Review

Andrew O’Hagan, Caledonian Road (#BookReview)

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When my reading group started back in 1988, most of us were time-poor mothers so we had a rule-of-thumb that our books could not be longer than 350 pages. Those days, however, are long gone, and some time ago we agreed that our January (aka summer) read could be a BIG book. Last year, for example, it was Demon Copperhead (my review). This year, some were keen to read Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, so that’s what we scheduled.

My problem is that while it’s summer, January is also tennis season. I don’t watch much sport, but I do love the tennis. Reading a big book while trying to keep up with the tennis is always a challenge. As is the fact that, as most of you know, I love short books. Give me a novella and I’m (usually) happy. However, I also love my reading group, and so I gave myself extra time and got stuck in. I was immediately engaged. The protagonist, fifty-two year old Campbell Flynn, art historian, writer and academic, captured me. There was a certain Jane Austen tone to the opening:

Tall and sharp at fifty-two, Campbell Flynn was a tinderbox in a Savile Row suit, a man who believed his childhood was so far behind him that all its threats had vanished.

Ha! He certainly was a tinderbox, as he was about to slowly implode. Further, as we soon discover, his childhood was not at all behind him, and is implicated in his unravelling. The first paragraph ends with some foreshadowing telling us that the first of his “huge mistakes” was not to “take people half as seriously as they took themselves”, with the second being “the proof copy” he had in his briefcase.

It is Thursday 20 May 2021, so the first wave of the pandemic is over but its long shadow provides a quiet background to the novel which is told over five parts, from Spring 2021 to Winter 2022, concluding around the time of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Now, back to my reading journey. I was interested, but as I read on, following the ups and increasing downs of Campbell’s life, along with those of an ever-growing cast of characters, there was a point where I started to baulk. It felt like a long wallowing in the ills of the modern western world. Did I need 640 pages of it? And then it clicked. I realised I was reading a modern take on the 19th century “condition-of-England” novel. These novels, as the The Victorian Web explains, “sought to engage directly with the contemporary social and political issues with a focus on the representation of class, gender, and labour relations, as well as on social unrest and the growing antagonism between the rich and the poor in England”. We’re talking Dickens’ “big” novels, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and south and Mary Barton, and so on. I loved them.

“a deep dive into the era’s shallows” (Campbell)

These novels have to be big, because a nation’s “condition” does not comprise one issue but a network of them, and this is what O’Hagan pulls apart in Caledonian Road. Through a cast of around 60 characters, O’Hagan explores a grab bag of the various ills we read about every day, with a British spin. All the big issues are here, including toxic masculinity; intergenerational wars; racism; modern technology with its related concerns like security, privacy, hacking, and digital identity; disruption as activist action; financial corruption and malfeasance; foreign interference; and human trafficking. Grab bag these might sound, but they are overlaid and connected by the traditional biggies – class, entitlement and privilege, economic inequality, and now, globalisation.

There’s a lot going on, but O’Hagan’s characters are vividly drawn, the plot is compelling if complicated, it is satirical in tone, and the language is so captivating that I enjoyed reading it after all. It is, necessarily, a disjointed read with the narrative constantly switching between the different storylines that make the whole, but I found I didn’t need the cast of characters helpfully provided at the beginning because the context always made clear who they were.

Before I return to the subject matter, I must share a couple of perfect character descriptions. First is Milo, a person whom Campbell doesn’t take seriously enough, and second is Candy, Campbell’s sister-in-law, the fey do-gooder wife of the egregious Duke of Kendal:

The young man had edges and they often glinted on the blade of his charm. (p. 76)
and
Candy stood like an emaciated meerkat looking out for an opportunity to enthuse. (p. 262)

So now, back to the “condition-of-England” idea. The characters range across the breadth of British society, from twenty-somethings to eighty-somethings, and include MPs, aristocrats, academics, journalists, business people, actors, criminals, activists, do-gooders, hackers, landowners, renters, gang members, migrants, factory workers, and lorry drivers. But, what most of them have in common is an idea of what England is. The most poignant comes from the migrants, like Polish Mrs Krupa and her son’s undocumented employee, also Polish, Jakub. As Jakub’s life, under the control of human-traffickers-cum-drug-lords, starts looking different to what he expected, he begins “to wonder if England was anything like the myth he … had bought into”.

O’Hagan, then, explores with clarity and a healthy sense of irony, today’s England (or Britain). The flawed but self-questioning Campbell – increasingly conflicted by his middle-class success and working-class origins – is our guide through a story in which hope, promise and sincerity are set against hypocrisy, greed and hatred. Desperate to remain relevant to the times, and to be a decent person, Campbell lets his guard down, allowing the driven, idealistic Milo into his life. Both are complex characters, who test our moral compass. Others not so much, like the aristocratic Duke of Kendal and Lord Scullion, the Russian oligarch Aleksandr Bykov, the corrupt billionaire William Byre, and the criminal Bozydar, all of whom, indirectly or directly, slash and burn those around them. In between are the decent, including women like Campbell’s wife Elizabeth and sister Moira, and the powerless, like rapper Travis and undocumented migrant worker Jakub.

Towards the end of the novel, the unravelling Campbell, who has become “lost in the sprawling web of it all”, inverts my favourite EM Forster quote when he reflects to himself, “only disconnect”. It’s a paradox. Campbell’s survival will depend on disconnecting from all that is wrong in his world (technologically and personally), while hanging tight – keeping connected, in other words – to all that is good. Ultimately, while O’Hagan paints a grim picture of what is wrong – the superficial, the hypocritical, the greedy and the cruel – in England, he also leaves us with a glimmer of hope. There are good people and they can prevail – but, will they, is the question we are left with.

PS Caledonian Road, being a big book, invites multiple responses. You can read those by Brona and Jonathan, who approached it from different angles and perspectives.

Andrew O’Hagan
Caledonian Road
London: Faber & Faber, 2024
642pp.
ISBN: 9780571381388 (Kindle edition.)

Alice Ruth Moore, A carnival jangle (#Review)

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Over the last two years I worked my way through the anthology Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers that was sent to me by my American friend Carolyn. It introduced me to many writers I hadn’t read before, and, valuably, to the issues and concerns facing some of America’s first peoples. Many of these issues – such as identity, and the long-lasting, all-encompassing fallout from dispossession – overlap with the issues First Nations Australians are confronting. It was an excellent reading project, so I was thrilled when, a year ago, Carolyn sent me another Dover anthology, Great short stories by African-American writers. I’ve read a few more of these authors than I had of the Native American collection, but not many, so I’m looking forward to another worthwhile reading project. Thanks again, Carolyn!

