2022/150: 21st Century Yokel — Tom Cox

Had they known me, they would have realised that ‘I wouldn’t try to go that way if I were you – it’s difficult’ is one of the three main motivational hiking phrases a person can say in my vicinity, along with ‘There’s a great pub at the apex of this route’ and ‘This hill is well known due to the coven which is said to have practised in the copse at its plateau during the middle of the seventeenth century.’ [loc. 151]

What I like most about Tom Cox's writing -- here, online, in Villager -- is the immensity of his enthusiasm for and curiosity about things. So many things: cats (obviously), music, otters, wood, woodlands, winter, scarecrows, pigs preparing for apocalypse, bat detectors, the sea, the sea ...

21st Century Yokel is a bit of a patchwork of anecdotes, rambling in more than one sense: there isn't a plot, except inasmuch as it's about going for long walks and getting your head together. There are hints of bad stuff in the past (divorce, quitting mainstream job) but it's mostly about the rabbitholes that his interests open up, and the ways in which the landscape affects him, and about his family (especially his dad, whose monologues are rendered in ALL CAPITALS, which can become slightly wearing). 21st Century Yokel made me, too, want to go for long walks and experience the eerieness of twilight on a deserted lane, or face down the sea to settle my mind.

This was self-published via Unbound, and it was good to see more than one friend's name in the list of sponsors.

2022/149: The Salt Path — Raynor Winn

The path had taught us that foot miles were different; we knew the distance, the stretch of space from one stop to the next, from one sip of water to the next, knew it in our bones, knew it like the kestrel in the wind and the mouse in his sight. Road miles weren’t about distance; they were just about time. [loc. 1991]

At the start of the book, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth lose their house: all their money's gone towards legal costs. Days later, Moth is diagnosed with an incurable, terminal, degenerative disease. Ray feels she can't go out and get a job if it means spending less time with her dying husband. So instead they decide to walk the South-West Coast Path, 630 miles from Minehead in Somerset to Poole in Dorset, via Devon and Lands End. (They initially hope to walk it in the other direction, with the easier parts first, but all the maps and guidebooks are geared towards the Minehead-to-Poole route.)

Quite an ambitious project for anyone, let alone a couple in their fifties, one of them dealing with terminal illness, both of them reeling from the loss of their home. Understandably, there are moments at which Ray becomes quite resentful of the perceived privilege of other walkers they encounter. There are also some scenes where human kindness is decidedly lacking: cafes charging for water, people shrinking away when Ray admits to being homeless. ('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.' [loc. 1438]) There are occasions, too, where Ray and Moth are desperate enough to steal: confectionary from a shop, an overnight campsite where they sneak out without paying. Balancing the grimmer moments, there is joy: watching a peregrine falcon, being mistaken for poet Simon Armitage (who was doing a well-publicised coastal walk at the same time), a nighttime swim. "...showers of white and silver dancing through the water, each swell sparkling with shattered, iridescent crystals of light. The moon, the source of it all, moving, swaying, refracted through the water to the sand and rock of the seabed... at eye level the water fizzed with the same light."

The walk is restorative both physically and mentally: the repetitive physical motion restores some of Moth's strength and muscle control, and Ray finds walking a meditative experience, helping her to accept rather than to rage at what she can't change. "Only one thing was real, more real to me now than the past that we’d lost or the future we didn’t have: if I put one foot in front of another, the path would move me forward." [loc. 2557]

I'd been wary of The Salt Path for two reaons: firstly because of its 'instant bestseller' status, which doesn't always reflect quality of prose or subject; and secondly, because my father wanted to walk the whole of the same coastal path (in sections), but degenerated too quickly to manage more than a couple of stretches. I was concerned that reading this would bring back the helpless sorrow I felt during his illness. It didn't: instead it made me miss long country walks, by the sea or otherwise. I doubt I would physically be able to do the coast path (breathing issues, especially on even the slightest incline) but I can certainly attempt some shorter routes on the flat. And I'll have a home to go back to -- which, I'm happy to say, Ray and Moth have too, by the end of the book. Their experience of homelessness showed how easily it can happen to anybody, and how little there is in the way of safety nets. And this was 2013, when things were not quite as bad ...

