Like all but the most indefatigable, Blue Steel, eye-of-the-tiger bibliophiles, I possess a pile of books, increasing stealthily year on year, which in my personal library should be shelved under Dusty Reproach – the mighty canonical works I've gradually given up hope of conquering. In the teetering DR tower sits War and Peace – in three different translations – Finnegans Wake (ain't never gonna happen) and Moby Dick. (I tried everything, even banishing all other books from the loo cistern. I repeatedly read the Harpic blurb instead.) These omissions cause me shame, but I'm old and knackered now and wear mum jeans. I have more pressing matters to blush for.
I have another shelf of failures, though, which might be labelled Cowardice Reproved, and these do cause me considerable disquiet. The books in it also tend to the canonical and "must-read", often full of language in which I take inordinate pleasure. But I find them simply too painful to read in their entirety. They're like decades-old plasters, so grimed and woven with skin and tiny hairs that I just can't bring myself to rip them loose.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles is the CR title par excellence. I have a love-hate relationship with Hardy, often getting very cross with his self-destructive characters but remaining pruriently fascinated by the macabre and surreal turns of his novels – pigs' penises, exploding hearts, wife-selling, sheep-bloating and other charming rural pastimes. But I have never managed to read Tess of the D'Urbervilles to the end. Mostly, I get as far as Tess's rape before hurling my copy across the room. On two occasions I've gritted my teeth past her bearing and burying a child named Sorrow, to be lulled into disastrous optimism by the appearance of sanctimonious, butter-wouldn't-melt Angel Clare. The whole diabolical business of the unread note and the wedding night, and the awful shredding sense of everything going horribly, irreparably wrong as he repudiates Tess – unlucky, unlucky Tess! – is just too much for my snivelling soul to deal with. And I know how horrendously it ends, although I've only ever read summaries. I sincerely hope my daughter never has to read Tess for any kind of coursework in the future, as the conflict between the need to proffer sharp-elbowed "helpful" discussion and my total inability to read the book will cause me to rip myself in half like Rumpelstiltskin.
I can live without Tess, since I've managed to read some Hardy novels to the bitter end. But a more serious presence on the cowardy custard shelf is To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee's Pulitzer-winning only chick and child. In 2006, British librarians voted Mockingbird ahead of the Bible as their top "must-read before you die". Wilfully refusing the counsel of librarians is painful to me, especially as I love the book – Scout is one of the most winning narrators I've ever encountered – but I still can't finish it. As with what happens to Tess, the inexorable tragic outcome awaiting Tom Robinson is JUST TOO UNFAIR for my overemotional inner child, wigging out in the playground because no one's letting her join in Jingle Jangle.
In short, I have a prohibitively low unfairness threshold, which prevents my reading (and certainly rereading) many classic novels. Tragic outcomes are all well and good (ish) if they've been set in train by crime, hubris or overweening something-or-other – pride, passion, obsessive coveting of Maltesers – but sorrow, terror and death visited upon the gentle and undeserving are right out. It may not surprise you that the author best represented on my Cowardice Reproved shelf is Steinbeck. Utterly traumatised at primary school by the ending of The Pearl, and reduced to abject jelly by being made to study Of Mice and Men, I have taken a no-further-Steinbeck vow. No Grapes of Wrath, no East of Eden – no more.
Does anyone else share my quivering inability to stop empathising with invented characters? Or do you have any tips to help surmount the hump of unfairness that consigns so many amazing books to the shameful shelf?
