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Hannah Freeman

23. The 23 enigma

Today our countdown, extracted from Rogerson's Book of Numbers, explores conspiracy theories and morbid coincidences

In Tangier in 1960, the beat writer William Burroughs met a sea captain called Captain Clark, who boasted to him that he had never had an accident in 23 years; later that day Clark's boat sank, killing him and everyone on board. Burroughs was reflecting on this, that same evening, when he heard a radio report about a plane crash in Florida: the pilot was another Captain Clark and the plane was Flight 23. From then on Burroughs began noting down incidences of the number 23, and wrote a short story, 23 Skidoo.

Burroughs's friends Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea adopted the "23 Enigma" as a guiding principle in their conspiratorial Illuminatus! trilogy.

Twenty-threes come thick and fast: babies get 23 chromosomes from each parent; 23 in the I-Ching means "breaking apart"; 23 is the psalm of choice at funerals; and so on.

All nice examples of selective perception or, as Wilson put it: "When you start looking for something you tend to find it." The composer Alban Berg was also obsessed with the number, which appears repeatedly in his opera Lulu and in his violin concertos.

Tomorrow: 24 angulas make a forearm ...

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson

Reference and languagesWilliam BurroughsGeneticsBarnaby Rogerson
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Notwithstanding by Louis de Bernières: pleasures of the parish pump

From rambunctious nuns to soft-hearted military men, eccentric characters save these stories of village life in rural England from tweeness

Louis de Bernières wrote this collection of stories over several years, perhaps whenever he needed a little emotional comfort, about a village similar to the one in which he grew up in rural Surrey, in the good old days before commuters and yuppies.

The name, Notwithstanding, like the stories themselves, is a bit twee – in the manner of HE Bates' Darling Buds of May about Pop Larkin's cheerful life with his neighbours in rural Kent. De Bernières is not as funny as Bates, but he has his laugh-out-loud moments. There's a convent of nuns who keep appearing as they drive madly through the lanes. And there's vivacious Bessie Maunderfield: "If it rained, she held a tray over her head to protect her black curls, and, if the worst came to the worst, she had a canvas cape that was well smeared with pork lard… It was very effective, but it smelled dreadful, so the housekeeper would make her hang it up on a nail in the stable."

It's a book I found on a hospital swap shelf, and read through the night while sitting at my mother's bedside. It has warm stories about largely decent people of all ages, who try to do the right thing when faced by challenge or adversity. There's an 11-year-old boy with a pet rook, who finally manages to catch the village pond's legendary Girt Pike, and falls in love with the sad pretty woman who asked him to stop the monster eating all the ducklings. She dies young from cancer and he secretly buries a letter to her in her grave: "Dear Mrs Rendall, I am sorry you have died because you were so pretty and so nice, and you let me catch the Girt Pike, which was the best thing ever…"

Some might accuse De Bernières of being mawkish, as he has a taste for sweet sadness. He likes old military gentleman with soft hearts, such as a major who is reminded of a mercy-killing on the battlefield when he has to put down a rabbit suffering from the horrors of myxomatosis. There's also a general so distraught when his wife dies that he keeps wandering into town without his trousers.

De Bernières also has a penchant for the unexplained, possibly occult. In one story, the rector meets an old woman in his church who tells him he must go and give communion to a dying parishioner. He finds the man perfectly hale. After the parishioner dies suddenly that night, the rector remembers that the old woman left no footprint in the snow, and realises she was a ghost from the man's past.

What makes the book more than soppy is that De Bernières is campaigning. "I cannot help looking back on it all as a rural idyll," he writes in the afterword. "The old social structure had gone, along with the old trades, but the countryside was intact… I was out in the fields every single day that I was at home… I know where the bluebells and kingcups are."

He does not like the pond being prettified and made safe. He has two wise old countrymen play a complicated trick on a retired city whizz-kid who tries to bully and short-change them for their work. It involves golf and rabbits and so shocks the city slicker that it drives him back to where he came from. De Bernières wants us to know that even in the 20th century, Surrey was still a county of rural communities, with many different characters doing their best to get along with each other.

