Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 9, Issue 5 Read online

  On this particular afternoon he had eyed the two students quizzically, expelled a long stream of blue smoke, then asked what they were reading. They had both been caught with a contraband and much-thumbed copy of Forever Amber, however the young minister also had The Catcher in the Rye in her schoolcase, actually a book banned from the school—not that the principal would have known nor cared—while her friend also always carried and devotedly perused a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. He seemed dissatisfied with this and, after lighting up a fresh cigar and inhaling deeply, recommended they turn to The Classics for edification. Which classics, she wanted to ask, but was afraid, in case there was only the one of that title, and that she would betray her ignorance by asking. Eventually she came to understand that The Classics referred to any black Penguin, and she read them accordingly and developed her lifelong regard for all those black, green and orange Penguins. He then dismissed them with a mumbled instruction to make sure they were on some sort of sport list, somewhere, and to turn up to something, somewhere, and they skipped off, not back to the music room, but home, deciding to walk instead of catching the bus, thereby proving they weren’t entirely anti-fitness.

  Evidence of the existence of at least two bookish, unsporty students in the school probably had nothing to do with it, but next term the perfect sport was offered for the first time: walking. This involved catching a bus to the beginning of a trail in a nearby reserve, alighting, ambling along for an hour or so, then catching the bus at the other end of the trail and returning to school. All the despised skinny or pudgy, uncoordinated, uncompetitive types opted for walking which had everything going for it: no balls to run after, kick, catch or throw but mainly drop. No sweating, huffing, fainting, turning blue from cold or red from exertion. No despised team spirit. No team. No scores, and hence no humiliation at the end of the game. And no game as such. She was not smothered in mud, nor did she have her shins kicked in, her shoulders dislocated or her character thoroughly abused, as had been the case in other sport.

  Walking attracted no honours. There were no pennants, trophies, district carnival representation, or assembly applause for walkers. But they did not care. Walking meant that there was no one to yell at you, blow whistles in your ear, or tell you off for dropping the ball; there were no endless playing fields to traverse, no hordes of fit and jaunty girls laughing at your baggy gym shorts or the bare legs your mother wouldn’t let you shave. It was just you and your friends out there in the fresh air and sunshine strolling along admiring nature. You could even take along a book and read, if you wanted. And Dr Wheeler did.

  4 Reading is a verb

  It was assumed that the position would be pretty much ambassadorial and promotional. Visiting primary schools and prisons, running the annual President’s Reading Challenge, creating new literary awards and competitions, hosting book launches and initiating anthologies, websites and magazines to raise the profile of literature.

  But as the first national Reader, Dr Wheeler saw matters more clearly. Reading was a verb and she intended to be far more active. She bought spare reading glasses and invested in a quality recliner, and although her reading activities were intended to take place as much inside as outside her office, visitors to her office quickly became accustomed to the sight of the Reader outstretched, shoes off, with a copy of Crime and Punishment or On the Origin of Species or The Robber Bride in her hands. If the Treasurer could sit at his desk poring through lists of numbers, she could do the same with words. As she saw it, her brief was to read widely, broadly. To read uncensored and to be blind to genre or gender. To read openly and optimistically, and while she could abandon any reading matter on the basis that it was boring, ill-conceived or poorly expressed, she could also approach every new book, magazine, journal or article with the same well-intentioned expectation of edification or amusement. Her only requirement of a book was that it transport her to another place. Most importantly, her job was to be seen to be reading. In public, the minister for reading read. She stood on railway platforms, patronised charity events, watched the races, attended the cricket, donated blood, opened garden parties and school fetes, had her hair cut, appeared at media dinners and social functions with an open book in her hand. Reading, she doorstopped at the Capital and fielded questions from journalists: ‘Is it likely we will see another Salinger title now he is dead? What about the rumours of unpublished manuscripts?’;‘Why do you think the narrator of Rebecca doesn’t have a name?’; ‘Who’s your favourite poet?’

