Lockdown Reading: What Are We Escaping From? What Are We Escaping To?
When it looked like we were hurtling towards a lockdown in March 2020, it was really interesting to observe what customers were drawn to in the bookshop. Lots of people went immediately for classics, the things you feel you “should” have read — we sold out of War & Peace and Crime & Punishment pretty swiftly. Camus’ The Plague was obviously popular, but mostly people seemed to want big, long, difficult books. I think we were all under some illusion back in March and April that we would finally do the things we simply didn’t have “time” for in our previous lives — if only I had time, I would read all the Russians, I would learn a new language, I would sew my own clothes, I would write every day… I wonder how many of those copies of War & Peace actually got read.
Still, it was heartening in many ways to see people’s attitudes to literature during a crisis. There was something about books that people clearly wanted, and they knew it was necessary to have an alternative to screen media. But when bookshops reopened in June, the habits were very different again. Classics were less popular, and the focus was more on page-turners. Will it grip me? Will it completely distract me from the world? Will it solve my problem of not being able to focus on anything for more than one minute without refreshing the news on my phone? Customers wanted to know that a book was really worth their time — see last week’s discussion about wanting “the best” book — but requests got even more specific. Bookseller recommendations weren’t enough. They wanted this one particular thriller, only available as a self published ebook, because their sister’s brother in law had shared it on his GoodReads account, or the out of print business book deemed essential by a podcaster, and so on. It was exhausting to cater to, and, if I can be self-centred for a moment, at times insulting. (My job is to be a well-informed, well-rounded recommender of books. Please trust me!)
This shift from ~difficult~ to tried-and-tested, compelling reads was a bit like an admission of defeat. It’s ok, I felt that too. I had the equivalent of a book a day in my to-read pile for April. Needless to say I ended up managing about one a week, which is pretty similar to my non-furlough reading average — this shocked me, and I felt guilty about it. I thought books would save me, in the way they did when I was a child and I could shut out the world by opening a novel, but I just couldn’t concentrate on reading. It was a realisation that I’m only capable of so much, and it’s not my busy pre-pandemic life that was holding me back, it’s just…me. I have a limit and I was at it. I don’t think there should be any shame in that. Personally, I was also struggling with a feeling that often pervades my reading: even when I’m really enjoying a book, I often have half a mind on how I would sell it. It’s quite distracting, and can be incredibly dispiriting when reading something you think is brilliant but you know no one else will buy. Being tuned into this line of thinking while also feeling a) anxious about how little you feel you’re reading and b) frustrated by knowing you can’t actually sell these books anyway was a fractious emotional state.
In any case, I think all those buying trends, despite seeming contradictory, all come back to the desire for escapism. We often tie the idea of escapism to genre fiction, thinking about epic sci-fi or chunky fantasy novels, but there’s a lot more nuance to it than that. Even recipe books can be escapist; even self-help handbooks. Obviously the definition of “escapism” is very subjective and depends pretty heavily on your particular life circumstances — I think in the case of the readers I spoke to at work in the latter part of 2020, the overriding escapist tendency in the books they were buying was simply “something actually happens” — perhaps it’s helpful if the “something” is easy to understand: even if it’s calamitous, it has an explanation, a cure, and a resolution. This is the appeal of crime novels and TV shows: the status quo is restored at the end in some form or another, and the episodic structure means that characters don’t really change or grow based on what happens to them, but in the middle, something happens and someone comes along and fixes it. As someone whose depressive episodes are characterised mainly by long binge-watches of Lewis, I deeply understand this craving. This wasn’t what I wanted from books though.
For me, the most escapist book I’ve read in the past year was January’s Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz. Originally published in 1977, this gorgeous series of vignettes poses as a love letter to an anonymous man but is more a love letter to Los Angeles, and to Eve’s entourage of lovers, friends, and acquaintances. Heat radiates from this book. Parties are as casual as sweaters — you can end up at a weekend-long bender by just popping out for some milk — and friends swap lovers without a hint of heartache. Eve’s friendships burn brighter than most of her affairs, and her tender closeness with other women is intoxicating to read. She loves everything about LA, even the dark parts, and even the Santa Ana winds. Eve’s California life as fictionalised in her various novels and reportage is about as far away from my grey, locked down, London-in-January existence as it’s possible to get. It rained almost every day I was reading this book — it even snowed. Escaping to Eve’s nightmarish weekend trip to Palm Springs was all I had: I even envied the myriad faux pas and social embarrassment. (Well, almost.)
