that you’re normally not aware of, the reality of other people and their interests, foibles, concerns, obsessions and extends your experience into a reality you’re (or rather I’m) only, at best, vaguely aware of. In an earlier post I joked about him knowing what the horses were thinking, but there’s a moment in the later part of the novel when Levin is out shooting snipe with Oblonsky and another chap when you get to know what’s on the mind of Levin’s dog and there’s nothing in the surface of the text to indicate that this is all a bit odd. You just accept that, yes, that’s exactly what the dog would be thinking at that point in time.

This reading of the novel made me aware of just of poor a reader I am capable of being when I recall with embarrassment that on my first reading of the novel I thought that Karenin and Vronsky were pretty thin stuff. This time round I’m pleased to say my responses went a little deeper. The astonishing thing here is that from the outside the two men can seem to be poor stuff, but the moment Tolstoy gets you inside them you recognise their complete humanity despite, possibly because of, their manifold failings. Just two bits to mention: the moment when you are made to realise that Karenin’s career has peaked and everything from now on will be downhill, though Karenin himself will not be able to consciously see and accept this. So much of what has been despicable about the character in his supposed success becomes oddly moving in his failure. And the last time we see Vronsky, with a terrible toothache, on his (noble? foolish?) way to fight the Turks – we see him almost entirely from the outside, suffering, ruined by Anna’s suicide – and, again, we are deeply moved in a way that seems disproportionate to our knowledge of the character. It’s almost as if Tolstoy is reminding us that no matter how much we know someone we never really know them at all.

And how was Tolstoy ever able to write Anna’s suicide? Surely impossible? - until you read it.