De Bernières was roundly ribbed for his cosiness when the book was published, but that's what makes it a comfort read. The eccentrics are interesting, rather than crazily dangerous, as they might be seen in a city. He argues that he has not romanticised the countryside in a sentimental way. There is for instance a "truly shocking amount of roadkill".

He has since moved to Norfolk, to "a place where there was only recently a man who lived in the woods with his animals….The village is closer to its past…The names of the graves and war memorials are the names of families that still live here. I hope that one day my son and daughter will feel the same way about their childhood village in Norfolk as I do about mine in Surrey."

Louis de BernièresTim Maby
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22. Letters of the Hebrew alphabet … the length of a cricket pitch

Today in our books advent calendar: a significant number in religion and sport, extracted from Rogerson's Book of Numbers

If you look closely at medieval drawings of the seven-branched menorah candlestick of the temple of Jerusalem, you may be able to count 22 almond blossoms draped over the branches. These represent the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are themselves linked with the 22 different pathways that connect the 10 different divine attributes of the Kabbalah, the mystical interpretation of the Bible.

This chart of potential influences led to the 22 cards of the tarot pack, first used as a tool to understand basic human predicaments, and find possible ways out of dilemmas. Christian scholars, not to be left out of the intriguing intellectual dance of Kabbalistic thought, made their own lists of 22, such as the virtues of Christ, the number of works of God during the creation (as composed by St Isidor of Seville), and the number of books of the Old Testament. St Augustine may have been aware of this tradition when he divided his City of God into 22 chapters (the Revelation of St John also has 22 chapters). And 22 is also significant for the Zoroastrians, who inherited 22 ancient prayers in their holy book the Avesta.

However, in at least four current usages – Joseph Heller's book Catch-22; French criminal slang for the cops; the length of a cricket pitch in yards ("a chain"); and as an expression for the purity of gold – there seems to be no direct link with anything Kabbalistic.

Joseph Heller changed the title of his book from Catch-18 to Catch-22 right at the last moment, and 22-carat is not a measure of absolute purity (it comes in at just over 91%).

The ancient English measure of a chain had no connection to the God-created Hebrew alphabet, but was based on what a man and an ox could be expected to plough in one day – one acre, divided into 66 units of 660 foot-long trenches. A chain is therefore 66 feet in length, and the origin of the 22 yards between one wicket and another.

Tomorrow: the 23 enigma

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson

Reference and languagesReligionJudaismChristianityCricketAgricultureBarnaby Rogerson
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Possession: an unforgettable lesson in love and letters

Reader Sara Richards finds comfort and joy in AS Byatt's Booker-winning triumph of biographical sleuthing

What I look for in a comfort food is something rich, long and complex. I want the same from a book, so I always return to this novel, which I have read, since its publication in 1990, in hospital, on holiday, when I have been bereaved and for the sheer comfort and joy it gives me wherever I find myself.

It's the story of the romances between two twentieth century literary scholars and the two poets they are investigating. Byatt has a great deal of fun at the expense of her literary scholars. Roland, whose personal life is chaotic, works for Professor Blackadder, compiling references about a Victorian poet, RH Ash, in an area of the London library that has become known as the "Ash Factory".

Maud, who heads a women's studies department, is studying the poet Christabel LaMotte, who is known to have lived with her friend, Blanche. It is supposed that they had an exclusive, possibly lesbian, relationship, and that LaMotte eventually died a childless spinster. One significant year, LaMotte disappears for several months and Blanche commits suicide.

The story opens when, purely by chance, Roland unearths fragments of two letters by Ash addressed to some unknown person. Realising the significance of the letters, he is desperate to possess them; so he steals them, unleashing merry mayhem in the world of academic literature.

Women's studies come in for similar irreverant treatment: "Roland... began on his familiarisation with Christabel LaMotte. He leafed through the chapter headings: 'From Venus Mount to the Barren Heath'; 'Female Landscapes and Unbroken Waters, Impenetrable Surfaces'; 'From the Fountain of Thirst to the Armorican Ocean Skin'"

At the heart of Possession is the love story between the poets Ash and LaMotte. They meet at a literary breakfast in a fashionable part of London and embark on an affair which becomes a personal tragedy for them both.

