The benefits of losing yourself in a world that is not your own have never been heightened more than when your own world is in a state of turmoil. The question of “why do we read?” no doubt has many answers, and there is no sole answer for it. But one answer is undoubtedly escapism. Entry into a different world, full of characters in whose lives you become entangled, and plots with twists and turns that you walk alongside, with every page that you turn.
For however many blissful minutes you read the book you hold in your hands, you are pulled away from your surroundings into a world that is not your own. It is astonishing just how much written words on the leaves of pages can offer such a sense of escapism – it is an unparalleled experience.
Fiction, unlike non-fiction, does not contain characters whose lives we know, or events that we are living through, or have learned about as fact in history classes. It does not, overtly at least, contain politics, ideological thought, religious debate, or popular, current fads. It may borrow from the past and the present, but it is unique in offering an evasion from society as we know it.
Fiction is born in an almost dreamlike state in an author’s brain – a spark of an idea, that is written down and built upon, on many pages, with many litres of ink, a world is created. Yet this world does not really exist – intangible, it exists only in the mind of the author and the reader. It is not constrained by the confines of non-fiction, reporting facts and offering opinions.
It celebrates the impossible, creates what is impossible to create in reality, and offers solace for the reader battered and bruised by the reality in which he or she is living. As a girl, my very best friends could be found not in the school playground with me, but between the pages of my very favourite books that I would lose myself in the moment I returned home.
I ran, I laughed, I danced, I explored, I sailed, I roved, I cried. All without every leaving the chair in my bedroom, beside which there was an omnipresent stack of books. Yet escapism should not be confined to childhood alone. As an adult, with weary days filled with uncertainty, insecurity and exhsuation, in this awful cyclical structure of Covid-19 and the vastly damaging lockdown, escapism is now as important as ever, if not more so.
We live in a time where it is impossible to switch off from the world. Our news cycle is 24 hours, our election cycle is every year. News and opinions and upsetting stories from near and far are filtered through to us on smartphones in real time. I often think about the now famous news broadcast where the newsreaders declared “there is no news”, and simply played the piano. Such a thing could never happen nowadays, as we are in media res of social media, the age of contractability, and never-ending streams of virtual discussions.
What fiction does offer us, is the chance, however briefly, to be able to escape from this. When you open a book and begin to read those beautiful first lines, you are transported through the pages away from your every day. You can walk beside Cathy and Heathcliff, sail with Hemingway and stroll with Forster along leafy English parkland. No reader will ever imagine a novel in their mind’s eye quite the same as another reader. How you see the events of a work of fiction unfold is purely up to you. Only in fiction can we really be the masters of what we want to see, steering our own ships as the plot unfurls around us.
Fiction offers us something that real life sadly cannot do – a sanctuary. A place where you will always be welcome, and where you will be among the most loyal of friends. And no matter how many years pass, whatever may transpire in your life or in the world around you, the next time you go to open up the pages of your favourite book, the characters, the intrigue, and the beauty of the story will still be there, waiting to welcome you home.
