Graham Greene

Good Good Books, Bad Bad Books, and Community Values

I went to teach a couple of English students at Vodafone yesterday with a bag full of books. These books could have been divided into two broad categories. Half of them were what could be termed bad bad books, a couple of bad good books, and three or four good good books. This sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it. In fact, it makes a real kind of sense, as George Orwell, writer of good good books, explains in rather complicated language here, a New Yorker blog post discusses in even more difficult language here, and I will try to explain in easier-to-understand language here.

We can say there are four general types of books, in terms of quality. First, we take the genre, the style of book the writer is trying to write, and we decide whether it is “good”, meaning that the author is writing about an important subject, something perhaps, like war and peace, the actions of great men and women, science. We look at whether the writer wants the reader to think seriously about these things or, in the case of a “bad” book, if the author’s intention is to do nothing more than entertain the reader, let them pass time for a while. I write about this first, because it is the first decision we have to make, but this, in the phrase “bad bad book”, as in those related to it, such as “good good book” and “bad good book” is the second “good” or “bad”.

The first “good” or “bad” is the judgement we make about the book itself. Here we ask, did the author succeed?

Let us first take the example of a writer who sat down at his writing desk from morning until night for weeks on end with a cups of coffee constantly at his side in order to explain to the world how to live well, to write of the lives of great historical figures and to gift the world with everything he had learned about the forces of love and its opposite, hate, hope and fear, fortune and fate. After all of this work he finishes, triumphantly sends out his manuscript (a stack of paper with the text of his book), and he finds a publisher. His book goes out into the world and… and it is rarely read and quickly forgotten. His book is, all agree, almost unreadable. The characters do not feel alive. They talk to each other in lines no person would ever say. Things do happen in the book, and one thing does lead to another. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. Reading the book, though, you never come to care about the characters, or what happens to them. In short, it is boring. The writer spent too much time trying to tell you what he knows, and too little thinking about how people think and speak and, perhaps most importantly, how they act. He has written a bad good book.

Let’s take a second example. This author grew up surrounded by books. She read as many as she could find, beginning with picture books before she could read or understand them even when they were read to her. Her parents could never get enough to satisfy her natural curiosity and love for the things. Friends of her parents noticed this and came bringing gifts of books they had finished with, and which they had found in charity shops. She grew up and did okay in school – nothing special, perhaps – went to an okay university to study English, and then got a normal-ish* job in a normal-ish town where she settled down and got married and then started a family. When she was pregnant, and in the first months of being a mother, she found that her brain didn’t work in the way it had before. She had never thought of herself as an Einstein, but now she sometimes could not remember anything except what she had to do for her baby girl. When she read, instead of the classics she had read for years, she reread children’s books from when she was little, silly romances and detective books she got free with women’s magazines. One day she surprised herself. Falling half-asleep to the news at the end of a long day, half-listening to her husband tell a story about a customer at work who could be very aggressive at times, and half-listening to depressing stories on the evening news, she had an idea for a detective story of her own. She picked up the pen and paper she had started the easy crossword in her magazine with, and started writing it down. For weeks, the story grew in the little spaces in the day she had when her daughter was eating, sleeping, or occupied with something. Finally, she couldn’t take it any more and asked her husband if he could get up forty five minutes to an hour earlier every day and deal with the first tasks of the day. He grumbled a little, but she reminded him how early he would get up to go fishing and do things that mattered to him, and that maybe his wife and daughter might matter just as much, and he started to do it, and stopped grumbling when he saw how much she enjoyed it and how much energy this gave her. Because day after day in these little breaks in her day, she wrote. Every day a few lines. Every day a new couple of ideas, a discovery. Sometimes what she had written would go in the bin. Other times, though, it would go in a completely new direction; her characters had come alive enough that they could surprise her, refuse to do what she wanted from them. Two years later, she published her first detective novel. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was translated into tens of languages. People talked about the characters from her book on train journeys and in cafes and restaurants, all the time talking about them excitedly, or in whispers, saying they hated them, or really wanted to meet them, even cook for them and be taken on safari with them; they talked about them as if they were real people, because that’s what they felt like. Some other people complained and muttered that basset hounds could not recognise their owner’s handwriting or dial numbers on smart phones, that grandmothers could not fly police helicopters no matter how many times they have played their grandson’s X-box games, and that you can’t start up chainsaws in residential areas in the middle of the night without attracting attention. But they were just grumpy or jealous, and nobody listened to them. Realistic or not, the story was exciting, and you cared about the people in it. She had written a good bad book!

