Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky (translator Christine Lo)

There is something about islands which captures the imagination, about which every person has an instinctive reaction. Perhaps that reaction is fear: a terror of being trapped or contained, a horror of being isolated or alone. Perhaps that reaction is exuberance: the prospect of forging your own destiny unhindered by wider society, the idea of being free and independent, self-reliant. Our reaction to the idea of an island may depend on mood. Perhaps in a good frame of mind we envisage our island as a paradise rich with bird and plant life, luscious blue seas and a cocktail bar on the beach. In more forbidding moods we may imagine our island to be tiny and desolate, edged by vicious rocks and a wild sea, a tempestuous wind. Even for those of us that live on an island, as I do, the islands of our imagination rarely match the real thing and it can be hard to conceptualise the idea that we are alone and isolated, cut off from the mainland, though ringed by seas that cannot be bridged without reasonably advanced technology.  There are so many of us here, after all. Yet something about this reminds me how once I became trapped in an elevator, and the whole time I felt like a person abandoned on an island, isolated and alone. I quite enjoyed it, but the experience lasted only around 1 hour and 15 minutes and I was well provisioned. Surviving on a remote island may be a different proposition entirely.

“It struck me for the first time that islands are in fact small continents and that continents are in turn no more than very large islands. This clearly outlined piece of land was quite perfect and yet lost at the same time, like the loose sheet of paper on which it had been drawn. Every connection to the mainland had been lost. There was no mention of the rest of the world. I have never seen a lonelier place.”

Judith Schalansky explains in the detailed introduction to this book, tantalisingly sub-titled “Fifty Islands I have not visited and never will”. I often skip book introductions, impatient to get to the ‘meat’ of the story, but this introduction is well worth reading as though it Schalansky explains both the concept for this book and what the exploration, from the safety of her study or library, has taught her about what islands mean to people. “a land surrounded by water is perceived as the perfect place for utopian experiments” is one answer; “The attraction of a beautiful void” another. Perhaps more disturbingly “the island that has been the focus of so much yearning often turns out – as might have been expected – barren and worthless” or “a remote island makes a natural prison: surrounded by the monotonous, insurmountable walls of a persistent, ever-present sea”. Chilling just to think about it.

The fifty islands themselves are an eclectic bunch, and their stories are unique and, whilst brief, strangely satisfying. It is a book to read at leisure, taking time over each story to absorb its brief beauty. Organised by ocean, Schalansky devotes a page to text and a page for a map of each island. She shows us islands inhabited and uninhabited. Islands abandoned and islands claimed. Islands which are remote, inaccessible, frozen and lifeless. Islands with unusual and dying customs. Some islands are more familiar than others: Easter Island, for example, that monument to human folly; Iwo Jima representing folly of a different kind. But it is the stories themselves that fascinate, like here as Schalansky describes Lonely Island, a Russian island in the Kara Sea shaped, curiously, like a decaying leaf. Now abandoned, a record of the island’s history remains in the log book from polar observatory that had existed on the island and Schalansky draws our particular attention to its last entry:

“The final entry in red felt-tip pen spills over the confines of the columns: 23 November 1996: the evacuation order came today. Pouring the water out. Turned off diesel generator. The station is…The final word is illegible. Welcome to Lonely Island.”

But this book, whilst focused on the islands, is also a love letter to the art and adventure of cartography. Schalansky didn’t set out to find these islands, instead she traced them on dusty old rolls of paper hidden somewhere in an archive or the dark belly of the public library. What she learned of the islands, she learned through meticulous exploration of records and archives, old newspaper reports and notes from scientific journals. “It is high time for cartography to take its place among the arts,” she says, “and for the atlas to be recognised as literature, for it is more than worthy of its original name: theatrum terratum, the theatre of the world.”

I’m inclined to agree. I, too, have a love of maps. I remember, as a child, tracing the outlines of countries in my hand-me-down Australian encyclopaedias that had belonged to my brother and sister when they had lived on that rather larger, warmer island than the one I found myself growing up on. I remember my own drawings of islands: imaginary ones and those intended as representations of the real, taking care over all the tiny twists and turns of the coastline refining, perhaps, inaccuracy to something in the order of hundreds of miles. Even now I have a ritual when we go camping that I will always pick up the Ordnance Survey map of the area, and it is a small excitement unfolding the map, laying it out on the uneven ground and tracing the contours I can see if I only look up and around me. Finding the odd place names and trying to imagine how they came to be. The secret pleasure in being able to refold it properly, which always seems near impossible. My children, on account of this exposure, have inherited this love too, and this makes me wonder if the joy of map tracing is something of a dying art, as the world moves to a more ‘accurate’ and less romantic digital view. Perhaps as long as gorgeous books like this one exists, the art of cartography and the joy of map exploration on a damp Sunday afternoon will long continue. I hope so. 

