Gathering of the Tribe: Landscape by Mark Goodall

Posted on 13/01/2023 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – January 2023

… a personal selection dredged from years of seeking out and listening to obscure and difficult music; music that is profound but which was made for reasons which the creators and performer are often at pains to properly explain.

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Gathering of the Tribe is a series of books by Mark Goodall in which he explores music and soundscapes which are capable of triggering altered states and mystical experiences. Each volume comprises a series of essays examining records selected from his personal collection. Volume 1, Acid, focuses on music and psychedelic drugs. This second volume, Landscape, takes as its premise the powerful effect that a particular landscape, be it urban or rural, can have on a creative mind.

The albums discussed are mainly from artists most of us would regard as obscure and esoteric, although better known works by John Cage, Basil Kirchin and early Pink Floyd are also featured. It is difficult to write about music, and writing about the kind of music that Goodall himself concedes is ‘obscure and difficult’ is even more of a challenge. The great success of this collection of essays, however, is that makes you want to go out and track down these recordings and listen to them.

Goodall’s selection of music is impossible to categorise, other than the inspiration 0f ‘landscape’ that he suggests they all share. Jazz, rock, folk, symphonic music, eastern music and electronica are all present, together with found sounds and field recordings.

Works discussed:

Barney Wilen – Auto Jazz: Tragic Destiny Of Lorenzo Bandini (MPS, 1968)

Basil Kirchin – Worlds Within Worlds (Columbia, 1971/Trunk, 2019)

Ian Humberstone / David Chatton Barker – Theo Brown & The Folklore Of Dartmoor (Folklore Tapes, 2014)

François Bayle – Jeîta Ou Murmure Des Eaux (Philips, 1970)

Gavin Bryars – The Sinking Of The Titanic (Obscure Records, 1975)

Harold Budd – Abandoned Cities (Cantil, 1984)

John Cage – In A Landscape (Catalyst, 1994)

Loscil – City Hospital (Wist Rec, 2013)

Pandit Pran Nath – Earth Groove (Douglas, 1968)

Pink Floyd – Pink Floyd Live At Pompeii (Director Adrian Maben, 1971)

R. Murray Schafer – The Vancouver Soundscape (Ensemble Productions, 1973)

Richard Hill – Chanctonbury Ring (Pye, 1978)

Virginia Astley – From Gardens Where We Feel Secure (Happy Valley Records, 1983)

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A very welcome inclusion by Goodall is to illustrate each essay with the vinyl album cover of the work discussed. This includes the front cover and, crucially, the back cover, including the sleeve notes and credits. For those of us brought up in the vinyl age, sitting (cross-legged) carefully studying the sleeve was part of the ritualistic pleasure of listening to an album. Unfortunately, with the size of the book (16.5cm x 16.5cm), the back covers reproduced are very difficult to read, but I’m sure this was an enforced economic decision rather than an artistic one.

Notwithstanding that, this is an absorbing work that is both passionate and erudite. I look forward to reading further volumes.

Mark Goodallauthor

Mark Goodall is an author and academic who teaches and writes about film. He is also a musician and composer, experimental filmmaker and has worked as a journalist, bookseller, community artist, printer and cheesemonger.

 

Gathering of the Tribe: Landscape.  Companion to Occult Music on Vinyl, Volume 2
Mark Goodall
Headpress Books
October 2022 
UK – £13.99 (paperback)
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The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker by Merlin Coverley

Posted on 14/12/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – December 2022

For such a seemingly innocuous activity, and one which is commonly conducted with the participant largely oblivious to its operation, the act of walking has aquired a surprising degree of cultural significance.

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This is a revised and updated version of Merlin Coverley’s book which was first issued in 2012. He uses this new edition to include material from works published since that date. He has also, as he alludes to in his new preface to this work, made a conscious effort to try to break free from from the grip of the boys’ club that psychogeography and flânerie seems to have become in recent years. In doing so he readily acknowledges his debt to works by Lauren Elkin, Kerri Andrews and Annabel Abbs.[i]  Notwithstanding that, most of the writers discussed in this edition of The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker are still men – so says the male reviewer about the male writer, fully aware of the irony of his observation.

Coverley’s central contention is that the act of walking and a particular strand of writing are inextricably linked. There is a canon of literature, he asserts, for which walking is the narrative, the creative stimulus and the inspiration. Coverley’s extensive review of his subject matter takes us from the classical world to to the ubiquitous urban explorations of latter-day psychogeographers. For the ancient Greeks, he concludes, walking was nothing more than a means to an end; whereas, for many of today’s Gore-Tex-clad explorers, the act of walking is the whole point.

Coverley considers his thesis through a series of chapters that follow a roughly chronological order. Each chapter also focuses on a particular aspect of the link between walking and writing. The Walker as Philosopher examines early thinkers, such as Rousseau, for whom walking was part of the process of their philosophical writing. The Walker as Pilgrim, on the other hand, covers the period of the spread of Christianity throughout Europe through to the age of the romantic poets, writers and composers.