Now, I would tell you something more about the bad bad books in my bag but really, all I ought to say is that they are the kind your mothers read when you aren’t looking. Go and ask them. Few good bad books, strangely, and then a handful of good good books. The ones that get spoken about in university cafes and written about in the cultural sections of newspapers and the posh hang-outs on the internet.

All of these books had been donated by members of staff. I had asked for such books. Any books. Even the not-so-good ones. The reason for this was that I have, for a few weeks now, been visiting a community “library” near where I live in Záběhlice. A cupboard, basically, with weather-proof doors at both ends, people can leave books for others to borrow or take. There is no catalogue or method of scanning out and returning the books. You could say the library runs on a kind of honour code. You can take books away and not return them, but the system works best when people are considerate and leave as many books as they take, or leave more.

I confess that until I carried my bag full of bad bad books and good good books, with a few bad good books for good measure, from Prague 1 to Prague 10 yesterday, I had taken a lot more books than I had left.

Now, I know a good book when I see one, and I had got a good few good good books, and one good bad book, a Czech translation of Ross Macdonald’s The Zebra–Striped Hearse which I finished a few days ago. Another was an interesting case of a good bad book written by an author known for his good good books. There is a practice in US television known as “bottom feeding” in which rubbishy popular programmes are made to make the money needed to invest into more serious programming which tends not to make much money. Graham Greene did something similar with the novels he wrote. He had two types. Firstly, there were the entertainments. These were his good bad books. And then there were the novels, the more serious literary works. Well, I picked up a copy of the Czech translations of The Honorary Consul and Doctor Fischer of Geneva, two of his entertainments.

So what of the good good books. Well, many of them will stay in the library, for a time at least. All but one of these are in Czech, and that one is in Slovakian, so many of you will not be able to read them. The majority, though, have been translated into Czech, many of them from English, and all but two are available in English, so it’s certainly worth taking a look at them. I will go over a few of the better ones.

Now, there are a few more, and they are all very good. But then aren’t they a little bit too good? I hear you ask. I mean, it’s all very well replacing, say, ten books with ten books, but if you take away all the best ones and replace them with these bad bad books you keep on talking about, that’s hardly more community-minded is it?

Well, it turns out I have given this some thought and actually, I have been toying with you a little bit here. We can divide books into categories and Orwell’s way of doing it is probably as good as any. It is true that there are good bad books and there are good good books, and it is a very different experience to read one or the other. But then we shouldn’t judge people for the books they read, especially if we haven’t read them ourselves. I haven’t actually read any of the books I put on the shelves of the community library the other day so I can’t judge them, even if I have heard a lot about them. And besides, just as there may be good good books and good bad books, there are good reasons to read good bad books (and even bad bad books) and bad reasons to read good good books (and I know a few people I could think of there). I am pretty sure that some of the books I put on the shelves the other day will have been long forgotten in five years’ time, let alone ten, and certainly won’t last as long as even the less well-known works of Dickens and Karel Čapek, but then I also know for sure that lots of people have read and enjoyed them – in fact, for a time I think the majority of women I met had read them. Soon enough, I’m pretty sure somebody will be reading them on the Metro or on a tram to work, which, given as it will most likely be somebody reading it in their second language, will likely be a lot easier and more pleasurable for them than their trying to read Dickens or even Gerald Durrell in English. I have discovered many of the pleasures of good bad books since the time ten years or so ago when I started learning Czech. Believe me, I have read good good books in Czech and it is hard work. I have read these books on public transport and after I cook my dinner following a long and difficult day at work, but, as much as I love them, entertaining it isn’t.

“Please give me any old books”, I said in the e-mail to other teachers, “I’m starting to feel like a bad citizen, and you’d be helping me to sleep nights.” I still have a few books I intend to take from school to the library to the community library in the park, but, grannies in helicopters or no grannies in helicopters, somebody will get as much pleasure out of those books as I hope my students get out of those I discovered there myself. I think I’ll be able to rest easy tonight.

 

* If you put -ish at the end of a word, it means the same as if you put “quite” or “kind of” before it, so “normal-ish” means “quite normal”. It is informal, but a lot of people use it. Some people even use it as a word on its own, which is kind of is, and kind of isn’t, though actually, that’s rubbish, since a word is a word when people use it as a word, so ‘ish’ is a word after all. Ish.

2 CommentsLeave a comment