The perfect holiday read

There’s only one author that people who love reading are packing this summer. He is Alexander McCall Smith, an eccentric Scottish Law Professor whose “No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series, just published by Abacus, has sold over a million copies in America entirely by word-of-mouth recommendations. Featuring an African woman detective in the old-fashioned, poor yet flourishing Botswana they are wise, funny, intelligent, gripping and so beautifully-written that readers reviewing it on amazon.com are comparing him to Dickens.

Oh, the agonies of finding books to read on holiday! Those two weeks off from working life represent the time in which most of us do the majority of our reading, and even those like myself who read for professional reasons want a different kind of book to take on holiday. Even the most high-minded reader wants a B-road not an A-road, something that takes you meandering down pleasurable landscapes of the imagination. You have your foot off the pedal, and want to read entirely for pleasure rather than for instruction, fashion or the sensation that, in swallowing serious literature, you are taking the equivalent to prunes and bran, something that is Good For You. Somehow, all those prizes for fiction and biography – the Booker, the Whitbread, the Orange, the Samuel Johnson – are likely to fall into this last category. Yet even so, the holiday read can be a minefield for those who choose to relax in the vicinity of other readers. You might privately prefer to veg out by reading a Jilly Cooper or a Wilbur Smith, but unless you are absolutely lacking in shame you will find others looking askance at this choice. You don’t want to read the sort of novel that, even if superbly written, offers an awful sort of consolation – the feeling that Life is even worse than you suspected. Yet at the same time, you need to find something as pleasurable as, say Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or Miss Garnett’s Angel.

What you want is not grim-lit but sun-lit: fiction that is both literary and pleasurable, something that lifts the spirits while engaging the mind. Dr.Johnson observed that “the true end of literature is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it.” While practically every Booker short-list, and the entire range of Granta’s new Best of Young British Novelists is strong on endurance, it remains extraordinarily hard to find novels that celebrate life, or at least leave you with a feeling that it might include laughter, joy or hope.

My own sun-lit discoveries on holiday have given me hours of astonished pleasure that did more than anything else to relax and revive. There was the summer two years ago when I came across Elinor Lipman’s glorious romantic comedy about anti-Semitism and love in the 1950s, The Inn at Lake Devine. There was the time after my Finals at Cambridge when I rediscovered Dickens through Our Mutual Friend, and drove my companion mad by laughing at the social ambitions of the Veneerings. There was that train-ride across Thailand, with a battered copy of Balzac’s Lost Illusions, when I was so excited I couldn’t be sure whether the flashes I saw in the dark were giant fireflies or a cascade of illuminating ideas for what became my own novel, A Vicious Circle. There was the autumn in Venice, when my whole family encountered the gloriously funny and exciting novels of Eva Ibbotson, and couldn’t wait for the siesta hours to lie on our hotel beds enjoying them. You never forget that wonderful feeling of a really great holiday book, which seems to pour its life and energy straight into your own veins like a gift from the gods.

Sun-lit, unlike grim-lit, is not merely feel-good: it is the landscape of human fate and character irradiated with a kind of energetic hopefulness and comedy. Laughter, as Nabokov famously observed, is the best pesticide, and we are never more in need of this than when we are taking time out of normal surroundings and habits. Writing it takes just as much inspiration, skill, knowledge and sympathy for the human condition as writing tragedy, but where tragedy is cathartic, sun-lit s the embodiment of the healing art. In the case of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series the shadows of AIDS, hunger, violence and murder are not forgotten but you are given the sense that Mma. Ramotswe’s goodness and the virtues of Botswana itself are more potent. As a result, instead of hardening your heart in despair towards Africa you find yourself thinking that there might after all be something to love and embrace. You become better, kinder, more hopeful and indeed more thoughtful – just as you do when reading Dickens, or EM Forster.

Sun-lit authors are among the most distinguished in English fiction. Shakespeare was predomniantly sun-lit, as was Fielding, the father of the novel in Tom Jones. Dickens, Trollope, Jane Austen, Mark Twain and Alison Lurie wrote or write novels that are not just romances or thumping good reads. To read them is to undergo that miraculous transformation of mood, so powerfully uplifting that Francis Spufford, in his book The Child the Books Built, compared it to taking a drug such as tobacco or opium. Once upon a time there was even a prize, the delightfully-named Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, famously won by Stella Gibbons for Cold Comfort Farm, which addressed precisely this kind of audience. Now, it no longer exists. Kingsley Amis, despite being best-known for his peerless comic novel Lucky Jim, would never have won the Booker for it. That was only given to him for The Old Devils, a dreary rant about bores in a pub.