The Walker as Vagrant considers the works of Rimbaud and Verlaine and The Walker and the Natural World takes us from the Romantics through to Thoreau. Coverley, in the section headed The Walker as Visionary, pays particular attention the the writings of Arthur Machen, whose contribution to the literature of walking he asserts is unjustly neglected.  Indeed, he borrows the title The Art of Wandering as a homage to Machen. Writing about Machen’s The London Adventure he suggests:

For while he was, on the one hand, to celebrate London in all its immensity and to revel in the occult preoccupations of his fiction, his own response to the endless horizon of streets within which he found himself was that of an overwhelming  sense of awe, bordering on outright terror.

The unknown menace lurking in the city streets was, of course, anticipated by James Thomson a generation before in his The City of Dreadful Night. But Machen’s great achievement was a painstaking and systematic exploration of London’s ever-expanding network of streets.

At the heart of Coverley’s book is an examination of those writers who consciously incorporate walking into their writing practice. The Flâneur pays particular attention to the explorations of Baudelaire and Benjamin and The Return of the Walker focuses on contemporary British writers, such as Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Nick Papadimitriou. Writing about Papadimitriou’s Scarp, he concludes:

Here, once again, walking has proved itself capable of inspiring not merely an act of remembrance, but of initiating, in those who know how to look, a means of reading the landscape anew, revealing a vision of the local environment entirely at odds with the accepted or promoted version.

Coverley presents the fruits of his extensive research in a highly accessible form and the end result a very readable and stimulating work. In addition he provides substantial notes and a comprehensive bibliography for those who feel inspired to explore his subject matter further.

[i] Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, London: Random House, 2017; Kerri Andrews, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking, London: Reaktion, 2020; and Annabel Abbs, Windswept, Why Women Walk, London: Two Roads, 2021

Merlin CoverleyMerlin_Coverley

Merlin Coverley is the author of seven books: London Writing, Psychogeography, Occult London, Utopia, The Art of Wandering, South and Hauntology. He lives in London.

 

The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker
Merlin Coverley
Oldcastle Books
October 2022 (revised and updated)
UK – £12.99 (paperback)
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Psychogeographic Review’s Books of the Year, 2022

Posted on 24/11/2022 by Bobby Seal

What is psychogeography, anyway?  My understanding of the concept is three-fold: it is a theory, a practice and a body of evidence.  The most interesting of these, for me, is the body of evidence: the books, works of art and reportage that enable us to understand and engage with the social and geographical environment in which we live.  Thus, at Psychogeographic Review I write about the novels, poems, maps, photographs, paintings, films and music that help us to construct a living map of the places where humans live.

But it’s still important to acknowledge that there is a set of theories underpinning this approach to how we interpret the world around us.  I’m sure others can explain this more eloquently than me but, basically, the term ‘psychogeography’ was first coined by Guy Debord and the Situationist International in the 1950s.  Debord and his associates were a disparate group of French intellectuals and dissidents who highlighted the fact that the city is a human-created environment.  The way in which we experience and react to these environments, they argued, is not neutral but is conditioned and controlled by the prevailing drivers of our society.

As the Situationists were essentially Marxists, albeit maverick Marxists of a more libertarian persuasion, they identified capitalism as the force which coloured our view of the world.  Everything in human society, all the ways in which we experience the world, is subject to a process of commodification by the prevailing system.  So how do we get out of this bind where even the ways in which protest against the control of the system are absorbed by it and turned back on us to tighten its grip?

Psychogeography’s most powerful tool for experiencing the city in another way is the dérive, or drift.  A dérive involves the participants in wandering through the city with no particular purpose or destination.  But it is not an aimless walk; on a dérive our minds remains consciously engaged.  And as we walk we remain open to the resonances that certain streets or buildings produce within our emotions and we note not just what we see, but the sounds and smells we encounter and the texture of the ground beneath our feet.

But the dérive isn’t something new.  The literary character of the Parisian flâneur, the casual wanderer of the streets, was created by Baudelaire in the nineteenth century; but the idea goes back even further to Defoe, Blake, De Quincey and beyond.  More recently a host of writers, from Peter Ackroyd to Iain Sinclair, have written about our experience of ‘place’.  Invariably these are places on the liminal margins of our cities that the writers encounter on foot.

For me the exciting element that contemporary writers, such as Sonia Overall, add to ‘traditional’ psychogeography, if using that word is not too much of an oxymoron, is a heady seasoning of myth, history, topographical resonance, popular culture and occult-like phenomena.  There is also a lot of personal disclosure in modern psychogeography: ‘this is me in the landscape and this is the landscape in me’.  The following is my personal and very subjective list of some of the books that have informed this discussion in 2022.

Every Day until Antwerp: A Walking Trip along the Railway Line by Jacqueline Schoemaker

Every Day until Antwerp is an account of a journey on foot that Schoemaker made in the summer of 2012, just before the old inter-city line was closed. Her plan was to walk the 150+ km between the two cities, shadowing as closely as she could the route of the railway line. She thought she knew this route well, having made the journey by train on many occasions. But, reflected Schoemaker while she planned this journey, her perception of the route was limited to the view from the train window. She had been a passive observer catching fleeting glimpses of the landscape rather than actually experiencing it by becoming a part of it. As we follow her journey, the repetitive nature of the landscape becomes apparent: various combinations of road, railway, cycle path, farm, village and industrial come into view, seemingly without end. In between these features in the landscape, however, are spaces that seem to belong to no one and have no particular utility. Schoemaker reclaims these liminal places; she humanizes them by using them as places to rest, wash or answer her calls of nature. Along the way she meets people who are kind and friendly. Most, however, ignore her, giving no more than a quizzical glance at this strange woman pulling along a shopping trolley.

