Love, lifelines and Larkin: the best books to make you feel less alone
“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion that for the moment we’re not alone.” Orson Welles wrote those words for the film Someone to Love in 1987. Welles forgot to add that we can do it with printed words too. Minds sundered by miles or by millennia can be joined, sometimes permanently, by the spark of human connection that can be found simply by reading a book.
Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone tells the story of a young woman who, coasting through life, has sex for the first time and finds herself pregnant. The story that follows is not only a journey through the world of pregnancy and motherhood in the 1960s, but an extraordinary emotional blossoming, as the narrator forms a bond with her infant daughter, and – through her – with the world. It is subtly brilliant, almost slyly feminist, and by the end you will be as desperately involved with the daughter’s wellbeing as her own fictional mother.
If that’s too sunny for you, try Stoner, John Williams’s majestic biography of an American English don. Stoner is born alone and does die alone, without question – but the story of his life, and his brief, fragile encounter with true love, make the book one of the high points of American literature. Almost all the readers who have discovered and loved the novel did so after Williams’s death. How’s that for connection in spite of it all?
Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice takes the theme of isolation and carries it far beyond the individual. In the first half, a British woman suffers terrible cruelty at the hands of the Japanese army on a forced march through British Malaya during the second world war. After the war, she tries to find the Australian rancher who saved her life by being willing to sacrifice his own. Yet the most desperate isolation described is not that of any one individual but of the town of the title, an abandoned and flyblown place in the Australian outback which is regenerated by her efforts and flowers into unimaginable, delightful life.
Science fiction has taken human loneliness to new, interstellar heights and depths, and Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is one of the greatest examples. It’s set in an icy world where individuals have no fixed biological sex; all are hermaphrodites, barring a few days a month when they enter a sexual state and can reproduce. The apparently unapproachable isolation of the narrator – a visiting male human, who is made alien and freakish by his being permanently male in this world – is slowly broken down by a long journey with one of the planet’s citizens, a disgraced politician in fear of his life. Love and the essential interconnectedness between all life forms trump even the species barrier here, and produce something beautiful and strange.
In Somewhere Becoming Rain, Clive James’s collected essays on the poetry of Philip Larkin, the brilliance of James’s analysis, his clear-sighted view of Larkin’s solitude and humanity, and the fragile friendship between the two recorded in the book’s final pages, provide a monument to human connection and isolation together. It’s a perfect example of the “almost instinct” Larkin managed to prove “almost true” (hedging his bets to the end) – that what will survive of us is love.
• The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray is published by Hutchinson.
