Brian Pendreigh:

Braving The Hill of Death was worth it

Blind summits can be a little daunting. They are even more scary if it is a single track road and there is a sheer drop on one side. And as if that is still not quite enough, make the summit a T-junction as well.

It is so crazy it has to be real – all too real for my wife and daughter who refused to stay in the car while I drove over the hill. We affectionately nicknamed it “The Hill of Death”.

We flew to Malaga for a late summer holiday. We were not headed for the beaches on the Costa del Sol, but rather the village of Tolox in the Sierra de las Nieves mountains. Or, more precisely, we were headed for a villa just beyond the village, on the other side of The Hill of Death.

The villa was what you might call “out of the way”, so imagine my surprise to arrive and find Dan Brown, Robert Ludlum, and JK Rowling were already there.

And not just Brown, Ludlum and Rowling, but Enid Blyton, G K Chesterton, Boris Pasternak and even Henrik Ibsen.

Never had I seen such an eclectic collection of writers in a single bookcase. There were even books in Japanese, possibly left by a previous occupant, though the bookcase must initially have been stocked by the owner, possibly on the assumption that occupants might be tempted to spend more time than usual at the villa, given the presence of The Hill of Death between the house and remainder of Spain. There was also a nice pool.

Normally I get through one single novel on a week’s holiday. And the winner of that accolade this year was supposed to be… Cloud Atlas. The film version had been shooting in Glasgow, so I thought I had better read it.

We had two copies. Both my wife and my daughter had it, though neither liked it. Knowing we had two copies, my wife gave hers away. And then of course we could not find the other copy. So I decided I would read Life of Pi, the book my wife was reading, but I had to wait for her to finish it first.

Then I found the bookcase – not to mention the DVD collection, which included A Taste of Honey, a wonderful working-class drama from the 1960s, and Topaz, one of the very few Hitchcock films I had never seen.

Like many people, I always have a list of a dozen or more novels that I want to read, and many titles maintain their position on that list year in and year out. James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the Mountain has never quite made it on to the list, but it was a book I knew was a modern classic. And, if I didn’t know, it said it on the cover.

A couple of days later I had finished Baldwin’s story of a religious black family in Harlem in the 1930s and was tucking into Things Fall Apart, a 1958 novel by the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, about an African village and the impact of English missionaries and colonists.

It might have seemed a challenge back home, where generally if I can get through two pages in bed without falling asleep I am doing well – even better if I can remember next day what I read.

But it was refreshing to rediscover how easy it is to get through a novel, given time, sunshine and the absence of a telephone. Given that I am about to become a published novelist, I felt I should maybe read one or two.

And it was like a pleasant birthday surprise, being given mint-condition copies of classics I had read about back home. I knew about them from that excellent volume entitled 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. It is an odd title, unless of course they knew that I still had to face The Hill of Death one last time.