  She would answer their questions succinctly, in perfect sound bites for the evening news, waving the novel or essay she was reading, the latest issue of the New Yorker or Granta, or commenting on the lead-up to her appointment of Novelist Laureate, hotly speculated in the press.

  Her advisers had all been appointed on the strength, speed and resilience of their capacity to read. A simple test administered by Ainsley under strict conditions—the applicant in a reading chair, given similar editions of Ulysses, The Da Vinci Code, Paradise Lost and the Twilight series, the rates at which pages were turned, eyes were rubbed, yawns, sighs and smiles produced and requests for drinks of water or Jamesons all monitored via video and run through a simple program assessing the Delight-Boredom Index, followed by an old-fashioned comprehension test, multiple choice, pencil ticks. Soon they were all surrounded with stacks of books, brought from the stores of the libraries, the dump bins of chain stores, the back rooms of secondhand bookshops, and from the warehouses of publishers. They were armed with Kindles, iPads and their iPhones, loaded with apps for literary and cultural journals and poetry chapbooks and stuffed with their favourite book bloggers. And she advised her advisers. Have opinions, she urged them. Don’t be afraid to voice them. Don’t be afraid you may be wrong. Show the public you can take it. That you can read anything and respond to anything. And when at moments Dr Wheeler herself may have felt unnerved, a shrinking in her spine, a crack in the confidence of her reading judgement, a fear of the crowds and their questions, she recalled the most controversial facts ever known about reading. The fact that international fashion models could survive the announcement of their never reading books—unless they were ones written by themselves—and that world leaders could lead worlds and still struggle to read—even if the texts were magnified, reduced to monosyllables, on autocues—was encouraging. The President himself, it was well known, refused to read a paperback. A book to him was something bound in card, preferably leather, and she suspected every one sat on his shelves unopened. That was something the minister was determined to address before her term ended. Each month, she presented him with a new paperback, and like Yann Martel and Canada’s prime minister, waited patiently for a result. One day he would crack.

  Meanwhile, the changes she had made! On her very first day at the Capital, a few years back, she had had a quick tour. They had started on the top floor of the vast compound and worked their way down, past the President’s personal quarters, past the main chambers of government, the public galleries, and into the offices of the ministers and their staff. The place was a city within a city, bisected by paths and cycleways, and dotted with gardens and lawns. When they arrived at the reading room, Dr Wheeler was almost out of breath. It had taken twenty minutes of brisk walking along corridors, past atriums and down stairs, from the time she left the President’s first briefing for ministers after the election. When her guide and assistant, Ainsley, then stopped at a set of double doors which opened inward, the minister paused, a hand on her chest. And then her breath stopped, for a moment. The implications sank in. A reading room. That a whole room in the Capital could be devoted to this pursuit alone was a luxury more extravagant than the personal gyms she had just seen, with machines that hummed and whirred at the touch of a button, the research and administration support rooms with staff waiting to type one’s notes or check facts, the sitting room bars stacked with reserve spirits and award-winning wines, or the bathrooms, men’s and women’s, equipped with heated towel rails and
pneumatic self-closing toilet seat lids.

  She was to be disappointed. At first she savoured the experience, every nanosecond of it. With a sense of the ceremony of the moment she sat in one of the green leather armchairs, next to her at hip height a low table, just large enough to hold a few books, a cup and, in the past, an ashtray. The chair faced the east window, with a view of the rhododendrons along the fence, no other distractions. Ministers had sat here for decades with their pipes and their glasses of port or brandy. What had they read?

  But the chair was too sturdy to be comfortable. It was not a chair to sink into, to drift away into. Clearly it was a chair for consulting books rather than for serious reading, perhaps the reference volumes that lined the walls. Past years, more prosperous years, there had probably been several attendants for this room alone, servants of the Capital, older men on the verge of senior citizenship, devoted to handling, cataloguing, reshelving and dusting these books, and attending to the politicians—mainly men—who consulted them. They would have been called Stanley, Merv, Walter. They would have brought diamond-cut crystal tumblers of Dimple or Black & White whisky on a silver tray, plates of ham and mustard sandwiches for late-night snacks, fresh ashtrays for cigars and pipes, as ministers read on through the volumes of statistical bulletins and parliamentary handbooks. The edifying volumes, the worthy tomes.