Fulfills the ‘read in November’ rubric of the 52 books in 2022 challenge.

2022/148: Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials — Alice Roberts

Man had emerged from the Ice Age to become a weapon of mass extinction. Here we were, divorcing ourselves from Nature, wreaking havoc with the climate, and crucifying biodiversity. [loc. 1692]

Alice Roberts examines seven burials, ranging from the 'Red Lady' of Paviland (34,000 years ago), via the Amesbury Archer (4,500 years ago) and the Pocklington chariot burial (2,300 years ago), to the cremation -- very unusual for the time -- of archaeologist Pitt-Rivers (120 years ago). She uses these examples to discuss the waves of migration, and the 'restlessness', of the past, and to explore ideas about race, gender and culture. There is evidence of cannibalism in human remains from the Cheddar Gorge, dating back 10,000 years: but was it cannibalism in a time of starvation, or cannibalism for religious purposes, or something else? Chariot burials were usually associated with male warriors, but of the burials where biological (osteological) sex could be determined, nearly a third are female. Perhaps women were warriors -- think of Boudicca, of Cartimandua -- or perhaps these were women living as men, or perhaps ... something else.

As in Buried, there's a lot of archaeogenetics here. Roberts writes of the Thousand Ancient Genomes project at the Crick Institute, which aimed to sequence a thousand ancient genomes: unfortunately this was put on hold at the start of the Covid pandemic. (They've started to publish results this year, for instance '1,000 ancient genomes uncover 10,000 years of natural selection in Europe'.) I was intrigued by the genetic analysis showing that 'the people who lived in Britain before the Bronze Age didn’t contribute much ancestry to later populations', and by evidence of the yersinia pestis (Black Death) bacterium in human remains dating back to the Bronze Age. Roberts is at pains to emphasise, though, that genetics can only provide the bigger picture: archaeology fills in the smaller details, the remains of individual lives. She writes movingly of lifting a pottery bowl out of a child's grave: 'Human experience is built of moments – and here were two, linked together across millennia. The moment I lifted the bowl out of the grave, my hands earthy from digging; the moment the potter (the mourner, the parent?) held the bowl in their hands, making that corded pattern, their hands covered in clay.' [loc. 3357].

At first, the inclusion of the Pitt-Rivers 'burial' seemed an awkward fit with the other burials here: but it gives Roberts an opportunity to discuss, in more relatable terms, the cultural trappings of a burial. When Pitt-Rivers was cremated, it was only fifteen years since the first cremation in Britain: burial in a graveyard -- inhumation -- was by far the most popular option, and the one deemed acceptable by the Christian church. Roberts suggests that Pitt-Rivers was not especially religious. He clearly didn't believe in bodily resurrection, and perhaps his archaeological career had 'lift[ed] him out of his contemporary culture'. Cremation now accounts for nearly 80% of 'mortuary rites', although it is astonishingly un-green. ('Each cremated body results in 400 kilograms of CO2 emissions – about the same as burning two tanks of diesel in an SUV. Toxic mercury vapour from tooth fillings also escapes into the atmosphere from the chimneys of crematoria. [loc. 4985])

A fascinating and deeply humane book, well-written, with a distinctive voice and a wealth of incidental detail. I'm almost tempted to watch some of Roberts' TV work ...

2022/147: Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain — Matthew Green

These are Winchelsea’s ghost streets. The sight of the seven-hundred-year-old New Gate marooned at the southern end of the old town makes the soul quiver; there it stands forlorn, a stranded portal to a lost world. [p. 110]

In the years after the Brexit referendum and Trump's ascent, Green's life was changed by personal losses. He became 'determined to discover how [the] country had been shaped by absences', and set out to explore eight 'lost' settlements in Great Britain, from the Neolithic settlement Skara Brae, abandoned around 2500BC, to Capel Celyn, levelled and flooded to create a reservoir in 1965. Shadowlands is his account of visits to Dunwich, Old Winchelsea, Saint Kilda and the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy, and the factors contributing to each place's demise -- weather, plague, politics and piracy, war gaming, the post-war economic boom -- as well as the human responses. Some fled their homes, fearing the wrath of God; some went up against faceless bureaucracies; some hung on til the grim end. Some never left at all.