Alice Ruth Moore

The first thing to say about Alice Ruth Moore is that she is better known as Alice Dunbar Nelson, which is the name Wikipedia uses. Born Alice Ruth Moore in New Orleans in 1895, she married three times – Paul Laurence Dunbar (1898–1906), Henry Arthur Callis (1910–1916), and Robert J. Nelson (1916–1935). Poet Dunbar died in 1906, but it had been an abusive relationship and she’d left him before his death. Her marriage to physician and professor, Callis, ended in divorce, and she did not it seems take – or keep – his name. Her final marriage was to poet and civil rights activist, Nelson, and this marriage lasted for the rest of their lives. His name she used, but she also retained Dunbar. Fascinating.

A poet, journalist and political activist, Dunbar Nelson, who had a black mother and white father, was among the first generation born free in the South after the Civil War. She was also one of the prominent African Americans involved in the Harlem Renaissance (about which I wrote in my post on Nella Larsen’s Passing.) She lived in New Orleans for 21 years, and briefly taught primary school there, before moving to Boston and then New York, where she co-founded and taught at White Rose Mission, a school for coloured working girls (in the non-euphemistic meaning of the term!) She also lived in Washington D.C., Delaware and Pennsylvania.

Racism was an important issue for her, but she also took a wider view of human rights. She was an activist, for example, for African American’s rights and women’s rights. By the 1920s, she was concerned about social justice and the struggles of minorities in general. Wikipedia’s article concludes with this:

Much of Dunbar-Nelson’s writing was rejected because she wrote about the color line, oppression, and themes of racism. Few mainstream publications would publish her writing because they did not believe it was marketable. She was able to publish her writing, however, when the themes of racism and oppression were more subtle.

“A carnival jangle”

“A carnival jangle” appeared in her first collection of stories and poems, Violets and other tales, which was published by The Monthly Review in 1895, while she was still in New Orleans. She wrote a brief, self-deprecating introduction to the collection, commenting on the number of books being foisted on the market, and then offering her “maiden effort, — a little thing with absolutely nothing to commend it, that seeks to do nothing more than amuse”. Many of “the sketches and verses” had appeared in before, but many others were new.

There is also a preface by Sylvanie F. Williams (d. 1921) whom Wikipedia describes as New Orleans-based “educator and clubwoman“. (Click on the link to find out more about the women’s club movement in the USA.) She says the author ‘belongs to that type of “brave new woman who scorns to sigh”, but feels that she has something to say, and says it to the best of her ability”. However, she is also young, “just on the threshold of life, and with the daring audacity of youth makes assertions and gives decisions which she may reverse as time mellows her opinions, and the realities of life force aside the theories of youth”. Love this.

Williams also writes that “there is much in this book that is good; much that is crude; some that is poor”. I haven’t read any Moore/Dunbar Nelson, so I have no way of knowing where “A carnival jangle” sits in terms of her oeuvre, but it certainly feels like a standout in this collection.

Set during New Orleans’ Mardi Gras festival, “A carnival jangle” is fundamentally a mistaken identity story. It is just 4 pages, but delving into it – as the podcasters at CodeX Cantina did – reveals an impressively complex story offering multiple readings. I don’t usually go looking for analyses before I write my posts, but I came across CodeX Cantina when I was researching who Moore/Dunbar Nelson was. I’m glad I did because they teased out some culturally specific aspects that I didn’t know. For example, I completely misread the use of “Indians” in the story. These are the New Orleans or Mardi Gras Indians – an African-American carnival subculture, not Native Americans.

The story opens:

There is a merry jangle of bells in the air, an all-pervading sense of jester’s noise, and the flaunting vividness of royal colors; the streets swarm with humanity, — humanity in all shapes, manners, forms, — laughing, pushing, jostling, crowding, a mass of men and women and children, as varied and as assorted in their several individual peculiarities as ever a crowd that gathered in one locality since the days of Babel.

It’s tight and short, and tells of a young girl named Flo, who, hovering “between childhood and maturity”, is drawn away from her “unmasked crowd” by a “tall Prince of Darkness”, “a shapely Mephisto”, who promises to “show [her] what life is”. She is swept away to a costume shop and disguised as a “boy troubadour”, before joining the masked dancers – but things don’t turn out the way she is promised.

The two podcasters discussed “the tower of Babel”, which is alluded to in the opening paragraph and which suggests the idea of people coming together, until all falls apart, and the Faustian bargain, which is implied through the narrative and which presages a promise not fulfilled. The masked society can be understood as one in which all are equal, regardless of race or gender. However, masked people can also be invisible, unknown, and this tension between freedom and danger underpins this story.

The language is vibrant and lush capturing the excitement of the carnival, but is also constantly subverted by references and allusions to darker things. Carnivals, after all, tend to encompass opposing ideas – fun versus pandemonium, humour versus derision. The revellers here include “jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys…”, an odd and unsettling assortment which reflects not only traditional carnival characters but the diversity of New Orleans, and the racial tensions developing as Jim Crow laws were being enacted. Moore’s New Orleans is a place in flux, and the carnival motif is a perfect vehicle for conveying that.

The CodeX Cantina podcasters don’t talk much about Flo, and the fact that we don’t know what she wants or thinks. Described as “the quietest and most bashful of the lot” when she is drawn away, she seems to have no choice or agency in what happens to her. Is this because she’s simply a tool in the wider story, or is there a comment on gender, or both? What does it mean that she’s white?

“A carnival jangle” is a sophisticated story about a complex place and time, written by someone who was just starting her writing journey. It warrants more teasing out than I’ve done here, because it has so many angles to think about. Do read it, and, if you have time, listen to the CodeX guys. They don’t have all the answers but they do some good thinking.

Alice Ruth Moore
“A carnival jangle” (1893)
in Christine Rudisel and Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by African-American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2015
pp. 1-4
ISBN: 9780486471396
Available online at louisiana-anthology.org

Gavin Casey, Dust (#Review)

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I have had to put aside the novel I was reading for Bill’s Gen 1-3 Aussie male writers week, as my reading group book called. I will get back to it, and post on it later, but in the meantime, I wanted to post something in the actual week.

So, I turned, as I have for other Reading Weeks, to The Penguin century of Australian stories, an excellent anthology edited by Carmel Bird. Given Bill’s week encompasses writers working from 1788 to the 1950s, Bird’s anthology offered almost too many choices. Besides the obvious Henry Lawson, there were Steele Rudd, Tom Collins, Vance Palmer, and more, ending with Judah Waten’s 1950 story, “The mother”. I considered several, but Gavin Casey captured my attention because in her Introduction to the anthology, Kerryn Goldsworthy, looking at the 1930s and 40s, commented that Gavin Casey’s “Dust” and John Morrison’s “Nightshift” exemplified the more overtly political stories of this era. She added that:

they are stories in simple, unadorned language … that focus on workers and workplace disasters, on the physical dangers lying in wait for working men and women.

I have been interested in this period – and its socialist-influenced political thinking – for some time, so it had to be Casey or Morrison. Casey it was because I have listed him in a couple of Monday Musings posts but knew nothing about him.

Who was Gavin Casey?