In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer

With In the Pines Paul Scraton presents us with a strange, brooding collection of literary fragments. They are drawn together by an unnamed narrator and haunted by the ever-present forest that dominates the narrator’s life. We are not given the name of the forest, nor is it made clear in what country Scraton’s stories unfold. Neither are we given the name of the narrator and even their gender is left unclear. Integral to the book is the black and white photography of Eymelt Sehmer. She uses a photographic technique called the collodion wet plate process. This requires a black tin plate to be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. The viewpoint of the central narrative switches regularly from the first person to the third, often within the same fragment. The only constant is the forest; its presence underpins everything.

Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo

Manifesto is part memoir and part handbook providing insights into Bernardine Evaristo’s creative process. This inspirational work tells the story of her life and the influences, attitudes and ways of working that led to her eventual success as a writer. Recognition was a long time in coming and winning the Booker prize at the age of 60 was testimony of Evaristo’s commitment to never giving up. In 2019 Evaristo won the Booker prize for fiction for her novel Girl, Woman, Other and now combines her own creative work with teaching and encouraging others. Despite her current status as part of the nation’s literary establishment, Bernardine Evaristo has spent most of her career as an outsider. Her race, gender, sexuality and class all provided sticks with which she was regularly beaten, But, rather than cave-in to rejection and scorn, Evaristo used it to make herself stronger and more resilient. Manifesto is a portrait of a woman who has dedicated her life to breaking down barriers and bringing people together.

Shalimar by Davina Quinlivan

Davina Quinlivan is a writer and lecturer whose background embraces a rich cultural heritage. Her extended family melds together strands from Burma, India, Ireland, Germany, Portugal and the Shan hill people of South-East Asia. Shalimar explores the history of this family, comprising forebears from Europe and Asia, and takes us through to Quinlivan’s present life in rural Devon with her partner and children. At the heart of the book, ever present even after his death, is the writer’s father. At a social and political level Shalimar is about race, colonialism and migration. At a more personal level it is an exploration of the meaning of family and home. Like the rest of us, Quinlivan’s life is an outflowing of the influences of her family history. Unlike most of us, she is able to express this profound truth in achingly beautiful prose.

Nettles by Adam Scovell

Nettles opens with a harrowing account of a boy’s first day at secondary school and the campaign of bullying to which he was subjected.  The bully has no name and is simply referred to as He and Him. He is the leader of a gang of fawning acolytes and presents as an almost mythical figure, one in possession of great physical strength and animal cunning. At its heart, Nettles is a lament for the loss of childhood innocence and happiness. But the boy is not without his allies; the marsh and the motorway bridge just behind his school provide a place of refuge, somewhere to hide from the attentions of the bully during lunchtime and breaks. But it offers more than just a place of physical safety, the marsh offers a kind of spiritual sanctuary too. It speaks to him, it encourages him to endure and promises that in the end he will prevail and will defeat the bully for good: ‘He will die.’

Robinson in Chronostasis by Sam Jenks with Koji Tsukada and Dan Jackson

Opening the pages of Robinson in Chronostasis is like setting out on a psychogeographic dérive. You do not know where the journey will take you nor what you will see along the way. Discovering the route through this work is satisfyingly unclear. You can follow Sam Jenks’s narrative, a small block of text on each page, or perhaps read the story told by Koji Tsukada’s photographs, starting and finishing the sequence wherever you choose. Alternatively you can be drawn along by the looping threads, the puzzling symbols, of Dan Jackson’s graphic designs. Jenks’s narrative takes the reader on a journey through the streets of Bath, mixing past and present, memory and sensation. In doing so he seems to raise questions about our perception of time and the nature of story-telling and memory. The answers, if there are any, are left for the reader to decide. Robinson, of course, is the companion of the narrator in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson films. He/she/they is an almost mythical figure, the archetypal flâneur. Jenks’s Robinson stalks a trail left by the artist Koji Tsukada, his commentary mixing past, present and conjecture.

Terminal Zones by Gareth E Rees

Each short story in this new collection by Gareth E Rees is set against the background of the global climate crisis. In the Britain of the near future the ice caps are melting, our coastline is eroding, the land is poisoned and our forests and heathlands are burning. In the best of these ten stories Rees’ prose, quite appropriately, sizzles.  Though it has to be said that the quality varies and some of the tales are more successful than others. But throughout Rees writes with passion and verve. But this is no scientific treatise nor work of polemic. Rees concentrates on what he writes about best, which is people. Throughout this collection ordinary people are caught up in extraordinary events. All of the usual Gareth Rees tropes are here: motorways, pylons, car parks, retail parks and abandoned industrial sites. The thing that is new, that is experimental, is the range of characters Rees creates, a whole world of them.