Green explains that 'this book is written in the minor key': it's about waste as much as destruction, 'squandered potential', not only economic and physical ruin but the heartfelt loss of hearth and home. I learnt quite a bit, especially about the rise and fall of Winchelsea, attacked seven times by the French and the Castilians between 1360 and 1389, and breeding a fair few pirates itself. Some of the vignettes, lives brought into sharp focus in a few lines of prose, were decidedly melancholy, and others gloriously defiant.

Shadowlands could have done with an eagle-eyed editor: as Green sometimes contradicts himself or misremembers facts (on page 53 he writes of medieval Wales as 'a patchwork of princedoms – twenty-two at their peak' and further down the same page 'the various warring princedoms of Wales – eighteen at their peak'); elsewhere he writes of salt as one of the items the inhabitants of St Kilda couldn't readily produce -- whyever not? They lived on an island surrounded by salt water. But this was, despite occasional glitches, an immensely absorbing and engaging book. Green's good at balancing his own emotional reactions, and his modern perspective, against his sense of a place and his research into its history. I especially liked his phrase 'the presence of absence', the sense of emptiness we feel in a place that has been populous but now is not. The Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Ruin', which Green quotes in his Introduction, evokes that magnificently:

Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls,
high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude,
many a meadhall full of festivity,
until Fate the mighty changed that.

2022/146: In the Eye of the Wild — Nastassja Martin (translated by Sophie R Lewis)

Leaving the therapy center, I raise an exhausted face to the white sun. Did I need that? Once again I will have to look deeply into myself. I think of the bear. If he’s alive, at least he is living his bear life free from attacks like this, symbolic and actual, without paying this price. [loc. 600]

In 2015 Nastassja Martin, a French anthropologist who was studying the indigenous Evens in Siberia, was attacked by a bear. She spent a long time in hospital in Petropavlovsk: later, she was repatriated to Paris, where French surgeons redid the work of the Russian doctors (introducing a life-threatening infection) and French therapists urged her to confront her hostility and inner darkness. Her response: 'Why must I bring everything back to myself?' She returned to Siberia, to her Even friends, finding their animist philosophy more acceptable and more compelling than the 'Western' narrative of sacrifice, symbolism, and interpretation. Which is not to say that the Evens were universally accepting: they believed the bear meant to mark her, not kill her, and that surviving the attack had made her medka, someone who lives between the worlds.

Poetic and philosophical, yet also rather unsettling. I felt that despite her comfortable familiarity with the Evens, and her sense of alienation whilst in France with her mother and sister, she was trying to have the best of both worlds: she mythologises the encounter with the bear ('I had marked out the path that would lead me into the bear’s mouth, to his kiss, long ago. I think: who knows, perhaps he had too'), and her honest, raw account of the healing process often feels dismissive of those around her. The nature of her relationships with the Evens is not really clear, either, because the focus is so firmly on her own interior life. There's very little about their culture, their beliefs, or what they think about having a French anthropologist embedded in their village. (And yet, and yet: one of them, having a premonition that Nastassja was in trouble, travelled a hundred kilometres to a place where he could get a mobile signal -- and learned of her encounter via a text message she persuaded someone to send for her.) I'd have liked more about Kamchatka: the wilderness, the people, the culture, the uneasy balance between the Evens and the 'Russians'. But that is not the book that Martin needed to write. In the Eye of the Wild is about alienation: about living between two worlds, not quite part of either, and there is some powerful writing here, with a distinctive voice.