Time to think

I’ve taken a few days off work, taking advantage of the bank holiday, and as always happens when I have a few days to spare with no real plans I find myself with time to think. Not straight away. It takes a few days, a few days of reading, of travelling around, perhaps, a few days of going to the shops or looking out of the window and watching the rain or the clouds passing by. Eventually those things run out of currency, and I’m left with nothing to hinder the thoughts I try so hard to escape from. This time I've decided to listen.

It is good to have time to think. The most creative times, I find, are those times when you have no option but to think, where thinking is something that springs upon you almost as an inevitability. Like in the shower, or on a long walk. These are often the times I find the keenest insight into my life and what I need to do with it. It is, perhaps, not surprising that so many writers are often keen walkers.

When I’m at work, when I’m in my normal routine, I don’t think. That doesn’t mean to say that I don’t think in my job, of course I do – I have to – but what I have to think about is everything other than myself and what I am doing. I can think about my work, I can think about my role and the meaning of my role, I can think, hard, to solve a problem. I think a lot, but that thinking is never reflection. On my way to and from work, I read. My free time at home is limited, and I can easily fill it with administration, with my kids, with housework or gardening or more reading. All this enables me to carry on through my life without thinking about what I’m doing. This engenders a kind of blindness, a lack of awareness and a failure to make real decisions. If I ever challenge myself, I spin out that old trope ‘I’ve made compromises,’ which isn’t quite true because ‘compromise’ implies a conscious choice whereas I think it is truer to say that I’ve simply taken the expedient route. This is nowhere else more apparent than in my reading obsession. If I think about the next book and the next book I want to read, then I don’t have to think about why I’m reading them or what it is that drives this need, this need which enables me to avoid confronting the course my life is taking. Reading, it appears, is a great source of distraction and I’m reminded of one of my less successful university interviews, many years ago, when my interviewer asked me why I read and I answered ‘escapism’. I didn’t get a place at that university, but I knew myself better then it seems.

Not surprisingly, then, my thinking has started with my relationship with reading, which I’ve blogged (briefly) about before. I am reading more than ever. I have a list of books I want to read which is ever growing, to the point that it is unachievable. I could buy a book every day, add them to my stack and get around to reading them, one day. Part of this is driven by my blog, but there’s something underlying it which I’ve been hiding from and which, to my surprise, has been revealed to me when I’ve thought about all the books which have particularly affected me. Those books were telling me something, and giving myself some time to think has made this clear to me.

Those books have been Tracks, A Book of Silence, A Woman in the Polar Night, Full Tilt. More recently, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain – which I will blog about shortly – all of these books have shook me to my core. What is it about these books? All these women have taken a brave (or crazy) step. They have all done something which seems impossible, whether it is cycling across the world or walking across the Australian desert. All of these women have actively sought isolation and in the course of doing so have discovered who they were. This is something which I know absorbs me, as every idea I have for a novel centres around this theme. All of these women have sought an intensity of experience, they have risked their safety and suffered social approbation for what these have chosen to do. Yet their experiences have shaped them, they have enabled them to have a transcendent experience. What is my obsession with transcendence if not a sign to myself that the way I am living is simply not enough?

I am not unhappy with my life, in fact if I was unhappy it would be easier to make a change. What I see, instead, is that I am living an unchallenged life. My work is challenging, but not risky and it is easy to rise to that kind of challenge and pretend it is enough. It is not enough. I need to challenge myself, I need to confront myself and always remember that a fulfilled life is not necessarily an easy life. I let myself off the hook too often. I love reading, but there comes a point where you realise that the story you want to read isn’t out there, but is already inside you waiting to be released. I am ready, I think, to write my story. Actually it doesn’t matter if I’m ready, I simply must. I need to stop living this middle-of-the-road life. I have walked a path which has been opened up for me, instead of forging my own way and I have let my dreams fall along the wayside, victims of expedience and practicality.

My dream as a child was to be a writer, but along the way I have created the excuses which have permitted me not to pursue my dream. I have tinkered here and there but never taken it seriously. No one should give up their dreams so easily. I need to read less (crazy as that sounds), blog a little less and stop myself from filling those free hours with anything other than writing activity. I need to stop buying books, because the story I need to read is right here already. It will be a difficult read, and I won’t be able to read it and move on to the next story in a matter of days; but it will be the best story I will ever read and if I don’t nurture it from me now I’m condemning myself to die an old, regretful woman. I’m determining, right here, that this is not going to be the story of my life. 