Borderland: Identity and belonging at the edge of England by Phil Hubbard

Borderland was born out of a series of journeys made on foot by Phil Hubbard in 2019. A native of Kent now based elsewhere, Hubbard wanted to explore the county’s coastline from the Thames and the North Kent Marshes down to Dungeness and the Sussex border in the south. It is a coastline configured by Britain’s relationship with continental Europe and is subject to the ebb and flow of relations between the two sides of the Channel; periods of antagonism followed by periods of ‘entente cordiale’ and closer ties. Hubbrd highlights how, during times of strained relationships such as the present, Kent’s coast is presented by some as the imagined battleground where a number of national myths are played out. Borderland is a hugely engaging read and offers some profound insights into the past and present of Kent’s coastline and, by extension, of England as a whole. Hubbard examines the myths we summon up to explain our national past together with the malleability of memory and how some will seek to exploit that.

The Half-Life of Snails by Philippa Holloway

The Half-Life of Snails is a novel permeated by a sense of place. Philippa Holloway examines the influence of place upon the lives of the people who inhabit two landscapes, two separate places linked by a single catastrophe that occurred several decades before, but the resonances of which linger on. The Half-Life of Snails achieves a powerful evocation of both the north coast of Ynys Môn and the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Holloway conducted extensive field research in Ukraine while she was planning this book and her descriptions of ‘the zone’ have a palpable intensity. This is a landscape defined by absence. But the empty villages and farmsteads are, nonetheless, peopled by the echoes, the ghosts of those who once lived there. It is, in a very real sense, a haunted place.

 

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its seed or potential, like a music score. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the seed germinates, the symphony resounds.

Rebecca Solnit, from a talk given at Novato Public Library, California

 

AntwerpAntwerp

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CB Editions

Posted on 21/11/2022 by Bobby Seal

the old punk spirit that inspires the best kind of artists: if you’re dissatisfied with the culture, do something about it.

Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

CB_Editions1

CB Editions is the brainchild of writer and publisher Charles Boyle. He also commissions, edits, typesets, designs the covers and publicises every book published, all from the living room of his house in West London. This is one of the smallest of small presses and Boyle’s aim is to publish books that he himself believes in, but that no one else will publish.


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Two CB Editions books I have enjoyed recently are Simple Annals by Roy Watkins and This Is the Place to Be by Lara Pawson. Roy Watkins had several short stories published by Faber & Faber in the 1960s and has taught at universities in the UK and the United States. Simple Annals tells the story of his early childhood in Southport, Lancashire, covering the war years and into the 1950s when he reached the age of eleven. Watkins does not try to present any form of retrospective psychological analysis of his experiences, nor does he set his memoir in a social and historical context; the kind of understanding we might have when we become older. This is not the adult Watkins looking back, rather it is Roy the child sensing and feeling everything around him – the people and surroundings that form his whole world – as experienced at the time.

Too soft when Mam puts me to bed, too soft. She turns the gas low, puts things in drawers. While her back’s turned, shadows come slinking into the corners. She doesn’t know they’re there.

As Roy grows his language changes; his sentences become more coherent and his vocabulary more expansive. We see a world through a child’s eyes, a provincial working-class community which, in many of its features, no longer exists. This is a valuable historical document and an entertaining read.

Lara Pawson’s book is a very different kind of memoir. This Is the Place to Be is a fragmentary account of her time as an African correspondent for the BBC. It covers the period from 1996 to 2007 and focuses in particular on the wars in Angola and the Ivory Coast. The horrors and suffering she witnesses test her both as a journalist and as a human being and cause her to question the ethics and morality of her role.

Two doctors from Vietnam were working around the clock, tidying up blasted bone, sewing up stumps and flesh and, No, Lara they don’t want to be interviewed.

Woven into Pawson’s reminiscences are questions of identity; racial, national and gender identity. Her own somewhat androgynous look has often led to misunderstandings and abuse. She quotes James Baldwin’s thoughts on this kind of intolerance: ‘we are all androgynous … because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other – male in female, female in male’.

To be frank, both Simple Annals and This Is the Place to Be would struggle to find another publisher, at least not without changes of a type that would undermine the author’s original vision for the book. We have CB Editions to thank for enabling these books, and some seventy others, to see the light of day.

 

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The Half-Life of Snails by Philippa Holloway

Posted on 14/11/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – November 2022

The hollowness of the space like a migraine building behind her eyes. The landscape transformed by absence, defined by it.

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The Half-Life of Snails is a novel permeated by a sense of place. Philippa Holloway examines the influence of place upon the lives of the people who inhabit two landscapes, two separate places linked by a single catastrophe that occurred several decades before, but the resonances of which linger on.

Helen is the single mum of a 5-year-old boy and works the family sheep farm close to the Wylfa nuclear power station in Ynys Môn, North Wales. As well as Wylfa, this area has another connection with the nuclear industry in that, when the reactor exploded at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine in 1986, radioactive particles released into the atmosphere were carried by the prevailing winds and fell with rain in North Wales and other parts of the western UK. Soil and ground water were contaminated and restrictions were imposed on more than 300 Welsh sheep farms. In some cases these measures remained in place until 2012. Helen was just a child at the time of Chernobyl, but it cast a very long shadow over her life.

