Sue Bailey

Someone – I don’t remember who, and Google isn’t helping me – once said that the English learn their history from Shakespeare and their religion from Milton. I’m a good Ricardian, so I protest the Shakespeare, though I’ve no objection to Paradise Lost as a scripture: if we have to have religion, let it at least be made of beautiful language.

It’s not just Milton and Shakespeare. Everything I know about Imperial Rome, I know from the pages of I, Clavdivs. There are vast swathes of English history (the eighteenth century, for example) that I know only by trying to figure out what 1066 and All That is joking about. Scottish history is Macbeth and Braveheart. And I’m entirely convinced that British government is like Yes, Minister (with shades of House of Cards) and American government is like The West Wing.

The British Museum has a new exhibition, devoted to Monteczuma, Aztec Ruler (doesn’t that sound like a Viz character?). Unsurprisingly, there has been a plethora of documentaries and press coverage on the Aztecs and their disastrous confrontation with Cortés… all of which has only served to remind me of my sole source of knowledge of South American history. Oh dear:

Once upon a time when I was doing my A’levels, it was the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, and Granada Television (I think it was) made a sumptuous version of A Tale Of Two Cities to celebrate. As I was doing both English and History (though neither Robespierre nor Dickens came into it), I was one of the students dragged along to the launch event, about which I remember nothing except that we were given the Penguin tie-in edition of the book, and Kenneth Baker came to give a speech.

Someone had the bright idea of giving a room full of Manchester teachers and students a Q&A session with the Education Secretary, and the first question up was (see, I still remember it 21 years later): “Mr Baker, does the fact that you’ve given us all a copy of A Tale of Two Cities mean that the government has reversed its policy and is actually going to supply schools with books?”

After the applause had died down and we had all resumed our seats, Mr Baker’s response was that the books had nothing to do with the government and were the generous gift of Granada TV and Penguin. Oh, how we larfed. I still have my copy of aToTC.

So I was a bit sad today to read that Governor Schwarzenegger is proposing to save millions of dollars from the Californian education budget by scrapping paper textbooks in favour of digital ones. It’s inevitable, I suppose, but I can’t help feeling a little loss for the physical object of the textbook. That wonderful moment when you find that your French grammar book was used last year by the very boy in the year ahead that you’ve had a crush on for two terms! Or better still, that your physics book was used by the science nerd and his notes are still in the back!

Facebook just doesn’t, somehow, seem the same.

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BTW, if any restaurateurs are reading, I think Tempura Mutantur would be a superb name for a Japanese/Ancient Roman fusion establishment.

On Tuesday, The Guardian had a feature on the book that changed my life. I’ve been considering this question every since it arose in Mig’s comments so long ago that I can’t even find the post, and the conclusion I’ve come to is this:

to change a life is a big ask from a book.

Let me make this clear – I love books. If I had to choose between [sex + alcohol + music] or books, I would pick books. If I had to choose between the internet or books, that would be tougher – because it’s all about the reading, innit.

If you want to talk about pivotal moments in my reading, I don’t need whole books: two sentences cover it. Aged 7 or 8, reading that “most evolutionists reckon the natural world to have emerged in the same order as that listed in Genesis”, and realising I didn’t have to disbelieve in science to carry on believing in God. (I expressed my delight to my mother, who responded that the theory of evolution was just a theory, while the Bible was fact.)

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The Guardian asks Which character has the worst name in fiction? (The Grammar Police are sure that should be “which character in fiction has the worst name?” but we’ll let it go.) And Stuart Evers makes the same choice I would have, Angel Clare from Tess of the D’Urbervilles:

As far as I’m concerned, the President of the Immortals can do whatever the hell he wants with someone who’d fall for a guy called Angel, who’s bound to be a total shit. You might be able to defend Hardy’s most indulgent slice of depression, but no one can make excuses for such playground deception.

It’s not just Hardy; anyone else called Angel is bound to be odious: a vampire with a soul but without a personality suits the name very well. (Spike, now there’s a proper name for a vampire.)

Amongst the good names, I’m surprised none of The Guardian’s commenters has mentioned Gormenghast yet: the name of the house itself, of course, but also Irma Prunesquallor, Abiatha Swelter, Nanny Slagg. Sourdust for the master of ritual is a bit Dickensianly obvious, but Steerpike, oh, Steerpike is perfect. I remember the first time I read it, in a junior school English class, a tiny portion of Gormenghast that involved weasel plague and imprisioned twins and this deliciously poisonous name. I went home via the library.

