On Holiday Reading

I’ve never really gotten the hang of holiday reading.

I know that the Sunday newspapers get a lot of column inches from this sort of thing – you know, ‘This summer’, says David Cameron, ‘I will again be reading the latest fashionable thing that makes me look good and just a little bit normal.’ But I still have this sneaking suspicion that it’s based in a reality: that when people go on holiday they read different sorts of books.

OK, for some people I can see that this may mean that they read a book at all. Something for the beach, perhaps. But even setting this group aside, there seems to be a class of books that are meant for the holidays.

As I said at the start, I’ve never really understood this. The first hint that there was a problem came on a holiday to Turkey with future missus in 1988. We were travelling around, doing sights, ruins and beaches. So I took something I wanted to read; something I was interested in.

I still don’t understand why it was wrong to read Chaucer on the beach in Kuşadasi. I mean, I could perhaps understand if I was reading a particular tale that was offensive; but no, that wasn’t it – in any case, I’d brought the Robinson in paperback (I think), so I had them all with me, with footnotes and critical apparatus. There wasn’t even a polite enquiry as to which of them I was looking at at the time. No, it was just ‘You can’t read that on the beach!’

Now, I might accept this if it had been said with a tone of thoughtful concern – you know, that I might get sand in a valuable or much-loved volume. Although as I mentioned I’d brought the paperback and left the hardback at home so that wasn’t very likely. No, the tone of voice was one of outrage. Horror, even.

So I had to accept that this was a new epistemology of reading, one I didn’t get. That some books and some places just don’t go.

Now, mostly, having recognised the problem, I’ve ignored it. I’ve happily read Baudrillard in North Wales, Shakepeare in Belgium and Asimov in Brittany. And Jilly Cooper in Hungary but apparently for some reason that was OK.

This year’s reading before the Spain trip was different again. I’d never been to Spain before so I thought I ought to do some background research. We had a lot of guidebooks and stuff but I started in the most obvious place: the first Canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimmage. Only to be reminded again, and more forcibly than usual, that I really am not a fan of Byron. I couldn’t finish it. Never mind, Homage to Catalonia came next. A much better read (for me), and interesting from the viewpoint that Orwell was writing before the outcome of the Spanish civil war was known. It gave me some insights but I still felt that I needed more.

And so we come to the three main books that came with us on holiday (apart from some post-structuralist theory and a little light fantasy of course).

What a tiresome book Roads to Santiago (Cees Nooteboom, 1992) is! It’s basically the story of the Dutchman’s meanderings around Spain over the last forty years. He maunders up to a derelict village seeking to have a look at an old (usually pre-Romanesque) church. Only to find no-one is in, but after a few hours of sitting and wandering he comes across a wizened old man who has a key to the place and lets him in. He has a look around and although there are some interesting things inside, and he can indulge in some outré art-historical musings which are pretty much meaningless because he doesn’t describe things very well and the photos in the book are frankly rubbish, he ends up vaguely disappointed and says so at some length. And then he does it again, in another bit of Spain. And then again, only this time the bloke with the rusty key doesn’t materialise so he doesn’t get to see inside and goes away even more sad than usual. And if you get overwhelmed by this journeying and sadness you can have a rest, turn over and look at the back of the book where you can see his picture, which must be the most fed-up-looking author picture I have ever seen.

Sigh. Since we were in a campsite surrounded by Dutch people I was worried about reading it in plain sight. We only had it in translation, but if they saw it and knew the book, we’d remind them about it and there was a good chance we might provoke a rash of suicides.

So I started to read The Ghosts of Spain (Giles Tremlett, 2006). Only it turned out I could only read this in front of non-Spaniards (in our case, in the campsite, this meant the Dutch), as some of it at least is about Spain’s act of ‘forgetting’ related to the reign of General Franco. About the violence and injustice that has been left unaddressed and unresolved in the name of stability and peace, and the effects on those who see themselves as victims. It is about a hidden, fragmented and uncomfortable Spain.

In some ways the subject-matter of this was more conducive to me. A bit of politics from a left-liberal perspective (Tremlett writes for the Guardian & Observer) is very comforting. But he writes like a journalist – lots of human interest accounts; short punchy sentences; and he changes the subject a lot (so you don’t get too bored). I found this all quite annoying by the end of the book, and - unpleasant as the thought was - I preferred the maudlin Dutchman.

I needed some sensible, well-turned prose that might be making a less liberal political point, but which I could trust to be argued from a plain, muscular, matter-of-fact point of view as an antidote to the Nooteboom. Sir Walter Raleigh’s Selected Writings (Penguin). I’d grabbed this in a hurry as we left London, as something I should have read before, and which ought to be a good read on holiday. So I turned readily to the first prose piece:

A report of the truth of the fight about the Isles of Azores, this last summer, betwixt the Revenge, one of her Majesty’s Ships, and an Armada of the King of Spain.

This was going to be much more like it! A true and unbiased view of the Spanish from a highly trustworthy source (or perhaps not).

Possibly this was another text I couldn’t read in public – how touchy were the Spanish about the wars of the sixteenth century against the English? Tremlett explains that several of the separatist movements in Spain claim some form of continuity going back to grudges beginning more than eight hundred years ago. So the Elizabethans are comparatively recent and may be fresh in the memory. However, I risked it and nobody seemed to mind.

Except for one or two members of the family, who said it wasn’t proper holiday reading.