Mobile library ... Detail from Edward Hopper's Compartment C, Car 293
Good books are good travelling companions. They are no respecters of borders and you can pack many different worlds into them. Take my first ever journey from Dublin to Belfast a few weeks ago. I lost track of my surroundings, only realising I'd crossed the border and was in Northern Ireland when I glanced out of the window and the road signs were no longer dual language. In my mind, I was traversing the Mughal Empire and Renaissance Florence, my nose in the pages of Salman Rushdie's forthcoming The Enchantress of Florence.
Books in transit build a wall of solitude around you; they're wormholes to a different time and place. But actually, what you read when you travel is never a purely private affair. The book in your hand is a flag to the world, a passport to conversations with fellow travellers and strangers in strange lands. In The Enchantress of Florence, Petrarch's Canzoniere seals the friendship between a Scottish soldier of fortune and a mysterious Florentine stowaway discovered on his ship. Books on the road can be bonding or breaking.
Some time ago a friend, whose own novel Winter Under Water is all about language and love in unfamiliar territory, spotted me reading Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. He told me that this novel had started up more conversations than any other when he travelled in Central and Eastern Europe. Although no longer samizdat, it remained a flashpoint of recognition, a now canonical book which is still such a breath of fresh air to read it pricks the bubble of reserve between strangers and cultures.
Books on the go don't always result in the extended hand of intellectual friendship. There are stumbling blocks. Language can be a real tripwire when trying to strike up bookish conversations on the move. Another friend was attempting to read Jane Austen in French in a Paris café. A French woman began to ask some penetrating questions about it - naturally enough, in French. This entirely threw my friend who, while not wanting to give up the ghost of a spontaneous intellectual soiree, managed to get his linguistic wires totally crossed and managed only a "Oui" in response.
And language is not the only pitfall. We can also blunder in with our own prejudices when presuming to comment on the reading choices of strangers. Once, on a train out of Waterloo, a young gentleman decided to remark on the book in my hand - a selection of Octavio Paz's essays, which I was looking at for the first time and would have very much liked to discuss. But, irritatingly, the only thing the whippersnapper wanted to talk about was his surprise that anybody other than himself could possibly open a copy of Paz's work in public.
A female pal had a not dissimilar experience when reading Luke Rhinehart's The Dice Man on the tube. An eager young lad had just squeezed himself through the closing doors and spotted said pal with book. He proceeded to tell my friend that he'd never expected to see such a pretty woman reading such a book and how exciting it was. She told him he should get out more.
Good advice. And take a book with you too. You never know who you might meet.
