Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was published in 1936. Wikipedia tells me that a Harris poll in 2014 found it to be America’s second favourite book, behind the Bible. When I did English with American literature at university, Gone with the Wind wasn’t included on any reading list. All these years later it was with some trepidation that I downloaded a Kindle copy. A bit of initial review reading had revealed accusations of racism in some quarters. Was this book the equivalent of a gun? Guns are popular in America, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea for me to buy one.

Nevertheless, I started reading, finding myself in Georgia in 1861, where huge fortunes are made growing the valuable commodity of cotton using cheap slave labour. The resulting society is one of extremes, wealthy and poor, coarse and refined. Those at the top show off their money with fancy clothes, big houses, or perhaps by cultivating the image of gentlemanly intellectualism. Parallels between wearing fancy dresses at extravagant parties, and sitting around reading Shakespeare, immediately give a feel for what will become a major preoccupation of the book – the nature of value. If this book were racist, for example, one lot of people would be portrayed as better and more valuable than another. Does it do that?

This is a long book and there are so many examples you could reference. But from the early part of the story, showing the South at its decadent height, there are unexpected parallels between the role of slaves and pampered white women. Mammy the black nanny is stuck between plantation matriarch Ellen on the one hand, and Ellen’s head-strong, teenage daughter Scarlett on the other. Mammy has to carry out Ellen’s instructions with regard to Scarlett, even when Scarlett doesn’t want to do as instructed. Theoretically Mammy would be expected to obey both conflicting sets of demands. Considerable guile is necessary to navigate this treacherous situation. Then there’s Jeems, a servant to the Tarleton twins – not allowed to listen in on white conversation, unless his masters tell him that’s what they want him to do. The rules of good behaviour keep changing. And interestingly this is the same for privileged women. For a respectable young woman, winning a husband means cultivating the image of a meek airhead, which is only relevant until the woman is married, after which she is expected to became a competent estate personnel manager looking after a combined household and business perhaps involving hundreds of people, all the while making it look like the husband is in charge. Women and slaves have to balance one set of demands against a totally opposing set.

This all takes on another dimension when war is declared over the issue of slavery, between the northern Union and the Confederacy of southern slave owning states. The Confederacy, deluded in believing its agricultural wealth can challenge the industrial power of the North, suffers a terrible series of defeats, throwing it into a kind of post apocalyptic scenario worthy of Margaret Atwood. What do bonnets or books mean when you haven’t got enough to eat? People and values swap places, as the world tips on its head. Former strengths are now weaknesses and vice versa. Scarlett, bewails the end of slavery, but doesn’t seem to mind that in the confusion she has more freedom to throw off the shackles that weigh her down as a woman. She becomes a mill owner and entrepreneur, something that would have been unthinkable before the war. She manages, at least partially, to escape social rules that are as harsh as anything found anywhere in the world. Following the death of her first husband early in the war, exuberant Scarlett is expected to effectively end her life, spending what remains in mourning. Her admirer Rhett Butler tells her about the former Indian practice of suttee, practiced among high caste women:

‘In India, when a man dies he is burned, instead of buried, and his wife always climbs on the funeral pyre and is burned with him.’ ‘How dreadful! Why do they do it? Don’t the police do anything about it?’ ‘Of course not. A wife who didn’t burn herself would be a social outcast. All the worthy Hindu matrons would talk about her for not behaving as a well-bred lady should—precisely as those worthy matrons in the corner would talk about you, should you appear tonight in a red dress and lead a reel. Personally, I think suttee much more merciful than our charming Southern custom of burying widows alive.’

Racism demands that one set of people is valued above another. That is just not the case here. If Gone With The Wind were a gun used to shoot someone, it could just as easily become a weapon that turns on the person who wields it.

So did I miss out when my American literature course passed over Margaret Mitchell? If her book was nonfiction it would no doubt be misleading. I mean, Rhett’s quote about suttee makes out this is a common practice in India when it’s a tradition almost entirely consigned to the past. But then no account of history is perfect. And besides that, Gone with the Wind is a novel, a fictional form, the best examples of which explore the fictions people deal in. And this novel both projects and undermines a smug, distorted image of closed-minded exceptionalism. Shakespeare is mentioned a number of times, and a play like Henry V, seemingly jingoistic, also subversive, does something similar. These are works of literature helping us to understand strange, interesting, often brutally self-centred societies, and also helping us understand people in general.

The book ends with those famous words, ‘tomorrow is another day’. This is the sort of book I will continue to think about, and people will continue to argue about. Tomorrow I might give it one star. Today, however, I’ll give it five.

Lucky Jim is a novel by Kingsley Amis, published in 1954. It tells the story of young Jim Nixon, who is in his probationary year as a lecturer in medieval history at an unnamed provincial university. He loathes the pretensions of his colleagues, and wages a vendetta against the son of his boss, a second rate artist with first rate belief in his own genius.

And yet while those colleagues and egotistical artists are useless fakes, so too is Jim. He seems to hate his subject, only taking medieval history because it had been the soft option when he was studying for his own degree. He doesn’t like teaching, ignores the one conscientious student the university seems to posses, while favouring prettier, less able ones. He bluffs his way along with the rest of the staff, living in mortal fear of losing his detested job.

Meanwhile in his personal life he is in an uneasy relationship with Margaret, an emotionally volatile fellow academic, who seemingly tried to commit suicide following a previous failed relationship. Jim feels compelled to continue with her even after meeting another girl with whom he seems much happier.

These personal and professional tensions all lead up to a chaotic climax at a lecture Jim is obliged to give on the theme of Merrie England. He is expected to extoll the lost virtues of a society engaging in summer morris dancing and winter mummers’ plays.

I suppose, getting to the end, I was asked to accept that there was a difference between Jim’s fakery and the fakery he was surrounded by. While Jim was an honest faker, the other staff were of the dishonest variety, especially it turns out, Margaret – I will leave you to discover the details there. So then I had to ask myself, is it possible to have this sort of distinction between good and bad fraud? I then wondered, thinking of the bigger picture, if we are perhaps being asked to accept that novels are themselves a kind of honest sham? After all, Lucky Jim is rather self-consciously a novel, in the sense of having novel-like things in it, such as an enemies to lovers scenario, and proving your love by racing to catch someone before they board a train at a station. Can you get more truth from this sort of thing than say, an academic paper on fifteenth century ship building? Maybe life is, and always has been something of a swindle. There was no age of innocence, no Merrie England. And there is no place of innocence. Universities are not some sanctuary offering the truth and fairness lacking in the rest of society. A university is just another work place dominated by favouritism, internal politics and saying what the boss wants to hear.

Maybe the fakery of a novel is the best way to get to the truth of such a situation. Maybe in the end Jim is lucky to be a character in a pretend novel rather than an academic at a real university.