7 Talking books

Glenda has been running Milltown’s mobile library single-handedly for longer than she cares to remember. It’s painted battleship grey, which makes it look like a breeze-block on wheels. As small as Glenda is, she manoeuvres the unwieldy vehicle through narrow lanes with calm expertise. It’s second nature to her now; she could almost do it in her sleep.

Her task is to bring the written word to our rural backwaters. Sometimes it can seem like literary evangelism, sometimes missionary work, occasionally an unrewarding chore. After all, there are bachelor farmers living on the hills around Milltown whose reading is confined to the application forms for set-aside grants and the cooking instructions on the back of a ‘Boil-in-the-bag Cod in Cheese-style Sauce’ TV dinner for one. After a hard day’s work they’re unlikely to curl up by the fire with a Booker prizewinner. “I read a book once”, a local worthy confided to Glenda, by way of explanation, “and, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t impressed.”

After all these years Glenda has a pretty good idea what country people like to read. There’s not much call for science fiction, or avant-garde poetry, or impenetrable stories that boast of their ‘exciting and experimental use of language’ (which generally means no punctuation). She’s tried - God knows she’s tried - to introduce her readers to the classics. It can be a thankless task. Weaning them off the execrable Jeffrey Archer is a start. But it’s the smallest of victories, like getting cannibals to eat with a knife and fork.

What Glenda’s customers want is an undemanding read. Historical family sagas, as big as house-bricks - their embossed covers featuring an attractively tousled young woman wearing a shawl and a ‘come hither’ smile. There’s always a potted plot summary on the back: ‘From clogs to clogs in three generations, the Arkwrights raised themselves from humble beginnings to the big house on the hill, through a combination of hard work, opportunistic marriage and gunboat diplomacy’. Or fatuous adventure yarns - usually featuring killer bees, for some reason - in which no cliché is left unexplored. Or romantic fiction: an uncomplicated world where men are men, and women are airline stewardesses. Conveyor-belt books: nothing to tax the brain after twelve hours spreading sileage or being beastly to dumb farmyard animals. One day these books will be written by computers, though probably never with quite the precipitant urgency that Dame Barbara Cartland churns them out.

The romantic action used to stop at the bedroom door, with three little dots of discretion... Readers could fill in the more salacious details for themselves, depending on their own tastes, experience and sexual proclivities. But these blockbuster authors have no such qualms. Confronted by a locked bedroom door, their first instinct is to batter it down and burrow voyeuristically beneath that double duvet of desire. Some of Glenda’s more elderly customers may raise their eyebrows and suggest that the book they’ve just finished was a bit on the steamy side... before asking, in a demure whisper, if she’s got any more like them.

Milltown, by contrast, is an island of literary sophistication: a place where a man with floppy hair, a strange, plonking voice and a notebook full of poems is a familiar sight. So when Glenda takes a break from rubber-stamping large-print books for her more elderly readers, she likes to relax in the congenial company of the Milltown Writers’ Group. Meeting once a fortnight, in the back room of a local pub, the group comprises a bunch of literary malcontents who put aside their mutual antagonism for just long enough to give their undistinguished doggerel an airing. Isn't it splendid that poetry, arguably the highest of literary expression, can also offer a safe haven to the inept and mediocre? Can there be a more democratising artform than is?

You might consider following the example of Milltown’s poets. It’s possible to carve out a small career - footling around in the foothills of literature - by observing a few simple ground-rules. Avoid, at all costs, the 'Mcgonnegal effect': producing verse of such transparent awfulness that you become a laughing stock among your peers. This can best be achieved by keeping your poetry opaque and meaningless; it’s difficult for people to criticise what they don’t understand. Leave your readers feeling that they are the ones at fault, for failing to catch your erudite allusions and subtle nuances of language. Conceal any last vestiges of sense beneath a thick layer of poetic varnish. By embracing incomprehensibility, you'll be able to carry on for quite a while - maybe for years - before someone finally plucks up the courage to articulate what most people are actually thinking: "Your poetry... it's crap, isn't it?"

The Arts Council must shoulder some of the blame, by rewarding persistence and bloody-mindedness rather than genuine talent. At present they give bad poets financial inducements to publish slim volumes of verse, which no-one ever reads. The Arts Council could perhaps follow the sterling example set by the Ministry of Agriculture: awarding small 'set-aside' grants to encourage bad poets to give up writing altogether. Rotate those crops, guys; save another tree. Leave that paper fallow for one more season.

Glenda’s own forté is short stories; compared to what the other members of the Milltown Writers’ Group are composing, they are models of lucidity. She’s the first to admit that she’s not a good writer. She’s not bad either. As she says herself, modestly, they’re just ‘so-so’ stories. But what she has in abundance is a healthy imagination, honed by spending so much time on her own. As she negotiates blind bends, and gears down to goad the mobile library up steep Pennine hills, she lets her fantasies take wing. Yes, Glenda dreams of exotic lands - far, far away - where small, pear-shaped women are worshipped as goddesses.

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