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (translator: Michael Hulse)

There are many kinds of books you can encounter in a lifetime. There are books which are soulful and full of grace. Books that are like a slap in the face. Books that nurture and console you. Books that make you laugh. Books that are like a lifelong journey. Books that are like a puzzle you don’t have the brainpower to solve. Books that never seem to end.

Then there are books that are like walking along the riverside in the company of an erudite and well informed man, someone with whom you have only a tenuous relationship, perhaps through work or a shared acquaintance, but whose company is always interesting. You are walking along the riverside on a pleasant summer day, heading towards a pub you visited together a number of years ago. The sun is blinking through the trees, there is a gentle breeze and soft summer clouds floating fatly in the blue air. Your companion is telling you a story about a man he once encountered as a child, a lord of something or other who had a peculiar penchant swans – your friend mentions this pointing towards a pair of swans paddling along the river. The lord had such a love of swans that he had created a sanctuary somewhere hereabouts. The swan sanctuary turned out to be short lived and the ruin of the man.

As your companion talks you see the pub come into view. It is on the top of a small hill to your left, its grounds rolling down towards the riverbank clustered with picnic benches and you remember when you came here the last time. Then you were much younger, you were newly arrived in the area and this man, through your shared acquaintance or work, had offered to show you around. The day, one similar to today, was bright and warm, there were bees buzzing in the grass and ducks on the water and your anxiety about having moved from your home to a new, strange place had been assuaged for the duration of the afternoon. Something about your companion and his excellent conversation.

When you arrive at the pub the man goes off to the bar to buy beer, and you sit down at one of the tables close to the waterside. It is then that you discover that things are not exactly the way you remember them. The pub, its grounds so well situated on such a lovely day, is largely deserted. The wood of the picnic table splinters under your nails, there are cracks in its surface and great gouges torn out of the wood. The swans are gone from the river and the ducks from your memory are absent. Your friend returns and sits down, passing you your beer glass from which you take a great gulp. The beer doesn’t taste as good as you remember. ’It was here,’ your friend explains. ‘This was the place of lord such-and-such’s swan sanctuary.’ The Swan, is the name of the pub. As the bitter taste of beer melts from your tongue, you realise with surprise that you are now the same age as your companion was the last time that you were here together.

The air turns chill, a dark cloud rumbles overhead blocking out the sun. A melancholy mist rises from the river, drawing with it the brackish tang of decay. It reminds you, somehow, of a dream you had recently in which you had been walking along the self-same riverbank heading towards the pub at which you were now drinking. In the dream it had been a day much the same as today, but you had walked alone. The air seemed thick and dense, and as you walked a great, ancient forest appeared. With each step more trees grew, until the forest grew so thick you became lost within it. The familiar houses and landmarks had decayed to tumbledown ruins, and if there were any other people in the forest there was no sign of them. You walked until you were ready to lie down with exhaustion, and only then did the forest open into a clearing and the way out became obvious. You turned to find that the light was failing, that the path you had walked along had disappeared. It was a peculiarly vivid dream, and though you had felt lost you woke from it feeling only that you had experienced something like truth.

That is The Rings of Saturn.   

The end of #TBR20, and a confession

It is done. My TBR20 challenge is complete. Last night I read and read doggedly, and I finished David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks. I did not greatly enjoy it, which makes me sad. It wasn't the pressure of reading - had I been enjoying it there would have been no pressure at all - but rather it was a Mitchell book I didn't feel engaged with. Has my Mitchell worship been broken? Quite possibly.

Yes, I have finished reading my 20 books. The full list is as follows:

1. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

2. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie

3. The Waves by Virginia Woolf

4. The Years by Virginia Woolf

5. Flush by Virginia Woolf

6. Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

7. Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

8. Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys

9. Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson

10. A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

11. Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy

12. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

13. Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros

14. Behindlings by Nicola Barker

15. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

16. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

17. School for Love by Olivia Manning

18. The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

19. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

20. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

If you recall from this blog entry I made a cracking start on my TBR and by early January I was already half way through. So I decided to make it harder. Then I made it even harder on myself by going stir-crazy over library books so my TBR reading has taken about 3 times longer than it had to. And whilst this is no excuse whatsoever, I have to admit that when I stalled on my last 3 I totally caved and bought 4 books. Yes, I am a terrible cheat. Mea culpa.

So, what have I learned from the process? It's been great. I may have cheated towards the end, but by that point it had been over 3 months since I'd last bought a book which is probably the longest I've managed without book buying in the last 10 years. I think, whilst not being 100% successful, it has gifted me a better relationship with book buying. Now I only want to buy books I intend to keep. I'm using the library much more, which is no bad thing, and whilst I haven't completely quashed my acquisitive spirit or the compulsive curiosity that makes me want to immerse myself in random themes (right now it's islands and cyber crime. Don't ask) I am in a lot better shape. One of the things I've done is to create a spreadsheet where I can note down books I want to read, then I research what I can source at the library and which I really want to buy. I find writing them down helps to quell the desire to impulse buy, and by spreading out my planned acquisitions it gives me time to decide I don't want to read them after all. Sounds crackers, I know, but it helps. 