My other pieces of escapist reading over the past year have come in the form of historical fiction, a genre I’m not usually wildly into, but reading anything set “now” feels either too much or too trivial given, you know, these ~unprecedented times~. Last March I started reading Wolf Hall for the first time, and, hot take, it’s actually really good. Who’d have thought that millions of readers and awards judges might be right? There’s something about the density of it that becomes completely absorbing; there’s an intimacy in it that I’ve rarely experienced in a novel before. You spend so much time with Cromwell, the cumulative effect of which is that you start to understand the rhythms of his thinking — you feel like you really know him. He is, when you take a step back from it, a deeply unpleasant man, but you don’t think about that while you’re reading because you are completely inside his head. This too, is escapism: oh, to be a very odd man gaming the system and evading the ire of the Church and the King in the 1500s, living each day in fear that an order might appear for your execution, secure in the knowledge that come what may, you will be able to exert your influence and get what you want. Cromwell’s stoicism comforted me, his quiet confidence and acceptance of fate was a balm to the turbulence of 2020. Last night I finished reading Sylvia Townsend Warner’s delightful The Corner That Held Them, which documents the mundane, deeply boring lives of a convent of nuns in fourteenth century Norfolk (coincidentally just a village along from my birthplace) — I thought I might read about the nuns isolating from the Black Death to find some parallels with our current situation, but actually the plague portion of the novel is very small, and I’ve found that, as with Wolf Hall, immersing myself in the petty minutiae of the convent, its strange social structure and fallings in and out of both considerable debt and favour with the various bishops, has been a relief from thinking about the petty minutiae of my own life, here in London in February 2021. Unlike Wolf Hall, it’s not one character that you become intimately familiar with in The Corner That Held Them, it’s the dynamic of the whole community of women— and how alien to my life that sounds, but how familiar from school, university, even some aspects of my workplace.
What I want from reading when I seek escapism is not far flung fantasy worlds or gripping action and adventure — although those may feature in the Venn diagram of my desires — but detail: all-absorbing, overwhelming detail. I want my anxieties, worries, concerns about money, what I’ll cook tomorrow, what I’ll wear, which route my daily walk will take, what decorating project will come next, when I’ll be back at work, what to write in my blog posts to be completely subsumed by the sheer level of detail of someone else’s life. This doesn’t necessarily mean always reading Mantel-length tomes; Eve Babitz achieves an absorbing level of detail in 160ish pages — you understand the beats of her life, the balance of her friendship groups, the ingredients of her cocktails, her preference in drugs, the mood of the different restaurants and bars she frequents at different times. I need the book I read to take up my entire brain while I’m reading it: sometimes in life I’m happy for this to be done with beautiful or ingenious uses of language, a twisty plot, the surrealism of weird fiction, but right now I crave the intimacy of knowing the rhythms of another person’s life, growing familiar with the bonds between different individuals in a community, how that community functions as a whole entity, how different factions break off within it. That might be a community on a spaceship, in a fourteenth century convent, in 1970s California, in eighteenth century Russia, a band of travellers hunting down a dragon, a group of people haunted by literal ghosts.
There’s been a lot of talk about “the power of books” or “the importance of literature” in helping us through the pandemic. I think this is true in that we need to remind ourselves of what life can be like when lived with other people. Life as we know it will be changed forever by this, but many things won’t change at all, and many things will go back to a semblance of how they were before. We are social creatures and we will come together again. Reading is powerful, reading can improve the reader, but reading doesn’t have to be a tool: the utility of reading is a by-product of engaging in it for pleasure. Reading as a reminder of how other people work, how their minds work and how groups and communities work, because there is pleasure in people, is vital.
