The magic of books.

We had some interesting cultural cross-pollination going on at our house this month as the o very different books which my wife and I happened to be reading, started leaking into our daily lives and conversation. Neither book was a typical choice for either one of us. Perhaps because of that unfamiliarity, the impact of these books seemed to be that much more vivid. Preparing to make my first trip to Italy, Rome and the Vatican this October, I was engrossed in that classic fall-of-Rome and rise-of-Christendom epic, Duo Vadis?, and would roll off the couch every couple of hours to put the kettle on, calling out, "Hail--O spouse of my heart! Wouldst thou perchance care for a warm and soothing ministration of tea?"

Put off for decades by the successive, pasteboard Hollywood remakes of Quo Vadis?, I instinctively shunned the 1896 novel by the Catholic-Polish, Nobel Prize-winner, Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916). (There was a new Polish production from about five years ago that reportedly won favour with John Paul the Great but I have yet to see it.) It is frequently remarked that having to study an uncongenial novel at school can put one off a book or a writer for life. Well, so can encountering a bad or corny movie supposedly based on a great book. When a copy of Duo Vadis? fell into my hands this summer, I started leafing through some early pages in strictly morbid curiosity; hoping to perhaps fasten onto quick snippets of hokey dialogue like those which make the Robert Taylor/Deborah Kerr film version so howlingly funny.

Imagine my surprise to find instead a thoroughly intelligent evocation of the exhausted collapse of one decadent way of life and the simultaneous emergence from the underground of a whole new social and moral order. Like his fellow Pole Karol Wojtyla, Sienkiewicz's profoundly Catholic imagination and identity were tenaciously and ingeniously forged under the boot heel of foreign oppression. In his lifetime it was the Russians. For John Paul it was the Nazis and then the Communists. Sienkiewicz knew in his soul just how to tell this tale of persecuted Christians and does an uncannily good job of painting his distant scene and expressing the mutual bewilderment and suspicion that marked the clash of these two antipathetic cultures. His portrait of the emperor Nero as an overgrown, overindulged monster with no one to hold him in check is at once richly comic and horrific.

As I read my way through the bloody spectacle of mortal contests in the amphitheatre and the apocalyptic conflagration of Rome, my wife was out in her studio listening to audio-tapes of The Heritage of the Desert. This was the earliest of the popular Zane Grey (1872-1939) westerns which altogether sold a boggling 13 million copies in that author's lifetime. While I've dabbled in 'toga operas' in the past, this was my wife's very first 'horse opera'; chosen not because of a sudden interest in rattlesnakes and sagebrush, but because it seemed the most promising among the less than scintillating selection available at the library that day. She's fooled herself sometimes when grabbing her usual fare of mysteries off the audio-tape shelf; can even be sailing into the grand denouement before she realizes that, "Oh, right, I read/heard this one ten years ago."

Because everything about The Heritage of the Desert was new to her, the story quickly permeated her world in a way more familiar fare might not have. It affected the way she looked at everything. Momentarily stepping out of Grey's dusty world of cacti and tumbleweeds into our back garden, the verdant lushness of our world seemed almost intoxicating. The bossy demeanour of our border collie, secretly yearning to herd hundreds of cattle instead of that handful of insufficiently docile human beings he lives with, suddenly made perfect sense. Zane Greyisms crept into her language as well, emerging in alarming assertions like: "My stomach's growlin' like a polecat. Must be time to rustle up some grub."

When she asked me something that only required simple agreement, I was delighted to answer by concocting an alliterative, two-word construct that seamlessly (not!) pulled both of our new literary genres together: "Verily, varmint," I replied. What are the odds, I wonder, that this particular conjunction of words has ever previously been uttered in all human discourse?

My illustrations may seem petty or crude, but part of the magic of books and the way that we read them is this wonderful capacity they have to mingle and overlap their worlds with our own. In a more sustained and intimate way than with a movie or a play, we take on the period and locale, the preoccupations and climate of a book. For a few days or a few weeks, these characters and stories take root in our own lives, and we in theirs. Call it symbiosis or cross-pollination, but there is an active transmigration of the imagination between writer and reader unlike anything that transpires in any of the other arts.

Often it is these book-driven holidays of the imagination which take us the farthest out of ourselves; which leave impressions on our memories as vivid and lasting as any real-life experience. When I first visited Britain 15 years ago, no small part of what made that encounter so powerful for me was the confirmation, the validation, of so much of what I'd been reading all my life by so many favourite authors. My backlog of reading about Italy and Rome may not be so extensive as my reading about Britain. But between Hilaire Belloc and John Ruskin, Ignazio Silone, Eugenio Corti, and now Henryk Sienkiewicz--not to mention all the lives I've read of various saints and popes--I expect to feel that same thrill of deeper recognition when I finally visit Rome for the first time.

Herman Goodden is a full-time journalist. He writes from London, Ontario.