A Good Read

An interesting issue was raised in this week’s Good Read on Radio 4 presented by Harriet Gilbert – namely, you can enjoy a book at one period of your life but not in another.

She gave as her example The Franchise Affaire by Josephine Tey.

I read a lot of Christopher Isherwood as a kid but I wonder how his suppressed homosexuality – not to mention turning his back on his country with W.H. Auden before the outbreak of World War Two – has stood the test of time when writers like Alan Hollinghurst and Sara Waters are openly gay writers.

I might be offended now by the racial comments in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop or the anti-Semitism in Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train.

Then there is fashion.  Ernest Hemingway is hardly read and when I re-read Wuthering Heights I found it unwieldy and rambling  to the point of unreadable.

I regarded The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford as a classic but on a re-read the flashbacks and the unravel of the unreliable narrator Dowell are almost incomprehensible.

Recently I met a grandfather who is preparing a collection of children’s books for his  grandchild.

He bought a collection of 32 Tintins but Tintin in the Congo was excluded from the box set, presumably for an unacceptable colonial/neo-racist stance.

Herge, the author and creator of Tintin , stayed on as a journalist in a Belgian newspaper which collaborated with occupying Nazis.

In the end I hold to Oscar Wilde’s verdict on being asked whether a book is pornographic:

“A book is either good or bad.”