Books as Bombs

Every so often, a book comes along that challenges our beliefs and shakes our world view. So what does it take for literature to make history, asks Boyd Tonkin in the Independent.

From the story...

At work, at school, at home, all-encompassing systems organised lives on the basis of a logic and reason that – on closer inspection – came to look utterly phoney. "Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't," writes Heller, "but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle." Search for the roots of the 1960s counter-culture, with its mischievous and irreverent withdrawal of respect from the rules and the rule-givers, and the few thousands who sampled psychedelic drugs will not take you very far. Focus instead on the legions who soon began to spot – and still spot – a Catch-22 whenever they feel trapped by the ironclad craziness of modern authority.

That novel rebooted minds, and even lives. Yet whenever we think of the books that changed the world, an ingrained bias tilts towards the ideological "grand narratives" and abstract great ideas. The Holy Scriptures, the doctrinal treatises, the revolutionary manifestos: all did help to shape our world, of course. This spring, the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible – as epoch-making a volume as ever passed through a printing press – has rightly triggered a commemorative avalanche. In his new book, The Book of Books, Melvyn Bragg proposes that that the KJB translations not only moulded the speech and thought of Anglophone culture. From Newtonian experiment to suffragette feminism and the civil-rights movement of Martin Luther King, they also fixed its future routes in politics and science, shining like "the sun to a solar system of human life".

Yet the question of how, and how far, key books and the ideas within them can push social and political change has teased historians ever since the Enlightenment.