Fulfils the ‘in translation’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2022/145: When We Cease to Understand the World — Benjamín Labatut (translated by Adrian Nathan West)

He had replicated in the subatomic world what Newton had done for the solar system, using only pure mathematics, with no recourse to imagery. He had no idea how he had arrived at his results, but there they were, written in his own hand; if he was correct, science could not only understand reality but begin to manipulate it at its most basic level. Heisenberg thought of the consequences knowledge of this nature might have, and was struck with a feeling of vertigo so profound that he had to restrain the impulse to throw his notebook into the sea. [loc. 1199]

In this 'nonfiction novel', Chilean author Benjamín Labatut explores the darkness at the heart of science, and the tipping-point between genius and madness. What happens to the mind when scientific theories passes the limits of human understanding?

The book is in five sections. The first, 'Prussian Blue', is a more or less solid, non-fictional discussion of the discovery of hydrogen cyanide, which 'yielded a blue of such beauty that Diesbach thought he had discovered hsbd-iryt, the original colour of the sky—the legendary blue used by the Egyptians to adorn the skin of their gods' -- and also yielded Zyklon-B, the gas used to murder millions in Nazi death camps. 'Schwartzchild's Singularity' is more fictionalised, and deals with the existential dread felt by the dying physicist who, having deduced the possibility of black holes, feared that something equally horrific could result from a sufficient concentration of human will. 'The Heart of the Heart' is about mad, or differently sane, mathematicians, Mochizuki and Grothendieck; 'When We Cease to Understand the World' fictionalises (and surrealises) the intellectual duel between Heisenberg and Schrodinger, who independently created competing theories of quantum mechanics. And 'The Night Gardener' focuses on another mathematician who abandoned his career after realising that 'it was mathematics — not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon — which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant'. Here the author enters the book, becoming a direct narrator, interacting with -- but perhaps not fully understanding -- the night gardener.

This was not an easy read, but it was curiously compelling: it blended scientific concepts (which I believe are rendered faithfully) with the human frailties of the men who experienced those epiphanic revelations. (No female scientists here: are they less prone to such frailties?) When We Cease to Understand the World also resonated, uncomfortably, with the part of me that fears a vast, uncaring, violent universe, and used to have nightmares about falling into the void... Some really fascinating(ly horrific) details, too, like the cyanide capsules handed out by schoolchildren after a 1945 Wagner concert in Berlin: 'in small wicker baskets, like votive offerings at Mass.'

A beautiful translation from the Spanish: I felt a distinct flavour of the original language, though I'm not sure whether this is an artifact of phrasing and syntax, or a deliberate choice by the translator, or my own imagination.

Does not fulfil the ‘non-fiction in translation’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, though I'd started reading it in the belief that it would: while the first section is non-fiction, the 'creative' elements became clearer in later chapters. "This is a work of fiction based on real events. The quantity of fiction grows throughout the book; whereas “Prussian Blue” contains only one fictional paragraph, I have taken greater liberties in the subsequent texts, while still trying to remain faithful to the scientific concepts discussed in each of them." [loc. 2205]

2022/144: Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain — Alice Roberts

The idea of British culture (and the British population) being enriched by all these civilising influences – bringing farming, metalworking, Roman civilisation and the rest – is a colonialist construction: the incomers are a Good Thing. But this origin myth – the idea of civilising influences spreading from the east – is balanced against another in which indigenous culture evolves, with a home-grown hero like Boudica pitted against a tyrannical regime.[loc. 3670]

Alice Roberts examines several unusual burials from Roman and medieval times, and uses them to illustrate the diversity and the history of the first millennium AD in Britain. As she writes, these are 'the traces of ordinary lives, and people whose stories were never written down': there's a fair amount of speculation here in these very human stories, like the man buried with a pipe poking out of the earth above the grave, which may have its roots in Greek Orthodox tradition: wine, or blood, may have been poured down the pipe as a way of including the deceased in a graveside feast. (Apparently this custom was also practiced in Soviet Russia.)

