Another national lockdown returns me to Dickens.  I have written already about the reassurance and pleasure provided through long novels.  Good audiobook versions are my substitute for live theatre:  more than anything else, this is where I can find compensation for the things I miss – shared space, face to face interaction.  Headphones increase the intimacy, encouraging and enabling the retreat from the outside world and full immersion into a new one.

I am a re-reader as much as I am a reader – I love revisiting works, rejoicing in both the deep pleasure of the familiar and in the always-to-be-found thrill of something new, something overlooked last time or simply striking afresh because I – or my circumstances – have changed.  At the moment it’s Nicholas Nickleby (again) which means just me and Alex Jennings inside my head. 

I can hear anyone who knows me sighing loudly, commenting that this combination is nothing new, poor Alex.  I’m ignoring such slights, however accurate:  it’s a wonderful place to be (and the Audible reviews bear me out).  Dickens’ novels are populous, eventful and discursive and Alex Jennings reads with intelligence and superb characterisation.  So, like Richard II,  my internal world is ‘peopled’, teeming with figures, ‘in humours like the people of this world’, full of richness and diversity.  Dickens also gives moral certainty, celebrates courage and kindness, tolerance and goodness.  He overflows with both sympathy and empathy.  The comfort and reassurance this provides are tremendous.

I am not physically alone:  my husband, of course, gives unstintingly good-humoured companionability as we pace through this strange year, which is inestimable . Our Christmas plans being curtailed, we did our best to take the time off work as welcome holiday, selecting activities which would help us to relax and feel nurtured.  This included a Lord of the Rings Marathon, in a nostalgic hommage to 2004, when a box-set of the extended edition DVDs was the highlight of the Christmas gifts.  The children were then 9 and 11, a point when family cohesion is, perhaps, strongest and easiest.  It’s a stage when there can be shared interests, when the inequalities of the parent/child relationship can be set aside, in collective enthusiasm for things such as Tolkien, and these films.  We were unable to be with our children this year, and watching these films revived memories of those times.  That wasn’t, consciously, a motive for watching them, but it was an effect and benefit.  Turning away from the world into fiction also reconnects and reorientates us.  And inside our own heads is the only place we can hold those we love at the moment, so we must treasure them there.

Like Dickens, the world Tolkien creates is vast, populous, multi-stranded in its narrative.  His characters are co-dependent; fellowship is as important as courage; endurance is as essential as heroism.  Although neither author shirks from including loss, pain, injustice and death within their stories:  their happy endings are not easily won.

The immediate relevance of all this sustaining fiction doesn’t need explication. If you know the works, your own mind will already be teeming with ‘still-breeding thoughts’.  But I cannot resist the temptation to share two moments which leapt out on this revisiting and in which I find comfort:

Sam:  It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo.  The ones that really mattered.
Full of darkness and danger they were,  and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end.  Because how could the end be happy.  How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened.
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
Those were the stories that stayed with you.  That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why.
But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now.
Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t.
Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo : What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam : That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

And as Newman Noggs says:

Hope to the last!’ said Newman, clapping him on the back. ‘Always
hope; that’s a dear boy. Never leave off hoping; it don’t answer. Do
you mind me, Nick? It don’t answer. Don’t leave a stone unturned.
It’s always something, to know you’ve done the most you could. But,
don’t leave off hoping, or it’s of no use doing anything. Hope,
hope, to the last!’

Nicholas Nickleby Chapter 52

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