2011

Mind, Body, Forest, French: 3 non-fiction reads for #ABookADayInMay

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I’ve been getting my reading done for A Book A Day in May, but not very good at fitting in writing about the books – so today we have a triple whammy. And the last three books I’ve read have all been non-fiction (and all books I’d started before the days in question).

The Immune Mind

The Immune Mind (2024) by Dr Monty Lyman

Monty is a friend of mine, and I always make sure I read a friend’s first book – but he is also a brilliant writer, which is why this is his third and I’m still pre-ordering copies. The first two were on skin and pain, and the third is on the links between the mind and the body in health – specifically between the brain, the immune system, and microbes in the gut.

This is one of those areas which feels like less of a surprise the less you know? I know basically nothing about medical science (or any science), and would have merrily assumed that the mind and body were closely interlinked in health. We all know that being ill makes us feel sad and cross, and we know that feeling low is a time when you always seem to get ill – we use terms like ‘being run down’ to cover both. But apparently this sort of casual chat was not transferred to science – until recently.

The reality is that there is no mental disorder that is not also physical, and most physical diseases have some mental element to them. We have been trained to pigeonhole disease into either one or the other, even to the extent that we visit one hospital for the body and another for the mind. I know from my experience as a doctor that there are both implicit and explicit pressures to force patients down the grooves of either ‘physical’ or ‘mental’, evem when it is clear that neither is a perfect fit.

As Monty Lyman makes clear, this is an exciting area of medical science where things are starting to change. People are beginning to challenge long-held separations between mind and body, and increasing research is being conducted into the ways our mental health and our immune system affect each other. As one snapshot, a woman with severe allergies was shown a plastic flower – and not only responded badly in my mind, but also in her physical symptoms: the brain’s expectations affect the body’s defence mechanisms.

The first part of this book explores in depth what lies behind the immune system and behind the brain’s defences, and starts to look at how these crossover. Monty Lyman explains everything very well – I don’t know if it’s just because we’re friends, but it feels like he is cheerfully encouraging me along through the more densely scientific bits. It’s more challenging that skin and pain, because I instinctively understand what those are, even if I wouldn’t have a clue how to describe or define them. The immune system? That’s further from my grasp.

As The Immune Mind continues, I enjoyed myself more and more – the case studies are really helpful for illuminating Monty’s arguments. And you can’t say he isn’t game in his research. At one point he makes himself deliberating ill, and another time takes something that causes depression. He’s immersed! As with his other books, there is a compassion and empathy to his writing that makes it feel so much more than a scientific treatise. Again, I don’t think it’s just because I know he’s a good, kind man – it is evident there on the page. Particularly when he discusses people with long-term illnesses, there is great care as well as knowledge.

In the final section, The Immune Mind has advice for how to foster good microbial health, good mental health, and good non-inflammatory health. Monty Lyman is clear that this isn’t a work of self-help – but I appreciate that he doesn’t want to leave something with such potential, personal impact as theory alone. (I’m making a list of the number of different plants I eat this week – will I make it to the target of 30? I was surprised to find that I’m on 18 after three days, so fingers crossed.)

It’s a fascinating book, beautifully written – and I believe Brits can hear some it excerpted on Radio 4 this week, fyi.

Book summary: Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson - Live Wildly

Consolations of the Forest (2011) by Sylvain Tesson

There’s some nominative determinism for you! Consolations of the Forest by Sylvain Tesson – translated from French by Linda Coverdale – is subtitled ‘alone in a cabin in the Middle Taiga’. If, like me, you don’t know where Middle Taiga is – it’s in Siberia. This isn’t a balmy woodland retreat: Tesson went to spend six months in temperatures a long way below freezing, with ever-present dangers including bears. Why? The opening paragraph dryly suggests that it is to get away from the capitalist indulgence of a supermarket shelf having fifteen types of ketchup. Later on, he gives a list:

