Jaun Elia’s daughter, the great Urdu poet from Karachi Pakistan, mentions in an interview that on their dinner table, there were usually some guests of her father’s invited and they exchanged lengthy and exuberant talks on the topics of philosophy, religion, history, and literature. What I took away from this insight into Elia’s dinner-talks was the history of something, or a beginning rather, of something that comes about more fully later in the life.
How we spend our days, the things we do, the people we surround ourselves with, and the effects we leave on one another, has always a somewhat direct link to how emerge to be later in our lives. While I do believe in the innateness of some of our traits, and also understand how certain singular events shape our lives, a more general and obvious formular is that of routine and consistency, when it comes to understanding our lives. What do most of our days look like? Who do we spend most of our time with? What do we usually talk about? What interests and what bores us in our lives generally? The answers to these questions have in them a sketch of what we’ve become, or what we’re out to be.
I didn’t grow up in a poet’s house, nor did I have educated parents. The most immediate link I can find about the origins of my reading life, or a tendency towards ‘literary’ things, was my elder brother. He was an enthusiast like myself, but he grew more from it because the struggles for him were of the raw kind. Whether his first computer, books on English grammar or general knowledge, or the tuition fee for college or language academy, he had to earn and convince the household to get them. ‘The Alchemist’ by Coelho, or ‘Islam a short history’ by Armstrong, these were few of the books from my brother’s humble collections that I later read myself. ‘The Children of Heaven’, ‘Harry Potter’, ‘Mr. Bean’, these were some of the first movies that I ever got to watch, thanks to my brother.
Compared to him, I live a life of luxuries, albeit, with a fair amount of guilt involved. I own near 500 books, have watched over 800 movies, own my laptop and smartphone, internet and pocket money, a degree from a private university, and experience of living in multiple big cities of my country. Yet my possessions, amongst them few of my achievements as well, can never live up to his times and the rough experiences he went through; paradoxically because he eased it out for me, and I longer face those hard times.
But I can’t recall him ever reading. My childhood practice of reading, then discontinued for years, was with little Urdu books of ‘jokes’ and moralistic ‘short stories’. I was quite fond of reading them, and purchasing them was as separate a joy as buying books today is for me. Once I started playing cricket, what little reading I did, was gone. In my university, I realized that my fellows had read books like ‘The Secret Garden’, ‘Alice in Wonderland’, ‘The Little Prince’, ‘Little Women’, in their schools or colleges. Yet the irony was that I was an active reader among them, and they no longer read. But still, those books read and studied in years of adolescent, help in the development of students, not only to become avid readers later, but to understand the worth of books and become better people because of them.
The children of East Mole, a small countryside village in rural England, suffered much the same reading drought that I did in my childhood, until the 24 years old Sylvia comes as their new librarian. Renting a cottage, number 5, in a series of small houses, she in the course of little over one year, changes the whole spirit of that town, and makes for a memorable set of stories that the inhabitants of the town would discuss even decades later. Arriving in East Mole, the friendly Sylvia quickly befriends the town’s children, among them Sam and with his twin sisters, Lizzie Bird, and Marigold, and gets on with renovating the Children’s Library. She also blends effortlessly with the parents and the town school’s staff, thereby setting in motion a communal rekindling of reading and love of books.
Vickers’s writing is easy to get a long with, and her worldbuilding is like watching a work of art in fast-forward film. Her protagonist, Sylvia, is one of the sweetest girls, and despite her knowledge of books, has a very easy-going nature about herself, and is great with kids. What makes this novel even more interesting is the climax of it, which involves multiple love affairs, a theft of a banned novel, and the unbecoming of this promising change that Sylvia brought in East Mole.
I can’t deny that Vickers’s novel was a delightful
companion for me during these sick days of soar-throat and painful flu. This one
was quite a surprise for me: what might seem a children’s book, holds in it the
delights of reading and storytelling.
Ratings:
4/5 **** August 15, 2022_