Casey (1907-1964) was an author and journalist, born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, to an Australian-born father and Scottish mother. 

He doesn’t have a Wikipedia article but there is a useful biographical entry for him in the Australian dictionary of biography (ADB). Written by Anthony Ferguson, it says he had a sketchy education before obtaining a cadetship with the Kalgoorlie Electric Light Station. However, he left there to work in Perth as a motorcycle salesman, only to be “forced” back to Kalgoorlie in 1931 by the Depression. He then worked “as a surface-labourer and underground electrician at the mines, raced motorcycles and became a representative for the Perth Mirror“. He married in 1933, but “poverty plagued them, long after their return to Perth next year”.

By 1936, he was publishing short stories in the Australian Journal and the Bulletin, and in 1938 he was foundation secretary of the West Australian branch of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. His two short story collections – It’s harder for girls (1942), which won the 1942 S. H. Prior memorial prize and in which “Dust” appeared, and Birds of a feather (1943) – established his reputation. Ferguson writes:

Realistic in their treatment of place and incident, his stories showed—beneath the jollity and assurance of his characters—inner tensions, loneliness, unfulfilled hopes, and the lack of communication between men and women.

You may not be surprised to hear that his first marriage failed!

Overall, he wrote seven novels plus short stories and nonfiction works. His novels include Snowball (1958), which “examined the interaction between Aborigines and Whites in a country town”, and Amid the plenty (1962), which “traced a family’s struggle against adversity”. There is more about him in the ADB (linked above).

Ferguson doesn’t specifically address the political interests Goldsworthy references. Instead, he concludes that critics liken Casey’s earlier works to Lawson, seeing “a consistent emphasis on hardship that is tempered, for the male at least, by the conviviality of mates”. Ferguson also praises both for “their perceptiveness” and “their execution”.

The reality of Casey is a bit more nuanced, I understand. For a start, his men are not bush-men but suburban workingmen. Consequently, I plan to write more on him in a Monday Musings Forgotten Writers post, soon. Meanwhile, on with “Dust”.

“Dust”

“Dust” features male characters only, and there are some mates but, while they are important, they are not central. “Dust” also must draw on Casey’s experience of working in Kalgoorlie’s mining industry. It’s a short, short story, and is simply, but clearly constructed. It starts with a physical description of dust swooping through the township, over housetops and hospital buildings, and “leaving a red trail wherever in went”. It sounds – almost – neutral, but there are hints of something else. Why, of all the buildings in town, are “hospital buildings” singled out with the “housetops”, and does the “red trail” left behind signifiy anything?

Well, yes it does, as we learn in the next paragraph. Although this dust comes from “honest dirt” and can do damage like lifting roofs off, it is “avoidable” and is nothing like the “stale, still, malicious menace that polluted the atmosphere of far underground”. Ah, we think, so the “dust” we are talking about is something far more sinister than that flying around the open air.

And here is where the hospital buildings come in. Protagonist Parker and his miner friends are waiting for their six-monthly chest x-rays checking for the miners’ dust lung disease which killed his father. Things have changed since his father’s times, Parker knows. Not only are there the periodic medical examinations, but there are mechanisms to keep the dust down, and a system of “tickets” and pensions for affected miners. But, the risk is still there, and Parker’s anxiety increases as he watches his mates go in one by one, while he waits his turn.

This is a story about worker health and safety – but told from a personal not political perspective. It’s left to the reader to draw the political conclusions. However, it is also a highly relatable story about humans, health, and risky choices and behaviour, because it seems that Parker does have a choice. I won’t spoil it for you, but simply say that the ending made me smile – ruefully.

Gavin Casey
“Dust” (orig. 1936)
in Carmel Bird (ed.), The Penguin century of Australian stories
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2006 (first ed. 2000)
pp. 86-90

Gideon Haigh, My brother Jaz (#Review)

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When I posted my first review of the year – for Marion Halligan’s Words for Lucy – I apologised for starting the year with a book about grief and loss. What I didn’t admit then was that my next review would also be for a work about grief and loss, Gideon Haigh’s extended essay, My brother Jaz. This does not herald a change in direction for me, but is just one of those little readerly coincidences – and anyhow, they are quite different books.

For a start, as is obvious from its title, Haigh’s book is about a sibling, not a child. It was also much longer in the making. Halligan’s book was published 18 years after her daughter’s death, and was something she’d been writing in some way or other all along. Words are also Haigh’s business, but he ran as far as he could from his grief, and it was only in 2024, nearly 37 years after his 17-year-old brother’s death, that Haigh finally wrote, as he says in his Afterword, “something I had always wanted to write, but had suspected I never would”.

Before I continue, I should introduce Haigh for those of you who don’t know him. Haigh (b. 1965) is an award-winning Australian journalist, best known for his sports (particularly, cricket) journalism, but also for his writing about business and a wide range of social and political issues. He has published over 50 books. I’ve not read any, but I am particularly attracted to The office: A hardworking history, which won the Douglas Stewart Nonfiction Prize in 2013. However, I digress …

Unlike Halligan who, to use modern parlance, leant into her grief in what I see as a self-healing way – as much as you can heal – Haigh did the opposite. He did everything he could to avoid it; he worked, he writes, “to flatten it into something I could roll over”. And it affected him. If he, just 21 at the time, was a workaholic then, he doubled down afterwards and work became his refuge, his life:

It was the part of me that was good; it was the only part of me I could live with, and that sense has quietly, naggingly persisted. Go on, read me; it’s all I have to offer. The rest you wouldn’t like. Trust me. You don’t want to find out.

If this sounds a bit self-pitying, don’t fear, that is not the tone of the book. It is simply a statement of fact, and is not wallowed in. It represents, however, a big turnaround from someone who admits early in the book that he was known for his “pronounced, and frankly unreasonable, aversion to autobiographical writing”. This aversion was despite the fact that, “at the same time, trauma, individual and intergenerational” was something he’d written about – and been moved by – for a long time. So, in this first part of his six-part essay, we meet someone who had experienced deep pain, but had shrunk from indulging in a certain “kind of confessional nonsense”, and yet who increasingly found himself “backing towards an effort to discharge this story” to see if it made him “feel differently”.

What changed? Time of course is part of it. Haigh shies from cliches, as he should, but grief will out. It just can’t be bottled up forever, no matter how hard he tried, and so in early 2024, during the Sydney Test Match no less, “something previously tight had loosened” and over 72 hours he wrote the bulk of this essay. A major impetus was the break up of a relationship. It was time for a “reckoning”, he writes on page 76, but much earlier, on page 47, he alludes to it:

Why did I even start this? The only reason I can think of is that it has to be done. It can’t remain unwritten, just as I could never leave Jaz unremembered. I have myself to change, and how am I to do this unless I examine this defining event in my life face on?

