Reading fiction helps us to learn from and lead multiple lives

Depending on what you read, books make us smarter. They help us recognise familiar patterns before we become trapped by them. [iStockphoto]

It is said that in every village there is a madman. Well, I know we should be sensitive and treat mentally challenged people more empathetically, but we are yet to turn that corner as a society.

Indeed, there is a popular story in Kenyan politics, popularised by a famous politician, about a madman who found another man bathing in a river. It so happened that the man bathing in the river had left his clothes on the riverbank. On seeing the madman wearing his clothes, the man bathing in the river hopped out of the water and chased the madman all the way to the market, where people, mouths agape, saw not a madman being chased by another man whose clothes he had stolen. The crowd saw instead a madman chasing another man. The story, often but erroneously attributed to a Kenyan politician, actually appears in Chinua Achebe's Girls at War and Other Stories, a collection of short stories.

I found myself thinking about this story in a week when a debate on our poor reading culture was touched off by my literary psychoanalysis teacher, Prof Egara Kabaji, who writes the column across the page spread. It is unfortunate that we still associate reading widely, especially reading fiction, with elitist affectations.

In high school, there was that odd boy who sported an afro, walked at what we would call an academic angle and always clutched a voluminous novel. When schools closed, you would see the young man, usually in the company of a college girl, speaking a lot of English, the voluminous novel tucked somewhere on his person and an air of exaggerated self-importance completing the picture. I came to realise that such people carried books around for show and never really read.

Reading, however, was for us not something for the world outside to acknowledge or be wowed by. Indeed, we never initially read books that you would associate with academics or highbrow literature. That came much later in life. Those who started out reading The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew for boys and girls respectively will admit that these kinds of books made one feel extremely street smart.

When we graduated to James Hadley Chase, Sidney Sheldon and Robert Ludlum, we really felt like world-beating sleuths out to save the world. I remember reading a collection of stories entitled Victorian Tales of Mystery and Detection, edited by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert. It had stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Morrison, Grant Allen and Ernest Bramah, among others. After reading the book I felt drawn to a career among those who have now come to be associated with Subarus, balaclavas and masked registration plates. All this after reading only one book borrowed from an uncle who was then a young but senior police officer.

Books are that powerful. Psychologically, I have come to appreciate that we do not like works of fiction because we want to sound “all of a sudden very clever”, as some recently highly hubristic Kenyan politicians would put it. Neither do we read widely because someone is watching or praising us for it.

Once one is inducted into the world of literary appreciation, where you learn to unlock meaning from the behaviour of characters in fiction, their motivations and dilemmas, the story does not end there. You carry it into the real world where you realise, as they say in literature classes, there is an Okonkwo in every village. If you have read widely enough, virtually everyone you encounter reminds you of a character in a great book because the archetypes that great moments in our lives follow are the same archetypes that great stories follow.

So in tough times such as these, every time someone reminds you how indebted they are, you are reminded of Okonkwo's father Unoka, in Things Fall Apart, who kept track of his debts by making chalk marks on the wall of his hut. Such stories of debt and cash-flow problems remind you how Unoka, when asked to repay what he owed, would point to his debt record and remind the creditor that there were other people he owed much more and they were yet to come for their dues. Of course we do not recommend Unoka's attitude to debt. Our point here is the deep and even mystical connection between memorable characters and our everyday realities.

The truth about reading fiction is that no great story was ever inspired by abstract imagination.

I talk to writers often and every time I encounter a moving story, I make a point of enquiring what inspired it. In most cases it is a personal encounter the author experienced or heard about. Given that we live only once, it follows that the story arcs of our lives are short. We therefore have a choice. We can learn only from what we experience ourselves or we can learn from many other experiences distilled into stories by talented writers.

If we choose the second path, we become no different from people who have lived multiple lives. If you have read novels set even in places you have never set foot in, the culture shock becomes much less once you travel there.

You also find it easier to relate with people in such places and avoid the comical behaviour of a villager who comes to town, is sold a city clock and is asked to go home and wait for it to be delivered by the next long-distance bus.

Depending on what you read, books make us smarter. They help us recognise familiar patterns before we become trapped by them.

Had more people read the popular thrillers of the 1990s, many would have recognised the classic confidence tricks in which strangers feign affection, spike drinks and leave their victims penniless by morning with no phone and, for some, looking for their cars in their pockets.

Reading is not for that boy with a shock of thick hair walking at an academic angle. Books are the gyms of the mind because they allow us to live only one life physically but many others imaginatively. Put another way, reading fiction helps us to lead and learn from multiple lives.