Would I do it again? Absolutely. In fact once I've got my initial need to acquire some new books out of the way (by the end of this weekend, then) I will select another 20 from my to read pile and implement a new book buying ban. Next time I'll go a little easier on myself, and perhaps pick a selection of books which is not quite so mentally challenging (or at least I won't save all the long ones to the end). 

In the meantime, I have a lovely book about Tove Jansson to reward myself with...

Holloway by Robert McFarlane, Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards

A holloway is a sunken path, a deep and shady lane, a landmark that “speak[s] of habit rather than suddenness” explains this brief and poetic book by acclaimed nature writer Robert McFarlane (plus buddies). It is a book which is very much an exploration, a way of being in nature, a memorial to a man – Roger Deakin – with whom McFarlane began this journey. In the beginning the two men set out to find a holloway, to which there is no map, mentioned in a book called Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household – a book, as it happens, that I have also heard mentioned somewhere else very recently, the result of which is has found itself onto my to read list. It is the book that inspired them, their shared love of it, and so they set out with map and tent, penknife, matches and candles and a hipflask each to find this hidden place. Together they enter a church, crest the summit of a half-moon of hills; they enter the dusk of the holloway and camp out in a flower meadow with full and glorious views of the stars.

Then Roger Deakin died, suddenly and unexpectedly. A few years following Deakin’s death McFarlane returned to the holloway, this time in the company of Dan Richards and Stanley Donwood who contributed to this book. They slept in the holloway, pursued by rain and something mysterious they they couldn’t identify but all felt. It is fitting, perhaps, that in the course of this second journey McFarlane should encounter the ‘ghost’ of Deakin, though not in a literal sense as he explains:  

“That long & happy day passed in exploration, tree-climbing, walking, talking, lounging. I had not gone in search of Roger’s shade, but I found him there nonetheless, glimpsed startlingly clearly at the turn of a corner or the edge of a tree-line. Actual memory traces existed in the stumps of the holly saplings we had cut as staffs, our blade-marks still visible in the wood. He knoweth hym by the traces & by his denne and by the soole.”

A further outing ensues, similar to the last in tone, in character and emotion. There is a sense of boys out at play, rediscovering the freedom of the countryside as described here:

“That car. That strap. My bike. This. The tactile reassurance of the close at hand. Sunlight falls and kestrels call to disavow what we’d just seen and been through and, indeed, the clouds seem to have lifted off and melted quite away when we turn and look back.

Stan and I plunge down the brink and speed. The rifled lanes spill past and we grin tight until, turn approaching, brakes applied – and now, and now; no, come on; now – I begin a slow crash into Dorset with its gleaming chalk and plough-turned flint-tipped ruts.”

So, in Holloway, McFarlane shows us both the experience of continuance and renewal: continuance in returning to the holloway, renewal in that each experience was unique whilst bearing the scars, or the ghost, of the previous visit. There is no ending. It is a book not so much about seeking as it is about discovering something about the self, a way of being, an honesty which comes from using your body out there in the world, surrounded by hills and hidden groves. The book is accompanied by strange, pencil-line drawn black and white pictures of the holloway itself, pictures which are at once unnerving and yet also bring to mind the birth canal, all ridged and furred, a place which may be frightening to enter but which brings you out into a new, and exciting world. And there’s a sense that this is what the book is inviting us to do – to enter the world. Before it is too late.

The language echoes the theme; a dense filigree of words that tangle and yet draw your eye down a path. It is beautifully written, and achieves a great deal in its brevity. Each sentence can be read and re-read repeatedly, the words spilling through the mind like water, un-claimable yet etching their way in. Through these words we learn of history, of ghosts, of nature wild and untameable, hidden places and what they reveal about ourselves and others. We touch on the question of loss, so delicately, and it is, perhaps, the absence of reflection of Roger’s death, the way it is so barely mentioned, that makes the loss seem more poignant. The return to the holloway allows McFarlane to discover that “stretches of a path might carry memories of a person just as a person might of a path” and this is a source of comfort: that a path carries the echo of a person means, somehow, that the person is never truly lost, and the holloway itself is the memory of many, the slow returners, the creatures of habit, a path formed by years and repetition, hidden but always discoverable.

Hol weg. Holwy. Holway. Holeway. Holewaye. Hollowy. Holloway.