Wylfa

Wylfa

The fictional company that runs Wylfa now wishes to expand its operations and is actively buying up local farmland for that purpose. Helen has no intention of selling and is one of the leaders of the local anti-nuclear campaign. She blames the proximity of Wylfa and the fall-out from Chernobyl for her mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis. She is also undergoing investigations herself for a lump in her breast, though she has not yet disclosed this concern to her family.

 

While she is awaiting her test results, Helen makes a long-planned visit to the Chernobyl exclusion zone. This is partly for research purposes, but also to try to lay to rest some of the ghosts of her childhood. She leaves her son, Jack, with her sister, Jennifer. Helen’s stance on the power plant is something of an embarrassment for her sister as she and her husband both work at Wylfa and live on a neighbouring smallholding. They are also concerned about Helen’s obsession with doomsday prepping and the effects this seems to be having on Jack. Helen’s plans for her return journey from Ukraine are disrupted when she becomes inadvertently caught up in the Euromaidan protests. Jennifer has to cope with her own anxieties as well as those of Jack while they await news from Helen.

The Half-Life of Snails achieves a powerful evocation of both the north coast of Ynys Môn, where Wylfa is situated, and the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. Holloway conducted extensive field research in Ukraine while she was planning this book and her descriptions of ‘the zone’ have a palpable intensity. This is a landscape defined by absence. But the empty villages and farmsteads are, nonetheless, peopled by the echoes, the ghosts of those who once lived there. It is, in a very real sense, a haunted place.

The methodology that I used for researching the book was psychogeography, so that’s going to a particular place and examining really closely how those places, how those landscapes or structures affect people’s feelings and behaviours.

At one level The Half-Life of Snails highlights humanity’s differences: geographical differences, political differences, generational differences, gender differences. Even within the same family Helen and Jennifer are, ostensibly, very different. But a closer reading reveals our similarities and hints at something deeper which unites us all. Even Helen and Jennifer have more in common than they are, perhaps, prepared to admit.

Current events in Ukraine give Holloway’s book an added poignancy and relevance. We are reminded that things that happen elsewhere, even 2,000 miles away, can still have an impact on all our lives. Events, be it a nuclear explosion, a war or a more personal trauma can, and do, echo down the years.

Philippa Holloway

authorPhilippa Holloway is a writer and academic. She has won prizes in literary awards including the Fish Publishing Prize and the Writers & Artists Working Class Writer’s Prize. She is co-editor of the collection 100 Words of Solitude: Global Voices in Lockdown, and a senior lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Staffordshire University.

The Half-Life of Snails
Philippa Holloway
Parthian Books
May 2022
UK – £15.00 (hardback), £9.99 (paperback)
Cover and author picture – Parthian Books
Wylfa picture – Philippa Holloway
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Borderland: Identity and belonging at the edge of England by Phil Hubbard

Posted on 09/11/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – November 2022

What could I say about borders and bordering that would help others make sense of Brexit? My mind raced through the different forms of exclusionary nationalism – social, cultural, political, environmental – that I had witnessed, and my emerging conviction that Britain was turning away from Europe at a time of immanent and inescapable global change that requires cooperation, not isolationism.

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As I sit down to write this review the news is full of reports about small boats making the perilous journey across the English Channel. Families, many of them with small children, fleeing war and oppression. Young men and women seeking a better life, eager to fill some of the UK’s many unfilled job vacancies and pay taxes into our depleted exchequer. Witness also the frenzy of hostility being whipped up by sections of the press and social media. The spectacle of a Home Secretary, herself the child of economic migrants, characterising the arrival of these clutches of bedraggled and bewildered people as an ‘invasion’, as if to invoke the spirit of an island fortress with the Kent coast as its front line.

Borderland was born out of a series of journeys made on foot by Phil Hubbard in 2019. A native of Kent now based elsewhere, Hubbard wanted to explore the county’s coastline from the Thames and the North Kent Marshes down to Dungeness and the Sussex border in the south. It is a coastline configured by Britain’s relationship with continental Europe and is subject to the ebb and flow of relations between the two sides of the Channel; periods of antagonism followed by periods of ‘entente cordiale’ and closer ties. Hubbrd highlights how, during times of strained relationships such as the present, Kent’s coast is presented by some as the imagined battleground where a number of national myths are played out.

But the myth of England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ does not encompass the rest of the UK, nor even all of England. Rather it refers to a cosy southern English rural idyll as imagined, for instance, in H.E. Bates’s The Darling Buds of May, and in particular in the 1990s TV adaptation. But behind the idyll Hubbard discovers pockets of extreme poverty and deprivation along the Kent coast. He charts examples of precarious lifestyles affecting locals and refugees alike.

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But there is also affluence. Whitstable, once just a working town centred on the oyster trade, has now been gentrified by wealthier ‘down from London’ people (DFLs) who are driving up property prices and encouraging the proliferation of high-end restaurants and shops. Margate too, while it still has its share of deprivation, has moved up market with a revival in the town’s fortunes stimulated by the art market. Thanet and Sheppey, however, continue to suffer with the problems brought about by low incomes, limited expectations and poor infrastructure.

