Edgelands

An interesting Edgeland that I saw last month in the Huon Valley, Tasmania:
half junkyard, half sheep pasture

A few months ago when I blogged about Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways I said that it was almost as if the book was designed specifically to please me (in contrast to much of our current culture which seems to be designed specifically to annoy the hell out of me)...In The Old Ways Macfarlane followed some of the ancient walking routes of Europe and conjured up the literary ghosts of previous travellers on those routes, particularly the poet Edward Thomas. The Old Ways became an unlikely international best seller on the strength of its writing and by appealing to the inner yearning of urban based reviewers and readers for the beauty of the great outdoors. Edgelands is a travel book written by two poets, Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley, which is a kind of anti-Robert Macfarlane. Instead of looking for the wilderness at the top of Scotland or in some deep wadi in Palestine Roberts and Farley find the strange, wild and wonderful just down the road from us in that bit of wasteland behind the bus station or in old quarries or junkyards or abandoned factories or canals. In Edgelands the spirit is less Robert Macfarlane and John Muir and more JG Ballard and William Burroughs. The book sets out to be an exploration of "England's True Wilderness" and it reminded me of Ballard's Unlimited Dream Company and Concrete Island and Ian Sinclair's walk around the M25 recorded in London Orbital. Because the authors are poets who love poetry there is a full length poem or a lengthy extract in nearly every chapter from many great contemporary poets. Even more so than Macfarlane the authors realise that it is poets and artists who can see through the mundane to the sublime beyond. (I forgot who it was that said that if you stare at anything long enough it becomes beautiful.)
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Roberts and Farley celebrate the weirdness of all night golf driving range, container parks, scrubby woods, motorway service stations, airport car parks and they see loveliness - as, famously, Derek Mahon does - in burned out hotels, old alleys and dereliction. This, as I say, is a kind of anti Robert Macfarlane aesthetic but it's just as good as him (better actually in some ways because the authors have a sense of humour) and it even comes with a generous blurb from Macfarlane on the back cover. I don't know if it's been published in the US or Australia but you can get it on Amazon.co.uk and you can read a bit of it there too. 

Why The Booker Prize Might Actually Go To The Year's Best Novel This Year

The Booker Prize longlist was announced yesterday and it was an encouraging sign that the Booker people want their prize to be taken seriously as an award for the year's best or, at the very least, the most interesting novel. Too often the Booker has gone to someone in a clique of white, posh, North London based writers who have written some dreadful old rubbish that has been reviewed favourably by their friends in the broadsheet press. The Booker for a long time became a kind of lifetime achievement award for someone who had said the right things, gone to the right parties and blurbed the right people. Or, if petty jealousies got the better of the clique, the prize was given to some random person from the Commonwealth that nobody had heard of. 
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But this year's prize is being judged by Robert Macfarlane who I respect as a writer and a man of integrity and whose range of interests is broad. Yes he's a privately educated third generation literary-type who lives in Cambridge (no surprise there) but Macfarlane is better read than most Booker judges and better travelled too. I expect he'll take his job very seriously and actually read all the books. (This doesn't always happen.) The longlist has excluded nearly all of the North London clique - much to their fury I expect - and has actively sought out writers from the Commonwealth and Ireland. Only Americans are excluded from the Booker Prize for reasons that are still obscure to me. 
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Anyway here's the list in full (below). I've read 4 of the books on there and I was happy to see that three of the authors are Irish. (Colum McCann better hope the judges don't find out that he has a US passport.)
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Five Star Billionaire Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)

We Need New Names NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus)

The Luminaries Eleanor Catton (Granta)

Harvest Jim Crace (Picador)

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman Eve Harris (Sandstone Press)

The Kills Richard House (Picador) 

The Lowland Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury)

Unexploded Alison MacLeod ( Hamish Hamilton) 

TransAtlantic Colum McCann (Bloomsbury) 

