I am reading Colum McCann’s latest novel, Apeirogon. An apeirogon is a shape with an infinite number of COUNTABLE sides – I delight in this notion. The book is brilliant. Mesmerising, with an incantatory effect in parts, it is long, structured in sections, some only comprising a single sentence. The story (though there really is not a story per se) is shaped around real events: a friendship between a Palestinian man and an Israeli man, both of whom have lost their daughters in the on-going conflict; these are ordinary men, yet extraordinary in what they do, how they understand. The book is about everything: the habits of birds, biblical characters, partition, the holocaust, the Irish troubles, tight-rope walking, every section providing another layer or another SIDE to the apeirogon. Detail by detail, story by story, the book builds a picture of…of the world really. There’s no plot, not in any traditional sense, but the book is unputdownable. It is, truly, an awesome achievement. When I first saw the title, I scoffed: how could any author be so foolish to provide a title that is meaningless to the vast majority of people. But Apeirogonis exactly right: this book is an apeirogon, the world we inhabit is an apeirogon.

While I am reading, the world beyond the book is silent, held suspended, does not impinge. While I am reading, I do not reach for my phone, I do not even think of my phone, nor my iPad, nor my computer. While I am reading, I do not think of the coronavirus. I am fully engaged in the world of the novel. And my mind is working, working hard. As the world of the novel expands layer by layer, panel by panel, I am making connections, imaginative connections; as I read, my own world grows larger and my understandings deepen.

When the world appears to be hostile and/or when you have lost your place in it, when your anxieties have fully occupied you, squeezing out both rationality and humour, fiction provides easy and readily available respite. Indeed, for my entire life, when things have gone awry, I have reached for fiction, most particularly the novels of Jane Austen – dear Jane – but many others as well. And for a time, with the novel in my hands, my dog’s head resting on my thigh, I am transported into other lives, other places, other times, other minds.

No matter how long this pandemic lasts, the fiction will not run out. Go to your book-cases and take down those classics you’ve always intended to read again. Go to the website of your local bookshops, they all have on-line ordering and delivery services. And your library has a wealth of books; best of all, if you’re set up for e-delivery, you won’t need to leave the couch. We are all going to be spending more time alone and with our immediate family. And this is where fiction is so versatile. You can read aloud with your beloved; you can read to your parents; you can read to your children, and you can read quietly, in peace, for an hour by yourself, while the world outside stumbles along.