Reasons why I’m living alone in a cabin

I talked too much
I wanted silence
Too behind with my mail and too many people to see
I was jealous of Crusoe
It’s better heated than my place in Paris
Tired of running errands
So I can scream and live naked
Because I hate the telephone and traffic noise

Consolations of the Forest takes the form of diary entries over the time he is ‘alone’. I was surprised by how very many visitors he had. There were people in similar cabins about four or five hours’ walk in two different directions, there to deter poachers or similar, and he would sometimes trudge off to see them – but there are any number of Russians passing by who pop in to drink vodka and make crude jokes. At one point there’s even an American tourist. I felt sometimes like I am more alone in my flat than Tesson was in his cabin.

There are beautiful descriptions of unabashed wilderness in this book, and some people would find his account very interesting. I’ll admit that I did find it a bit hard to warm to the book. I think of similar ventures like Nell Stevens’ in Bleaker House (on Bleaker in the Falkland Islands) which I absolutely loved – and I think that was because she was freer with her foibles, more willing to reveal her practical and emotional struggles. Tesson leans more into philosophy. He is – how else to say it? – very French.

Our fellow men confirm the reality of the world. If you close your eyes in the city, what a relief it is that reality doesn’t erase itself: others can still perceive it! The hermit is alone in the face of nature. As the sole consciousness contemplating reality, he bears the burden of the representation of the world, its revelation before the human gaze.

I was quite happy to keep reading Consolations of the Forest through to the end, but some slight spark was missing in it for me. Interesting, but not quite up my street.

When in French: Love in a Second Language [Book]

When in French (2016) by Lauren Collins

Speaking of French – here’s a book I started ages ago, and somehow forgot to continue, all about French. Specifically, it is about Lauren’s experience being married to a Frenchman, Olivier. They met in England (she is American), and moved to Geneva, a French-speaking part of Switzerland. It is essentially asks the question: what is it like to love across a language barrier?

I was nervous, the usual anxieties a person has about whether or not her boyfriend’s family will like her overlaid with uncertainty as to whether, in the fog of language, they’d even be able to make out the right person to like or not.

In amidst that question is a huge amount of other research – are people different in their second languages? Can you be your true self when you are learning a language? Can goats have regional accents? (Yes, it turns out.) It’s an ambitious amount to cover in a book that is also a more straightforward memoir of living abroad, struggling to acclimatise, losing some of yourself, finding triumphs and humour in the everyday.

We spoke to each other in endearments. My darling, my love, mon amour, ma chérie, poussin, mouton, bébé. This was new to me, not characteristic. The word baby, applied to anyone over two, had always seemed like the adult diaper of endearments.

“Mon amour,” he’d say. “Pass me the salt?”

I’d yell across a store, trying to get his attention: “Bébé! Over here, in dairy products.”

People we knew, I think, made fun of us. What they didn’t know was that we couldn’t say each other’s names.

There are two very real people at the heart of the book, in Lauren and Olivier. Olivier is admittedly harder to read, and I’m not sure he comes across quite as Lauren sees him. As I’ve already mentioned this month, I love non-fiction where memoir and autobiography intermingle. I think I’d have preferred the balance in When in French to lean slightly more towards memoir, but that’s perhaps because the worlds of language and identity are so vast that you can only really scrape the surface on an objective level. The subjective is slightly easier to package.

I’d definitely recommend the book – and feel some personal triumph that my Duolingo French lessons have enabled me to translate most of the (easy) French she peppers into the story. It’s fun, thoughtful and honest.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka #ABookADayInMay No.19

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The Buddha in the Attic: Julie Otsuka: Amazon.co.uk: Otsuka, Julie: 9780241956489: Books

I think I picked up The Buddha in the Attic (2011) at a day that Penguin ran for book bloggers back in 2013 and it has survived numerous culls of my shelves since then on account of its brevity. It’s only 129 pages, I thought. It doesn’t take up much room on the shelf, and surely I’ll manage to read it one day. Ten years later, that day has come!

