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curiosity about the printed word.
    In the medieval morality play of
Everyman
, Knowledge says: ‘Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, In thy most need to go by thy side.’ The old Everyman editions used to print this on the inner covers, it was their motto. (The revived Everyman editions happily use the same motto.) I remember another slogan: ‘A good book is the precious life blood of a great master’, or words to that effect. We sat at meals with our open books. My mother liked to read cookery books between meals,especially during the period of food rationing. We were the only family in my class at school who didn’t have a television set. They got one at last, when my father retired, ostensibly so that he could watch the news; things went downhill, after that.
    Although I grew up with books and have spent a good deal of my adult life among them, make my living out of writing them and very much enjoy writing about them, I can contemplate with equanimity the science-fiction future world that every day approaches more closely, in which information and narrative pleasure are transmitted electronically and books are a quaint, antiquarian, minority taste. Not in
my
time, anyway, I say to myself. And, anyway, a book is simply the container of an idea – like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters. Even so, I admit to having a fetishistic attitude to books, to their touch, their smell. All the same, human beings told each other stories, instructed one another in the names of things, speculated about the meaning of it all (and came to few if any conclusions), discussed the habits of animals, composed recipes, before there was such a thing even as writing and will doubtless continue to do so because the
really
important thing is narrative.
    All books, even cookery books and car-maintenance manuals, consist of narratives. Narrative is written in language but it is composed, if you follow me, in time. All writers are inventing a kind of imitation time when they invent the time in which a story unfolds, and they are playing a complicated game with
our
time, the reader’s time, the time it takes to read a story. A good writer can make you believe time stands still.
    Yet the end of all stories, even if the writer forebears to mention it, is death, which is where our time stops short. Sheherezade knew this, which is why she kept on spinning another story out of the bowels of the last one, never coming to a point where she could say: ‘This is the end.’ Because it
would
have been. We travel along the thread of narrative like high-wire artistes. That is our life.
    But there is more to it than that. The Balinese embark on a marathon session of reading aloud after they have prepared a corpse for burial. They read stories from collections of popular tales without stopping, twenty-four hours a day, for days at a time, in order to keep out the demons:
Demons possess souls during the vulnerable period immediately after a death, but stories keep them out. Like Chinese boxes or English hedges, the stories contain tales within tales, so that as you enter one you run into another, passing from plot to plot every time you turn a corner, until at last you reach the core of the narrative space, which corresponds to the place occupied by the corpse within the inner courtyard of the household. Demons cannot penetrate this space because they cannot turn corners. They beat their heads helplessly against the narrative maze that the readers have built, and so reading provides a kind of defence fortification . . . It creates a wall of words, which operates like the jamming of radio broadcast. It does not amuse, instruct, improve or help to while away the time: by the imbrication of narrative and the cacophony of sound, it protects souls. 1
    And that is quite enough about the importance of narrative and ought to explain why the largest section of this book is devoted to pieces of writing about