Before this downfall, they take the chance to slip away and go fossil-hunting and walking on the North Yorkshire moors, enjoying an illicit holiday
posing as a married couple. As I come from Yorkshire, I always enjoy the descriptions of the walks along the moors and coast – the familiarity evokes a pleasurable sense of nostalgia.

The complexity of the novel lies in the virtuoso way that Byatt handles her large cast of characters in two centuries. Since Possession was published, it has become quite fashionable for novels to slip between different times, but this was the first one I read and remains, for me, the best. Byatt must have enjoyed writing pastiche poetry; long, wordy and worthy for Ash, and, in LaMotte's case, reminiscent of Emily Dickinson's.

Maud recalls a poem by LaMotte and so solves one of the mysteries in the novel:

"Dolly keeps a Secret
Safer than a Friend
Dolly's Silent Sympathy
Lasts without end.

Friends may betray us
Love may Decay
Dolly's Discretion
Outlasts our Day."

What follows is a literary detective story, as Roland and Maud try to discover
what really happened to Ash, LaMotte and Blanche. At the same time they are being pursued by other academics with their own interests in the story.

The novel reflects the various meanings of the word possession, from the obsessive urge to possess, which drives some individuals to extreme behaviour to get what they want, to love itself. The novel examines, in a humane way, the relationship of love with shame, daring and loss.

Along the way we are treated to fairy stories, poetry, natural history and even Victorian spiritualism. There is humour, pathos, skulduggery and vengeance, but there is also tenderness – I have never managed to read the final scene without shedding tears.

Possession is the rich, long and complex book I turn to when a good laugh and a good cry are just what I need to remind me of what it is to be human; to love and lose, but also to love and find love.

AS ByattFiction
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21. Twenty-one-gun salute

Today's countdown entry looks at the bravado of the 21-gun salute, as extracted from Rogerson's Book of Numbers

One of the prime expressions of acknowledged sovereign national power is the 21-gun salute, which seems to show interesting analogies with the traditional coming of age of a fully entitled adult, who can vote, drink, serve in the army, have sex, marry and drive. But this age of adult initiation is only a very recent tradition in the western world, coinciding with the end of university education, and is in any case today slipping back towards 18 and 16.

In fact, the 21-gun salute has no spiritual origins. It evolved out of an expression of explosive power by Britain's Royal Navy that would demand a first salute from a foreign ship, then give them a withering demonstration of their superior discipline and power with their own salvo. Initially restricted to seven rounds, or seven cannon, it grew expediently with the size and arsenal of the ships of the line, but was capped at 21 so as not to waste too much time and powder. It also became less aggressive, and by the 19th century ships would salute each other with a friendly gun-for-gun exchange.

Tomorrow: the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and beyondenigma

• Taken from Rogerson's Book of Numbers by Barnaby Rogerson

Reference and languagesRoyal NavyMilitaryBarnaby Rogerson
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Does Putin's new Literary Assembly bode ill for Russian writers?

The Russian president says he wants to support literature, but his new writers' club looks like the return of state control for literary culture

Russia has a long history of revering writers; it also has a long history of censoring, exiling, corrupting and, on occasion, killing writers. The Tsarist and Soviet authorities recognised that the written word was powerful and thus dangerous – a view widely held in the country until the 1990s, when authors suddenly discovered they could write whatever they liked and nobody much cared, the state included.

The era of official disinterest may be coming to a close, however. Last month, Vladimir Putin took time out from his busy schedule wrestling tigers and posing for beefcake snaps to speak at the opening session of Russia's new Literary Assembly. According to news reports, the Kremlin intends it as a replacement for the Union of Russian Writers, itself the replacement for the Union of Soviet Writers, which was established under Stalin in the 1930s, to catastrophic cultural effect. Allegedly, more than 1,000 Russian writers, critics and publishers will participate, with the first official congress slated for the upcoming spring. At the grand opening, Putin – whose own literary tastes include Hemingway and the Persian poet Omar Khayyam – announced plans to make 2015 the "Year of Literature" in Russia, and of getting young people to read more.