The Buddha in the Attic is a historical novel about a time between the World Wars where Japanese women would be shipped from Japan to America to meet with their husbands. Not people they had married back in Japan, but new husbands – Japanese men who had already emigrated; people they had exchanged letters and photographs with, each side selling their end of the bargain. The man would make promises about economic opportunities; the woman would talk about her capabilities and beauty. The photos, they learned, were often old or even of other people. The letters were written by other people, filled with lies.

In the first chapter we are aboard the boat, and the opening paragraph shows the technique that Otsuka uses that makes this novella so unusual and, to my mind, so successful.

On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years-faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.

Throughout the book, the pronoun is always ‘we’. Even if the incidents are clearly individual and unique, the narrator will say either ‘we’, ‘some of us’, or, occasionally, ‘one of us’. There are sections that go through so many different scenarios with a lilting, poetic repetition.

Home was a cot in one of their bunkhouses at the Fair Ranch in Yolo. Home was a long tent beneath a leafy plum tree at Kettleman’s. Home was a wooden shanty in Camp No. 7 on the Barnhart Tract out in Lodi. Nothing but rows of onions as far as the eyes can see. Home was a bed of straw in John Lyman’s barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse at Stockton’s Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us.

And so on and so on. Otsuka’s aim is to give the reader a whole sweep of experience – a whole generation of these young Japanese women. They mostly suffer hardship, whether that be thankless jobs, violent husbands, racism from white Americans, or simply a sense of hopelessness. At no point does an individual emerge as the heroine – rather, the heroine is the whole group. It is an intriguingly collectivist point of view, where almost every novel is an exercise in individualism. What an ambitious undertaking and, to my mind, it works really well.

I had to reconsider what I expected from a fictional narrative. Almost nobody is named, and there is no arc of individual narrative, and so I had to embrace a structure made of infinite variety. And somehow it is still compelling. I’m not sure it would have worked over a much longer book, but at novella-length it is a real success.

A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz

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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that Janeites will read anything about Jane Austen – and it’s also a truth universally acknowledged that this opening ‘bit’ is wildly overused. Sorry about that. Anyway, I can’t remember exactly where I heard about A Jane Austen Education (2011) by William Deresiewicz, but I was delighted when my friend Malie got it for my birthday last year. It seemed like the right sort of book for all this *gestures at world* – and I was sucked in straight away by this opening paragraph:

I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life. That she’d been dead for a couple of hundred years made not the slightest difference whatsoever. Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.

It’s rare to find a man writing a non-academic book about Austen, and Deresiewicz certainly owns up to some masculine prejudice at the outset. He was a graduate student at an American university, doing a six-year PhD programme. Apparently specialising comes quite late in the day in American PhDs, so the first years were spent covering a lot of literary ground – and that included reading Jane Austen. Deresiewicz was much more concerned with the big men of American fiction, and didn’t want to bother with the quiet manners that he perceived he’d find in Austen. Starting with Emma.

At first, he hates it. He hates Emma’s poor decision making and small world. Still more, he hates the boring Miss Bates and the interminable Mr Woodhouse. But he gradually realised that they were meant to be boring and interminable – and a whole lot more than that too, of course. It is the famous Box Hill scene that finally changed this mind.

And that was when I finally understood what Austen had been up to all along. Emma’s cruelty, which I was so quick to criticise, was nothing, I saw, but the mirror image of my own. The boredom and contempt that the book aroused were not signs of Austen’s ineptitude; they were the exact responses she wanted me to have. She had incited them, in order to expose them. By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face. I couldn’t deplore Emma’s disdain for Miss Bates, or her boredom with the whole commonplace Highbury world, without simultaneously condemning my own.

This passage does also reveal one of the few issues I had with A Jane Austen Education – that Deresiewicz leans a little too heavily on the idea of discovering ‘the’ point that Austen was trying to make, rather than landing on one particular interpretation. His moments of revelation are nuanced and intriguing – like Northanger Abbey helping him realise he should ask better questions, or Mansfield Park making him a better listener – but I wish he had more openly recognised that there is no singular conclusion that can come from any novel. As a PhD in literature, he surely knows this full well.

