Are we missing out on the music of literature?

Jul 27, 2024
Girl drinking hot tea and reading book.

A reading survey of three years ago found that a quarter of Australians never read a book – or listen to one.

Released in 2021, Australia Reads found that fewer than half of us – 42 per cent – read three or four books a year. Just over a quarter of the 3000 readers canvassed were described as “frequent or passionate” about reading, gobbling up one or two books a month. We read more fiction than non-fiction, and of those of us who read most have waiting-to-be-read piles.

What are we reading? An overview in Books + Publishing published in October last year quoted Nielson BookScan Australia. Sales overall had flattened after three years of growth. Adult fiction sales were up 7 per cent, driven largely by romance, historical and mythological stories.

But frighteningly for those of us who appreciate the music well-written words can make, the importance of books in stimulating thought, those of us who like to write complex tales told by untrustworthy narrators, literary-fiction sales were down 7 per cent.

Deakin University research from April is even more troubling. A third of 13,217 teenagers never read – presumably books — in their spare time, and only a seventh read each day.

How different things were a century ago. Yes, radio and television were absent then, but even the brightest of actuaries would be challenged to determine how their absence affected reader numbers.

I find surveys of what people liked to read a century ago fascinating. Literary Digest International Book Review in the US, for instance, ranked in March 1924 the most popular books since 1900. Edith Wharton’s novella Ethan Frome topped the list, followed by Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga was third, and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows fourth.

O’Henry’s short stories came in sixth, and Conrad’s Lord Jim seventh. What might be called these days “literary” fiction dominates the top 100, and several collections of poems are listed.

And while Australians read increasingly higher piles of romance and crime fiction, many of them simply bedtime stories for adults, what distinguishes the popular authors of 100 years ago is the trouble they took over their words. And how they lined them up. They aspired to creating the complex yet organised music fine literature makes. And their readers must have loved it.

This is Wharton introducing her protagonist: “If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade; and you must have asked who he was”.  Simple, musical writing – and grammatically and syntactically perfect.

Or John Glasworthy describing the death of Old Jolyon so brilliantly that – for me at least — it brings on tears: “The dog Balthasar stretched and looked up at his master. The thistledown no longer moved. The dog placed his chin over the sunlit foot. It did not stir. The dog withdrew his chin quickly, rose and leaped on old Jolyon’s lap, looked in his face, whined; then, leaping down, sat on his haunches, gazing up. And suddenly he uttered a long, long, howl”.

From 1918 to 1920, Joyce’s Ulysses was serialised in America. Two years later it was published in Paris as a book. Eliot’s The Waste Land came out in 1922, and three years later one of the most inventive and important novels in English, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, was published. E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India came out in 1924, and arguably the greatest novel, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was mid-way through its seven-volume voyage.

It’s great that at least three-quarters of us read at least one book a year. But are we missing out on the music literature can make if we decline to read writers who try to do more with their narratives than just tell a story? Should we read books that make us think, that immerse us in their authors’ ideas and characters and lyricism? My answers would be yes, yes and yes, but you will have your own thoughts.

Stephen Downes’s novel Mural is published by Transit Lounge on 1 September.

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