Lolita, the famous or infamous book by Vladimir Nabokov, and Earthfasts the well-respected children’s story by William Mayne, both raise questions in different ways for the reader.
Lolita, as most people know is a novel about the love of a twelve year-old girl by a very much older man. This book was the choice for our book club, and one of our embers said she wasn’t going to read it or attend the meeting because of the content. I can sympathise with her point of view and can understand why she doesn’t want to read it, whatever the quality of Nabakov’s writing.
Earthfasts written by William Mayne is a most wonderfully written novel for young people which does not compromise in any way on language; he has been criticised for being inaccessible, but I’ve used the book with classes of all ages and abilities, and never once did my students not manage to grasp the story, but in fact learned new vocabulary, new ways of using language and expressing themselves. The story is part ghost story, part supernatural, part mythological and partly just a great adventure. It brilliantly evokes the beautiful Yorkshire countryside and captures a certain period in postwar Britain which is rarely shown, the old country ways existing with the old country people, the new ways and thoughts of the school boys growing up in the 1950’s.
When I was a child I read many of Mayne’s books, although somehow I missed Earthfasts, maybe I was reading adult books by the time it was published. Mayne was a widely read and much respected author, having received many awards and prizes for his novels so it was with great shock and some sadness I read in 2004 that he was sent to prison for molesting young girls. I was horrified, disgusted,outraged. I stopped reading his work… but should his work stand separate from his personal life? Should his work – or the work of any artist, writer, musician, stand apart from the artist, writer, musician? A similar debate is conducted over the music of Wagner, and some people refuse to listen to it or play it.
This raises many interesting questions… and I’m not sure I know the answers. I shall be interested to hear what my fellow book clubbers have to say about Lolita.
Lois Elsden 
There are some subjects and some genres that just don’t interest me very much, so I would not choose to read books in those categories, but I don’t understand how you can be in a book club but refuse to read a book from a writer as good as Nabokov because you have some sort of moralistic objection to what you THINK is going to be the content of the book, especially as it is really about a lot more than its popular notoriety would have you think.
Dostoevsky thought a lot about what it felt like to murder someone, but nobody thinks he was actually a murderer, just because his character, Raskolnikov, is so convincing as one in Crime and Punishment. I don’t think Nabokov was ever accused of being a paedophile, but he understood what a powerful obsession for adolescent girls could be like, he had thought about it a great deal, and Lolita was not his first book on that topic. Lolita is a fine book, and it examines, through his imagined character, Humbert Humbert, something that is very much part of the human condition, and, like all Nabokov books, it’s beautifully written, even though English was not his first language.
The Rev. Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, would be strung up by his backstraps in the street today if he hung out with pre-pubertal Alice Liddell like a love-sick puppy the way he did in late Victorian England, and wrote books and poems and letters to amuse her the way he did. Yet, the Alice books are timeless classics.
Wagner was the product of his turbulent Germanic times, when virulent anti-semitism was completely respectable among his peers, and his lyrics are often violent and morally appalling, but the music he created was sublime and timeless. If Jewish musicians like Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Zubin Mehta, and Daniel Barenboim are happy to play and conduct Wagner’s operas it would seem to me to be silly to cut yourself off from the possibility of that sort of artistic pleasure just because your 21stC political correctness disapproves of 19thC German Christian discriminatory attitudes.
Artists have often been totally reprehensible people, but their works are their works, and should be judged for what they are, not condemned by our personal moral attitude towards their creators.
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Thank you, Peter… very interesting reply.
Book club was one of the best meetings we’ve had and we all agreed that people who didn’t come missed out on a lot; we had a wide-ranging discussion and didn’t just concentrate on Lolita. One of the members is an 18 year-old, and her perspective on the book was very different from ours and I remembered that when I first read it when I was about 16 or 17 I thought about it in a different way too.
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