The pain and pleasure of long books

Why do so many people who rarely read books at all opt, when they do so, to read long ones? Airport bookshops testify to the attractions of lengthy escapist novels bought for the plane journey ahead or the beach on arrival. Why, to ask a naive question, are such books favoured over short ones?

By all accounts – one of the few bits of good news from the pandemic – sales of books have climbed during lockdown, many of those books doubtless rather long ones. A young family friend who has hardly ever been known to read books for pleasure, has recently developed an addiction to the novels of Stephen King. He has just purchased approximately one third of his oeuvre, seemingly squirreling away for the next phase of the pandemic. Apart from some collections of short stories, King’s extensive output is comprised entirely of novels rarely less than 400-500 pages apiece and some much more (The Stand is over 1,300 pages in paperback). All of them are thrillers or horror stories of one kind or another. Perhaps their appeal is to be found simply in the popularity of those genres, along of course with King’s ability to spin a good yarn.

It isn’t only today’s thrillers or “chick lit” and the like that are impressively long and heavy on the wrists, however. Many new biographies are especially long, with other non-fiction instances much in evidence nowadays. I had thought multi-volume doorstopper lives of the great and the notable had faded out with the Victorians. Not so it seems. Charles Moore’s three volume biography of Margaret Thatcher (an astonishing 2,688 pages in total) is appropriately Victorian in scope for such a Victorian political figure. It is also and not incidentally – I have read all three volumes – a wonderfully fluent and incisive read.

William Feaver’s hefty two volume and notably intimate journey through the life of the painter Lucian Freud, is equally, though very differently, magisterial, and a shade under 1,300 pages. Who would have thought that the letters of the historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin, published only a few years ago and comprising 2,400 pages in three long volumes would sell, if not like hot cakes, at least like a very choice fruit cake? So perhaps I am being unduly pessimistic if I question whether Hermione Lee’s soon-to-appear, and monumental life of the playwright Tom Stoppard will be the choice for many Christmas stockings. I enjoy Stoppard’s plays as much as anyone, but 800 pages on his life story?

There though is the rub. How many such indulgently lengthy volumes are actually read in their entirety, even if purchased during the special circumstances of lockdown?

The same is said for other non-fiction works. How many purchasers of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century (or his possibly more arcane follow-up tome, Capital and Ideology) have conscientiously read through its 700 pages? Perhaps Piketty sensed this himself which is why he has co-operated in the making of a film adaptation of his book (yes, truly: coming your way soon).

Maybe even the Victorians didn’t read every hagiographical page of the Lives they purchased; and probably their children were relieved in turn when Lytton Strachey broke free from the Victorian straitjacket and engaged in the biographical equivalent of “free-verse”, volumes only loosely and often tendentiously based on his subjects’ actual lives, but blessedly less prolix.

As we head into further lockdowns over the Winter months, long books may well draw us in between their covers, the literary equivalent of comforting log fires. Not only may my young acquaintance steam on through his shelf load of Stephen King escapism, but perhaps others of us will be pillowed-up under our duvets with even longer and more demanding “reads” to hand. 800 pages on Stoppard might attract us; or the 887 pages of Julian Jackson’s huge life of De Gaulle, A Certain Idea of France; or even Yuri Slezkine’s 1,000 pager on the horrors of Stalin’s oppressive rule, The House of Government (it is actually quite brilliant if, that is, you can manage to hold it up long enough to read it).

I rather suspect, though, that many such tomes bought with the best of intentions will remain only partially read. Heavy books will eventually find themselves displayed like literary monuments on sitting-room bookcases when Spring beckons and the pandemic (oh, we all so hope) eases in one way or another, and we walk back out into the sunshine.