Hubbard pays particular attention to Dover and Folkstone as this stretch of the coast is both the main arrival point for refugee boats and the centre of activity for anti-migrant activists, and more recently a far-right terror incident. This area, and Dover in particular, has suffered from the decline of the ferry business. Despite efforts to stimulate tourism by highlighting the town’s military history, Hubbard suggests that this is still a place with an uncertain future.

Further along the coast, around Romney Marsh, Hubbard gains a sense of an older, rural and more isolated Kent. Near the end of his final walk, in the area around Dungeness, he describes a totally unique landscape, one that is bursting with hauntological resonances. The gloomy, bunker-like nuclear power station dominates this stretch of coast. but Hubbard also finds sunnier, more optimistic expressions of the human spirit. Derek Jarman’s former home, and particularly its shingle garden, still possesses the power to move those who visit it. This is, as Jarman himself once wrote, a ‘landscape of past endeavours’. Joe Sweeney’s installation, using an old BT call box, is called Leave a Message for Europe and marks the end of Hubbard’s journey and prompts him to reflect on what he has seen and experienced and what the future might hold for Kent’s coast.

Borderland is a hugely engaging read and offers some profound insights into the past and present of Kent’s coastline and, by extension, of England as a whole. Hubbard examines the myths we summon up to explain our national past together with the malleability of memory and how some will seek to exploit that. This is neither an academic textbook nor a straightforward travel guide. Instead, in a short but cogent review of what he terms the ‘new nature writing’, he clearly seems to wish to ally himself with this approach. As he explains:

Much of this writing disrupts any neat binary between nature and culture. Indeed, the work that has been placed in the genre of ‘new nature writing’ often focuses on the relationship between landscape, place and people. It tells a story that is personal and political, often using autobiography as a tool for environmental critique.

 

Phil Hubbard

Phil_HubbardPhil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London. He has published widely on questions of class, gentrification and the impacts of urban policy on socially marginalised populations. His books include Cities and Sexualities, The Battle for the High Street, and Key Ideas in Geography: City.

 

Borderland: Identity and belonging at the edge of England
Phil Hubbard
Manchester University Press
June 2022
UK – £15.99 (paperback)
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Terminal Zones by Gareth E Rees

Posted on 15/08/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – August 2022

Maybe it’s the heat. This endless summer drought, longer even than the one we had last year, and the one before that. There’s not a cloud in the sky. The sun is bastard hot.

Terminal Zones coverAs I write this review the temperature outside is pushing 40C. Seen through my window, the grass of the neighbourhood lawns is crisp and Savannah yellow. A constant procession of blackbirds and sparrows swoop down to scoop up beakfuls of liquid from the seed trays full of water I have left out for them. Meanwhile, my news feed tells me that several of the rival candidates for the leadership of the Tory Party, our next Prime Minister, are vying with each other to convince their fellow MPs about how they will remove the ‘burden’ of net zero.

Each short story in this new collection by Gareth E Rees is set against the background of the global climate crisis. In the Britain of the near future the ice caps are melting, our coastline is eroding, the land is poisoned and our forests and heathlands are burning. In the best of these ten stories Rees’ prose, quite appropriately, sizzles.  Though it has to be said that the quality varies and some of the tales are more successful than others. But throughout Rees writes with passion and verve. But this is no scientific treatise nor work of polemic. Rees concentrates on what he writes about best, which is people. Throughout this collection ordinary people are caught up in extraordinary events.

Some stories in Terminal Zones could almost have been culled straight from contemporary news reports. In Tyrannosaurs Bask in the Warmth of the Asteroid a grassland fire threatens an East Sussex zoo park, while When Nature Calls tells of the last members of a coastal community clinging onto life and normality in their cliff edge home. Other tales are more fantastical. A Dream Life of Hackney Marshes imagines a troubled young man who falls in love with an electricity pylon. The Slime Factory reveals an abomination created in a Gloucestershire railway depot and Meet on the Edge suggests vampiric entities lurking in a B&Q car park.

But, in the hands of Rees, even these decidedly weird tales are deeply serious and utterly convincing, leavened in no small part by the writer’s humour, which is as dark as a Goth’s eye-liner. All of the usual Gareth Rees tropes are here: motorways, pylons, car parks, retail parks and abandoned industrial sites. The thing that is new, that is experimental, is the range of characters Rees creates, a whole world of them.  Some are more fully realised than others but they people his nightmares and, as a collective, they are the driving force behind these stories. He also wins the prize, in my opinion, for the best short story title of the year: My Father, the Motorway Bridge.

 

Gareth E Rees

Gareth E ReesIs a writer of fiction and non-fiction, based in Hastings, East Sussex. He’s the founder of the website, Unofficial Britain (www.unofficialbritain.com) and the author of Unofficial Britain (Elliott & Thompson, 2020) Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013). He has also contributed short stories to numerous anthologies of weird fiction and horror.

