Mark Hodkinson was born in a “modest, boxy” house in a Manchester suburb. There was one book in the house, kept on the top of a wardrobe with other revered items such as his cycling proficiency certificate. The book was Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, and Hodkinson writes that: “When I see the front cover again, an illustration of Cernunnos, the Celtic horned god, looking startled and irked … I fall through time.”
Hodkinson’s family moved to Rochdale in the mid-1970s, when he was 10, and he still lives there. He became not only a working-class reader – as per the subtitle of this book – but also a working-class publisher and writer too, which makes him a very rare bird.
The upper-middle-class grip on British literature may be stronger than ever today, working classness being, as Hodkinson writes, “disavowed and discarded” in favour of an American notion of aspiration. Accounts of working-class life must be smuggled under flags of convenience. Hodkinson lists them: “female, ‘misery lit’, black, ethnic, gay, Welsh, Scottish or Irish.”
And of course the working classes are more elusive these days. Of 70s Rochdale, Hodkinson writes: “Many streets had mills on them, standing tall and wide like battleships, completely out of scale with the rest of the surroundings”, whereas Rochdale now is “Anytown UK … spotted with litter-strewn retail parks”.
Working-class writers did get a look-in during the 50s and 60s, when prosperity and permissiveness shook up factory life and the social-realist “kitchen sink” genre emerged, mainly in the north. The young Hodkinson read those books but found the protagonists too earthbound, too fixed in their northern locales. They were not the inspiration of his writing and reading, nor the reason he has now accumulated 3,500 books.
He has none of the chippiness afflicting some of the kitchen sinkers; he is not out for revenge. Instead, he’s a dreamer. He reads to be “spirited away from reality”. We see the young Hodkinson lying in bed “with books fanned out around me like numbers on a giant clock”. His reading is of a piece with his “thinking while drifting, across wasteland and cemeteries”. He once consulted a therapist (because he’d got a bit worried about having so many books), who told him they were his metaphorical friends.
I know Hodkinson slightly. Like him, I was born in a modest, boxy house in the north (there were about 10 books in ours). Perhaps that’s why I so enjoyed the way he talks about literature, some negative remarks about one of my own works excepted.
On a snowy day in Rochdale, the young Hodkinson reads The Outsider by Albert Camus. In his head he is in dusty Algiers – “the fig trees, the red sky” – watching the sea sending “long, lazy” waves across the sand. He describes Billy Casper, urchin-like hero of A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (a late kitchen sink work), as “half-boy, half-pigeon”. Of Morrissey: “The words he uttered were drawn from the end of the rainbow – ‘charming’, ‘elegant’, ‘marvellous’.”
There are vivid character sketches of authors Hodkinson has published. Simon Armitage, doing star jumps with his wife on their daughter’s trampoline when he was made poet laureate. Hunter Davies, knocking on, but not so much sprightly as spritely. As they walk through the Lake District chomping on apples, “I half expected him to suggest a game of hide and seek”.
There is much dark comedy about Hodkinson’s publishing career. A driver brings a truck load of 3,000 unsold books, to be stored in a lockup. Hodkinson has done his back in, but the driver makes clear he is “under no obligation whatsoever” to help.
This is a book about the north; it is also about publishing, writing and music, but it transcends its subjects and meets the criterion Hodkinson sets out in his preface: “The best books, the same as the best days, skitter on the breeze. They go their own way.”
Andrew Martin’s latest book, Yorkshire: There and Back, is published in May by Corsair
• No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader by Mark Hodkinson is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