This idea of the examined life is something Halligan mentions too in her memoir. She writes near the end of her book that “I do believe that the unexamined life is not worth living, and that an enormous part of that is the recollected life”.

What I hope I’ve conveyed here is the way this essay is driven – underpinned – by a self-questioning tone, more than a self-absorbed one. Even as Haigh writes it, he is interrogating his reasons (and perhaps by extension anyone’s reasons) for writing about the self. That this is so is made evident by the way the narrative, though loosely chronological, is structured by the writing process rather than by the “story”:

“OK it’s getting on to dawn, and I’m going to click on ‘Jasper Haigh [inquest] Reports for the first time” (p. 29)

“It’s raining, but I’ve just returned from a walk. I often walk when I have something to turn over in my head.” (p. 33)

“I’m at the point right now where I just wonder what the hell I am doing.” (p. 47)

“I have picked this up again after putting it aside to draw breath, to consider what next … So, I’m going to stagger on, with the excuse that this is no memoir: this is less a geology of my life than a core sample.” (p. 61)

This approach helps us engage with a writer who prefers to push us away. It finds, in a way, the art in the artifice, and enables Haigh to write something that questions the memoir form while at the same time paying the respect that the best memoirs deserve. It’s a juggling act, and I think he pulls it off.

By the end, Haigh is not sure whether writing this work – this raw “reckoning” to re-find his emotional bearings – has achieved anything. It is, he believes, “too early to tell”, but I wouldn’t be so sure. He is a writer, and he has put on paper the defining event – the “core sample” – of his life. That has to mean something.

Gideon Haigh
My brother Jaz
Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2024
87pp.
ISBN: 9780522880830

Marion Halligan, Words for Lucy (#BookReview)

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For my reading group’s tribute to Marion Halligan last year, I had planned to read one of her older novels, Wishbone, which I did (my review), and her last book, the memoir Words for Lucy, which I didn’t. But, I have now. I guess a book born of a mother’s grief for a daughter who died too young doesn’t make the cheeriest start to this year’s reviews. However, such is the life of a reader so you’ll just have to bear with me!

Lucy, for those who don’t know Halligan’s biography, was born in 1966, with a congenital heart defect. She was not expected to survive more than a few days, but she did – for nearly 39 years. In the end, however, in 2004, her heart gave out. I’ve read two other memoirs written by a mother about her seriously ill daughter, Isabel Allende’s Paula and Joan Didion’s The year of magical thinking. They are very different books and in fact, in Didion’s case, her daughter did not die during the book, though she did die young (and Didion wrote a book about that, Blue nights). The reason I am sharing this is that Halligan, Allende and Didion were all published authors, and it shows. As Halligan writes in the opening to her book, “My business is words”. For these three writers, the process of writing was an important part of how they processed their feelings. Halligan’s book might have come out some 18 years after Lucy’s death, but she’d been writing all that time.

While confirming my memory concerning Allende and Didion, I came across the Wikipedia article on Blue nights. It includes a quote from Rachel Cusk’s review of the book. She says “Didion’s writing is repetitive and nonlinear, reflecting the difficult process of coping with her daughter’s death”. While I don’t know about the reason, the “repetitive and nonlinear” description could equally be applied to Words for Lucy. The book is divided into twelve parts (plus a postscript), with each part comprising many small sections. There is an overall chronological arc to the book, in that after briefly describing Lucy’s death, Halligan does start with her birth, and tells of the funeral and wake near the end. What comes in between, however, is, writes Halligan, like “box of snapshots. You find your own way through the story, from random details”. In other words, if you are looking for a traditional grief memoir in which the memoirist works chronologically through the “stages” of their grief, you won’t find it here.

Carmel Bird and Marion Halligan
Carmel Bird and Marion Halligan, 2016

What you will find is a book about mothering and “daughtering”, about living with a chronically-ill child, about making memories and living with memories, about sadness and joy, about loss and grief (because Halligan has had more than you’d think fair), and about writing. It’s also about friendship. Having experienced my own devastating loss (of my sister in her early 30s), I know very well the value of friends. For Halligan, a great friend was the writer Carmel Bird. I was much moved by the role Carmel played in Lucy’s life, and by the love and support she clearly gave Marion.

Now, returning to Halligan’s “snapshots”, I enjoyed how, within a broad thematic structure, Halligan wanders through family life – from the lighthearted like Lucy’s love of things to the serious like her long and complex medical journey that cramped her life so much, from the family’s experience of living overseas to travelling there together later. From these, and more, so many truths emerge. For example, Halligan writes on page 2,

Love is so important to us. We so much need it. We can’t do without it. What we don’t realise at the beginning is the price it comes at.

Right there I knew I was going to like this book, because I was immediately taken back to my first pregnancy, and the fear I had that something would happen to this child I was bringing into the world. Ah well, I reassured myself, I didn’t have him (as the child turned out to be) before and I was fine, so I’d be alright! But of course, as soon as that child came into the world, my life changed and I realised things would never be the same, that if anything happened to him, I would not – indeed, could not – go back to how I was. The price of love…

The price of love isn’t all bad of course, even when the loved person dies, because there are the memories, and it is through memories that Halligan charts both Lucy’s life and her own grief. There is, though, a sort of paradox here that Halligan admits to. It’s what she calls the Janus face of grief. There’s the grief we feel for the person who has gone, for the life they are missing, the things they’ll not see or experience, and there’s that selfish grief the bereaved person feels, the loss, the misery, the wanting that person back in your life to make you happy (in effect).

It’s a complex thing grief – not linear, which Halligan knows and hence her book’s structure, and not all misery either, which Halligan also knows. Happy, joyful memories do pop up. You do laugh. Halligan describes some special memories, and then writes this beautiful thing about them:

Those are perfect memories, I can take them out whenever I like and run their cool and sparkling shapes though my fingers, look at their brilliant colours, the light refracting through them.

These memories may not be “factual”, may not be the same as those of others who experienced the same person or event, but as Halligan would tell her sisters who questioned her memory of some family event, “Write your own narratives … this is mine and I’m sticking to it”.

Throughout Words for Lucy there is the writer’s eye on what is fact and what is truth. Truths can be “different” (indeed, “many”, as Emmanuelle learns in Wishbone) while facts are “another matter”. And so, in the final pages of the book, Halligan, paying her due to “a memoir’s desire for honesty”, shares one last painful fact so that we don’t go away believing some wrong truths about her family.

Words for Lucy was Marion Halligan’s last book. It’s a memoir, and has the honesty that form demands. However, I see it as also containing her apologia, her final statement on what fiction is. For her, and she understood the slipperiness of this, it’s about truth, which is different from fact. “Fiction is always life”, she writes in this book. It means writers using life – including their own – “in all sorts of imaginative ways”. Think Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and her own, somewhat controversial, The fog garden.

Ultimately, whether Halligan was writing fiction or nonfiction, words were her business. And these, her final ones, represent a fitting legacy for a brilliant career as well as a beautiful tribute to a beloved daughter.