That all sounds very noble, but Putin was speaking to a room severely lacking in literary talent, as practically no respected Russian authors accepted his invitations to attend the event. Boris Akunin, the pen-name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, whose literary detective stories have sold millions of copies, was fairly scathing on his blog, writing:

As long as there are political prisoners, I cannot get near the leader or even be in the same room with him. That would mean that I considered it acceptable to listen to speeches about the finer things in life from a man who is keeping people in prison for their political convictions. I would enjoy talking to Putin about literature after all the political prisoners are released. Until then, it is not possible.

Akunin's attitude seems to be shared by anybody of note in the world of Russian letters. That's not to say that Putin's literary shindig lacked for marquee names, however. In a bizarre act of cultural necromancy, Putin invited along the shades of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin and Lermontov, as represented by their descendants – none of whom is a writer. Vladimir Tolstoy makes sense, as he is a cultural adviser to Putin and heavily involved in promoting his great-great-grandfather Leo's legacy. Alexander Pushkin, however, is a random Belgian distantly related to the legendary poet, while ex-tram driver Dmitri Dostoevsky is certainly an amusing interviewee but doesn't have much worthwhile to say about literature. The perennially cheeky Putin even tried to get the ghost of the great dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on board by inviting the author's widow along, but apparently she asked a question about the use of slave labour in Russia's prison camps, striking a less affirmatory note than he might have liked.

As for the non-dead authors in attendance, prominent Russian literary agent Julia Goumen told me that "hundreds" showed up, but they were

… the relics of Soviet times dreaming of restoring the Union of Writers and the privileges and advances they enjoyed thanks to it … It looks as though the bulk of those who attended have no relevance in the literary market whatsoever. And it is they who most strive for being fed by the state … This was at once a shameful and pathetic scene of the buffoons of dead classic names and the mob of generally unknown literary fungus, to put it sharply.

It would be nice to believe that Putin really is motivated by a passion for his homeland's magnificent literary tradition, for it is a tradition in trouble: 2012 was the worst year for Russian publishing in a decade, and the book market is in decline by about 7% year on year.

Alas, Putin's track record as an activist in cultural/social matters is not good. His sudden concern with public morals, most notoriously expressed through the law banning "homosexual propaganda", has been well covered in the media, while Russian courts have a ludicrously free hand when it comes to banning books. This month Putin abolished the country's most respected news agency, putting a bigoted, Ministry of Truth type in charge. The response of Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov to Akunin's comments was also ominous: he accused the writer of "social nihilism" – ie a thought crime against the state's current ideological mishmash of "traditional values", orthodoxy and patriotism as defined by the Kremlin.

Speaking at the plenary session, Putin himself adopted a reassuring tone: "We will never return to that terrible time in the past when Pasternak was exiled," he said. In fact, Pasternak was never exiled; rather, he was one of a handful of writers who managed to produce excellent work while living inside the Soviet system.

Whether or not the birth of Putin's Literary Assembly marks the dawn of a new era of state censorship remains to be seen. Goumen, however, makes a crucial point by highlighting the appeal of such a body to the untalented. For if this postmodern zombie version of the Union of Soviet Writers resembles its predecessor in any way, then collaborating writers will at the very least enjoy decent salaries, nice state-funded trips and relaxing holidays at sanatoria in Russia's warm southern regions. All they will have to do is obey.

For the more ambitious, the opportunities for self-betterment could be far greater. After all, in addition to revering authors, Russia has another venerable tradition – cosmic levels of graft perpetrated by state functionaries. Reportedly the Literary Assembly will be funded by taking 7-10% of Russian book sales; given that the market is worth around $2bn (£1.2bn), that's a lot of cash to tap into, not to mention a great deal of largesse to be spread around, a lot of foreign holidays to be enjoyed and many, many luxury villas to be built by those ambitious literary mediocrities willing to make the Kremlin happy.