Roberts explains, clearly and without jargon, the intricacies of determining gender and biological sex from burials, and how it's important not to project modern cultural concepts onto the dead. Early archaeologists had a tendency to assign sex and gender based on grave goods (brooches for women, swords for men) but osteoarchaeology shows that there isn't a definite correlation between the biological sex of a skeleton -- where it can be determined: the majority can't -- and the goods in their grave. Roberts mentions a number of theories: heirloom jewellery in a man's grave; jewellery worn by men and women alike; individuals biologically male living as female, and vice versa.

Some of the burials discussed here are poignant, such as the remains of a very young child (perhaps a late foetus) which had been dismembered, most likely during obstetric surgery. There are lethal acts of violence, too, with little care being taken over the interment of the bodies: decapitated corpses, possibly victims of 'headhunting' or of superstitions about the walking dead, and a group of 'foreigners' found in a ditch in Anglesey, their bones revealing that they came from as far away as Scandinavia, to be executed with considerable violence.

The mention of 'foreigners' is deliberate: Roberts is interested in the narratives of waves of invasion in the post-Roman period -- 'Gildas, Bede and then the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle present this picture of a Roman, Christian culture destroyed by pagan, Saxon culture' -- and argues that it's more likely to have been peaceful migration, or at least assimilation of raiders. And she's keen to emphasise that there have always been migrants, and always been people whose families have lived in the same place for a long time, and that these two groups have intermixed over the centuries.

Highly readable, with clear explanations of the cutting-edge science of archaeogenetics, and a pleasing balance between the raw data of archaeology and its human context. Even before I'd finished reading Buried I'd started on Alice Roberts' more recent book, Ancestors: review soon.

2022/143: A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome — Emma Southon

No other society has built media empires on such mountains of dead and mutilated women. But, to us, the Romans look like the weird ones because they were fascinated by murder in a different way. We have our mountains of dead fictional girls. But they had mountains of dead real men. [loc. 85]

Murder in Ancient Rome came in many forms, and Southon explores them all: the 'social death' of enslaved persons, which meant that their actual deaths were trivial; the infamous murders of assorted emperors (I did not know that Claudius was the only Emperor to have been poisoned); death as spectacle in the arena; ritual murder and sacrifice; the high rate of infant mortality, and whether all those dead babies were killed deliberately or not.

The book also examines the ways in which the empire became increasingly corrupt, the emperors kings in all but name, and the vast inequalities at the heart of Rome: rich men at the top, women (even wealthy aristocrats) almost invisible and almost powerless, a 'middle class' of commoners, and an underclass of enslaved people who were, well, barely people. I was appalled by the existence of professional firms who 'offered bespoke punishment of enslaved people and execution services for the busy enslaver who didn’t have the time to do his own killings'. ("Probably the best insight you’ll ever get into the mundane reality of a slave state like Rome and how little the lives of individuals meant to it," notes Southon.) There are also accounts of especially barbaric murders by aristocrats of their slaves. Between these and the public enjoyment of staged violence in gladiatorial contests, and the thousand-year existence of a state founded on the dehumanising of the enslaved, it's easy to conclude that the Romans did not feel empathy: and it's also unsettling to realise that all those historical novels about free persons forming strong friendships with their slaves are, at best, portraying an exceptional occurrence.

The Romans had 'a unique and deep-seated cultural horror of murder within the family', or rather the familia: 'one’s whole immediate and extended family, plus people who have been enslaved, plus formerly enslaved people who have been freed who now have a limited kind of freedom but are still around and share the family name, plus any random men who might have been adopted in...' The murders that 'mattered' were those of wealthy, important men: but Southon also describes the few surviving accounts of murdered women. ('These women are only visible to us because their male relatives had enough social status and money to cause an imperial level fuss.') Wives murdered by husbands for getting in the way of the husband's wickedness; wives and daughters murdered to make a political point, or to punish the family or familia of a man who'd fallen from favour.

Southon's colloquial voice and willingness to poke fun at the mores of Roman society may not suit everybody, but it does make A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum extremely readable. But what she is writing about is violent and appalling, and though she is both furious and intellectually critical about Roman society, and its foundation of death and suffering, there are moments when the humour feels a little off-key.

Fulfils the ‘Recommendation’ rubric (thanks, Kate!) of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.