What books do you think explain Britain best? Do you agree with our expert
panel? Post your views at the bottom of this story
An alien’s guide to Britain
1 George Orwell 1984/Animal Farm/Essays
2 Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams/ Civilisation and Its
Discontents
3 James Lovelock Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth/ The Ages of
Gaia/The Revenge of Gaia
4 Charles Darwin The Origin of Species
5 Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim
6 Martin Amis Money
7 Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland/Alice Through the Looking
Glass
8 Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene
9 Charles Dickens Bleak House
10 EH Gombrich The Story of Art
11 Aldous Huxley Brave New World
12 Franz Kafka The Trial
13 Philip Larkin Collected Poems/the poem Going Going
14 Nikolaus Pevsner (ed) The Buildings of England
15 Katie Price Being Jordan
16 Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations
17 Various authors Ikea catalogue
18 Evelyn Waugh The Loved One/Brideshead Revisited
So, this alien – let us call him Stuart – lands his Galaxy Hopper in your back
garden and, after you have persuaded him that you can’t take him to your
leader, demands a list of five books that he should read to help him get a
grip on this country of ours. Stunned by the implications – and possible
repercussions – of your answer, you retreat to your library and return, 12
days later, with... what?
It is, of course, a slightly odd question.
Why books? As Roger Scruton ruefully observed when giving his answer to this
exercise: “Books have a dwindling importance in Britain.” Television
programmes, films, computer games or obesity statistics may all be seen as
more reliable guides to contemporary Britain. But, of course, it all depends
on your alien – let us assume that Stuart is a thoughtful, bookish type –
and what he means by “get a grip”. Does he mean he wants to understand the
way it is now, how it became thus or how it should be? Does he want books
that millions read or books read by a few that have defined or changed who
we are?
Stuart is in no mood to answer such questions. “Just get the books,” he says,
with an imperious wave of his claw. And so you retreat to your library or,
rather, to a large advisory panel consisting of the brilliant, the gifted,
the great, the good and me. You keep the brief simple: five books to explain
Britain to an alien. What do you get?
Or, rather, what don’t you get? Strikingly, there is only one book on our list
by a politician, if you can call him that. Daisy Goodwin chooses Alastair
Campbell’s diaries. Campbell hasn’t a clue what he’s saying in this book,
but it does describe contemporary British political life in a way that might
make Stuart want to turn round and go home. Other than that, there are no
memoirs, biographies, speeches. I find this predictable, but troubling.
Contemporary politicians are not thoughtful, cultured types to whom we turn
for profound meditations on the state of the nation. You may argue this
discrepancy stems from our rather nonpolitical panel. It’s certainly true
that if we’d asked politicians and political journalists, we would have had
books by politicians on the list. But that only emphasises the point:
contemporary politicians are talking to themselves and their own kind, not
to the people, and certainly not to the wider culture.
Furthermore, there are few books that explicitly describe Britain. Pevsner’s
magnificent Buildings of England, chosen by Mary Beard and Nicholas Kenyon,
qualifies, as do Kevin Cahill’s Who Owns Britain and Ireland, and Who Owns
Scot-land by Hunter and Wightman – both chosen by AA Gill. In each case,
there is an element of the catalogue involved. Here, literally, is Britain.
Pont’s cartoons (chosen by David Kynaston) in The British Character are also
a kind of list, and novels such as Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (Cosmo
Landesman) and Martin Amis’s Money (Waldemar Januszczak, Robert Hewison) may
be descriptive of at least parts of the nation, but these stretch the point.
No broad description of Britain as she is now has been chosen. This may be a
disappointment for Stuart.
He may also be slightly startled to discover that the highest-ranking author
on the list, George Orwell, is dead, and that the second-highest, Sigmund
Freud, is both dead and foreign. The single most popular book is Orwell’s
1984 (John Carey, Peter Kemp, Nicholas Hytner, Vivienne Westwood, Beard);
the second is Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (Kemp, Hytner, Dominic
Sandbrook, John Gray). Orwell and Freud are also nominated for other books –
the former for Animal Farm and Collected Essays, the latter for Civilisation
and Its Discontents.
As a way of describing modern Britain, 1984 has a certain mordant precision.
We are watched everywhere we go by CCTV cameras. And we do have Big Brother,
but he is now a low-life reality-television show. It is a great testament to
the power of
Although entirely convinced of Freud’s importance, I am not sure he belongs in
this list. His potent sense of the eternal friction between our biological
and social selves is of universal significance, not specifically British.
Plainly, such big ideas affect the British as much as anybody else, but that
opens the floodgates to almost any work. I’d raise the same objection to
Gombrich’s The Story of Art (Beard, Hytner) and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag
Archipelago (Hytner).
Yet, crucially, I would not object on the same grounds to Darwin’s The Origin
of Species (Gray, Rod Liddle, Kemp), nor to any of the James Lovelock books
– Gaia (me, Kemp), The Ages of Gaia (John Cornwell) and The Revenge of Gaia
(Gray) – nor even to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (me, Carey). Why?