Almost English Charlotte Mendelson (Mantle) 

A Tale for the Time Being Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)

The Spinning Heart Donal Ryan (Doubleday Ireland)

The Testament of Mary Colm Tóibín (Viking)

The Icknield Way

As you know last week I had a whale of a time listening to Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways which I just thought was wonderful and up there with the best travel writers I've read. Macfarlane began his journey in part as an homage to the Welsh writer Edward Thomas who was killed in World War 1 and who was one of the first old way walker/explorer/writers in England. Macfarlane took with him The Icknield Way where Thomas wrote about his journey on "the oldest road in England" that runs from East to West (or West to East) over the chalk downs from Cambridgeshire to Hampshire. It's a happy coincidence that Macfarlane began his book (where he began following Edward Thomas's route) just a little to the south east of the village of Sawston which is where my novel Falling Glass ends. Like I say this is only a coincidence but a strange one as Sawston is a beautiful, but nondescript, out of the way sort of place.
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Just as one book leads to another so reading Macfarlane has led me to Thomas's Icknield Way that my local library did not have but which has been scanned and put online by an archivist from the University of California. Helpfully the archivist provided an embed code so I was able to blog the entire book below. I appreciate that only 1% of the people who chance on this blogpost will be interested enough to read the below book, but that's ok, you're the 1% I do everything for anyway. The best way to read it is to click the full screen button and then the two page option (the two rectangles). The dedication at the beginning is off puttingly dry but, trust me, the rest of the book is charming. If you're interested in British travel writing in the Golden Age (and if you're not you should be) then you'll enjoy this. Other authors worth checking out from this era are: Robert Byron, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Fleming, Freya Stark, Rebecca West and the travel books of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Anyway thanks to the University of California, here's Thomas's lovely, eccentric, borderline mystical, Icknield Way:

The Old Ways

Most of the products of our doomed culture seem specifically designed to get on my nerves, almost as if their authors have looked inside my head and thought to themselves: now what can we do here that will irritate Adrian the most. Of course this is a paranoid, solipsistic way of thinking and probably as silly as the implied idea that in the past things were better. Much rarer are the cultural products that come my way that seem to be written just for me. Last year I saw a couple of films Fish Tank and Wendy & Lucy that were that way; a couple of books: The Fortress of Solitude and The Art of Fielding and one play: Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth. This year so far no films have wormed their way inside my solipsistic mind but a recent audiobook has. The book is The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane, which could have been written solely to give me pleasure. It's a travel book about Macfarlane's adventures walking on the 'old routes' of Britain, Europe and further afield. Along the way he ruminates about other famous walkers and their journeys on foot: Rousseau, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Wittgenstein, WH Davies, Edward Thomas, George Borrow, John Muir etc. who are writers that I also love (Patrick Fermor's A Time of Gifts may be my favourite book of all time). Macfarlane is something of a naturalist and he observes flora, fauna and landscape with a keen eye. And it's a philosophical book too. Macfarlane is at one with the German Romantics who felt that one's surroundings could influence one's spirit and who recommended travelling to the wild places as a way of coming to understand oneself. The outward journey leads to the inner one: nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg as Novalis says.

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Listening to The Old Ways as an audiobook while walking through the city or the countryside or along the beach was such a pleasure for me that I had to ration the book out to thirty minute increments a day lest I finish it too soon. Most of my heroes, it seems, are big walkers: Iain Sinclair walked the route of the M25, Werner Herzog walked from Bavaria to Paris, JA Baker tramped over the Essex marshes looking for peregrines, George Orwell tramped over England and France looking for authenticity and the incomparable Paddy Fermor walked from The Hook of Holland to Constantinople looking for adventure. There's nothing quite like walking to connect you with the place you live in or a new place. If you're not a big walker or need a little inspiration along the long lonely path may I suggest that you get yourself an Audible account, and as your first free audiobook get The Old Ways which I really cannot recommend highly enough.