Marion Halligan
Words for Lucy: A story of love, loss and the celebration of life
Port Melbourne: Thames and Hudson, 2022
218pp.
ISBN: 9781760762209

Sherman Alexie, War dances (#Review)

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Sherman Alexie’s “War dances” is the fourteenth and last story in the anthology, Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. It is also the longest story in the book, and the most intriguing in form.

Sherman Alexie

Anthology editor Bob Blaisdell introduces Alexie as “born in 1966, of Coeur d’Alene and Spokane heritage”, meaning he is from US’s Pacific northwest. Describing Alexie as the “most colloquial” of the writers in the anthology, Blaisdell also says that he writes “with a confessional voice that is often humorous”. Not surprisingly, given Alexie is a contemporary and award-winning author, Wikipedia provides quite a lot more, too much in fact to share here in even summary form, so click on the link if you are interested. There are personal and political controversies there, as well as several literary awards.

Essentially, though, Wikipedia describes him as “a Native American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and filmmaker”. And, citing a couple of sources, Wikipedia says this about his themes:

Alexie’s poetry, short stories, and novels explore themes of despair, poverty, violence, and alcoholism in the lives of Native American people, both on and off the reservation. They are lightened by wit and humor. According to Sarah A. Quirk from the Dictionary of Library Biography, Alexie asks three questions across all of his works: “What does it mean to live as an Indian in this time? What does it mean to be an Indian man? Finally, what does it mean to live on an Indian reservation?” The protagonists in most of his literary works exhibit a constant struggle with themselves and their own sense of powerlessness in white American society.

“War dances”

“War dances”, as I wrote above, has an intriguing form. Blaisdell writes in his introductory Notes for the anthology that “we feel as if the writer [Alexie] is discovering the story himself and extending conventional short story boundaries as he composes it: we encounter an interview a checklist, a poem, a critique of that poem and continual jokes and revelations”.

Now, as far as I can tell, the “story” titled “War dances” comes from a book of short stories of the same name. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2010. GoodReads’ entry for the book describes it as “a virtuoso collection of tender, witty, and soulful stories that expertly capture modern relationships from the most diverse angles.” My problem is that I don’t know whether the “story” in Blaisdell’s anthology is a coherent excerpt from this book, or whether Blaisdell has selected disparate pieces to represent the work as a while. Whichever it is, I found an online version in The New Yorker. It comprises essentially the same content, with just a few differences that suggest some editing has happened between the versions. Also, in Blaisdell’s book the short pieces are numbered 1 to 16, while in The New Yorker they are not. None of this is probably germane to my comments so I’ll say no more. Consider yourselves informed!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece (these pieces). The quotes I’ve shared about his work all ring true from what I read here – the mix of forms (lists, poems, interviews, and so on), the wit and humour, the “diverse angles”. It is a work that draws from Native American experience, but that encompasses wider personal and political issues.

By personal issues, I mean his dealing with significant familial relationships, and by political, I mean his recognition that Native Americans don’t exclusively suffer from the socioeconomic (including health) ramifications of racial discrimination. While the pieces seem disparate, there is an overall narrative arc concerning the narrator’s own health – he is diagnosed with a meningioma – and his father’s. There are also recurring motifs which connect many of the pieces – insects, like Kafka’s bug (or cockroach), being one. Here is a scene from the first person narrator visiting his father in hospital. You can see the pointed use of bees here:

How had this change happened? For the first sixty-seven years of his life, my father had been a large and dark man. And now he was just another pale and sick drone in a hallway of pale and sick drones. A hive, I thought, this place looks like a beehive with colony collapse disorder. (4, Blankets)

The imagery here is clear, but not laboured. Alexie doesn’t, in general, labour his points but lets humour do the talking. The second last piece comprises questions for his dying father, the first one being

True or False?: when a reservation-raised Native American dies of alcoholism it should be considered death by natural causes. (15, Exit Interview for My Father)

There are many references to race, and to its construction by other in the determination to distinguish and separate, while for our narrator, no such distinction truly exists:

And then I saw him another Native man … Well, maybe he was Asian; lots of those in Seattle. He was a small man, pale brown, with muscular arms and a soft belly. Maybe he was Mexican, which is really a kind of Indian too, but not the kind that I needed. It was hard to tell sometimes what people were. Even brown people guess the identity of other brown people. (4, Blankets)

This is followed by a self-deprecating racist joke … the reason a Mexican was not the kind of Indian our narrator needed was because he was looking for a blanket for his shivering, hospitalised father, and, well, Indians do blankets don’t they! The dialogue with the man, who is indeed Indian, is priceless.

So, these pieces build up. Entertaining to read, with their varied forms and chatty but cleverly humorous style, they convey specific truths about racism, and larger ones about identity, change and loss. In terms of this work at least, I’d say Sarah Quirk’s above-quoted three questions nail it. “War dances” – including for its very title – makes a worthy conclusion to this anthology.

(Thanks to Carolyn for this book.)

Sherman Alexie
“War dances” (orig. pub. 2009)
in Bob Blaisdell (ed.), Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers
Garden City: Dover Publications, 2014
pp. 104-127
ISBN: 9780486490953

Available online, with some differences, at The New Yorker (August 10 and 17, 2009)

Sonya Voumard, Tremor (#BookReview)

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As I’ve previously reported, Sonya Voumard’s short memoir, Tremor, is one of the two winners of this year’s Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Publishing Prize. Earlier this month, I reviewed the fiction winner, P.S. Cottier and N.G. Hartland’s novella The thirty-one legs of Vladimir Putin. Now it’s Voumard’s turn, with her book on living with a neurological movement disorder called dystonia.

While essentially a memoir, Tremor also fits within that “genre” we call creative nonfiction. The judges would agree, I think, given their comment that Tremor is “notable for its compellingly astute interweaving of the author’s personal experience with our broader societal context where people with disabilities, often far more challenging than her own, try to adapt to the implicit expectations and judgements that surround them” (back cover). The interweaving of something personal with something wider is a common feature of creative nonfiction, but what seals the deal for me is its structure. Tremor has a strong – subjective – narrative arc that propels the reader on, with more objective information providing the necessary support.

The narrative opens on December 3, 2020, the day Voumard is to undergo brain surgery for her condition. It leaves us in no doubt that what we are about to read is a very personal journey. “I am”, she writes on this first page, “a hairless head on top of a flimsy cotton gown and long compression socks”. But then, two sentences later, she opens a new paragraph with, “as I wait to be taken to the operating theatre, I channel my inner journalist. I’m on a news assignment for which I have already gathered some key facts.” And just like that, we are in journalist mode, with Voumard describing her condition and the relatively new treatment she is about to receive, followed by some facts and figures. Around 800,000 Australians, she informs us, experience tremors of the body, and about 70,000 of these have dystonia. A couple of paragraphs later we flash back to early 1960s Melbourne. Voumard is four or five years old, and her personal trajectory begins with an anecdote about dropping a bottle of milk, about being “clumsy, prone to dropping things”, but also being “a risk-taker”.

