High brow, low brow – for heaven’s sake, just pick up a book
In the latest tedious round of the culture war, I did not expect to be taking a position on the books of the new culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, whose defenders point to her being a prolific novelist as evidence of a sincere interest in the arts. Instantly, we are pitched into a world of literature “that people actually want to read”, defined against all those who think novels should be about feelings and Kierkegaard and preferably only understood by a coterie of four critics. Does anyone who likes books really think like this?
Dorries’s novels, which often feature nurses, Liverpool and Ireland, all of which reflect their author’s biography, tend to come in groups – the Lovely Lane series, the Tarabeg trilogy, the Four Streets series – and are produced at impressive speed. If people enjoy reading them, who am I to complain that they’re not exactly Thomas Mann? The answer is that snobbery in books, while often perceived to be top-down – de haut en bas, if you want to be posh about it – frequently seems to go in the other direction: though I’m perfectly happy for people to fill their boots with Dorries’s nurses, me losing myself in something long and weird and unpronounceable really gets on the anti-lit brigade’s nerves.