From Mr Darcy to Harry Potter by way of Lolita

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, May 21, 2000 | by J K Rowling

From my favourite dead writer to my favourite living writer - Roddy Doyle. I love his work for many of the same reasons I like Austen's. There is no sentimentality in his sympathy for his characters. He can be laugh-out-loud funny and move you to tears within two pages with no grinding of gears. But most remarkably of all he can write women. Actually, he's the only heterosexual male writer I have ever read who can write such believable female characters. They are fully functioning females with souls and personalities as fully rounded, likeable and flawed as any of Doyle's male characters. The man's a genius.

There are two books whose final lines make me cry without fail, irrespective of how many times I read them. One is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. There is so much I could say about this book, and if you happened to be travelling from Bristol to London by train in 1988 you might have heard me say all of it, because I was having a very loud argument with my sister about it. There just isn't enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabokov's hands, a great and tragic love story.

For those very few people who do not know the story, Humbert Humbert, a fortyish man, abducts the 12-year-old Lolita, who escapes him at the age of 15 for another abuser. Humbert catches up again with her when she is 20, married, poor and heavily pregnant, and he recognises at last that his obsession with her has transcended the physical, when it is too late to repair either of their lives.

More relationship misery: JD Salinger's short story Uncle Wiggly In Connecticut, which will always be one of my favourites just for the line: "Listen, if you're not going to be a nun or something, you might as well laugh."

I READ A Tale Of Two Cities for the first time when I was 19 and sharing a flat in Paris with a Spanish woman and an Italian man. It wasn't the happiest living arrangement of my life, mainly because the Spanish girl had an obsession with cleanliness to rival Howard Hughes, and I was extremely untidy and never remembered to empty the bin. I consequently spent a lot of time avoiding the kitchen, holed up in my room reading.

I spent the whole of one Sunday reading A Tale Of Two Cities, and when I emerged I walked straight into Italian Fernando, who took one horrified look at me, with my mascara all the way down my face, and assumed that I had just received news of a death. Which, obviously, I had - Sydney Carton's.

My final choice is the only poem on my list. I love stories, and generally prefer prose, but I've loved Hilaire Belloc ever since I read Cautionary Tales For Children when I was around 10. This is verse 22 of his Dedicatory Ode. It has been pinned on my study wall for several years now. If I could give my daughter one great truth about life, it would be the one in this poem:

From quiet homes and first beginnings Out to the undiscovered ends There's nothing worth the wear of winning But laughter, and the love of friends.