First rule of book club? Don't read the book

I’ve never been that keen on Pascal’s Wager, partly because I agree that you should only gamble responsibly, but more importantly because it isn’t clear why God should hold to His end of the deal*. More intriguing, to my mind, is his aphorism to the effect that our miseries flow from an inability to just sit alone in a quiet room. Pascal made that remark nearly four hundred years ago. It continues to have some bite.

But even this insight seems incomplete. Along with solitude and quiet, don’t you also need something to read?

Sir Roger Scruton argued that morality and aesthetics are commingled and remarked that the hardest of the philosophical problems were presented in the musical experience. I suggest that the experience of reading runs music a close second. It is a mysterious thing how a sequence of sounds can be heard as a movement in musical space; it is similarly weird how a piece of script can put me in touch with the private anxieties of Rodion Raskalnikov.

Franz Kafka wrote that a book “is an axe for the frozen sea within us”. Which is a clever way of saying that the best books valorise moral improvement over mere enjoyment.

But these books are hard work. And in a world ordered to the demands and petty intrusions of social media and the text message, time is short, and Pascal’s quiet room is increasingly for members only.

These days, therefore, virtue is more often announced than earned . So some time back I asked myself an obvious question: how can I buy some literary kudos without the investment of time and the debilitations that attend serious effort?

Reader, I was in luck. Being a fully anglicised person of Irish descent, I realised that I could justifiably avail myself of that most eccentric of English practices: the joining of a book club.

I am now in a reading circle, which is the literary equivalent of the NHS rainbow lanyard – an unquestionable assertion of moral (and in this case intellectual) superiority. 

I’ve forgotten the name of the book we’re currently pretending to read. I have read some of the reviews. Goodreads, for example, said something about it being the story of a collection of misfits who fall under the spell of a charismatic Classics professor. A murder is committed, or is it two? The book critic for the New Statesman wrote some meretricious pap about it being written “at the apex of neo-liberalism”, which obviously doesn’t mean anything, but can be usefully dropped into book night discussion.

Incidentally, I’ve wondered whether these critics do something similar. That is, rather than read the book, do they just cannibalise colleagues’ reviews of it? Is the institution of literary criticism just a sort of Ponzi scheme? Did any of them bother to actually read The Satanic Verses ? If not, shouldn’t they have fessed up to this, and neutralised all the subsequent misunderstanding?

Based on my own experiences, I’d offer the following taxonomy. There are four types of book club attendee, and if you are thinking of starting your own reading circle my advice to you would be to make sure you include at least three. Assuming you intend to make it into Chapter Two.

It is essential that you have a Henry . For Henry, a book does not exist to be read as much as to be policed . He is ever alert to the possibility of an inappropriate ellipsis; controversies centred around the Oxford comma are meat and drink to Henry – he has all angles covered.

You’re going to need a Francis. He has the role of “plausible faker”. Francis probably hasn’t read the book. But you’re never quite sure. That comment he made about “apex of neo-liberalism”? He didn’t come with that by himself. Did he?

You’re going to want a Charles. Charles hasn’t bothered to read that week’s designated chapter but makes no attempt to conceal that fact. He once saw a book review program on BBC4 in which the prominent intellectual Yasmin Alibhai-Brown announced that she had very firm opinions on a text she hadn’t even glanced at. That Islington template is good enough for Charles.

It’s sub-optimal but you will also need Camilla , and before you ask: no, this has nothing to do with gender balance. Camilla, I’m afraid, is a subversive. Not only has she read the book: she has enjoyed it. Neither of these activities are required by our unwritten Articles of Association, but she is incorrigible when it comes to making the rest of us look bad. Camilla is the sort of person who takes out the January gym subscription and is still taking the spin classes in February. You cannot reason with people like that.

Reader, I do get that I am placing my soul in danger. I once accidentally read a paper by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in which he argues that faking is worse than lying. The liar, he argues, is only successful if he has some respect for the truth. The faker is not so burdened and is more prone to self-delusion.

So yes, my book club membership has amplified my capacity for effective fakery. But it was that or the audiobook. 

Book club has its place; in some people it might awaken their inner Camilla . This is to be celebrated. Way back when I taught philosophy, I seem to remember staying sober for long enough to pretend-read Aristotle. I think he once wrote something along the lines that you can, over time and with due application, fake your way to genuine virtue. If I ever get there it’ll be owing to book club and its first rule: don’t read the book. 

*There are some pedants who would claim that I’m missing Pascal’s point, which is that God is not to be found living in the conclusion of a probabilistic argument. I meet this with an appropriately Gallic shrug and a sharp cry of de rien!!  

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