Book Review 2 - Walking with Laurie Lee & Others
This post comes off the back of my recent ramble about why I walk and what it means to me. I’ve, for no better reason than it’s tidy and satisfying, bracketed my love of walking with my love for books. Below I will talk about a few books that are linked by their wayfarer characters and my fondness for them. I’m going to start with Laurie’s Lee enjoyable “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning” and then move onto past reads. This is going to include a beautiful book tracing Virginia Wolf in Sussex, a whole life spent in the mountains and finally a ramble in Suffolk.
It goes without saying - this is not an exhaustive explanation or the definitive list of good books on walking. I have excluded, from my own favourites - Edmund White’s "“The Flaneur”, Lauren Elkin’s “Flâneuse” (a wonderful rebuke to the male ownership of flaneuring) & Olivia Laing’s book “The Lonely City” in which she discusses her experience of loneliness in New York and how she, in part, used solitary walking to both embrace and overcome this. It is also impossible to exclude Walter Benjamin, the Berlin born but Parisian narrator, who invented the idle city walker. And then there is Virginia Wolf herself who under the whimsical guise of buying a pencil declared, in prose -
“As if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter - rambling the streets of London”
And I could keep going.
“I felt it was for this I had come: to wake at dawn on a hillside and look out on a world for which I had no words, to start at the beginning, speechless and without plan, in a place that still had no memories for me.”
Laurie Lee does beautiful things with words and imaginary. He has a capacity to create a collective memory, to reach into your youth and pull from it the boundless adventures and hopefulness. His walk becomes a shared experience and as you start reading this slip of a book you are next to him. The narrative starts with Lee leaving home to discover the world, his mother - rarely mentioned again - stands silently as Lee disappears from Stroud, that June sun soaked day, and walks to Spain. He does not go straight to Spain, both in the figurative and literal sense. His only push is a freedom, newly acquired, to go where he will. And this is a book about a young man’s will to walk alone and to embrace all that life might offer him. Throughout the journey are threads of humour - his first night is spent under rain in a ditch. In part it is this boyish uselessness that holds this book together, not all the narrative is as captivating as I’d like it to be.
Lee is not exceptional at anything but what he does - walk across the UK, embark on an equally jaunty stroll across Spain, return home and then escape again, via the French mountains, to Spain during the Civil War - is quite something. It is sometimes difficult to remember this. The limitations of this book being non-fiction were at times quite frustrating. I wanted more than the warm drunken evenings, repeated over chapters and for something just a little bit, well, more fictional to come up. Which is odd given that in the space of a year he traversed most of Spain, survived the fledgling rumbles of war, learnt Spanish, lived with a famous poet, ate amongst strangers and reliably got up the following morning to walk twenty or more miles. At the heart of this book is the familiar calming lope of Lee. That lope is transported to us through Lee’s story telling, with all the pace and velvety warmth of a Dylan Thomas poem.
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Olivia Laing’s ‘To The River’ isn’t actually about walking, instead it is - at least on the surface - about water and specifically the Ouse in Sussex. This is where Virginia Woolf made her final and successful attempt on her life. Olivia Laing walks along the entirety of the river and in doing so unpacks the life and immense life force that Woolf was. In an odd way Laing is able, by making Woolf’s suicide the central theme, to liberate her story from one of unrequited happiness to one of beauty and intelligence. We begin to see the way that personal narratives, like a river’s path, aren’t straightforward or as clear as we imagine they might be - instead it ebbs and flows, this simplistic analogy holds. What this book offers is a meditation on the power of the human heart to splinter and continue, or not continue. And then there is the beauty of the walk that Laing has committed to. She is a wonderful guide. Her midsummer walk is exquisite and lyrical. We have clear fields, cows hoofing across the pages, country pubs and balmy evenings.
I read ‘To The River’ after I finished W G Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’, at the time they felt like familiar bedfellows. It is with hindsight that I can see their differences with more focus than their similarities. Sebald is mischievous and lugubrious where Laing is poetic and gladdening. However, both go on long detours through history, both lean on modern literary works and both understand the way in which place frames narratives. Also, in an odd reverse, Sebald is the one - despite the walk starting after a new-found post-illness freedom - who falls more readily into melancholy and introspection. Whereas Laing who is, at the start of the novel, facing a number of personal crises comes across as embracing of the world’s capacity to delight.
My last book is a small work of fiction called ‘A Whole Life’ by Robert Seethaler. This is a novel that I would implore everybody to read. It is calm, beautiful and a balm. The quote below gives you a sense of what it will give you -
“He couldn’t remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn’t know where he would go. But he could look back without regret on the time in between, his life, with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement.””
This is the story of man and his whole life. It is a simple life that is extraordinary only in the sense that it is, by its very nature, uniquely his. At its core - or maybe at the core of my reading of it - are his walks across the Austrian mountains. These are not for pleasure, they are functional. Neither are these walks similar to the walks of Virginia Woolf, and yet the results - a sort of returning to yourself and a deeper understanding - are familiar, walking is often how we communicate with ourselves and to the world around us. As the narrator works the land the nineteenth century undulates around him. Though this is not a novel noting the brave new dawn that slipped over the world during that period. Rather, this novel is an exploration on how a man embraces and works with the harshness of his surroundings, often the enemy are people not weather fronts. But despite this brutality the narrative is full of human kindness and our capacity to embrace beauty. This is a novel about the joy of being alive, right now.
