Let them read books

In the latest tedious round of the culture war, I did not expect to be taking a position on the books of the new culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, whose defenders point to her being a prolific novelist as evidence of a sincere interest in the arts. Instantly, we are pitched into a world of literature “that people actually want to read”, defined against all those who think novels should be about feelings and Kierkegaard and preferably only understood by a coterie of four critics.

Dorries’s novels, which often feature nurses, Liverpool and Ireland, all of which reflect their author’s biography, tend to come in groups – the Lovely Lane series, the Tarabeg trilogy, the Four Streets series – and are produced at impressive speed. If people enjoy reading them, who

am I to complain that they’re not exactly Thomas Mann? The answer is that snobbery in books, while often perceived to be topdown – de haut en bas, if you want to be posh about it – frequently seems to go in the other direction: though I’m perfectly happy for people to fill their boots with Dorries’s nurses, me losing myself in something weird and unpronounceable really gets on the anti-lit brigade’s nerves.

The idea, I suppose, is that one can’t possibly be enjoying oneself and is just doing it for show or to make everybody else feel bad. Ah, well. I note that Dorries is about to embark on a new series, the Belfont Legacy, whose first tranche is entitled A Wicked Woman but for which we will have to wait until next summer.