Kevin Myers: State support only lends madness to libraries
Forty years ago this summer, one of the most influential novels of the 20th century -- and to my mind one of the greatest -- was published: Frederick Forsyth's 'Day of the Jackal'. It was sensational. It managed to dovetail a mastery of technical detail with a thrilling and complex plot: we learnt how to foil an assassination as meticulously as we learnt how to make a sniper's rifle that could be dismantled and then reassembled into a metal crutch.
I've bought the book three times, and each copy was duly stolen; so having thrice given Freddy his due royalties, I decided not to buy the special 40th anniversary issue but to order a second-hand copy through Amazon. I re-read it over the weekend, with a combination of utter awe and envy. Yes, of course, it has been panned by "literary critics" -- actually, no higher praise -- but the real issue is this: Did readers buy it? God's teeth, they did. Did they enjoy it? They loved it. Is it memorable? Totally. Why? Simple: it enthrals, which is the primary duty of any writer. That's what Frederick Forsyth did, and still does. I can give you a guided tour of Booker Prize winners whose books are unread beyond page 40 or so: pretentious, indulgent, smug, self-regarding, but gushingly reviewed by their peers, who will in due course be gushingly reviewed by those over whom they have themselves ejaculated so warmly.
Sales. That's the only true measure of a book's worth. I have little interest in critically regarded but otherwise unknown masterpieces. Yes, sales might take years to accumulate -- look at Patrick O'Brian -- but nonetheless, they are the only true and abiding artistic measure. Why else does Shakespeare sell, by the million, century after century? Or Bach? Or Beethoven?
Coincidentally, I briefly interrupted my time with the Jackal to irritate myself with Alan Bennett's defence of public-libraries in 'The Daily Telegraph'. If Frederick Forsyth is a writer whom London society disdains, Alan Bennett is one it drools over. He is not impenetrably high-brow, but a sort of Queen Mother of the arty salons: cuddly; cherished; accessible, a man who has specialised in a remorselessly coy, mill-town whimsy. His characters are wholly predictable: aged and querulous old women with troublesome bowels and with a slightly homosexual stay-at-home, hen-pecked son called Nigel. Islingtonians love Bennett primarily because he supports Labour, dislikes the Tories and panders to their stereotype of Northern folk being quirky, amusing and authentic.
His defence of the library is familiar territory for any writer of working-class origins. We have our own version of it recycled regularly: some proletarian hero of Hibernian letters describing how he, clad only in the single family sock, would crawl out of the cardboard shack that was his childhood home and make his way to the local library, where he would enter the great and glorious empire of literature, a golden pleasure dome in which he could inhale the balmy myrrh of civilisation. Would you close down libraries, he cries, and thereby deprive working-class children of the chance to escape the kneecapping drudgery of their lives? And of course, reasoned debate is incompatible with this when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife kind of moral blackmail.
As it happens, the financial reality of the public library was contained within the front cover of my copy of 'Jackal'. It was bought by North Finchley library in the London borough of Barnet in 2005, and was borrowed 16 times in the next three years before it was disposed of. During that time, the entire economic consequence of this book -- its purchase, the payments and future pensions of the librarians, the cost of running and heating and lighting the library, and paying both the original purchase-royalty and the 16 subsequent borrowing-royalties to the great Frederick Forsyth -- was covered by the state.
Why? Why should the exchequer pay for libraries to stock best-selling novels in order that miserly adults may borrow them for "free"? Meanwhile, bookshops that are economically self-supporting and generate real, earned money both for the state and the author are closing everywhere, not least because of competition from the nearby lending-libraries. Indeed, the latter, almost comically, have now also diversified into CDs and DVDs. I bet my chum Bono just loves that.
This economic lunacy is so wrapped up in the swaddling clothes of sanctimony that it's almost impossible to see that inside there's not some famished waif, but a wolf. Defending today's libraries because of what they once did for young would-be writers with rickets, scurvy and scabies is intellectually rather like arguing for air-raid shelters, gasmasks and cod liver oil, or wet nurses, the Poor Law and alms houses. Yes, by all means, let children borrow books for free. But that's no argument for the Exchequer supporting public-lending libraries that largely indulge the literary tastes of mean-minded grown-ups. How long did it take for the Chinese peasant to discover that he didn't have to burn down his house every time he wanted roast pork? How long before we realise that it's not necessary to give free libraries TO ALL in order just to lend books without charge to children?
Irish Independent