Through the book, each of Austen’s novels gets a chapter – his reading of the book going alongside his own life, including failed relationships (romantic and otherwise), stalled academic work, and a difficult engagement with his father who wanted a different career path for his son. I love books that interweave the personal and the interpretive. This has become increasingly the way that creative non-fiction is written, and I think it has enriched the genre no end; A Jane Austen Education is perhaps most similar to Nell Stevens’ wonderful Mrs Gaskell and Me, though without a particularly biographical slant to his writing. I would have welcomed even more autobiography, but he is excellent at intertwining literary criticism and self revelation. I’d love to know more suggestions in this genre.

Over the course of the book, Deresiewicz goes from an Austen sceptic to regarding her as his favourite author – and the reader, who probably started far further down that spectrum, can forgive him his early hesitancy. I loved seeing his unusual perspectives on the novel, learning about him, and marvelling again at the way that Austen speaks across the centuries in a way that very few other authors have managed or are likely to manage. And, like all of Austen’s heroines, Deresiewicz’s journey through A Jane Austen Education isn’t in learning more about literature or the people around him – it’s a journey to better understand himself, and start changing where he needs to change.

Dancing With Mrs Dalloway by Celia Blue Johnson

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I always wonder at the wisdom of including specific books/authors/characters in the titles of books about books. In case you’re thinking “Simon, surely that doesn’t happen very often”, I can think of a few other examples – Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch, Dear Farenheit 451 by Annie Spence, Nabokov’s Butterfly by Rick Gekoksi. I have actually read all of those, and particularly loved Sankovitch’s book, but I did have to get over the barrier that I’m not particularly interested in Tolstoy. As it turns out, he only gets a brief mention – the book is really about reading a book a day for a year, to process grief. Anybody who read it because they love Tolstoy would probably be disappointed.

Why do people keep doing these titles? I don’t know. But Celia Blue Johnson’s book Dancing With Mrs Dalloway (2011) is another example – the subtitle, ‘stories of the inspiration behind great works of literature’, is a far more accurate representation of what’s in the book. Mrs Dalloway is just one of the 50 books that Johnson discusses, in short chapters that look at the genesis of the works in question.

It’s a fascinating premise for a collection, and there has obviously been an awful lot of research – or at least an awful lot of opening an author’s biography and paraphrasing a section from it. She has divided them into fairly meaningless categories (“in the telling”, “catch me if you can”, etc.), but basically it’s a random order. They range significantly, from authors who fictionalised people they knew to those who ‘saw’ the story in a dream. The prosaic truth is that most authors just have an idea and then slog away at it, but Johnson does an excellent job at making the book really interesting, even from the less promising accounts. I think it’s probably because the sections are short – we don’t have time to get bored.

The selection of books is a good range of classics, and a who’s who of books I should probably have already read (I’ve only read 20 of the 50). It maybe leans a little towards American literature, but there is a good international showing – I suspect nobody would feel short-changed about what’s included. And if any of the tid-bits particularly catch your eye, then there are further reading suggestions at the end. Basically, what’s not to like?

 

25 Books in 25 Days: #23 Virginia Woolf

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I’ve read a fair few biographies of (and books about) Virginia Woolf, but somehow I always keep going back for more. I’ve also met Alexandra Harris once or twice over the years, so it was sort of inevitable that one day I’d read Virginia Woolf (2011) by Alexandra Harris, published in a rather lovely hardback, and which I found in Brighton a year or two ago.

Considering how many long books have been written about Woolf, I wasn’t sure how Harris would get her complex and significant life into 170 pages. But what a staggering achievement Virginia Woolf is – this isn’t just the essentials (though it includes that); somehow, miraculously, Harris has still accompanied those with insights into the literature and a wonderful freshness to the whole thing. It steers between the Hermione Lee school of biography (every footstep requires three footnotes) and the ‘She must have felt…’ school of biography – into something approachable, concise, and extremely thoughtful.

