Madam, will you talk?
How Mary Stewart, Agatha Christie and a French deckchair helped me get my reading mojo back
I was sitting in a deckchair in the French countryside in the summer of 2016 when I realised that I had forgotten how to read.
Well, maybe forgotten is the wrong word. But I knew I had lost something, something that used to feel like a fundamental part of me. And I was both unsettled, frustrated and surprised by it.
I had been looking forward to this holiday for ages. For once my husband and I weren’t going to a city for our annual week long break. Instead, we were renting a lovely little house in the Dordogne that belongs to a friend’s parents. The house is in a tiny village, one of the many small towns in rural France devastated by post-war rural depopulation and basically kept alive by the holiday homes owned by grandchildren of the people who left or, in this case, Irish French teachers.
There isn’t even a shop in the village and the nearest town is about five miles away. And while we went on lots of day trips (including a day in Josephine Baker’s chateau, which I strongly recommend), we planned to take advantage of the fact that we were going to a house in the south of France with a patio and a gorgeous view by spending our days lolling around eating cheese, drinking Brouilly (my favourite red wine, which is bizarrely unavailable in Ireland even though you can pick up a bottle in every French supermarket for a tenner) and, most importantly, reading.
For weeks, if not months, before we set off, I had been planning my holiday reading list. Books were saved “for France”. All the nice big books I’d been waiting to get my teeth into while reading other, less important books – their time would come and that time would be at the end of August when I was ensconced on that deck chair under an awning, gazing out over the walnut and olive trees and the hills beyond. I would finally have the leisure to give them all the attention they deserved. I would be able to immerse myself in books, I knew, in a way I hadn’t since I was a kid. A good quarter of my suitcase was taken up with books. It was going to be heaven, I told myself happily. Pure heaven.
And yet, when I was finally there in my deck chair, feeling the deliciously warm southern sun soaking into my factor 30-smeared feet, that sense of immersion refused to come. I would read a bit of one book for fifeen minutes, then put it down and read a bit of another. I read French Elle and French Marie Claire and French Grazia. I read a whole bunch of French graphic novels including an extremely entertaining series called Les Enfants de la Résistance. I was reading all the time. There was always a pile of books next to my deckchair. But that sense of immersion I’d been anticipating, that feeling of being totally and utterly engrossed in one prose novel with no other distractions, never arrived.
It wasn’t the lure of screens – there was no wifi or reliable 3G signal in the house, and I found that refreshing, as if the house was saving me from my own impulse to constantly check Twitter and Instagram for no particular reason. I felt better without the internet, not bored.
And it wasn’t that the books I’d brought weren’t my sort of thing – they very much were, that’s why I’d brought them. I couldn’t understand what was going on. By the time we left the Dordogne, just over a week after we arrived, I had only read two prose books from beginning to end – Nancy Mitford’s biography of Madame de Pompadour, and Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death, which I’d found in the sitting room bookshelf. I’d read both of them before, back in my teens.
And while I’d had a lovely holiday, I really did feel like I’d lost something. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that even though I always have several books on the go (always one serious fiction, one non-fiction and one fluffier book), and was incapable of leaving the house or indeed going to the loo without something to read, that old childhood immersion in books was becoming rarer. And if I couldn’t get it back when I had literally nothing else to do but sit around in the balmy French countryside, how the hell could I get it back in dreary suburban north Dublin?
Then it struck me that the one book I read in one rush on holiday was the Poirot mystery. I still have lots of my old Christies from my many youthful binges, so I chose one whose ending I couldn’t remember and got stuck in. I inhaled it during an afternoon on the couch, taking breaks to make tea and go for a walk to stop my muscles seizing up. Then I read another one. And another. Over the next few weeks I kept reading the more complex books, but I always had a Christie on the go, and that Christie was the book that I would stay up late reading, burning to find out the answer to the old storytelling question: what happens next?
Because that’s what it took to kickstart my reading mojo again: plot. Some of my very favourite books don’t really have plots – the appeal of everything from The Diary of Provincial Lady to William Maxwell’s The Chateau is in the voice, in the tone, in the ideas explored and expressed. But god, the pleasure of immersing yourself in a good story well told – there’s nothing like it. I realised that I hadn’t been prioritizing it over the last few years, and that in order to read books that weren’t focused on plot I needed – and more importantly, I wanted – to make sure I also read lots of those good stories.
The following summer we went back to the house in the Dordogne. This time, I brought a classic Kindle, with no bells and whistles or backlight but containing the collected works of Mary Stewart, the 1950s thriller author whose work, mostly set in the south of Europe, had been recommended to me by the brilliant crime writer Jane Casey and Hodder editorial director Melissa Cox, whose newsletter is a joy. They were witty and twisty and not exactly like anything I’d ever read before, and the second one I devoured, Madam, Will You Talk, featured a breathless, terrifying pursuit through the southern French countryside that’s the best literary car chase I’ve ever read.
I brought other books too, and I read bits of them with great pleasure, but what I remember from that holiday is the pure joy of binging on five Stewarts in a row, of feeling parts of my brain lighting up again, of walking around the house with the Kindle in my hand because I couldn’t step away from Madam, Will You Talk , of sitting in the sun with a cup of tea and, later, a glass of wine and reading and reading and reading and reading.
It was heaven, after all. Just like I’d hoped it would be.
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Madam, Will You Talk by Mary Stewart
Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart
Wildfire at Midnight by Mary Stewart
My Brother Michael by Mary Stewart
This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart
Les Enfants de la Résistance by Benoît Ers et Vincent Dugomier