  Dry and dull, the lot of them. Dr Wheeler was already uncomfortable in this chair. She would never sit here and read. It was a chair designed to keep the mind alert and occupied, ticking over with facts and figures gleaned from the pages before her, ready to convert those details into confident utterances, speeches and written statements that would affirm one’s authority and maintain the nation’s faith. It was not a chair to let the mind wander and become lost, to disappear so completely into another world that meant returning to the present would be like snapping out of a hypnotic trance. Reading in this chair would be a punishing but virtuous attack on the system, a cold swim on a winter’s morning kind of experience. And no one would be on hand to bring her light refreshments or empty her ashtray, let alone return the books she read to their shelves behind the glass cupboard doors and replace the bulb in her reading light.

  Three minutes in this tightly upholstered dark green chair and Dr Wheeler had felt intimidated. Like she was meant to sit up straight and behave. It reminded her of her great aunt Muriel who had displayed the most magnificent figure until her dying day: erect bust and statuesque hips gripped in a longline bra and something she called step-ins, structured undergarments that kept her posture impressive and regal and which, her grand-niece was convinced, contributed significantly to her moral fortitude. Like Aunt Muriel, the chair resisted an embrace. It maintained its distance. She couldn’t imagine settling down here to a session of reading with her collection of paperbacks, with anything. Were she even to attempt a systematic and literary course of reading—such as the latest Booker Prize shortlist, all the novels of Nevil Shute, or the collected stories of Alice Munro, she would not be able to devote herself to the task. She would be looking too often out that window, hoping for a glimpse of something to distract her. She would be reading with only one purpose: to learn. What she wanted, though few seemed to appreciate this, was to escape.

  But would she want to escape this? Here was her dream position, the national minister for Reading. And a room especially for her. A room that for the first time said that it was okay—more than okay, that it was obligatory—to sit down, and read. Surely she should appreciate the value of that. But first surveying this room, her heart had numbed at the sight of nothing but large leather-clad volumes behind glass fronted cabinets. Without opening a single one Dr Wheeler knew that these worthy tomes would never be read. She longed to see a row of her sunny Penguins or a shelf of the charming and subversive contemporary writers she’d been reading recently (Mavis Cheek was her current favourite, her name perfectly suited to her work). She didn’t need to look closer to know that among all the dry books about early exploration, the dull histories of state, the political memoirs and biographies, the yearbooks and atlases and Who’s Whos, the only thing approaching literature in all those books would be a Compendium of English Poems or A Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Hemisphere.

  That first day it had been midmorning, and the sun on the south eastern quarter of the complex where the reading room was situated was seeping through the sides of the window drapes. She got up and pulled them wider. The light pranced throughout the room.

  ‘We don’t normally open them that wide, Dr Wheeler.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Well, the sun fades the spines of the books.’ Ainsley walked over to the bookcases. ‘Some of these had to be rebound ten years ago. We don’t open the curtains wide until the afternoon, as a precaution.’

  The minister pulled the curtains closer but left a broad band of light that ran out the door.

  ‘Tell me, how often is this room used?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘And for a room that’s rarely used, the redecorating is ongoing? Presumably costly?’

  ‘That’s right. We did the curtains three years ago. The carpet about the same time as the books.’

  ‘And Aunt Muriel here?’ She waved to the reading chair. ‘And her sisters?’ There was a collection of furniture, two squat sofas with sturdy legs, ones that invited perching on rather than sinking into, and several other armchairs, all leather, studded, deep russet and dark green—depressing gubernatorial colours, the unoriginal idea of some president past, or their spouse, or the benign contribution of a public servant with a dutiful rather than inspired approach to interior design—and which all looked as if they disdained human contact. Satellites of small side tables designed to resist rather than accept plates of food, piles of books, boxes of tissues and empty coffee cups, the normal paraphernalia of the constant reader. Several spindly low-wattage standard lamps loomed in corners like gaunt chaperones ready to dart out and tweak a misbehaving reader into line.

