Booker prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson, admired for his black comedy, was in dire mood about the state of literature when he launched Marlborough’s third literary festival at the town hall last night (Friday).
While the packed house laughed and hooted, giggled and applauded the hilarious stories he told, especially his encounters with his Jewish mother, 70-year-old Jacobson was in fearful mood about the decline in reading.
And the rise of a generation of uninformed people, mainly critics and bloggers on the internet, who believed their opinions are as good as any others.
“Through all the wonders of the internet and computers, one of the terrible things that has happened is that people have been empowered to believe that if they have an opinion they have a right to that opinion — and that it’s a good as anybody else’s,” he protested.
“It isn’t. It quite simply isn’t.”
He wowed the audience too talking about Zoo Time, his latest novel about the end of everything, which stemmed from a true story of a depressed author going into a bookshop and stealing his own novel.
He warned them: “My comedy is very bleak, very black…I remember Ian McEwen once saying the comic author is wrestling you to the floor and tickling you. I don’t. I wrestle you to the floor and put a knife in your heart.”
Yet he insisted: “It is the most terrific fun to feel we are at the end of everything. I love the feeling that it’s over, it’s finished. It gives me, for some reason, enormous joy.”
“In this room there is nothing wrong. In this room the world is fine, beautiful, there is nothing to complain of. But outside, elsewhere, things are quite dark.”
“Bookshops are closing. Libraries are closing. We do not know what will happen to the physical book from the threat of technology, the ebook.”
“I am not horrified of the ebook but I am no great fan of the ebook. And I don’t know where it will leave us.”
One reason for the worrying decline in reading was poor teaching in schools, where pupils considered “bits of books”, not the whole structure.
“We should say we will not have our children taught like that,” he said. “We should demand better teaching. We should be altogether much more demanding.”
I owe so much to your Nobel laureate William Golding Howard Jacobson, the first author to give a Golding lecture inMarlborough, offered his thanks and told the audience: “I am honoured to be the William Golding speaker. I owe him a great debt. “First of all, I read him when I was a schoolboy. He was very important to me. He was one of the writers who showed me how the novel is a serious thing, how absolutely crucial the novel is. “The other thing I am grateful to William Golding is that without him I would have been the oldest person ever to have won the Booker Prize. That’s not a distinction one wears lightly. And I’m glad he’s still got that. “It is a good thing that older people win prizes. And I hope as the years go by many, many novelists older than Wm Golding will win the Booker. You hear a lot about supporting the young. Let’s support the old.” |
He explores in Zoo Time confrontations with reading groups telling authors they can’t identify with their characters.
“I have had this said to me,” recalled Jacobson, who was interviewed on stage by Boyd Tonkin, literary editor of The Independent newspaper. “Every writer living has had it said to them.”
“And when anybody says that you want to kill them. You want to kill them because it is irrelevant whether you want to identify with someone in a novel. It can be wonderful. There are wonderful reading experiences when you think I am Jane Eyre.”
“But you can’t demand that because books do something else. You can’t demand that the characters in a novel be likeable. That’s the other thing you get – I didn’t like the characters in your novels. So bloody what!”
“What’s so nice about the MacBeths, do you really want to spend an evening with King Lear, where did this idea come from the literature is the story of the people you most like living next door?”
“It’s part of what drives me round the bend.”
So did questions about who were the great novelists, people scoffing when he listed Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
“There is a assumption abroad that the really good stuff isn’t fun, that there is a secret thing that we do at night that we put a torch under the covers and we read JK Rowling,” he declared. “Well, we don’t.
“The most entertaining book you will ever read is always the best book you will ever read. I am committed to that.”