There was a time when, in honour of Gormenghast, I would have cheerfully changed my name to Fuchsia. I tried Ophelia on for size when I was about 14, and my mother delights in telling me that but for my grandfather’s objections, I would have been Miriam. What would she have been like, that Miriam, I wonder: I imagine her dark, mysterious, a little bit exotic. So very much not a Susan.

Marshall McLuhan said that “the name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers”. I note his first, unused name, was Herbert. I think he knew what he was talking about. Susan is less a numbing blow than just the wrong name.

It’s strange, this feeling that one’s name is not one’s own: if being called Crapper causes you to improve the flush toilet, I can’t help thinking that this most personal of labels has some influence on a life spent with it. Is that why I spend so much of my time feeling that my life isn’t real? Is it why I spent so much of my childhood wondering when my real life – the one where I was pretty and had parents who cared for me – was going to start, writing stories about little girls who went to sleep brown and ordinary, wearing the sensible shoes of a Susan, and woke up blonde and beautiful?

We Susans get a pretty poor deal in literature, frequently at the hands of religion: Sue Brideshead gets all guilty and runs back to Phillotson; Susan Pevensie is the one who abandons Narnia for stockings and party invitations; Susanna doesn’t even make it to the proper bits of the Bible. Otherwise we’re supporting characters – Susan Bones in the Harry Potter books – or we don’t even get to show up on stage – Juliet’s Nurse’s dead daughter was a Susan.

And though Terry Pratchett almost rehabilitated us by Susan Sto Helit, her Susanness always wins out. She might be Death’s granddaughter and able to walk through walls and DO THE VOICE, but she still knows that “real children don’t go hoppity-skip unless they are on drugs”. She still has sensible brown shoes under her death robes. Susans can’t help it.

I bought 1000 Languages because the Guardian made a list of the top ten endangered languages. It’s the kind of list that makes me want to reach for the Linguaphone courses for Jeru and Ainu if such existed, and to regret more than I can ever say that the plan to learn Finnish came to nothing: the saviour of Ter Sami feels like something I would like to be.

The book, sadly, is nothing like so compelling as the list. It’s called “The Worldwide History of Living and Lost Tongues”; call me wildly optimistic, but I was hoping for some kind of history of human language, some narrative that watched the first caveman say “ug”, and went on from there. Instead, it’s a list of languages, with more or fewer comments about the state of each, how many people in which geographical area speak it, and so on. ‘World languages’ are given more coverage; those spoken by only a few thousand people, less. This feels somehow the wrong way round: English and Chinese don’t need a champion, but Yuchi, Oro Win and the delightfully-named Dan certainly do if they’re not going to pass away unnoticed.

Apart from a couple of brief paragraphs in the introduction, there is little about where each came from, or how it might be related to its neighbours. Austin teases us with a list of the words for the numbers one to ten in each language; we can see that geographically neighbouring languages often have very similar words for the same numbers, but there’s nothing in the book to take this thought further, nothing to suggest that it’s because they came from the same ancestor. Sir William Jones must be spinning in his grave.

This history neglects the past, but it ignores the future too. Several languages are said to be being revived or preserved or otherwise saved from distinction, but Austin doesn’t consider what this might actually mean. Middle class English people with holiday homes learning Welsh in summer school isn’t going to preserve that language, any more than a .bzh domain name is going to bring Breton into the 21st century. Preservation doesn’t keep the language alive: I’d have liked some consideration of what this actually means for the future of the 990 languages not designated world-wide here.

And that ‘world language’ designation is also rather questionable. I’ll give you English, French, German, Chinese – but Japanese? Japanese is spoken nowhere but Japan and places where people from Japan have gone to live. Austin seems to continually confuse the languages themselves with the people who speak them, and this is made a thousand times worse by the incomprehensible geographical organisation of his book. One might argue, I suppose, that having Finnish and Hungarian isolated in Europe in the midst of a sea of Germanic and Romance reflects their reality: it does, indeed, take a polaroid of how things are now, but it makes no sense of where these languages came from, and just what they are doing, and whether they might survive, or whether they, like so many others, are doomed to slow erosion and death.