One of my resounding memories from school is the snort of collective sniggering when I admitted I’d drawn up a list of novels I wanted to read. And, after the sniggering, the taunts for being a square and a sap. I know I should have known better, but I didn’t think my confession would cause offence – we were, after all, in an A-Level English Literature class.
For those students willing to brave social ridicule and pariahdom by reading novels for pleasure, our teacher had compiled her own list of contemporary authors to check out. One name that appeared on both our lists was the writer Hanif Kureishi.
Last weekend, Kureishi could be found reading from his work to a captivated crowd at the Latitude festival in Suffolk. His presence illustrated how the event has used literature to differentiate itself from the UK’s plethora of music festivals. Latitude’s heaving literature tent also hosted authors such as Irvine Welsh and AL Kennedy. Meanwhile in Dorset, festival-goers at the inaugural Camp Bestival listened to writers like Howard Marks and Richard Milward alongside music from Suzanne Vega and Kate Nash.
The Hay festival, the highlight of the UK literary calendar, has long added live music from the likes of Elvis Costello and PJ Harvey to its line-up of literary heavyweights, while many of last weekend’s authors are involved with London’s popular literary-cum-club nights such as Book Slam and Vox ‘n’ Roll.
On the face of it, there seems something incongruous about the growing number of initiatives linking live music and literature. The two things require such different mindsets. And yet from the pioneering Crossing Border festival in The Hague to the latest events across the UK, these efforts have proved an unlikely success story – particularly in attracting older teenagers to novels. Moreover, they shed light on why the so-called Playstation generation finds reading books for pleasure such a turn-off in the first place.
The explosion in electronic media clearly provides one explanation. You don’t need to be a neuroscientist or a cultural snob to realise repeated exposure to fast-paced video games and snippet-style music videos makes it harder to embark on reading a novel. While video games develop players’ reflexes and logic as they zap, shoot or otherwise eliminate obstacles, the same scenarios in novels usually come paired with consequences more complex and cumbersome than penalty points or tit-for-tat retribution.
There is much debate over whether video games therefore hinder the empathy skills that novels help to promote, but surely the important point is that the two worlds could hardly be further apart. Time spent in one world is time not spent in the other. And of all the reasons for the proliferation of summer festivals, they clearly represent an escape from the world of electronic media – to fields where you can barely get a mobile phone signal. There is a sense of liberation offered by both live music and literature that contrasts sharply with the vivid image in Kureishi’s latest novel, Something To Tell You, of a boy “attached to the TV by wires, clicking away like a widow at her knitting”.
Since my own novel was published two years ago, I’ve visited various schools and libraries to encourage young people to read more. This has highlighted the less tangible barriers that stand in their way – two of which come crashing down in the context of live music.
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First, reading novels is a solitary pleasure. Its decline among young people is arguably part of a wider decline in solitary pursuits as self-worth increasingly gets measured externally – by how others respond to you rather than by how you feel.
Counterintuitively, the internet hasn’t made people feel more comfortable being alone. Instead, we socialise in cyberspace – forwarding stuff to friends, playing multi-player online games and interacting on Facebook and the message boards beneath articles and blogs. Hence the success of reading clubs and literary festivals which make literature a shared, social experience. Last weekend’s events were an obvious extension of this.
A second barrier to reading is evident in teenagers’ frequently expressed concern that they won’t “get” a novel. In other words, steeped in a national curriculum that encourages a box-ticking attitude to learning, they fear their interpretations of a text may be so far removed from whatever is stipulated by the exam syllabus that their response is “wrong”.
As they clutch “study guides” and syllabuses instead of trusting their own instincts, there is little wonder teenagers view the novel as an educational chore rather than a form of enjoyment. Whenever I tell them I deliberately left strands of my novel untied and unexplained so that they might form their own interpretations, their all-too frequent response is “Yeah, but what’s the answer?”
By contrast, live music remains a bastion of individual intuition – where there is no right or wrong response and no need for interpretive crutches. We don’t need to “get” it because we intuitively feel it. That’s why music can bring thousands of people into a wet and muddy field. Perhaps it’s why, after musing on the appeal of Bob Dylan and Prince, the hero of Kureishi’s The Black Album asks: “Could literature connect a generation in the same way?”
Gautam Malkani’s novel ‘Londonstani’ is published by Fourth Estate
Peter Aspden is away
