‘If no one reads anymore, why do authors still write books?’

It’s no secret that regional Australia is suffering, and it’s not just the drought. In January and February 2013 it is said that 60 businesses and shops closed in our town alone and the living proof was there to see, with great swathes of the shopping strip either empty or on reduced hours. Indeed, you could argue that the drought was the icing on the cake which allowed our Pollyanna politicians the fig leaf they needed to admit all is not well.

Yet, you can’t keep that old human spirit down, so we were all stunned when a pair of amateurs decided to make a go of our only second-hand bookstore, Boobooks, whose gut-wrenching closing down sale had taken place only a few weeks before.

It’s quite amazing what the impact of this small, brave decision has been. Boobooks has been swamped with donations of books and donations of unpaid time because people in the regions don’t want to see another institution that is part of the fabric of their own little societies go to the wall. People here grimly want the shop to succeed, against all the commercial and legal nay-sayers who warn about “sending good money after bad”.

Grace, the redoubtable Grace, who is the least ‘joining’ person I could imagine, is one who has risen to the occasion and has offered her time and her not inconsiderable library and archival skills to giving Boobooks a fighting chance.

Several days a week, she can be found in the back rooms of the shop sorting and classifying piles of old books which had once been bought or donated but then left to moulder. And she has found a few saleable pearls, like early editions of Gray’s Anatomy and Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook. Les famously, she located a book entitled Waterwise Gardening – how timely is that? — as our prime minister might say, which now has pride of place in the display window.

But swamping these few pearls are hundreds of other books, gloomy old hardbacks, from authors who were once not only household names but great writers, though now quite forgotten. Hugh Walpole, Rafael Sabatini, HG Wells (that’s not Harry Wells, the former League great, by the way) and John Buchan — just a sample of what’s out there in the store room.

Now, if you ask a neighbour, who’s John Buchan, expect a blank stare; but if you ask the same person, does The 39 Steps mean anything to you, I reckon you’d be almost certain to get a positive reaction. Because Buchan’s novel has been made into no fewer than four film versions, plus a spoof production for the theatre.

Yet, he wrote great stuff; I read five of his stories before I was 14, while a much younger Grace, who has a pretty good grasp of Eng Lit, knew of none of them beyond the fabled ’39 Steps’. Rather, she was marvelling over how many of these dusty books became outstanding films although book and author have vanished from our awareness. For example, Rafael Sabatini wrote Scaramouche and Sea Hawk, both of which were movie blockbusters in their time.

But the one old book that still resonates with me — and sadly I have lost my copy — is The Mortal Storm, Phyllis Bottome’s 1937 novel based on her observations while a resident, school teacher and wife of an MI6 station chief in Nazi Germany. In the mid-1950s I saw the movie made from it and I must say it was one of the most chilling, and formative, experiences of my early life. It was then that I first understood the idea that a steel fist could be concealed in a velvet glove.

But Phyllis Bottome and The Mortal Storm have gone with the winter snows although both had an impact far beyond a mere book and a mere film. For one, King George VI was known to be deeply impressed by the book, and it could be argued that it might have weighed heavily on him when he was under enormous pressure from Lord Halifax, his close personal friend, to come to terms with Hitler in May 1940. And, second, one of Ms Bottome’s pupils in that hotbed of literate espionage and subterfuge, was none other than Ian Fleming who grew up to know a thing or 20 about the relationships between life, literature and the movies.

To me, the most sobering outcome of this experience was Grace’s despairing comment: “If books like these are no longer being written, where are the great movies of the future going to come from? Can we expect another four versions of The 39 Steps before we decide it’s about 30 steps too many?”

Or do we subsist on so-called modern melodramas like one I saw a couple of years ago, called August: Osage County. In this classic cliche of American film, a dozen people were corralled into one small house for a weekend, to eventually reveal a couple of them having seriously sordid character deficiencies while the rest just screamed at each other. I don’t think that life is like that, even in Osage County, Oklahoma.

Okay, we lead hectic lives; and we live in an electronic environment that rewards instant impulse and punishes contemplation mercilessly. But, frankly, you can’t distill the breadth of human experience into a neat package of declamatory statements (the bread and butter of modern movies) and unambiguous motivation; life’s much too messy and uncertain for that.

Even if we reject the idea that books and writing hold up a mirror to life, whether we act on it or not, and that we regard books as little more than a medium of entertainment whose day is passing, then I repeat Grace’s question; where are the great film scripts of the future going to come from? Where are the 120,000 words of careful, thoughtful observation to be eventually distilled into 120 rivetting minutes that have any meaning beyond more billowing napalm and zapping laser beams?

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