Vladimir PutinRussiaCensorshipDaniel Kalder
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The Code of Woosters, by PG Wodehouse: Splendid, Jeeves!

Bertie Wooster has been in the soup before, but the glorious convolutions of this particular Jeeves novel 'win the mottled oyster'

Few writers evoke the notion of 'comfort' like PG Wodehouse. Whether the lost upper-class Edwardian world of Bertie Wooster and the Drones club, or the pastoral haven of Blandings Castle, his work conjures a timeless myth of quintessential Englishness. The last 12 months have seen him flourishing in the popular imagination to an extent perhaps unmatched since the height of his success in the 1930s. There's been the BBC adaption of Blandings, the BBC4 biopic Wodehouse in Exile, Sebastian Faulks's Jeeves and the Wedding Bells, and the West End adaptation of the 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters. All of which have introduced him to a new generation of readers, as well as reminding the rest of us why re-reading him is such a delight.

The Code of the Woosters is among the most widely read Jeeves novels, and one of his best. Bertie Wooster and his "gentleman's personal gentleman" Jeeves must reconcile newt-obsessed Gussie Fink-Nottle with "droopy, blonde, saucer-eyed" Madeline Bassett; help Aunt Dahlia to deprive Sir Watkyn Bassett of an antique silver cow-creamer; unite Stiffy Byng and her secret lover, local curate and Bertie's old school friend 'Stinker' Pinker; and thwart the violent inclinations of Sir Roderick Spode by uncovering the mysterious "Eulalie". There's also the requisite theft of a policeman's helmet. The Code of the Woosters pushes Wodehouse's trademark convoluted plotting to the limit; Bertie has been in the soup before but, as he says to Jeeves at the beginning of the story, "this one wins the mottled oyster".

What makes Wodehouse wonderful, though, isn't the preposterous lunacy of the plots, or even the easy nostalgia of the setting; it is his prose. At the core of all of his stories is the surprise of language at its most flexible, fresh and fun. For Wodehouse, the sentence is an excise in versatility – the unexpected word, the unusual image, the etymological shift ("if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled"). The anarchic combination of high diction, erudite allusion, upper-class metropolitan slang and informal abbreviations should be incongruous, but instead is enchanting.

That apparent dissonance, the intangible mix of 'high' and 'low' culture, could be seen to define Wodehouse. It is hard to think of an author more closely associated with a certain kind of elitism than he is now. His stories are anchored in an Edwardian society of inherited wealth and aristocratic authority, and his allusions presume a certain level of 'cultural capital' on the part of the reader. But this was not the case at the time of writing. Wodehouse's literary medium was commercial magazines, and he perceived himself as a middlebrow writer. He wrote in 1957: "I go in for what is known in the trade as 'light writing' and those who do that – humourists they are sometimes called – are looked down upon by the intelligentsia and sneered at".

Yet the Jeeves stories have the narrative complexity of Dickens's Great Expectations: Bertie might be 'mentally negligible', but he is nonetheless a highly accomplished narrator. He's both the errant young man in spats and the consummate omniscient storyteller, able to put himself in the third person and literally step outside of the situation.

It is here that the characteristically Wodehousian definite article comes into its own. Slang it may be, but it also speaks to something essential about his method of characterisation. It is most often used in reference to body parts where you would expect a possessive ("moved the hand", "licked the lips") and seems to me a distancing technique at moments of intense emotion which imbues the characters with a distinct aura of vulnerability – a form of British 'stiff upper lip' which makes the characters, and their situations, seem somehow real, even when they are absurd.

Which emphasises something often overlooked about Wodehouse's stories – innocent, charming, naïve even, they may be, but safe they are not. Whether it's Bertie being hounded by innumerable aunts and the terrifying prospect of marriage, or the perennial threats to Lord Emworth's beloved Empress, the levity of tone lifting the stories is never at the expense of an essentially human predicament.

