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Some years ago a friend introduced me to a marvellous idea: if someone gives you a thumping great modern novel to read and you don’t quite feel up to it, read a classic you haven’t got around to instead.
Of course, to confess to a classic you have not read risks opening you up to scorn and ridicule. Which is why most people say that they have “re-read” a book, even if they have in fact just read it for the first time. But people should be honest about what they don’t know. Though even this, like everything, has limits.
In David Lodge’s 1975 novel, Changing Places, a group of academics play the game of admitting to the great literary work they’ve never read. There are obvious ones that aren’t too embarrassing. Everyone thinks they’ve read Oliver Twist but, in fact, someone admitting they’ve only seen the adaptations is a great relief all round. One of Lodge’s characters goes too far, though, and amid the thrill of confession he, a professor of literature, admits that he has never read Hamlet. After which he loses his job.
Anyway, earlier this year, when I was given a thumping great modern novel, the rewards of which did not strike me as obviously being worth the journey, I decided to read Dostoyevsky instead. I’d read some of the other works. But to my shame, I had never read Crime and Punishment. So I cast aside the modern novel and delved into one of my biggest reading gaps.
Crime and Punishment is not a chore, and it is most certainly worth the journey. From the start, I couldn’t put it down. Then after the first 100 pages, or so, I had to. Not least because I was starting to feel like I had committed the crime myself. Dostoyevsky’s description of the lead up to the terrible act, with Raskolnikov feeling drawn towards his crime as someone whose clothing has got caught up in a machine, tugs the reader in with it. The crime itself is described with such vivid horror that you might be forgiven for sweating through it – as I did.
One thing in particular struck me, and worried me, when I finally put the novel down. As those who have read – or “re-read” the novel – will know, the story is ultimately one of redemption. In all the years that I have known about it but not read it, and right up to cracking open the spine of the novel itself this year, I had expected the story of Crime and Punishment to be far worse than it is.
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