Heart-warming reading: "The Reader on the 6.27" by Jean-Paul Didierlaurent

One or two of the reviews I have seen of this book, including quoted in its own blurb, describe it as "set to be a book club favourite" (Independent on Sunday - quoted inside the front cover). That got me wondering about what makes a book a favourite for book club purposes. Is this some kind of code? If so, it is one publishers seem happily to adopt. Some books I have read even propose "book club questions" at the end of the story. If I were a writer, I'd have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it indicates both a path to sales and at least a modicum of meaning in the contents. On the other, I can't help but feel that the book club designation carries a hint of a rather supercilious "middle brow" categorisation.  However many book clubs may have discussed, say, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, it is hard to imagine a reviewer positing it as a "book club favourite". None of which is to say that "book club" books cannot be great books, maybe just that they are a certain kind of book. 

If so, The Reader on the 6.27 is probably that kind of book. It is without question a feel-good story, full of quirky charm and arresting ideas, underpinned by a love of books. 

The awkwardly-named Guylain Vignolles (easily spoonerised in French to mean "ugly puppet" lives alone with his goldfish, keeps a low profile and hates his job, which is to feed unsold books into a moloch-like pulping machine called a Zerstor 500, but referred to by Guylain as "the Thing". The machine has a kind of sinister life about it:

No trace remained of the books that has lain on the floor only a few minutes earlier. There was nothing but the grey mush that the Thing expelled in the form of great, steaming turds that fell into the vats with a gruesome giant plopping sound. This coarse pulp would be used one day to make other books, some of which would inevitably end up back here, between the jaws of the Zerstor 500. The Thing was an absurdity that greedily ate its own shit.

There are hints even that the Thing has a life of its own, turning itself on at night to devour rats and, more seriously, once having consumed the legs of Giuseppe, Guylain's predecessor as machine operator, in a notorious industrial accident. Giuseppe, invalided out and now dedicated, with Guylian's help, to recovering as many as possible of the books produced with the pulp including his own flesh and bone, Gardens and Kitchen Gardens of Bygone Days, as a way of recovering his lost limbs, is one of Guylian's few friends, alongside Yvon, a security guard at the recycling plant given to declaiming alexandrines on the job. Otherwise, the co-workers are an unappealing lot: the barking supervisor, genrerally known as "fatso" and the junior machine operator, Brunner, who spouts Front National style prejudice all day.

Jean-Paul Didierlaurent

The only thing redeeming Guylain's existence is his daily act of rebellion against the original sin of the Thing, its destruction of books. Each day, when he clambers into the bowels of the machine to clean it (on such an occasion Giuseppe lost his legs), he recovers a few sodden sheets of paper which the Thing had failed to destroy, clinging onto an internal ledge. These random pages provide him with the material he reads aloud on the 6.27 commuter train to his fellow passengers. Over time this eccentricity has been absorbed into the daily rhythm of the travellers, and Guylain's disconnected excerpts have become a kind of communal experience for the daily wage-slaves on the train, making him a kind of minor local celebrity. 

Of course, it is this habit, this testimony to the power and importance of the written word, which leads Guylain to the experience which will change his life, the discovery of the personal diaries of a lonely young woman called Julie, revealed in the extracts to be a lavatory attendant in a shopping centre, and whose life experience mirrors in many ways Guylain's own; yes, right down to those plopping turds. 

Rot Schwartz, translator

Again the power of literature is in evidence, as Guylain realises he is falling in love with the unknown toilet attendant, a fellow loner in a despised, low-grade job taking refuge in the world of the written word. And so, heart-warmingly, and with the help of legless Giuseppe, it goes from there. 

There's no question that this is a charming, funny, well-written and clever book, built around a delightful central conceit and a real belief in the value of the written word. Its humour and groundedness save it from tipping over the edge into fluffiness and the pages turn very quickly. Sure, it is a slight novel - also short, with bite-sized chapters, readable in a single sitting - but, for some genial summer reading it is perfect and, all in all, this is a book which unquestionably adds to the sum of human happiness. As several have pointed out, it seems only a matter of time before this becomes an Amélie-style film, in quirky French comedy mode.