Every once in a while a literary novelist (usually female) writes such a book. AS Byatt’s Possession was one, as was Rose Tremain’s Music & Silence, Carol Shields’s Larry’s Party and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith. So, arguably, is Yann Martell’s Booker-winning The Life of Pi. Sun-lit novels do exist, and when they arrive they are greeted with cries of joy from readers. Yet despite these examples winning praise and prizes, more often than not the sun-lit novel is despised by critics. There are “commercial” novelists such as Joanna Trollope, Mary Wesley, Nick Hornby and Joanne Harris who are every bit as incisive and intelligent as “literary” stars, yet who are unlikely ever to win prizes because they are simply too enjoyable and life-affirming.

It is not that sun-lit authors avoid dark subjects, but they handle them differently, as part of a wider picture. Those such as Anne Tyler, Jane Hamilton, Rohinton Mistry and Jon MacGregor address subjects such as suicide, poverty, old age and bereavement but bathe their readers in tenderness. As a result, you’re driven to anger, or compassion, but not to despair. You feel that suffering is affirmed by them, that they’re taking humanity under their wing, and that hope and laughter are not lost.

It is notable that America doesn’t suffer from the attitude that only the solemn is serious and good. Perhaps it’s having the right to pursue happiness written into their constitution, but Alison Lurie won the Pulitzer Prize, their equivalent to the Booker, for Foreign Affairs. Anne Tyler, Elinor Lipman and Lorrie Moore are no less loved, respected and rewarded for being perceived as predominantly “sun-lit” novelists. The great Canadians, Robertson Davies and Carol Shields, were both short-listed for the Booker Prize here, but Shields in particular was repeatedly attacked by critics for being a “feel-good novelist” – an accusation that relented only when it became known she is terminally ill with cancer.

“I think it stems from the feeling that if you’re reading for escapism, it can’t be art,” says Kate Saunders. A literary novelist and former Booker judge who crossed the divide to become a best-selling author of romantic comedies such as The Marrying Game, she points out that although “it’s easier to imagine the lowest depths than the highest heights, enjoyment is not a good reason to read a book. People tend to overlook how ferociously well-written Cold Comfort Farm, Diary of a Nobody or PG Wodehouse are – they deserved to be treated with far greater respect. If you look at Cranford, it looks like a tiny little novel besides Middlemarch but it has a rival greatness. It’s set in almost the same period and is also about a slice of life in an early Victorian town, but because it cheers you up Mrs. Gaskell isn’t taken seriously as George Eliot is.”

She thinks that while readers are always looking for the “lost Eden” of pleasure they found in children’s literature, they are made to feel that this isn’t respectable. “There’s a lot of solemnity in crap.”

The pick of the summer reads lists published in newspapers every year do not begin to address what readers really want. Notorious for being an invitation for a small circle of critics and authors to puff each other’s work, they are also absurdly pretentious. My own choice this year was for The Fourth Queen by Debbie Taylor - someone I have never met, and whose publisher, the mass-market Michael Joseph, has given her cover ominous lashings of gold. Set in an 18th century Moroccan harem it is pure literary Viagra, and as erotic as it is elegant and intelligent. I’d far rather read something like this on holiday than Monica Ali’s much-lauded Brick Lane, but somehow this choice is thought typically eccentric rather than honest. One of the perils of going on holiday with other middle-class people is that you can’t stray too far outside the consensus of opinion as to what is respectable entertainment. Those who pack book-bags are all too familiar with the awful choice between last year’s Whitbread-winner and the thumping detective-story or three we probably really want to stretch out with by the pool. Anyone who has stayed in an upmarket hotel is probably familiar with the phenomenon of the mini-library of former holiday reads consisting of both dismal trash and multiple copies of Midnight’s Children.

Adults feel so guilty about enjoying JK Rowling and Philip Pullman that their publishers have issued copies with appropriately gloomy covers. The new Everyman editions of PG Wodehouse are exquisite, but so restrained that you might never guess what riotous fun and wit lies between its monotonous covers.

Yet critics and purists remain unmoved. Even if Joanne Harris was once short-listed for the Whitbread, she was never going to be on the Granta Best of Young British list for 2003; like JK Rowling, she is perceived as sun-lit. Beryl Bainbridge, despite five short-listings for the Booker, has yet to win it, and novelists such as Fay Weldon, Vikram Seth and Deborah Moggach despite immensely distinguished outputs, have not been awarded a single prize.

If these attitudes are being driven by critics and literary judges rather than publishers and readers, why not bring back the Vie Heureuse Prize to celebrate what makes life worth living? It is not only when on holiday, after all, that we need to be reminded that joy, hope and love may and do triumph over their opposites. Why should we celebrate mankind at its darkest, rather than lit by the radiance of the sun?

The Times, August 2003