Terminal Zones
Gareth E Rees
Influx Press
October 2022
UK – £9.99 (paperback)
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Robinson in Chronostasis by Sam Jenks with Koji Tsukada and Dan Jackson

Posted on 08/06/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – June 2022

My mind settled on one turbulent year in my life in  which I moved home nine times. I wrote about a moment where, standing in a 19th floor council flat in Shepherds Bush, London, I felt confused and anxious, unsure if I was packing or unpacking the boxes and bags standing in front of me.

coverOpening the pages of Robinson in Chronostasis is like setting out on a psychogeographic dérive. You do not know where the journey will take you nor what you will see along the way. Discovering the route through this work is satisfyingly unclear. You can follow Sam Jenks’s narrative, a small block of text on each page, or perhaps read the story told by Koji Tsukada’s photographs, starting and finishing the sequence wherever you choose. Alternatively you can be drawn along by the looping threads, the puzzling symbols, of Dan Jackson’s graphic designs.

All three elements are offered up on each double-page spread and the reader is given a choice of routes to take. Indeed, with the whole volume coming in at less than eighty pages, it is possible for the creative reader to complete the book more than once, plotting a different route each time.

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Koji Tsukada

Jenks’s narrative takes the reader on a journey through the streets of Bath, mixing past and present, memory and sensation. In doing so he seems to raise questions about our perception of time and the nature of story-telling and memory. The answers, if there are any, are left for the reader to decide.

Robinson, of course, is the companion of the narrator in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson films. He/she/they is an almost mythical figure, the archetypal flâneur. Jenks’s Robinson stalks a trail left by the artist Koji Tsukada, his commentary mixing past, present and conjecture.

Tsukada’s photographs, grainy and brooding, pepper the text. They were created using a 3D photocopy/facsimile of a folding pocket Kodak from 1904 that he bought in a Bath flea market.

Robinson in Chronostasis is a bold and challenging work; a slim but beautifully produced volume. Somehow, however, it feels unfinished. But, I don’t know, perhaps that is the whole point.

 

Sam Jenks

Sam is a writer, queering psychogeography, strayed from the path, hopelessly lost. He uses fiction-auto-fiction-non-fiction-mash-up to approach his interest in landscapes and strangers in strange places. His short stories have been published in Fruit Journal, Queerlings, and Litro.

Koji Tsukada

Koji is an artist based in Nagano, Japan. Between 2015 and 2018 he studied and practised art in Bath, UK. He has a particular interest in landscape, memory and myth.

Dan Jackson

Dan is a designer with an avidity for literature, poetry and stories. His practice centres around using design and illustration to accompany, embellish and evoke the written word in publications and book covers.

Robinson in Chronostasis: A Surrealist Psycho-Geographical Non Romance
Sam Jenks with Koji Tsukada and Dan Jackson
Magdalen Yard Books
February 2022
UK – £5.99 (paperback)
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Nettles by Adam Scovell

Posted on 16/05/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – May 2022

I was weak and He was strong. I was shy and He was confident. I was afraid of violence, whereas He thrived on it. Yet, He would die, and I would kill Him.

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I read the first fifty or so pages of Adam Scovell’s Nettles in bed just before putting the light out. Big mistake. His harrowing account of his protagonist’s first day at secondary school and the campaign of bullying to which he was subjected was profoundly disturbing and kept me awake for much of the night. The bully in question has no name and is simply referred to as He and Him. He is the leader of a gang of fawning acolytes and presents as an almost mythical figure, one in possession of great physical strength and animal cunning.

The book’s central character is not named either. Like Scovell himself, this character spent his  childhood in the Wirral and now earns his living as a writer in London. Yet Nettles is presented as neither autofiction nor straight autobiography. It is simply an account of a writer making a journey back to the place where he was brought up and the powerful childhood memories that this stirs up. What makes Nettles so spellbinding, though, is the way Scovell seems to follow Emily Dickinson’s dictum to ‘tell all the truth but tell it slant’.

At the same time as having to deal with Him, Scovell’s protagonist has to cope with another crisis in his life: the breakdown of his parents’ marriage. Thus, at its heart, Nettles is a lament for the loss of childhood innocence and happiness. But the boy is not without his allies; the marsh and the motorway bridge just behind his school provide a place of refuge, somewhere to hide from the attentions of the bully during lunchtime and breaks. But it offers more than just a place of physical safety, the marsh offers a kind of spiritual sanctuary too. It speaks to him, it encourages him to endure and promises that in the end he will prevail and will defeat the bully for good: ‘He will die.’

But such an outcome demands a sacrifice in return, or so it seems to this desperate and frightened child. Speaking to a teacher or telling his parents about the bullying is never an option in the mind of the boy. Indeed, he makes great efforts to hide his cuts, bruises and torn clothing from them. He keeps covered too the angry weals on his legs where his bare skin was thrashed with nettle stems on the way back from games. To complain, he tells himself, would only result in more severe persecution. Instead he communes with the marsh and bides his time.

I had fallen into the habit of talking to the marsh, aiming words under the motorway but firm in the belief that they were heard. Sometimes the marsh replied, but I could never remember what was said.

The boy, now a writer in London, returns to the Wirral for a few days and stays with his mother in the old family home which she shares with her new partner. The couple are due to move to another home in North Wales very shortly and the writer needs to sort through the many boxes of stuff stored in his old room. This is the detritus of his childhood and teens, the things accumulated by by a bright, sensitive youngster obsessed with film, horror and science fiction.

motorway_and_marshThe writer ponders his childhood, exploring his memories of his parents, school, the marsh and Him. He revisits some of his old haunts and takes polaroid snaps, several of which are reproduced in monochrome in the book. He walks to the Breck, a rocky outcrop in a disused quarry near his old home, a place which played a significant part in the battle against Him.