From here, the book takes us on the two journeys I’ve just intimated. There’s the mostly chronological one tracking her life with dystonia until we arrive – at the end of the book – back at the beginning with her surgery and its aftermath. And there’s her exploration of dystonia, its causes, diagnosis, and treatment. Voumard binds these two journeys together with her astute, and empathetic, reflections and analyses. She knows what it’s like to live with a disability, even if early on she didn’t recognise it as such.

So, for example, she chronicles the tactics she’d use to hide her shaking, in order to get jobs and then to demonstrate she could do them (when clearly she could). She would sit on her hands, refuse offers of drinks, self-medicate with alcohol. Whatever it took to hide her condition. She talks about navigating a medical world that is so “siloed” that diagnoses ranged from the “psychogenic” (due to “some sort of failure of womanhood, an unfulfilled yearning, a cloak for something else”) to the “purely physical” (like a sports injury or from computer use) – depending on the speciality she was dealing with – when it was something else altogether. She touches on the cost of treatment, the overall politics of medicine, the gender issues which see women’s conditions so often dismissed.

And, lest I’ve given the wrong impression, she does this not only through her own experiences, but through those of others – met personally, or found through her research – ensuring that Tremor is not a “misery memoir” but something bigger, that contributes to our understanding of how people navigate a world in which they don’t fit the norm. This navigation has a few prongs: the obvious ones relate to coping with the physical limitations, discomfort, and/or pain the condition brings; and the less visible ones concern managing your expectations and aspirations, while also dealing with how people interact with you. Voumard shares the story of a woman who had suffered for over twenty years from cervical dystonia before she got a diagnosis. While diagnosis didn’t bring a cure, “identifying her condition had helped her to live her life more calmly, to not try to do too much and to understand something of others’ suffering”.

Voumard, you’ve probably realised by now, packs a lot into the 20/40 form (that is, into 20,000 to 40,000 words). At the winners’ conversation, she said there is the assumption that to be marketable you need to write 55,000 plus words. She had the bones, and had then started filling them out, but it was just “flab”. The competition, and then Julian Davies’ editing guidance, taught her that she had a good “muscular story”. So she set about “decluttering”. The end result is interesting, because this book doesn’t have that spare feeling common to short works. Tremor feels tight – there’s little extraneous detail – but not pared back to a single core.

Voumard, in fact, covers a lot of ground. She uses the Eurydice Dixon murder case, for example, to epitomise her ongoing interest in media and reporting, particularly regarding structural disadvantage and social justice. She also contextualises the latter stages of her journey against the 2019 bushfires, the 2020-2021 pandemic and lockdowns, and the 2022 floods in NSW’s northern rivers. Why all this? The subtitle explains it. This book, this “tremor”, is not just about a movement disorder but about something bigger:

My more recent thinking about disability has strengthened my belief in the urgent need to privilege the voices of others more marginalised than mine. But I also cling to the concept of freedom of speech – not as a neoliberal, tabloid-news defender of hate speech – but as someone striving to find ways to respond to the challenges of a democratic society that is becoming more disordered.

Tremor is another beautiful, thoughtful product of the Finlay Lloyd stable. Recommended.

Read for Novellas in November, because, while not a novella, it is a short work.

Sonya Voumard
Tremor: A movement disorder in a disordered world
Braidwood: Finlay Lloyd, 2024
129pp.
ISBN: 9780645927023

Review copy courtesy Finlay Lloyd.

Marion Halligan, Wishbone (#BookReview)

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My reading group’s last meeting of the year took the form of a tribute to Marion Halligan, who died earlier this year and who had generously attended our meeting when we discussed her Valley of grace (my review). We have done this once before with Helen Garner (albeit she hadn’t died) and it worked well. The process is that we choose something we want to read and share our thoughts with the group. I have read several of Halligan’s books, but I have a few on my TBR, so of course I chose one of those, Wishbone, her fourth novel, published in 1994.

Before I share my thoughts on that, I thought you might like to know what everyone read. Ten members attended the meeting. Some read two books, while others chose a short story or article. It is, after all, a busy time of year. The novels read were, in chronological order, Wishbone (1), The golden dress (2), The fog garden (1), Valley of grace (1), Goodbye sweetheart (2). Three people read her most recent memoir, Words for Lucy, while others read selections from Canberra tales (“Most mortal enemy”), The taste of memory (the first piece), Canberra Red (“A city of mind”), and Shooting the fox (“Shooting the fox”). In other words, we read widely across her oeuvre, resulting in an enjoyable – and occasionally excitable – meeting as we teased out some of her themes and ideas, including how much of her fiction was drawn from life!

“who knows what the hell is going on”

So now, Wishbone. It tells the story of a woman, Emmanuelle, her “motley family”, and the wishes they have for themselves. The novel starts with a young, passionate Emmanuelle having an affair with a married man, but it soon jumps some years hence when she is now married (to a man named Lance), and living in well-heeled Sydney with two children, Maud and William. The rest of the novel follows a period in the lives of these four and others in their close circle – friends, family and employees. During this time, we experience a life-threatening stroke, extra-marital affairs, mistaken assumptions, and a suspicious death, all set within perfectly rendered scenes of domesticity. Halligan can make you gasp with her audaciousness.

As I was reading this novel, a light dawned for me about why I so often use Jane Austen as a benchmark for writing I love. I do like all sorts of writing, but I am particularly drawn to writing that exposes human nature with wit, irony and a generous spirit. This is what Austen does, and this is also what Halligan does. Wishbone is a generous story about messy human lives. Halligan writes with a knowingness about those deep-down thoughts, wishes, and desires we all have, but she is also forgiving about her characters’ foibles and less admirable traits and behaviours. In Wishbone, she explores the tension between our wishes – particularly regarding love – and living with what you’ve got.

There’s something of a fatalist element, here, in the sense that we think we have choice in all this, but choice proves in fact to be elusive. Things happen that we have no control over. Late in the novel, as Emmanuelle sits around the kitchen table with her two children and au pair Mel, in what looks to be a cosy domestic scene, a question – which is both literal and existential – is suddenly proffered, “who knows what the hell is going on”. Who indeed? (And who is asking the question? Emmanuelle, surely, but there’s also an omniscient voice overlaying the characters’ perspectives. At least I believe so. Wishbone slides seamlessly between voices and perspectives in a way that never loses the reader, but that ensures we see multiple sides of things.)

This brings me to style, and how Halligan does what she does. Halligan is a born short-story writer. As I started Wishbone, I almost wondered whether I was reading a book of short stories. Every chapter is gorgeously titled and most felt like they could stand on their own as little nuggets from a life. The opening chapter, The Glade, tells of Emmanuelle’s youthful affair with her married man. It starts:

The difficulty of a love affair between a young woman and a married man may be its logistics. Where can they go? He lives with his wife. She lives with her parents.

