Trust

There were three or four times when I was starting out on Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human when I was tempted to give the novel a miss. It took me at least four days to get through the first twenty pages and I didn't enjoy the experience one bit. Yet once I got going I found myself enjoying the tale more and more such that by the final third I was entirely won over - and hugely entertained.

Sturgeon does something extremely challenging in those opening pages, giving you a point of view that hardly makes coherent sense, and keeps shifting, such that it's impossible to be sure even what kind of novel you're reading. It doesn't seem remotely like sci-fi. A lot more puzzling, I reckon, than the opening to Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published some forty years earlier, that many of my students seem to think is the last word in difficulty. The fact that a writer seen as working within a popular genre was prepared to go for something this challenging is surely a sign of the victory of Modernism (if such a movement really existed.)

So if those first pages were so tough to read why did I bother to keep going? I'm no masochist and, believe me, I read first, second and third, for enjoyment. The answer lies, I realise, in the sense of trust I have in what might loosely be termed the critical community. By this I don't just mean lit critics, although they are involved in some degree. I'm talking about that world of readers that have created the Library of America and decided Mr Sturgeon's novel is worth preserving for the generations, the fandom of the world of Sci-Fi, the readers who originally bought the novel on first publication, despite its difficult opening, and gave it positive reviews or told their friends how good it was because they recognised its qualities.

We don't read, listen or look alone, but it all comes through the eyes and ears of others before we make it our own. I think I've developed a reasonable degree of staying power as a reader, but I owe it all to others.