Because earlier this year I appeared on The Sky Book Programme to discuss, among other things, my favourite novel, so I reread it, for the eighth or ninth time, taking some notes because explaining why you like something is harder than explaining why you hate it, for me at any rate, but the interview took at least fourteen seconds (see above), and it seems a shame to waste all that pondering time.

Philip Pullman said (correctly) that studying literature at university equips you very badly for writing the stuff. You spend three years reading (often disconcertingly good) books, thinking about their relationship to the author’s life, their structure, their influences, their social context… Then you sit down to write a novel of your own and realize that you have never considered some of the basic questions. Who is narrating? Is it one of the characters? Or many? Is it you, or a dramatized version of yourself ? Do they have access to all the characters’ minds? Do they know they future? What is their relationship to us? Do they have an arm around our shoulder? Are they whispering conspiratorially? Are they standing in front of the fireplace declaiming…? Whether we like a book often depends on how an author has answered these questions.

And if the author writes well, we rarely notice how they’ve done this. For a good novel (or poem, or play) is a magic trick. The machinery works with such deftness that we’re too dazzled to notice the wires and the secret doors.

This is particularly true of To the Lighthouse. Yes, it’s about the clash of masculine and feminine world-views, the breakdown of the Victorian family, class, art, money, power… all that lit-crit stuff. But it’s the prose which dazzles me.

There is no narrator as such, more an narrating spirit which moves, with fairy quickness, in and out of people’s minds, and back and forth in both space and time. Sometimes it is hard to work out, immediately, who is thinking, or to put a date and time to the scene being described.

It sounds complex when spelled out (and one of things I love about Woolf is that she is a true Modernist, restlessly pushing at the boundaries of what fiction can do) but more than any other writer I can think of, she captures the sense of what it is to inhabit a human mind and to be a member of a family. The way our thoughts overlap and coalesce with those close to us, the way we complement and contradict one another.

She describes with absolute precision how the mind slips from the Wagnerian sublime to the trivial and back again without the slightest bump. You wonder if your life is a failure. You remind yourself to buy biscuits. You are entranced by the patterns in an oily puddle.

“How incongruous it seemed to be telephoning a woman like that. The Graces assembling seemed to have joined hands in meadows of asphodel. Yes, he would catch the 10:30 at Euston.”

Then, every so often, that narrating spirit breaks through the membrane which keeps us from the seeing the true nature of things, and the world catches fire.

“Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm, braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air like a rain of energy, a column of spray…”

It happens, again, in one of my favourite passages, which keeps its power every time I return to it.

“There was the silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain on the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath.”

I’m an underliner. I don’t think I’ve ever really enjoyed a book without wanting to scribble in it, to highlight the passages where the wheels leave the tarmac. My tattered copy of To the Lighthouse has underlinings on nearly every page. And in different coloured inks. For every time you return to a really good novel you find yourself reading a slightly different book. This time around (being the father of two small boys), I realised just how good Woolf is at describing parents and children, that fierce tenderness, the see-saw of love and hate, the pride and the sadness, the closeness and the distance.

The novel also gets funnier every time I read it.

Here is Mr Ramsay, the paterfamilias, once again, trying to convince himself that his academic career has not been a failure.

“[His] was a splendid mind. For if thought was like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q […] But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmer red in the distance. Z is only reached by one man in a generation.”