When you read a novel, as you become involved, you veer. You come to realize that you have veered into it and you go on veering. It is not like a movie or computer game or conversation or session with a psychotherapist, it is another world. It is not simply a separate world, a utopic place. Falling in love with a novel, letting yourself be seduced, drifting into its strange expanse that is really neither surface nor depth, you are certainly a pervert of sorts, a reader pleasurably submitting to that experience of disavowal that Roland Barthes describes so well and so relishes: ‘I know these are only words, but all the same …’. You may come away from your reading and then return, veering back into it, rather like the mind of Margaret, perhaps, into the house and garden, that is also a novel, called Howards End (1910): ‘her mind trembled towards a conclusion which only the unwise have put into words.