 

 

Nettles succeeds in capturing the very essence of the Wirral, its strangeness. It is a place between two estuaries, a peninsula facing the Welsh hills in one direction and Liverpool and the shores of the Mersey in the other. Not quite England and decidedly not Wales. It is a Viking outpost; its coast, semi-urban settlements, woodlands and marshes holding memories and nurturing myths. Adam Scovell delves into his own memories, but touches on something deeper, more universal. In doing so he gives us a hint, a brief glimpse, of that which lies beneath the primordial soil of the place he calls home.

Adam Scovell

authorAdam Scovell is a writer from Merseyside now based in London. He completed his PhD in Music at Goldsmiths in 2018. He has written for the BFI, Literary Hub, Financial Times, Little White Lies, and the BBC as well as many other outlets. He is the author of Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Auteur, 2017), Mothlight (Influx Press, 2019), and How Pale the Winter Has Made Us (Influx Press, 2020).

Nettles
Adam Scovell
Influx Press
April 2022
UK – £9.99 (paperback)
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Shalimar by Davina Quinlivan

Posted on 01/05/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – May 2022

Years on, the boy will think about the mangoes again when
his daughter is all grown up and he is seven decades old and
dying of cancer. He will know that his lungs are failing and
he is unable to cease the muddling of time and space, the
drifting through little corners of his unconscious. Waking
moments are gauzy vignettes fuelled by morphine. Childhood
memories swim up inside him like protective armour.

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Davina Quinlivan is a writer and lecturer whose background embraces a rich cultural heritage. Her extended family melds together strands from Burma, India, Ireland, Germany, Portugal and the Shan hill people of South-East Asia. Shalimar explores the history of this family, comprising forebears from Europe and Asia, and takes us through to Quinlivan’s present life in rural Devon with her partner and children. At the heart of the book, ever present even after his death, is the writer’s father.

Do ghosts breathe?

Quinlivan’s father lived in Burma until he was 18. His own father was a senior executive in the Burmah Oil Company. When the Japanese invaded in 1942 the whole family was interned. This experience, though never acknowledged or discussed with Quinlivan or other members of the family, stayed with her father for the rest of his life. It left him with agoraphobic tendencies and he always felt more comfortable staying indoors and sticking to set routines.

Once the Japanese left Burma, Quinlivan’s father was able to return to school at a monastery near Rangoon. But he was expelled from there for stealing mangoes from the sacred orchard; a life-changing encounter with forbidden fruit. He was sent to an American boarding school in Darjeeling, India and spent his school holidays with his older sister and her husband in Shalimar, where the husband was an engineer at the Shalimar Paint Company. This was a happy time for Quinlivan’s father, despite an extended bout of illness with typhoid fever.

Father

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After school he moved to England and worked in a number of factory jobs before he secured a post as a warehouse manager. He also met Quinlivan’s mother and they lived together at a number of addresses in West London. The writer was born in London and the family eventually settled in Hayes.

Years later, while Quinlivan was studying for her PhD, her father became ill with cancer. She and her music teacher husband, Dylan, were living with her parents in their small home at this time. They decided that the right thing to do was for them to move out in order to give her father the quiet and stillness in his daily routine that he seemed to need. It was also, she realised later, her own way of coping with the impending bereavement.

To be near Dylan’s work, but not too far from London, they rented a studio flat in a large old house in rural Surrey. This was a major culture shock for a city girl like Quinlivan, but life in the countryside was something that she gradually came to appreciate and embrace.

At a social and political level Shalimar is about race, colonialism and migration. At a more personal level it is an exploration of the meaning of family and home. Like the rest of us, Quinlivan’s life is an outflowing of the influences of her family history. Unlike most of us, she is able to express this profound truth in achingly beautiful prose:

Even if you pull a tree out of the ground, its roots will have threaded through the other trees around it and will go on providing a scaffolding to the living systems it has dwelled within for years to come.

Quinlivan moves from house to house across rural southern England, seemingly in search of her true home. Finally she settles in Devon, having lost her father and started a family of her own along the way. Much of Shalimar flows along with a dream-like quality and Quinlivan’s tale is peppered with symbolic objects: birds, plants, fruit, a bracelet of pigeons-blood rubies. She is a writer and lecturer about film and there is, indeed, a visual, cinematic quality to Quinlivan’s descriptions of people and places.

Shalimar is a fairly short book, but is by no means a flimsy one. Indeed, the story that Qunlivan tells lives on in the memory long after having read it. Her descriptions, and the places and people that she evokes, haunt one’s imagination.

 

Davina Quinlivan

authorDavina Quinlivan is the author of several books on cinema. She has taught at Kingston School of Art for over a decade and is a regular lecturer at The Freud Museum. She lives in Devon, with her family.

 

Shalimar
Davina Quinlivan
Little Toller Books
March 2022
UK – £16.00 (hardback)
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