Having read it today, I’m still not sure how Harris managed to get so much into so few pages. There are certainly books that get more treatment than others – Orlando gets a lot; A Room of One’s Own is rushed past – but nothing felt completely overlooked. There’s even a chapter on the afterlifes of Woolf, and how the publishing of her letters and diaries, and various biographies about her, have helped shape her reputation. Virginia Woolf is a brilliant starting point for anybody interested in her life and work – but, what is more, it’s also a vital and beautiful book for even the dyed-in-the-Woolf reader, however much they’ve already read about her.

25 Books in 25 Days: #5 Blow Up the Castle

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When I was in Canada last year, Darlene kindly gave me a couple of books – one of which was Blow Up the Castle (2011) by Margaret Moffatt. You can read Darlene’s thoughts about it on her blog; in brief, it’s about three vicars with very similar names (Peabody, Peacock, and Peasly) and tells of their lives. It’s more or less a collection of short anecdotes or witty events, rather than a novel as such, set in 1930s England.

In amongst all the little jokes and curious events, I have to put a word in for somebody mistakenly entering ‘The Lost Slipper’ into an art competition to depict The Last Supper…

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

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I’ve now read three books by Jon Ronson – the first two being So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Men Who Stare at Goats – but the first one I heard of was The Psychopath Test (2011). I seem to remember my brother reading it, or perhaps my friend Mel – either way, it appealed enough to start me hunting for other Ronson books, even if it took me a few more years to finally read this particular one.

Ronson has made a name for himself as someone who explores the quirky and unusual, often meeting and interviewing strange people in his unflappable, mild-mannered (and yet, simultaneously, rather anxious) way. Whether conspiracy theorists, Internet hate figures, or CIA operatives, he treats them with a Louis Theroux-esque genial bafflement. Even while he’s immersing himself in dangerous territory, he comes across rather like a calm observer – even, somehow, when he’s telling us how uncalm an observer he is.

But there can’t be many more dangerous people to meet than those who have been declared psychopaths and imprisoned in maximum security prisons. That’s where Ronson is – initially to interview somebody who alleges he faked his psychopathy to get a lighter prison sentence for GBH, and now can’t convince anybody that he isn’t mentally ill.

(Actually, this comes after a meandering and ultimately rather pointless anecdote about people being mysteriously sent strange little books – I suppose it’s intended to hook our attention, but I found those elements rather over-long and a bit of a distraction from the main theme.)

The Psychopath Test uses the prison encounter as our introduction to the titular test – developed by Robert Hare, it is essentially a checklist to determine whether or not somebody is a psychopath. There is naturally some discomfort in the world that something so drastic could be decided by this sort of test – ending, like a BuzzFeed quiz, with a ‘yes – psychopath’ or ‘no – normal’. Ronson explores the impact of the test, as well as analysing many of the people who have been criminally psychopathic.

And this is where I began to skip pages… I hadn’t really joined the dots, to realise what sort of descriptions would be included. I went in because I’m interested by the psychological aspects – though, unsurprisingly, Ronson also tells us what noted psychopaths have done. And reading about gruesome murders and sexual assaults isn’t really my jam… so, yes, I did end up darting through some of the pages.

More interesting to me were the sections this led to – about psychopaths in everyday life. Because many are not criminals – but simply can’t understand the concept of empathy. And Ronson speaks to those who have deduced that the percentage of psychopaths in the world (around 1%) becomes much larger when considering people in power – especially business leaders. It makes one think… not least because there’s one particular businessman who is rather prominent at the moment, and has never been known to show any noticeable sort of empathy.

More broadly, Ronson looks at the ways in which mental health diagnoses were determined – a frighteningly arbitrary council, seemingly – and how overdiagnosed things like childhood bipolar disorder have become. Not least because, accordingly to the experts Ronson speaks to, there’s no such thing as childhood bipolar disorder. These parts are where the subtitle – ‘a journey through the madness industry’ – becomes much more relevant, and I’d have valued more of a focus on this strand.

