There are certain books I've finished and, looking up, have found the world to be a gloomier place for having done so. I was reminded, thanks to the novelist Harriet Evans on Twitter last week, of how The Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden had exactly this effect on me. Her story of that "hot French August, [when] we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages" – when the Grey children, left alone in a small French hotel while their mother is ill, fall into danger – exerted such a powerful grip on me that I read it desperately, obsessively, and felt slightly ill when I emerged.
I am indebted, then, to the team at Epic Reads for dubbing this feeling the "book hangover", in a neat, funny little video. That's exactly what it is. The experience was good; the aftermath, not so much.
Just rereading the opening of The Greengage Summer makes me feel slightly woozy. Just as plums have to be cold, ever since reading William Carlos Williams, so do greengages have to be warm, after reading Godden. She tells us that the fruit "had a pale-blue bloom, especially in the shade, but in the sun the flesh showed amber through the clear-green skin; if it were cracked the juice was doubly warm and sweet." Dangerously addictive stuff.
Godden is the classiest of writers; the book hangover has also been inflicted upon me by far lesser pieces of work. Years ago I became addicted, over the course of a couple of weeks, to Simon R Green's Deathstalker novels. If you've not read them, then the name probably tells you everything you need to know. Suffice to say, there's a galactic empire cruelly ruled over by the "Iron Bitch", lots of increasingly deadly ultimate fighting machines/aliens/etc, and lots of references to "death's head grins" as our hero Owen – yes, the heroic Owen – unsheaths his sword.
I couldn't stop reading them, and finally reached the end of the series one Saturday afternoon in my early 20s (I vividly remember it; I was sitting in my boyfriend's room at uni while he was revising; it had somehow got dark). I was dizzy. I had a headache. I had read too much schlock in a row – that day, I think I'd been reading for around eight hours. We went to the pub, and I felt distinctly wobbly, walking down a street in the real world, unpeopled by wampyrs and wolflings and grendels.
As the Epic Reads people put it: "It's like one minute I was reading a book; the next minute … I wasn't." "All of a sudden, the words just stop." It's an odd, disquieting, sometimes genuinely disorienting jerk. And yes, it can, sometimes, feel like a hangover.
I'm not looking forward to my next one: home at my parents, I'm in the middle of a Daphne du Maurier binge read. Frenchman's Creek has been duly downed, I'm in the middle of Jamaica Inn, and God help me when I finish Rebecca.
What do you find brings on a literary hangover?