They can’t afford hotels, and anyhow it’s too risky as the town is small, but Brian knows “a good place”, a little glade under a cliff. Whenever Brian thinks of going to the glade, he whistles Handel’s tune, “Where e’er you walk”, which “always gladdened his wife’s heart, because she knew her husband was feeling cheerful”. Halligan’s discussion of this song, Brian’s behaviour, and the wife’s response is delicious in more ways than this little irony, but I will just share Halligan’s nailing the point, with “the song told her about the walking and the sitting but what she didn’t know about was the lying”. Just think of the double meaning in that last word! This writing just makes you splutter.

From here, the plot unfolds quietly but surely. Hints are dropped but aren’t heavy-handed, so we are still surprised when certain events occur, which brings me to the title, and its reference to wishes. In the third chapter, The Man in the Train, there is a mostly mundane discussion about wishes until the chapter’s titular, and unnamed, “man” asks Emmanuelle what she would wish for. Her answer?

I would wish for the gift of making dangerous choices.

As the novel progresses, various characters express their wishes. Emmanuelle’s friend Susie idly wishes she were a widow, while au pair Mel wishes she were beautiful. Emmanuelle wants more passion from her husband, while chauffeur Stuart wants money. And so on … What these characters learn, you won’t be surprised to hear, is that their seemingly ordinary, or common, wishes often carry a danger that is not expected. You know that saying, “be careful what you wish for”. But Halligan’s book is no simple moral tale. What Emmanuelle realises near the end, in fact, is that all choices can be dangerous. Susie asks her:

Have you ever wished Lance dead?
I’ve wished him different.
And did that come true?
Not in ways that I’d have chosen.

Where does this leave us? We won’t stop wishing, and we certainly can’t stop making choices, but we can think about our choices and be realistic about the outcomes, whether they are the expected or unexpected ones. In the end, Emmanuelle probably has the answer:

being alive is like reading a book. You might think you’ve got a fair idea of the plot but you don’t actually know what’s going to happen next, you’re as much a mystery to yourself as a character in a novel. Perhaps the secret is just to keep turning the pages.

Reading Wishbone has reminded me how much I enjoy Halligan. I must get back to that TBR.

Marion Halligan
Wishbone
Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1994
235pp.
ISBN: 0855615974

Margaret Atwood, Widows (#Review)

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Marcie’s (Buried in Print) MARM (Margaret Atwood Reading Month) event is now seven years old, but this is only my second contribution. I read a reasonable amount of Atwood before blogging, and since then have let her slide somewhat, though I have reviewed a couple of books here. You can’t read it all – but, I do like her voice …

So, I decided to join in again this year, as I knew I had a collection of short stories in my TBR pile. The only problem is that my non-Australian TBRs are still in boxes somewhere. What to do? Maybe, I thought, there’s a short story online somewhere, and sure enough I found one in The Guardian. Titled “Widows” it features Nell and (the late) Tig. From Marcie’s blog I learnt that this couple first appeared in Atwood’s collection of linked stories titled Moral disorder, and appeared again in her recent collection Old babes in the wood, from which this story comes. However, I’ve not read either of these collections, and I didn’t recollect those characters or their names.

Then a strange thing happened. According to Wikipedia, Moral disorder contains eleven connected short stories, the second last one being “The Labrador fiasco”. This is the story I read for last year’s MARM, but it was in a 1996-published Bloomsbury Quid edition. I had no idea it was later included in the 2006-published Moral disorder. Oh these writers can be tricksy. Did she change it in any way – such as to name the then unnamed character – for version in the collection? Anyhow, moving on, Wikipedia tells me that the 2023-published Old babes in the wood comprises fifteen stories in three parts: “Tig & Nell” (three), “My Evil Mother” (eight), and “Nell & Tig” (four). “Widows” is the thirteenth story in the collection, so presumably the second one in that last group of four.

I won’t rehash “The Labrador fiasco”, except to say that it is a “story-within-a-story” story, and that the framing story concerns the unnamed narrator (who is apparently Nell) visiting her aging father and mother. The father, in particular, is declining, having experienced a stroke six years before the story’s opening. It is told first person by the daughter, who regularly visits her parents and is becoming aware of aging and our inevitable decline. Some years have clearly passed, and in “Widows” Nell has recently lost her husband “Tig”. It’s an epistolary story, I guess you could say, though it contains only two letters, both by Nell to a friend named Stevie.

The first, and main, letter is a delight – and pure Atwood. It’s partly in what she covers, as this short short story manages to encompass Atwood’s recurring themes – women (their position in society, and their relationships), language, aging, social conventions, and the state of the world. But it’s also in the sly way she makes her sharp little points. For example, talking about widows, she has a dig at the modern penchant for creating increasingly complicated gender-neutral descriptions:

I’m hanging out with a clutch of other widows. Some of them are widowers: we have not yet got around to a gender-neutral term for those who have lost their life partners. Maybe TWHLTLP will appear shortly, but it hasn’t yet. Some are women who have lost women or men who have lost men, but mostly they are women who have lost men.

Similarly, there is a sly reference to world politics and climate change, when she says to Stevie, who is much younger, that:

if you live another thirty years and are still enjoying it, or most of it – if anyone will be enjoying, or indeed living, considering the huge unknown wave that is already rolling toward us – I expect you will look at a picture of yourself as you are today, supposing your personal effects have survived flood, fire, famine, plague, insurrection, invasion, or whatever …

Of course, Nell talks about grief, about the forms, assumptions and cliches that surround it. She’s quietly scathing about “checking the boxes of the prescribed grief process” and eschews the well-intended offers of casseroles and suggestions that she go on a cruise.

When I read writing like this, I can’t help being reminded of Jane Austen, because both have the ability to see through our conventions and pretensions to the truths beneath, and to make us chuckle as they do so.

However, for all the cheeky barbs and social commentary, there is also something heartfelt in her discussion of grief. She speaks of how it skews one’s experience of time, how it affects one’s relationship with the person who has died, and what grieving people really talk about and deal with. Atwood knows whereof she speaks having lost her husband of 46 years in 2019.

If I thought this first letter was both clever and moving, the second letter just nailed it. In fact, if I were writing criticism and not a review, I would discuss what Atwood does here, but that would spoil the whole experience, and I don’t want to do that because you can read it yourself at the link below. Suffice it to say that, while “Widows” is a short story, it does a lot in its few words, and its ending signs off with aplomb.