So, yes, there are many interesting sections in The Psychopath Test. The reason that it ended up being my least favourite of Ronson’s books isn’t simply because I’m so squeamish – it also felt like it cohered less than the other two I’ve read. His approach felt a little more scattergun, or less carefully edited together. The framing device for the book was (as I’ve said) not a winner for me, and the pacing of his journalistic elaborations doesn’t seem quite right.

The best of the three I’ve read is definitely So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which is also Ronson’s most recent book – suggesting that he’s getting better as he keeps writing.,

 

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch

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Tolstoy and the Purple ChairFor my holiday, I treated myself to one of the unread books from my shelf of books about reading. I’m rationing these because they seem all too finite, and I can’t get enough of them. Tolstoy and the Purple Chair (2011) turned out to be quite different from most of them, but a very good read.

Nina Sankovitch decided to read a book every day for a year. Each day = one book. And one book review. It sounds like an impossible task, but it’s what she needed to do to help recover from grief at losing her sister to cancer – which happened three years before her year of reading took place, but it took that long to realise that other coping mechanisms simply weren’t working.

Sankovitch wrote about her experience at her Read All Day blog, which I assume was later picked up by a publisher, and the first question has to be: how does she fit it in? Well, she wasn’t in paid work at the time: she’d left her job as a lawyer to raise four children, while her husband did paid work. By the time her ‘year of magical reading’ (overt nod to Joan Didion) began, all four were school age – so she prioritised reading during the day, as setting her on the path of recovery from grief.

The venture is bold and rather beautiful – but how to turn it into a book? We wouldn’t want to read 365 short book reviews in a row – or, at least, it wouldn’t be a continuous narrative. I was super impressed by how Sankovitch managed to make it work – because she manages to turn the experience into a novel. It is about memories of her sister, it is about the quick downhill spiral of the cancer, it is about everyday moments for a mother – and all the while, it is also about the books.

All the great books I was reading were about the complexity and entirety of the human experience. About the things we wish to forget and those we want more and more of. About how we react and how we wish we could react. Books are experience, the words of authors proving the solace of love, the fulfilment of family, the torment of war, and the wisdom of memory. Joy and tears, pleasure and pain: everything came to me while I read in my purple chair. I had never sat so still, and yet experienced so much.

There are plenty of books from her reading year which don’t get a mention in Tolstoy and the Purple Chair – except, thankfully, in the complete list at the end. (I’ve read only 22 of the 365, and haven’t heard of most of them – I think quite a lot of contemporary American lit appears, though Sankovitch’s reading tastes are catholic and admirable, and she writes very well about how books have affected her, as well as their literary qualities. And the Provincial Lady features!) But she does weave certain of them through chapters – either grouping, such as several that consider death, or sex, or war, or drawing out moments of beauty and realisation from her reading.

Somehow it all works beautifully together. I don’t think I’d ask for either less or more detail from her reading reflections, and presumably can dig out fuller details on her blog. But she has worked a miracle in making a story about grief and a story about reading 365 books come together into a captivating, moving memoir.

My only real criticism of the book (incidentally, I have a beautiful American paperback edition) is the title. She reads in a purple chair; one of the first books she reads is a Tolstoy novel. The book is emphatically not about Tolstoy, which is surely what anybody would think seeing this title? It’s certainly what I thought – and there are any number of titles that would have crystallised the book far better.

But hopefully you can see past the title, and add this to your own books-about-reading shelf. It deserves a place there.

To The River by Olivia Laing

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to-the-riverSomehow it took me months and months to read To The River (2011) by Olivia Laing, having it on the go alongside lots of other books I was reading – and yet it is likely to be on my best books of the year. I think I was enjoying it so much, and realising what an unusually perfect book for me it was, that I didn’t want to read any of it unless I was in exactly the right mood.

