Friday 30 March 2012

One is never enough

Am I missing something, in which case I'll take it kindly if you'll put me right?

I'm getting sick of campaigners saying stuff like "just one woman's death during an abortion is one too many" or "just one child put at risk of passive smoking is one too many" or "just one fox that dies a lingering death [death, you will find, has a tendency to linger] at the hands of a pack of hounds is one too many".

It's not just that dogs don't have hands and one can never be too many of anything if there was none of it in the first place. It's also a poor argument for banning the thing they don't like. Emotive yes, but poor. You might as well say that, since some women also die in childbirth, that's a good case for ending the human race. (There are far better ones than that.) More prosaically, at least one cyclist dies on British roads every year after falling off. Should we therefore ban bikes?

It gives liberals, one of whom I am desperately trying to remain, a bad name.

Saturday 17 March 2012

'The Wild Places' by Robert Macfarlane

It is often said that the only true natural wildernesses in Britain are the tundra tops of Scottish mountains and the storm-battered edges of our rocky coasts. Every landscape in between is either man-made or so moulded that our mark is everywhere. Robert Macfarlane's book 'The Wild Places' is a journey; a search for wild landscapes in Britain and Ireland during which his notions of wildness were transformed.

He begins where we are habituated to look for the wild, in the far west and north: the bird and seal island of Enlli (Bardsey) at the tip of the Llŷn peninsula in Wales; the bays and limestone karsts of Atlantic Ireland; in Scotland, Rannoch Moor, the Cuillin of Skye, Cape Wrath and the wilds of Sutherland. These last are the emptiest, least inhabited places in western Europe. As such they come close to what we think the wilds should be. They are our North-West Territories, our Siberia, or as the Readers' Digest once put it without a trace of a smile, our Outback. But dig deeper, as Macfarlane does, and neither the histories nor our perceptions of these places make for such comparisons. The Highlands were cleansed of people for sheep and of predators for game, and much of Ireland by murder, famine, disease and emigration. Enlli was a place of pilgrimage, sought out by men. The high tide mark of even the farthest Hebridean shore is home to the empty Coca Cola bottle and the discarded trawl net.  Beneath and beyond the scenery, these landscapes too are the work of men.

While I sense he may regret this, Macfarlane accepts it and neither laments nor pines. Rather he begins to seek wildness where we have ceased to look for it; as the book progresses, he moves further south and east in search of the pockets of wildness that remain, and those largely manicured or desecrated landcapes in which to our eyes there is none.

In doing so he questions many of our accepted ideas about wildness. Where we have learnt to crave an ideal of distance, emptiness and the undisturbed in juxtaposition to our networked urban lives, he finds wildness in intimacy, profusion and flux: plant colonies bursting with unseen life in a limestone grint on The Burren; the choked and secret hollow ways worn in the soft rocks of south east England; an old garden reclaimed by nature in long-forgotten East Anglian acres just half a mile from a main road; while sheltering with arctic hares in the lee of a Peak District tor of which 30 million people live within two hours' drive.

'The Wild Places' is a work of imagination not a nature book, and is only partly descriptive. Although each chapter has a more or less precise location, it is titled as a type of landscape: 'Beechwood', 'Ridge', 'Cape', 'Saltmarsh'. Macfarlane also sets his thoughts within a number of contexts: history, folklore, religion, the musings of amateur scientists and eccentrics, and the history of cartography. One of the best parts describes the evolution of maps from creative stories of men's passages through a world of endless variety into the modern-day grids that reduce and restrict such terrains to pre-set symbols; less representations of nature than selective products of technology and distilled, timebound utilitarian need.

This, however, I would rather view as a warning about than a criticism of modern maps, which I think are one of mankind's most beautiful and fertile creations. As with books, what can be read between the contour lines of a map is as significant as and often more inspiring than what is printed on the paper. Macfarlane's message for me is that - whether you are high on the moors or reading one on the loo, as I have done for hours daily since boyhood, my poor mother banging on the ceiling below and demanding what the hell I was up to in there - we must learn to look into the nooks and crannies between and within what seems obvious, settled or merely familiar. So it is with nature, and the wild.

Perhaps the selection of locations - admittedly from thousands of possibilities - could have been broader, although Macfarlane makes no claim to be comprehensive. Perhaps I envy many of the good people the author meets, who can afford or have time to be potters, poets, hemp-weavers, lute-tuners and the like (no Irish names among them in Ireland; no Welsh ones in Wales!) - but envy is a nasty emotion of which I need to be more ashamed than I am, and churlishness is not something this invigorating book deserves.

So switch off - no: destroy, publicly - the SatNav, plan an extra day into both ends of your holidays, pack a picnic, muzzle the kids - no: hand them the map - and learn to travel as well as arrive. And read this book while you do.


'The Wild Places' by Robert Macfarlane, Granta Books

Thursday 1 March 2012

'The Report - a novel', by Jessica Francis Kane


‘The Report’ describes and elaborates upon the events and aftermath of the night of 3rd March 1943, when 173 people were crushed to death at the entrance to Bethnal Green tube station. It was the worst British civilian disaster of the Second World War.
The tragedy itself is dealt with briefly. Rather, the novel focuses on its effects on local people connected to it by experience, work or family ties, on the subsequent inquiry led by Lawrence Dunne, and on the attempts some 30 years later of a young film director to make a television documentary about what really happened, what the inquiry said and what it left unsaid. The narrative switches between decades and between people, with the planning, the process and the testimonies of Dunne’s inquiry lacing them together.
Although the book deals with deep emotions it isn‘t sentimental, and although its subject is disaster it isn’t spectacular. It infiltrates rather than seizes the imagination. Above all it is concerned with the feelings and motivations of ordinary, decent people trying to make sense of the incomprehensibility of a domestic tragedy within the wider suffering of war: those who witnessed or survived the crush, a shelter warden, a police constable, the local vicar, local officials; Dunne himself, who is both an establishment figure and close to the people he lives among; and Paul, the film director of 30 years later, who tries to discover and revive what time and forgetting had eroded.
Jessica Francis Kane deftly paints a series of impressions of the wartime East End, its streets, homes and people, that amount to more than their sum. Although there is a quiet significance and nobility in many of the characters, she is not nostalgic: we see that Dunne was challenged not just by the Government’s wish to preserve morale at all costs, but also by his own desire to obscure a detail of the disaster for what he perceived to be a greater good, through suppressing a fact which might have been thought by others to betray a less admirable trait of his community.
This hints at the moral complexities and personal fallibilities with which we all have to deal, and for which we should not be judged too harshly in trying to accommodate. This is not just an evocative book, but a valuable one.


'The Report - a novel', by Jessica Francis Kane, Portobello Books