"I have lead a book infested life" says Penelope Lively, standing on the low stage at the Whitworth Art Gallery this evening, her appearance - the thin bob of hair, the scarf, the brown horn-rimmed spectacles - as Middle English as many of her characters. The event, a part of the Manchester Literature Festival, is titled A Reading Life. Penelope is here not to plug a new title, but to talk of the role that reading has played in her life; both professionally and personally. This is refreshing. She talks candidly, with both wit and warmth, and the invariable sense of shame that overrides many of these events - the writer talking to convince you into spending your money on them - is happily absent.
Readers of Lively's novels will know that her most essential theme is the theme of History: the history of the self, the history of the world (often the relationship between the two,) the effects of the past on the present, on the future. Like Death for Philip Larkin, Parents for Alan Bennett - it is a theme that she tirelessly revisits. And this is apparent even in her lecture this evening: the history of Literature informing one's own, personal, view of the world. Talking of her reading life - being "hooked on Homer" aged nine; devouring the contents of her then local Swansea library as a young mother; raising her family in Oxfordshire, Tolkien in one hand, the spoon to stir her first Goulash in the other (neither of which, incidentally, she particularly cares for today); and then as a writer herself, winning the Booker, literary festivals - as in her novels, her reflections on past times can be so incredibly poignant that the most mundane of observations can come to feel so incredibly sad, if only for the reason that they are past.
An inclination to read should bloom early on in one's life, thinks Lively. She herself was raised in Cairo - she first visited England aged six, but has no recollections of the event, and did not move permanently until she was twelve. Lively had, however, travelled vicariously: through books. She gorged on Kenneth Graham, Beatrix Potter - perhaps her imagining an entire country from such an early age informs her ability to portray today one world so convincingly on paper.
In his recent pamphlet, A Life with Books (2012), Julian Barnes wrote;
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be superficial escape - into different countries, mores, speech patterns - but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
Penelope Lively must agree. The books we read become in their way apart of ourselves. The "landscape of memory," as she calls it, is flooded with all that we have read: chunks of Shakespeare, paperbacks, memoirs, a line of poetry, journalism, History. Reading is tangential: we may not remember the exact trajectory of a novel, but remember instead fragments, fragments we may not even be aware that we can recall, but are reminded of when we see a similar scene, perhaps, in everyday life. A Dickensian character in a street. Reading is personal. We are co-creators, and thus every experience of a book is unique. Reading gives us individuality, and teaches us of life what Barnes correctly observes. Behind every great novel is what Lively calls a "spark" - an essence, a theme. Without which, all else is redundant. The characters, the setting, the language - all may be brilliant, but without the shining light, readers will quickly tire. It is this more than anything that we take from a book. Lively writes so accurately of all life's joys and sorrows, norms and quirks, its successes and failures, loves and lovelessnesses. Her understanding of humanity creates a great dialogue with the reader, and her sparks linger on long after the reader has closed the pages; even if I could scarcely remember most of her character's names, I could say what quite makes her characters "real."
Concluding, Lively focused on reading becoming writing. Read, and read, and read: the best possible advice for any budding escritoire, and yet the most fundamental thing that, from her experience, many Creative Writing students did not engage with. "Books inspire books," in what she called a great, "evolutionary tree." Evolutionary Tree, incidentally, would be a rather appropriate Lively title. I said earlier that readers are co-creators. We create images, we hear the voices. Writing must only be attained from reading. "You read on," she said, her final words, "and will ultimately write."