Although all these books are universal in their significance, each has a
distinctly British flavour; all express a peculiarly British relationship to
nature, in each case defined by a strict and pragmatic empiricism. Darwin
and Lovelock combine this with awe and reverence, Dawkins with a certain
extremism. All these books had clear effects on contemporary Britain. Both
Darwin and Dawkins contribute to the underlying belief system of British
secularity – a scientistic shrug of the shoulders – and Lovelock is the most
eloquent and informed of the envi-ronmentalists, though his ultimate
message, that humanism is dead and we must abandon our absurd ambitions, has
yet to sink in.
The general point is that the British dominated science until well into the
19th century, and we still do it very well, producing pungent scientists of
great character. There is such a thing as distinctively British science,
and Stuart needs to know this. The same case can be made for Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations (Liddle, Gray). This, again, feels distinctively
British in its method. I am, though, in two minds about Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations (Scruton). Scruton’s other choices – Eliot’s
Four Quartets, Leavis’s Revaluation, Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and
two Ruskins – are significant and unquestionably English, though not
British. But the Wittgenstein feels international. Perhaps Scruton can make
the case that it is, indeed, an English work, because it sprang from a
British intellectual context at Cambridge and stands in sharp contrast to
postwar continental philosophers.
Importantly, Scruton includes a disclaimer about all these titles. Having said
that books are of dwindling importance in Britain, he justifies his list by
saying: “But people are still alive whose minds were shaped by books.”
This suggests that the death of these readers will mean the death of these
books; that they had no lasting impact and cannot be said to define
contemporary Britain. Would we change if the last reader of Philosophical
Investigations were to die? It seems unlikely. If this means we have become
a nation uninfluenced by books, then it is a nightmare, which is what, I
think, Scruton intended.
This raises the question: can we describe Britain through books few people
have read? Most of our panel seem to think so. Overwhelmingly, they have
chosen literary or intellectual works. I think they are right to do so, but
this is an act of faith. I agree with Cornwell that Auden’s poems, in some
way, form the way we are, and with Simon Jenkins that we still feel the
presence of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. I could speculate about how
this happens, but I could prove nothing. I’m not sure this would be good
enough for Stuart. I think he needs something to get his topical teeth into.
Which is why I (along with Sandbrook) chose the Ikea catalogue and (along with
Gill) Katie Price’s “autobiography”, Being Jordan. In throwing in Gordon
Ramsay Makes It Easy (with DVD), Phil Spencer and Kirstie Allsopp’s How to
Buy a House and Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, I went further than anybody
else, but I do think shopping, sex, celebrity and house-buying are essential
elements of the current British identity. If uninformed about these
obsessions, I think Stuart would be utterly baffled when he left my garden
to look for Britain. In my defence, I should say I have faith in the
continuing power of great but little-read books, but their effects lie
beneath the surface, and you must know the surface in order to understand
what lies beneath. I seldom trust the insights of people who say they don’t
watch television.
Literature does well in the list. I strongly support Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim
(Carey, Hewison) as a brilliant evocation of the state of the postwar
British imagination: bedraggled, ill-tempered, reductive, but very funny.
And perhaps Carey’s choice of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a
slightly grander version of my Joy of Sex: both contain the sexual
“liberation” with which we seem to have so much difficulty. Scruton chooses
one Carroll, Januszczak another, Alice in Wonderland. These are good
examples of our persistent off-with-the-fairies mentality and our
heart-stabbing sense of lost childhood.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (Westwood, Carey) evokes our fear of
technology and, though utterly universal in its description of a world of
reproductive control, still qualifies as a dystopia with a British flavour.
Philip Larkin (Carey, Hewison) should, of course, be in there; like Amis,
but more terrifying. And I am entirely with Goodwin in choosing Pride and
Prejudice. She justifies it because Stuart might wish to grasp “the bedrock
of female romantic aspiration”. This is too universal a point. I’d say it
describes the deeply buried bedrock of British manners and, in fact, is not
so bad a description of contemporary teenage mores. Goodwin also chooses
Harry Potter. I must reluctantly agree, though it is pallid whimsy after
Carroll. Bleak House (Kynaston, Beard) is one I wish I’d thought of, the
greatest and most timeless of Dickens’s novels. Stuart could learn much
about British class, law and, indeed, language from its dense, fog-bound
pages.
Of course, if Stuart were in my garden, I’d have to give him my list, but,
having seen everybody else’s, I’m not so sure. The choices are strikingly
varied, from Rothman’s Football Yearbook 2007-08 (Sandbrook) to
TomStop-pard’s Arcadia (Kenyon), but, in most cases, I can see the logic of
the choice. We are, indeed, a land of football and high art, with a deep and
complex past and a brutal but colourful present.
What I’m saying, Stuart, is: five books are not enough. You need thousands.
Stick around. You’re lucky to have landed here. The landscape is sublime,
the climate is temperate and the people are . .. well, you’d better start
reading.
Additional reporting: Katharine Hibbert
www.bryanappleyard.com
THANKS TO OUR PANEL
Mary Beard, John Carey, John Cornwell, Dominic Dromgoole, Aminatta Forna, AA
Gill, Daisy Goodwin, John Gray, Robert Hewison, Nicholas Hytner, David
Kynaston, Peter Kemp, Waldemar Januszczak, Simon Jenkins, Hardeep Singh
Kohli, Cosmo Landesman, Rod Liddle, Dominic Sandbrook, Roger Scruton,
Vivienne Westwood
