What this book would like to be is a defence of the value of reading serious literature. To that end Philip Davis attempts to mark a distinctive “holding-ground” that is created when a reader engages attentively with a text. Within this “space”, he thinks, different types of thinking are possible and in most cases take place. Of course that might all just be a fanciful idyll if there were no connection between literature and the world at large. It happens that there is such a connection, Davis argues, and this in effect is what underwrites the value of literature and its study even in the face of recent attacks on the utility of the humanities. It is a conclusion that many readers, especially, would like to take up. Whether they should do so on the basis of this argument, however, is somewhat doubtful.

Initially it seems as though Davis wants to present us with a phenomenology of reading. But he eschews such technical and theory-laden efforts in favour of close readings of literary texts. No doubt Wordsworth’s “She dwelt amongst the untrodden ways” powerfully evokes a sense of loss in almost any reader. But how does this example, or any number of further examples, explicate Davis’ notion of a “holding-ground”. In truth it does not. Instead we have a series of plausible examples of occasions on which, as readers, we fully engage with a text, but in the end all that does is to confirm that Davis’ “holding-ground” is a metaphor. A powerful and appealing metaphor, surely, but nonetheless a metaphor. And metaphors alone will not accomplish the heavy lifting — the real philosophical work — that is required to firmly ground Davis’ further explorations of the value of reading serious literature.

In the book’s third section, Davis draws upon an insight of George Steiner’s to note that readers are “always secretly hopeful that this time this work might be the work, offering revelation.” Davis acknowledges how naive, but also irresistible, this is. Alas, I too am subject to such hopes. But this is not the book that will fulfil them. Maybe I’ll have better luck with the next one. ( )