  ‘These have been here since the 1960s. But before my time, so I can’t be sure.’ Ainsley’s voice warmed. She met the minister’s eye. ‘It’s a great shame. This room has rarely been used since I’ve been here. Twelve, nearly thirteen years.’

  ‘Well, it will be used now, I promise you.’

  5 Massaging the brain

  Her staff took their seats. Morrissey, recently returned from a tour of the western states including a conference on the coast. Kendall, the department’s representative on the UN’s International Reading Committee. Jonesy, whose favourite authors were all in the speculative realm and who kept his finger on the pulse of genre writing. Good old Jonesy. And Helen, who’d come in to work while on leave. Helen was their resident author-reader, a foot in both camps. She’d taken leave to write another novel. At least, it was thought to be a novel. And Tim, the poet.

  ‘Ainsley, shut the door please. Now this is confidential, I stress that. Nothing to leave this room please, and I’ll have to ask you to leave these reports here after the meeting.’ Morrissey raised a nicely arched eyebrow. The minister noted her tan as she replied. ‘Yes, confidential. But feel free to mark the pages.’ And Morrissey’s hair seemed a little blonder than usual. Perhaps there’d been more to that conference on the implied reader than she was aware.

  ‘As you know, the President has charged me, our office, with the task of raising the government’s ratings in the polls. We need to lift our game, and quickly, if we’re to get re-elected. Another way of putting it might be shackling the opposition. I’ve taken a creative approach in commissioning this report. I haven’t insulted you all with an executive summary, but there is a section highlighted towards the end that captures the main findings.’ Dr Wheeler leaned back in her chair as the others took up their copies. Kendall, a mad terrier sort of reader—one became exhausted just watching him—was already a few pages in, liberally exercising a pink highlighter. Jonesy was murmuring comments to himself while jotting notes in the margin
s. While she waited for them to finish, she leaned over to the shelf for a copy of Summertime. It would be the perfect title with which to test-run her latest idea.

  Now in the reading room, fiction sat beside non-fiction. The shelves were colourful, eye-catching, splendid in their careful disarray. The room was divided into nooks with chairs and small tables, newspaper holders, lamps, screens and potted palms. The effect was something like a cross between an Edwardian tea room and a secondhand bookshop. Only it was not so crowded, despite the array of books and furniture. Aunt Muriel and her stiff sisters had long been disposed of. Instead, Ainsley had brought in examples of the Capital’s original furniture, discovered in storage in the basements. Fine delicate pieces, their native timbers warmed to a soft sheen after polishing with beeswax, given a new dignity when their upholstery was replaced. There were a set of ladder-backed chairs and a small square tea table. Six elegant bucket armchairs upholstered in a pale green silk slub. A three-seater sofa, as good for sitting on as for reclining, and a matching divan that definitely invited repose. Dr Wheeler augmented the furniture with a couple of new chairs designed especially for reading. These were curved and padded recliners that tilted back as far as the reader wanted, and contained adjustable trays to hold books, Kindles, laptops, refreshments or all at once. She had conceived the idea when at the movies, noting the comfortable width and depth of the chairs, the convenience of cup holders and footrests. Thinking about this now, she wondered about the feasibility of establishing similar facilities for the purposes of reading: theatre-like places with a large screen featuring a text for those who wanted a collective experience, smaller alcoves and personal screens for those who read extra fast, or slow. There could be gentle waves of sighs and murmurs and laughs rippling through these places, as readers discovered at their own pace the jokes of Catch-22, the romantic climaxes of Gone with the Wind or the thrills of the latest Lee Child. She reached for a notepad and jotted the thought before it escaped her, as Morrissey, Helen and the others approached the final section of the report.