His women are, admittedly, less rounded characters, but the servants are as well realised as the masters (and certainly more in control!). Even in his depiction of Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the 'Black Shorts' and clearly an allusion to Oswald Mosley, humour never reverts to satire. Evelyn Waugh once described Vile Bodies as "rather like a PG Wodehouse novel, all about bright young people", but Wodehouse lacks the edge of Waugh. Guy Bolton, who collaborated with Wodehouse on several of his plays, called him "quite simply, the most humane and kind man I have ever known".

And that, as Bertie says in The Code of the Woosters, is the ultimate refuge underlying any Wodehouse novel: "I wonder if you have noticed a rather rummy thing about it – viz. that it is everywhere. You can't get away from it. Love, I mean. Wherever you go, there it is, buzzing along in every class of life".

PG WodehouseFictionCharlotte Jones
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Kindle readers make their mark

Amazon's 'popular highlights' chart reveals a revolution in reading habits

If you've skimmed the e-ink pages of a Kindle, you've probably come across a handful of passages underlined with a slight squiggle, akin to Microsoft Word's spellcheck. Kindle has for the past few years given users the opportunity to see "popular highlights": the passages in their ebooks that readers most often highlight or annotate.

The books most highlighted are often the most read – Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy dominates the Amazon ranking of highlights. Eight of the 10 most highlighted passages on Kindles are from The Hunger Games or its sequels; the other two are from Pride and Prejudice. It's interesting to note what people highlight, though. Not the smutty scenes at which a more lascivious reader might surreptitiously bend over a page corner. The highlights reveal that most readers of ebooks are unabashedly sentimental.

Passages with kernels of wisdom are also hot: 5,291 readers found the lines "I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts", in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, worthy of rememberance in our era of instant comment and social media. A line in Danny Dorling's So You Think You Know About Britain? – "There are more nurses from Malawi working in Manchester alone than there are nurses in all of Malawi" – is typical of the kind of quote highlighted in non-fiction: an easily memorable soundbite upending some widely held assumption.

The classics are understandably heavily highlighted, because they're heavily read. A passage in Moby Dick – "Heaven have mercy on us all – Presbyterians and Pagans alike – for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending" – has been highlighted by 598 readers, who may or may not also be cracked about the head. Anna Karenina is heavily annotated far beyond the obvious "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", although that has attracted the eye of 4,086 readers.

The appeal of the shared notes and highlights stems from what's enjoyable about physical books: picking up a secondhand book or finding a novel in a library, flicking through and finding evidence of who has read it before you. Notes in the margins, underlined passages: an affirmation from a previous reader that certain lines are particularly profound can add an extra edge to your journey through the pages. Or if you're a particularly lazy student, knowing which passages have caught previous readers' eyes is a boon. Conversely, readers of The Marriage Plot may find my first ever public note, "I HATE JEFFREY EUGENIDES", less than helpful.

As an act of intellectual voyeurism, this is all good fun. But it also feeds into a greater appreciation of novels: the high volume of highlighting in teenage fiction is symptomatic of a need to connect. Alarmists who claim that the young don't read nowadays may be amazed at the evidence in Kindle's highlights chart of how teenagers linger over fiction. And it's also social: people can see anything you highlight, so picking out passages is an expression of your better self. It's a mindful way of reading, but also quite public. When highlighting or annotating any part of an ebook, the eyes of dozens of other future readers are peering over your shoulder.

The five most highlighted passages

1. Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them.
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, highlighted by 17,784 Kindle users

2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, highlighted by 9,260 Kindle users

3. The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, highlighted by 9,031 Kindle users

4. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins, highlighted by 8,833 Kindle users

5. "I just want to spend every possible minute of the rest of my life with you," Peeta replies.
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, highlighted by 8,500 Kindle users

EbooksE-readersKindleAmazon.comClassicsChildren and teenagersDawn Foster
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Who is the greatest American novelist? 4: Toni Morrison v William Styron

You nominated the contenders – now reader Matthew Spencer pits Morrison's The Bluest Eye against Styron's Set This House on Fire

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