In his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times, Flann O’Brien once proposed a book-handling service for ‘illiterate, but wealthy, upstarts so that [their] books will look as if they have been read and re-read by their owners’. At the entry level, ‘Popular Handling’, this would involve dog-earing four leaves in each volume and the random insertion of tram tickets and such as forgotten bookmarks. The ‘Handling Superb’, meanwhile – the premium level – would include underlining and marginalia – ‘How true, how true!’ and so on – and at least six volumes with affectionate inscriptions from the author. (‘From your devoted friend and follower, Karl Marx’ is one of O’Brien’s examples.)
As Emma Smith notes in Portable Magic, her fascinating exploration of the material life of books, O’Brien’s is an acute satire of our relationship with books, which have always meant something larger and more human than simply being convenient receptacles for information or stories. As soon as the codex emerged – the first known reference is by the Roman poet Martial around the turn of the first century – it became particularly associated with the writings of the nascent Christian church. The format’s deep roots in Judaeo-Christian theology, Smith says, is one of the reasons we are inclined to sacralise the format itself. For the same reason, books have always represented knowledge – in particular, secret or revealed knowledge – in folklore and legend, with all the dangers that implies. (How lovely to learn, incidentally, that Gutenberg’s business partner was named Fust – or Faust.)
Smith’s focus is on the form rather than the contents, and it leads her to resist readers’ over-investment in the value – spiritual, emotional, psychological, financial – of printed works. ‘Bluntly, books, unlike people, are usually replaceable,’ she writes. And that question of replicability leads her to some provocative positions on book burning and censorship. Her essential argument is that books are objects, and we shouldn’t fuss about the destruction of any objects, especially mass-produced ones, regrettable though it may be. There is some sense to that; as she points out, the print industry pulps books in their millions every year and no-one bats an eyelid. Context matters, though. ‘Where people burn books, they are usually inadequate attention-seekers rather than genocidal tyrants,’ she notes in a chapter on the topic, which focuses in particular on the Nazi book-burning of 10 May 1933. Yes, but sometimes book-burners are tyrants – genocidal or otherwise – and Smith’s unwillingness to consider seriously the political or ideological contexts for book burning results in a Quixotic attempt to delink Nazi book-burning from the regime’s wider crimes against humanity.
It is easy to say, because it is true, that a book does not equate to a human being, or that the loss of a book does not equate to the loss of a human life. The harder thing is to try to define how books exist in an indeterminate space between that of mute object and full humanity. The question is glimpsed throughout Practical Magic. Smith writes movingly of a stack of well-used Spanish-language Gideon Bibles, taken from their owners at the Mexican-American border and treated as trash by the authorities, and how ‘Even the most mass-market book takes on an individual shape and character through use… each, preciously, one of a kind’. But further exploration of how and why that might be true – of the ‘magic’ of the book’s title – would have enriched the book.
Besides, Smith herself anthropomorphises the book in various ways. She writes about ‘bookhood’ and ‘bibliocide’, for instance, and draws an awkward parallel between the poor and destitute of Europe sailing to America in search of better lives at the turn of the 20th century and the concurrent transatlantic trade in high-value collectible books. ‘Like the men and women looking for work, these volumes followed the money,’ she writes. Elsewhere, Smith asserts that in reading a book ‘we will be turned… towards being the reader it imagined before we ever encountered it’. Having argued vociferously for the non-human quality of books, she seems willing to give a surprising amount of agency here to what is still an object. Not that I think there is necessarily a contradiction in Smith’s argument, but books accrue emotional significance – or human meaning, if you prefer – in complex, perhaps paradoxical, ways, and addressing them through a strict human / not-human binary obscures more than it reveals.
Because if books are not fully human, they do nevertheless have a life of their own. This is true in a general sense: many of us will have second-hand books on our shelves garlanded with personal inscriptions and passionate marginalia. But it can be true in strange and particular ways too. Smith writes about the 1663 Bible created by New England evangelist John Eliot which translated the scriptures into Wôpanâak language of the Algonquin peoples. While an extraordinary achievement on one level, because Eliot and his team were forced to create a written form for what was then wholly an oral language, the project would ultimately serve to eradicate the culture at which it was addressed – and with it Wôpanâak itself. And yet, over four centuries later, the Bible is being used for the exact opposite purpose: to recreate and restore the language to use.
It is insights like this that make Portable Magic, despite some flaws, a hugely enjoyable book. There is no doubt that it raises interesting questions about the role that books play in our lives – as gifts, as markers of status, as symbols of good or evil – even before a word has been read. Nevertheless, Smith’s assertion that Portable Magic is ‘about books, rather than words’ is a touch disingenuous. That beloved, dog-eared paperback is only the vehicle for magic; the magic is in how its words make us think and feel. By eliding this, and with it the role of the author or authors who wrote those words, Smith limits her ability to account for the power that books have, the way in which they act as a kind of synecdoche for the human heart and mind. The agency of the writer in filling so small a space with so much humanity is sadly little remarked on.
Smith seems most comfortable addressing book-human relationship directly at a material level, exploring how DNA testing is now enabling us to learn about the lives of readers through the traces they have left between the leaves. Studies of medieval religious books, for instance, show their users to have been much more pre-occupied with indulgences – remittances against sin, essentially – than the lives of the saints. ‘If we are made up of books,’ Smith writes, ‘books are made up of us.’
This reciprocal formulation put me in mind of another Flann O’Brien conceit, from his novel The Third Policeman, which posits that years of daily contact between a policeman and his bicycle results in exchange between the two at an atomic level, so that there are many policemen who are half-bicycle, and many bicycles that are half-policeman. Books may not have the status of people, but they rub off on us, just the same, in ways that are hard to define and harder to write about. But perhaps books are ultimately unknowable. In that respect if no other, they are all too human after all.
This review first appeared in the summer 2022 issue of The Author, the quarterly publication from the Society of Authors.
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Mathew Lyons 