OK, so let’s get going with the answers to this ninth round of Five Questions.
Question 1: Has reading a book ever changed your life? If yes, which one and why?
Yes, very definitely. That book (or series of 12 novels to be precise) was Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. I’ve written about this, in many ways, many times, but here is (a lightly edited version of) what I wrote recently for the Anthony Powell Society Newsletter in a column headed “My First Time”.
A child of intellectually bohemian parents in the 1950s I was always encouraged to read. We went to the local library every week and I was allowed to read anything in the house: dipping into my father’s Penguin Lady Chatterley shortly after publication; reading Peyton Place (how? why?) under the bed-covers; plodding through Ulysses in my mid-teens. But being a boy and a scientist reading fell by the wayside, not helped by my reading very slowly and finding the classics taught at school tedious beyond belief.
I rediscovered reading for pleasure as a post-graduate student, when I devoured chunks of Evelyn Waugh, Clochemerle, Laurie Lee, Gormenghast, Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice, plus the likes of John Gower and Piers Ploughman.
After Noreen and I married and moved into the house, Noreen’s best school friend, Jilly, was staying one weekend in early 1983. Jilly trained as a librarian; both she and Noreen read far more than me; talk naturally turned to books. Jilly, knowing I enjoyed (some) Waugh, suggested I might like AP.
Thus began my encounter with Dance, naturally at the beginning. I found A Question of Upbringing very slow; I really didn’t see the point, but I persevered. I decided to try the next book – try everything twice, to see if first impressions were right. Lo, by the end of A Buyer’s Market I was hooked.
This was the summer I had off work with glandular fever. On good days I picked our soft fruit and made jam. On bad days I read and watched cricket on TV. In between I had an affair with Jilly! (It’s OK, it was an open secret even at the time!)
So that summer I read Dance, with some gaps between volumes as the next of the (first) Marc Boxer Fontana paperbacks was sourced. The war trilogy especially captivated me; Temporary Kings was strange but powerful; the finale, weak.
By then AP had become one of my “heroes”. In the early 90s, I wrote my first webpages and it was natural to include a little about my “heroes”. Whereupon I realised there was almost nothing about AP on the internet: my AP page expanded and become a separate website.
In 1997, at the time of the Channel 4 films of Dance, I started getting emails from around the world; this stimulated me to set up the APLIST [the Anthony Powell related email discussion list on Yahoo Groups]. Then when, in March 2000, AP died Julian Allason rang me: “We must celebrate the man,” he said, “we must have a conference”. Recovering my composure we arranged for half a dozen of us to meet in Julian’s Chelsea rooms, when it became evident we needed an organisation on which to hang the conference. Thus was the Anthony Powell Society born. The rest is history; I’ve been the Society’s Hon. Secretary ever since.
Since that first reading I’ve reread Dance in sequence only once; however I dip into it continually – so continually that I’m not sure I could now read it straight through again. But I’m keeping that option for next time I’m laid up for a while.
So yes, reading Dance caused a huge change in my life, nearly 35 years ago, and that change is still happening; the Anthony Powell Society is always throwing up something new; it has me places, and introduced be to people, I could never have imagined.