John Lewis-Stempel – From Pyrenees to Pennines

On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.

Kate’s: Books are my Favourite and Best

I haven’t read the starter book, Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, which is set in small-town Michigan. Here’s how Book Browse summarises it: ‘Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart’. It sounds to me as though it also reflects upon how in the end we are alone, even if living in an established family or community.

Kent Haruf’s Plainsong is set in small town Colorado. This beautifully written, spare, stark book takes as its theme the loosely intermingled lives of various abandoned souls who live in the imagined town of Holt, Colorado. There’s teenage Victoria, pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend; Tom Guthrie, whose wife has retreated into deep depression, leaving him with the care of his young boys, Ike and Bobby; the elderly McPheron brothers; infirm Iva Stearn. These isolated people display dignity and stoicism in their difficulties, and struggle towards some sense of connection and community. Holt seems a pretty bleak town, and the landscape that surrounds it too. Haruf’s descriptions are always understated, always telling. His characters maintain their privacy, whilst allowing us to care about the ultimately optimistic conclusion of the book.

From a bleak town to a bleak continent: let’s go to the Arctic with Christiane Ritter: A Woman in the Polar Night. In 1934, Ritter, a painter, left her ordinary life with a teenage daughter to join her husband in his life as trapper in Arctic Spitsbergen. It turns out to be as cold and inhospitable as we all imagine, and twice as primitive. Home is little better than a shack, the stove is primitive and unreliable, and all fuel needs to be found and collected by them, The same applies on the whole to food. They have only a few basic supplies. Animals and birds have to be caught and processed, and these fatty unfamiliar meats form much of their diet. Husband and Norwegian friend and housemate are often out trapping, looking for animals whose fur they will sell. That’s enough to tell you what much of this book is about. It’s twice as tough as it sounds in this unforgiving climate. But it’s beautiful too, and Ritter dwells on this. Straightforwardly yet engagingly written, this book offers an insight into the strange world which she chooses for a year to inhabit, and leaves reluctantly.

Here’s another book about a woman alone: The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, by Vendela Vida. This book is written in the second person, and it distances us from a protagonist who wants to stay distant. She’s a young unnamed woman who’s come – fled perhaps – from Florida to Casablanca. Checking into her hotel, her backpack with all her important documents is stolen. The police ‘find’ it, but it’s not hers, the woman whose documents it contains is not her. But she accepts it. In many ways, losing her given identity suits her. She soon changes her identity again… and again. Her need for anonymity runs deep, perhaps partly from her wish to escape her own face, disfigured by teenage acne. Perhaps because of what we come to know of her story – no spoiler alerts here though. Through what little agency she has, she time and again shifts the ground beneath her feet. This is a novel of profound unease and bewilderment, and distancing our heroine from us by simply calling her ‘you’ is a part of that bewilderment. An unsettling reading experience – recommended.

Nahr is another isolated woman, who tells her (fictional) story in Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World. A powerful story, told by Nahr, a Palestinian woman in solitary confinement for an unnamed act of terrorism. Her time in the Cube, as she calls her cell is recounted in short chapters interleaved with longer accounts of her life thus far. Much of her early life was spent in a Kuwait ghetto where many Palestinian refugees, dispossessed by the Gulf War fetched up. After an unsuccessful school career, Nahr works hard at menial jobs to save up so that her brother can avoid her fate by going to medical school. She meets an older Kuwaiti woman who blackmails, prostitutes but also loves her, propels her into high-end prostitution. Marriage to a freedom fighter saves her reputation – and his – but he’s a closet homosexual who soon deserts her for his lover. I don’t want to reveal more of the story, but eventually she returns to Palestine and finds close relationships and a political awakening that changes her life forever. This timely read, detailing the brutal legacy of Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine is both powerful and thought-provoking. Though it is of necessity one-sided, it should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand recent Palestinian history. The shock waves of recent events continue and escalate.

Isolation seems to be developing as a bit of a theme here. Here’s isolation of a completely different kind. Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. Six astronauts (two of them are cosmonauts), all from different countries, some male, some female, orbit the earth in their International Space Station. We visit them for one day only, as they travel 16 times round the globe. We experience with them the wonder of this journey: the brush-stroke beauty of the landscapes they view from afar, as well as tiny detail – headlights, fishing boats. We accompany them as they go about their often mundane daily experimental tasks. Or using the treadmills that are part of their daily routine. Or we see their sleeping bags, billowing in weightlessness: the spoons they eat with, attached by velcro to the cabin wall. We perceive aspects of their life back on earth – children, a loveless marriage, a trusting partnership. The book moves through the spectacular and the ordinary, distance and intimacy and invites us, the readers, to wonder too.

Wonder at the earth? Let’s look at Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field, by John Lewis-Stempel. An utterly absorbing account of a year in the life of an English meadow. From harsh January, through the months in which warmth and life returns, to busy summer and autumn and back to chilly dormancy again, John Lewis-Stempel notices and absorbs everything. He sees birds, insects, animals and plants in microscopic detail. He relishes smells, tastes and sights. He enters fully into the life of his traditional meadow, one that may have existed for many hundred years. A celebration of traditional country scenes, leaving the reader with a campaigning zeal to preserve the rich variety of life it contains if sympathetically managed and left to itself. As he himself says: ‘To stand alone in a field in England and listen to the morning chorus of the birds is to remember why life is precious.’

Isolation seems to be a theme here. Will that continue next month, when we’re invited to start our chain with a favourite travel guide?

