The excellent new film Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska in the title role, is one of more than a dozen cinematic versions of the classic novel by Charlotte Bronte. That’s a lot of visual interpretation, and the great Gothic romance has been the subject of much more literary criticism. But perhaps no treatment of the old story has shone as much light on its origins as has another novel, Sheila Kohler’s Becoming Jane Eyre.
     The joy of reading Becoming Jane Eyre runs much deeper than the simple game of discovering to what degree the novel’s events and characters are thinly disguised recreations from Charlotte’s brief life. Rather, Kohler’s genius lies in the illuminating way in which she imagines Charlotte using her considerable skills to make art out of her many disappointments. Tim O’Brien has written that stories come from the place where memory and imagination converge. Kohler vividly depicts Charlotte discovering that place, and in so doing she puts the creative process at the center of the action.
     Charlotte herself states the central theme of Kohler’s book, late in the story, when Jane Eyre has become an instant bestseller and its author the toast of London literary society. “People want to find out who she really is,” thinks Charlotte. “What they really want to know is whether she has written her own story into her novel; how much of it is true? How could she answer such a question? She doesn’t know the answer herself.”

   I was camping with a friend in the Canadian Rockies, back in 1995, beside Berg Lake, at the foot of Mount Robson. One day, we decided to hike from base camp up to the spot where Robson Glacier reaches it lowest point and melts into the snow field. As we walked up the valley toward the foot of the glacier, the rock walls on either side of us seemed to become more and more imposing, growing higher, looming bigger and bigger, the subtle color in the rock coming into sharper focus, the quiet becoming ever more quiet with every step we took. We could hear the hum of the glacier moving all the time, maybe we even felt the rumbling through the soles of our boots, and there was the constant, though intermittent, thunder of avalanches on the higher slopes of Mount Robson. It was a generally clear day, with blue sky and strong sun, although big fluffy white clouds were floating through the sky, but with enough space between them so as not to obscure the sunshine for more than several moments at a time.
   We were probably within 500 yards of the glacier when I had to stop and sit down beside the trail. My friend kept on, his goal being to reach the top of the narrow valley and touch the glacier itself, as though it was a trophy to be collected upon completing the hike. I simply could not continue. I was in awe, in shock, actually. My senses, indeed, my soul, could not take in any more of such beauty. I felt that I might burst if I continued to collect any more of this wild landscape without taking the time to absorb it, to respect it, really. I sat there on the rock, shaking, nearly in tears, knowing that I was seeing god and understanding, not intellectually but viscerally, what wilderness is. I knew, not in a metaphoric way but with certainty, that this place was real, and that the city, and the life, I'd left behind were not.

    When the Blizzard of 2010 shut down London’s Heathrow Airport during the Christmas rush, the resulting criticism caused the executive who runs the place to forego his annual bonus. But that storm has passed, and for frequent fliers who want to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes at Terminal 5, one of Europe’s biggest passenger terminals, a recent paperback from Vintage Books is just the ticket.
   The arrival any book by Alain de Botton is welcome in my library, so I was pleased to find A Week at the Airport shortly after the holidays. De Botton, the bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Architecture of Happiness, was an inspired choice as Heathrow's writer-in-residence. He’s an elegant stylist and an original thinker, with a particular knack for interpreting the mundane predicaments of modern life in ways that illuminate their underlying meanings and their importance to the individual. One suspects, in fact, that he’s describing his own works when he tells a bookseller at the airport, “I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”
   A Week at the Airport is illustrated with a series of subtle, yet revealing, color photos by Richard Baker. Together, the writer and photographer expose both the public face of T5, which cost $7.6 billion and took nearly six years to build, and it’s backstage geography.

   Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 nearly sixty years ago, but it is as eerily relevant today as the day it came off the press. The dystopian America of Bradbury’s breakthrough novel is a place where floor-to-ceiling televisions blare fake reality shows, where the minimum speed limit is 55 mph, and teenagers get their kicks killing each other. This America is a police state that is forever at war or on the brink of war, including nuclear conflict. It is also, famously, a society in which books have been outlawed, and the job of firemen is to burn not only books but also the houses that conceal them and, sometimes, the inhabitants.
   The plot is well known: a fireman, Guy Montag, is shocked by his wife’s attempted suicide into wondering why a society so preoccupied with instant gratification produces so many murderous, suicidal, and lonely people. He begins to read the few books he has been secretly collecting, stolen from the scenes of the fires he’s started during his ten-year career. He finds an old professor of English, who tries to explain why books are both valuable and dangerous. “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget,” says Professor Faber. “There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
   In a wonderful bit of thematic juxtaposition, the professor tells Montag the same thing his commanding officer, Captain Beatty, tells him: the effort to ban the printed word didn’t originate with a repressive government; it was bottom up, stemming from the public’s desire to ignore difficult information. “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord,” explains Faber. “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And then the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters.”

   Have you ever wanted to disappear; to just walk away from work, family and financial obligations, without a word to anybody, without leaving a hint as to where you might  be going? Disappearance, or escape, is a common enough fantasy, perhaps tempting middle-aged men more frequently than anybody else. Such a man succumbs to that temptation in Monsieur Monde Vanishes, a short novel by the prolific Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903-1989).
   Monde’s escape is a simple matter of boarding a train, leaving behind his orderly life in Paris, to push through a long, dark night to the seedy, dangerous port of Marseilles. I’ve long been a fan of Simenon’s sparse but vivid prose. He’s known for his ability to set a scene, to create an atmosphere, and to draw credible characters with a minimum of  exposition. His descriptive skills are impressive. “The rhythm of the train took possession of him. It was like some music with a regular beat, the words for which were provided by scraps of phrases, memories, the passing images that met his eyes, a lonely cottage in the countryside where a stout woman was washing clothes, a stationmaster waving his red flag in a toy station, people passing ceaselessly by him on their way to the toilet, a child crying in the next compartment and one of the soldiers asleep in his corner, his mouth wide open in a ray of sunlight.”
   Simenon is best known for the 70-some-odd mysteries in the Inspector Maigret series, which are entertaining, certainly, but also formulaic. More significant are his noir crime stories, which he called “hard novels.” Monsieur Monde is one of these, full of foreboding, set in a nocturnal Riviera that tourists only see in nightmares, peopled with whores, thieves and junkies. Monde learns to navigate this world, in which nobody can be trusted, as adeptly as he navigated the Paris of a wealthy executive, husband and father. He becomes first the protector and then the companion of Julie, a loose woman with a shady past, and he settles comfortably into a job as assistant manager of the seedy nightclub where she works as a hostess.