Holiday Lazy
The average book already has plenty of story to it.
The truth is, I chose to read that particular book out of exhaustion, and with very low expectations. I had just finished reading the first novel in an epic fantasy series – an undertaking I hadn’t attempted since crashing out of Tolkein’s Rings twenty-odd years ago – and my head was too full of that rich and intricate story, and those involving and compulsive characters, to try and cram anything else of any value in alongside it.
(Also, I wanted to read something where it didn’t matter so much if the proof-reader hadn’t bothered with the final third of the book. A factor that, and maybe I’m seeing the past through rose-tinted glasses, didn’t seem such a concern a few years ago.)
On any other week, I’d have rested my brain with a little Xbox or some TV, but in the heat, and by the pool, there are two things to do – swim or read. I love the pool, but I’m not such a strong swimmer, and can’t venture out of my depth with much confidence. There’s only so much fooling around in the shallows you can do before the kids jump in and take over, and you feel a little foolish to be so out-swum.
So I needed to pick another book, and the small selection that I’d chosen to bring were all pretty high-stakes – novels that, for one reason or another, I’d saved up or faltered on, and carried across more than one sea in the hope that I’d finally get them done. And I didn’t have the energy to bow to that much pressure.
I’d found the novel in the small library of discarded holiday reads that the hotel kept in the lobby. We’d seen a similar library at the other Greek hotel – also family run – that we’d stayed at the previous year, but for whatever reason this one was much larger – almost three times the size. Like that one, there were a few obvious bestsellers, and the odd outlier, and there was an approximately similar ratio of English to German and Dutch-language books as in that earlier hotel. Books were double-deep on the shelves, but I hadn’t explored the spines behind the most immediately visible ones.
The truth is, I’d only looked at the library on the first day of our holiday, and then only out of mild curiosity, because I was still pretty confident that I’d finish my huge volume in the first few days of the break, and have enough momentum to barrel through the books I’d brought.
But I’d spotted this one book, an oddity, because I should have known it existed, and hadn’t. It was a slim tie-in novel to a popular television show that I had watched and loved for its entire seven year run. It featured a photo-cover of one of the show’s main characters – who from the blurb on the back of the book only had a minor role within – and to be honest it didn’t look very promising. Medium-large type, and less than two-hundred pages, and the description on the back still sounded like the writer might be struggling to fill the word-count with value.
It was one of those things – you know there’s potential in the initial property to make something really interesting and creative, and put it in front of a large pre-existing audience, but you also know that because there’s that large pre-existing audience, everyone involved knows that the book itself doesn’t actually have to be that good, and it’ll sell in quantity anyway.
(Spoiler warning: I did read the whole book, and it was exactly as lacklustre as I’d expected it might be.)
Morbid curiosity insisted that I pocket the book for a closer look when I wasn’t so preoccupied with checking in to the hotel. It wasn’t till later, after I’d finished my epic fantasy novel (reading, not writing but… well, I’ve probably made that clear already), and realised that I was too burned out to read anything that I might actually care about, that I noticed the letter.
The letter was on a small sheet of paper, small enough that folded across it’s middle, it could sit inside the paperback without being noticed. A glance revealed that it was written formally, with address and illegible date at the top, and signature at the bottom. The body of the note was in a spidery joined-up script, in obsessively neat, dense lines. The paper looked more weathered – and had a yellow patina to it that made it look older – than the book it was hidden in.
Now, it’s my feeling that every book has plenty of story to it. And an abundance of stories in it. These stories aren’t always that complicated, and often aren’t out of the ordinary, but they are there.
The truth is even a mediocre, commercial effort like my find in that library can spin a yarn or two, as much in the by-the-numbers, “good enough” style in which it was written – which tells you a lot about the situation it was produced in – as in the meat-and-potatoes plot and characterisation in the text itself. Sometimes, as in the case of this book, the former has more story to it than the latter. There are a lot of books – some of the incredibly popular – that tell you more about their author than they ever do about the characters within.
This isn’t limited to fictional works, or even narrative ones. Science books, for example, tell us so many stories about the nature of the world around us that it can baffle the mind. Those questions that you find in many school-books – like the one that goes “if a car is travelling in one direction at fifty miles per hour, and another is going in the opposite direction at thirty miles per hour, and they crash headlong into each other, what speed do they crash at?” – there are half a dozen Hollywood blockbusters hidden in every one of those things.
And the truth is, in that scorching, gorgeous sun, at that particular time, I didn’t have head room or patience for much more story than that tawdry little tie-in novel was already promising me. My wife, lounging on the lounger next to me, would have found the letter fascinating – within seconds of seeing it, she’d already have a dozen stories in mind for it, and that’s before even reading the damn thing – but she’s younger than I, and still sees the bountiful experiences that the world offers as something to be grabbed.
I see greater value in pacing oneself.
The truth of it is, the letter was written in Greek anyway, and I can’t read two words of the language.
So I slid it inside the back cover of the book, and quickly and easily forgot about it.