My first five photos come courtesy of Unsplash: Alexander Andrews; Levartravel; Vince gx; Annie Spratt; Gallindo Bailey. The final shot is my own.

‘On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book.‘

Six Degrees of Separation: Kate W

This month, the chain begins with Rachel Cusk’s Second Place. The narrator is M, living out in a remote country landscape with her second husband Tony, invites celebrated painter L to stay in the second cottage they own: she is powerfully attracted to his work. We’re witness to M’s inner monologues, as she worries about her relationship with her daughter, her husband and L’s antipathy towards her, manifesting itself in calculated rudeness. Cusk acknowledges the book as a re-write of Mieko Kawakami’s memoir of DH Lawrence, Lorenzo in Taos, but I haven’t read this. M could be thought obsessive, over-analytical, though much of what she thinks is beautifully expressed. Insightful? Pretentious? Only you can decide.

Some weeks on from reading Second Place, my lasting impression is of a lonely setting, and of characters who are ultimately alone. So the first link in my chain is Jane Harper’s The Lost Man. This story is set in the Australian outback, and for me the central character in the novel. Understanding the vastness, the harshness, the loneliness and unforgiving nature of this landscape was what I took from this book. It’s the story of a family, of three brothers who live next door to one another (by which you need to understand that they each live at least three hours drive from each other), and what happens after Nathan finds Cameron dead one day, by the grave of a long-dead stockman, in upsetting circumstances. The wider family unravels, then ravels again in a satisfyingly realised story, in which the ending was possibly just a little too neat. But it’s a great story, well told and visualised.

Loneliness of a different kind is at the heart of Javier Marías’ Berta Isla. Berta and Tomás fall in love while still at school together. Anglo-Spanish, Tomás goes to university in Oxford, to further his extraordinary gift for languages, while Berta studies in Madrid. At Oxford, Tomás makes a mistake which obliges him to make his choice of career to work for the British secret service. It changes his and Berta’s relationship for ever. This is the story of a marriage in which the husband is largely absent to his wife, to his children and to the world at large. It takes in – at a distance – the Irish Troubles, the Falklands War, and Franco’s dictatorship.

At one point Berta herself quotes from Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities: ‘…every human creature is destined to be a profound secret and mystery to every other creature’. That’s what this book is about. A thoughtful, discursive book which will remain with me for a long time.

A quiet bar in Madrid (Igor Olyarnik: Unsplash)

Let’s look at loneliness of a different kind: Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flynn. This is a book about what man has done to various places on earth, and what happens when man ceases to interfere: when the mining stops; the botanical garden is left to its own devices; the fatally damaged nuclear reactor is fenced off; the WWI chemical weapons site locked and the farmland abandoned. Nature begins to take over once more. Maybe not quite in the form that it had previously, but insidiously, by adapting and making do. The wilderness revives.

This beautiful, even lyrically written book celebrates Nature’s power to recover, even when to the average aesthete the results are not conventionally pretty. It may be almost too late. There is much to be concerned, horrified and terrified about as man continues to despoil the planet. But Flyn finds hope in nature’s power to take back control. A book I am pleased to have read: and one which gave me plenty to think about, and plenty to appreciate in the quality of Flyn’s writing.

Flyn didn’t write about the desolate but strangely beautiful industrial spoilheap that is Parys Mountain in Anglesey. But she very well could have.

Back to fiction, to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the tale of a father and son trudging through post-Apocalypse America. This is a land where nothing grows, no small animals are there for the hunting: where communities and dwellings are deserted and long-since looted for anything that might sustain life a few more days: where other humans might prove peaceable, but might instead be evil and dangerous. This book is bleakly, sparely written. Conversations between father and son are clipped, necessary. No speech marks. Sometimes little punctuation. Every ounce of energy is needed for the business of staying alive. This book, in which nobody lives happily-ever-after will stay with me for a long time.

An apocalypse of a different kind is described in John Lewis-Stempel’s Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War. I thought I was pretty clued up about the social history of World War I, but this book was a revelation. It describes the war, and life in the trenches and beyond from the point of view of the young subalterns who, in leading their men at the Front, had a life expectancy once there of six weeks. These young men, some no older than 17, had been equipped by their education in public schools to be team players, leaders, and military men through their membership of the OTC. They rose to the occasion, leading men often old enough to be their fathers, commanding their respect and even love. Some of these men became officers in their turn, because the public school men, frankly, were mainly all killed. Marlborough School, for example, lost 400 men in the Great War. This is about their short lives, and the lives of the men they led. Brilliant.

From a son et lumière at Ripon Cathedral in 2018 to commemorate the end of WWI a hundred years before

Oh goodness, this has been quite a dark month of book choices. Let’s lighten the mood for my final choice, in a book about that moment in our lives when we’re all finally alone … death. Waiting for the Last Bus by Richard Holloway. This is an excellent, thought provoking book written with a light, amusing touch. I’ve reached the stage in life where reflections on life and death seem appropriate, and this is a book I’ll read again. Holloway considers our fears of death, both for ourselves, and for those whom we love. He looks at what comes next, both for the deceased and for those left behind. A former monk, agnostic, and bishop, Holloway has written a book which is accessible to us all, not just Christians. Highly recommended, and not at all depressing.

Tag: John Lewis-Stempel

Six Degrees of Separation: from Tom Lake to Meadowland

It’s time for Six Degrees of Separation … in September…