Read for MARM 2024

Margaret Atwood
“Widows”
The Guardian, 25 February, 2023 (also pub. Old babes in the wood, 2023)
Available online at The Guardian, 2023

Raynor Winn, The salt path (#BookReview)

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While my reading group’s main fare is fiction, we do include nonfiction in the mix. In fact, this year has been unusual as we’ve scheduled three nonfiction books – Richard Flanagan’s Question 7 (my review), Anna Funder’s Wifedom (my review), and, last month, Raynor Winn’s The salt path. I can’t recollect how The salt path came to be chosen, and nor could the 8 (of our 11) members who attended the meeting, but we weren’t about to complain.

Many of you will know this book already, given it became a bestseller after its publication in 2018. It was shortlisted for some major awards, and won the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Prize (which I would call a “late bloomer” prize.) However, in case it escaped your notice, I will briefly summarise it. The book opens with two disasters befalling author Raynor and and her husband of 32 years, Moth. He is diagnosed with a rare, terminal degenerative disease called CBD (corticobasal degeneration) and, in an ultimately unjust court case, they lose their home which was also their livelihood. They have nothing but each other (and their two children who, fortunately, are young adults linving away from home). What do you do in a situation like this? You decide to walk England’s challenging 630-mile South West Coast Path, wild camping most of the way. That’s what.

Although it’s essentially a memoir, The salt path is better described as a road story that combines memoir, nature writing and social commentary. I would also argue that it’s a work of creative nonfiction, partly because of its strong narrative arc (albeit this is not uncommon in memoir and travel writing) but also because it includes dialogue (which, given there’s no evidence to the contrary, has presumably been recreated for the book). The result is a book which interweaves description, anecdote, personal reflection, social commentary and dialogue in a way that maintains our interest because it never bogs down in one mode or another. The balance Winn achieves is not only between these modes, but also in tone, which moves between serious and scared, melancholic and thoughtful, and light and humorous.

“you’ve felt the hand of nature … you’re salted” (woman on path)

I want to explore a little more how the combination of memoir and road story works to tell Winn’s story. Memoir, by definition, deals with a particular issue or time period in a person’s life. This gives the story a natural trajectory which conveys how that issue is handled or progresses – and/or what happens over that chosen time – until some sort of resolution or conclusion is reached. A road story has an even more obvious or natural narrative arc – the beginning of the trip, the middle with all the events and challenges met on the way, and the trip’s end (which may or may not be the originally intended one.)

So, in The salt path, the memoir, with its central issues being Moth’s illness and their homelessness, is framed by the road story, which describes the physical journey, that is, the landscape they walk through, and their experience of walking and wild camping. As in most road stories, we meet characters along the way, some positive or helpful, some amusing, and others negative or obstructive. And, as is also common in travel literature, we are introduced to issues that are relevant to the places travelled through. In this case they include conflicting ideas about heritage, conservation and the role of the National Trust in the communities and regions along the path.

There is, then, a lot to this book and while it works well as a coherent whole, some parts, of course, left a stronger impression than others. The strongest was their experience of the path, particularly given its recognised toughness combined with their impecunious state, inexpert preparation, and Moth’s ill-health. They were often hungry, wet and cold, and they walked at half the pace of Paddy Dillon whose guidebook they followed, but as time wore on Moth’s health improved. Why is a question never fully answered because they didn’t know why. Years later, he is still alive, still with the condition. Their strong interpersonal connection sustains them when little else does! And there is always the nature. This is Winn’s first book but she can clearly write. Her descriptions of the environment – the wildlife, the landscape, the vegetation, the sea – and of their feelings as they walk through it are perfect, like:

“A hidden land of weather and rock, remote and isolated. Unchanged through millennia yet constantly changed by the sea and the sky, a contradiction at the western edge. Unmoved by time or man, this ancient land was draining our strength and self-will, bending us to acceptance of the shaping elements.”

“The moon climbed into a clear sky, just past full, polishing the landscape in tones of grey and silver.”

After some time of walking the path, they start to look weathered – peeling skin, ragged clothes, and so on. It is around this time that they meet a woman who recognises the look. She tells them “you’ve felt the hand of nature … you’re salted”. Winn’s title is more than a literal description of a sea-swept path. It is also about being part of the nature, the life, they walk through.

From early in the book, however, another theme is introduced that threads through the book – homelessness. Obviously, it occupied Winn’s mind because they were suddenly homeless, but as the book progresses, she supplements their personal experience of being homeless with facts and figures. The facts are sobering, but they are made powerful by Raynor and Moth’s firsthand experience. For example, very quickly they became cautious about being honest about their circumstances, because it affected people’s attitudes to them:

“We could be homeless, having sold our home and put money in the bank, and be inspirational. Or we could be homeless, having lost our home and become penniless, and be social pariahs.” 

All sorts of other thoughts and issues arise, as you would expect on a long walk. Another is the aformentioned issue of protecting heritage and the environment, and the role of the National Trust. Locals complain about National Trust restrictions affecting their traditional jobs, but she also sees all the money coming in from the resultant tourism and senses “a strong whiff of hypocrisy”. In an area dug up for clay-mines, she discusses the various approaches taken after the mines have gone. One is creating an attraction like the Eden Project. Returning the land to its original state seems the least likely option, because “no tourist is going to pay to walk over a meadow with a leaflet that says, ‘You’d never know it, but this used to be a mine.’” By contrast, there’s the town of Tyneham that had been requisitioned during World War Two, and where

Strangely enough, limited public access, a lack of intensive farming and the occasional blasting by small-arms fire has allowed wildlife and vegetation to thrive throughout the ranges. A form of khaki conservation that no one expected to be the outcome when the villagers left their homes as part of the war effort.

Of course, insights into the land – into the many ways it has been used, modified and re-used – are common to those who walk, and land-loving Raynor Winn is no exception. Her observations are idiosyncratic to her. Readers may not always agree, but she is real and honest.

There is much more to say, but I’ll conclude on the personal, because this is ultimately a personal journey as much as a physical one. Winn starts off, somewhat angry but mostly scared (very scared about her beloved Moth dying) and deeply worried about the future and whether they are doing the right thing. Slowly though, as Moth’s symptoms seem to subside, and as time passes, she senses change in herself

I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we’d been unable to hold on to, or angry at an authoritarian system too bureaucratic to see the truth. A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that The salt path is a book about reality, not miracles but not tragedy either. Its interest lies in the particular situation this couple finds themselves in, in the path itself, and in Winn’s ability to write about it all with warmth, humour and honesty.

So, how did my reading group like it? Very much overall. Depending on our own experiences and perspectives, we varied in our reaction to the different decisions they took, but as lovers of the environment we all appreciated the description of the walk, and as lovers of “stories” we enjoyed the anecdotes about the people they met. Of course, we had questions, and there were little niggles – some didn’t always like the tone, and some couldn’t believe the couple’s poor preparation and apparent lack of sunscreen! But the discussion we had was excellent. So, a good book all round.

Brona also reviewed this book (nearer its publication!)

Raynor Winn
The salt path
Penguin, 2018
273pp
ASIN: ‎ B0793GXSBL
ISBN: 9781405937528