I discovered that To The River existed when reading reviews of The Shelf, I think (just in case you’ve missed how much I loved Phyllis Rose’s book, have yourself a merry little read of this) – I quickly ordered a copy, but waited until it felt like the right time to read it. Why was I so excited about it? Well, I have two words: Virginia. Woolf.

To The River plays on the title To The Lighthouse, and it’s inspired by Virginia Woolf – at least partly. The loose structure of the memoir (for such I suppose it is) is that Laing is walking the length of the Ouse – the river in which Woolf drowned herself in 1941, but also (unsurprisingly) one which has a long and varied history before that. Laing mixes the personal and the investigative as she walks along this route – an area she knows fairly well already, but with plenty left to explore and unearth… and all while Woolf comes in and out of the narrative, always a reference point, if not quite the subject of the book.

I am haunted by waters. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby. “When it hurts,” wrote the Polish poet Czeslaw Miłosz, “we return to the banks of certain rivers,” and I take comfort in his words, for there’s a river I’ve returned to over and again, in sickness and in health, in grief, in desolation and in joy.

I’ve kinda already spoiled which river that is (mea culpa) – and it was a form of grief that took Laing there this time: the break-up of a relationship, which she mentions throughout the book (though not in an Eat, Pray, Love sort of way – more as a series of memories threaded throughout). (FYI, I haven’t read Eat, Pray, Love and have no idea what it’s really like.)

Like Laing, I am very fond of rivers. I grew up in a village called Eckington, in Worcestershire, which is in a bend of the River Avon. That meant that it flooded every year, and two of the three roads that led out of the village would generally be impassable, but it also gave me a lifelong love of rivers – you could walk all the way around the village by river, or you could stroll down to one of the two locks. You could even follow the river for miles in either direction, if you so chose. And in Oxford I have usually lived relatively close to a river – it’s five minutes’ walk from my house now – and it’s where I instinctively go when I’m sad. This week, in fact, I was pretty miserable for a couple of days – and, in the first burst of it, I went and stood by the river, staring into it. Not in a Virginia-Woolf-throw-myself-in, I should add, but because I find rivers calming and beautiful, and somehow reassuringly constant.

Anyway, Laing walks along the river – or as near as she can get to it; a lot of the riverbank is privately owned – and it’s greatly enjoyable just to read about the places she stays, the people she bumps into, and her reflections on her surroundings. I love reading all this sort of thing:

I walked back through fields of sleeping cows as the dusk fell down about me. I was staying that night in an old farmhouse near Isfield church, in a room at the end of a long corridor separated from the rest of the house by a velvet curtain. It smelled smoky and sweet, as if apple wood or cherry had been burning for generations. I’d been lent a torch when I went out, and now, tiptoeing back in, I was given a flask of hot milk and a homemade truffle to take up to bed. It was nice to be coddled. I wrapped the duvet round me and ate my feast while flicking through a book I’d found hidden beneath a stack of Country Life.

But To The River is much more than a travel diary: along the way, Laing discusses all manner of things that happened near her route, or which she is reminded of. And I mean ‘all manner of things’. There is a brief history of the discovery of dinosaurs and the rivalries it entailed; the life of Simon de Montfort; Piltdown man; folklore about dancing nymphs – it’s really all there. And, weaving in and out of all of them: Virginia Woolf. The places she visited, the inspiration she gathered for her novels, and the way she would have experienced the area. To be truthful, I would have loved a bit more about Woolf and about Laing’s history of reading her books – but I can’t fault the exemplary way that Laing brings together all the disparate histories she discusses with the trip she is taking. It’s quite extraordinary. It somehow doesn’t feel disjointed at all – as each thought comes to the surface, naturally, she gives a brief and engaging summary of the topic. It’s conversational and (here comes the river metaphor) flowing.

It was a pleasure to spend time in To The River. Such an unusual premise for a book makes me applaud the good people of Canongate for being willing to publish it – and wonder what other books of this ilk might be out there. Thank you, Olivia Laing, for taking this trip – for being both a brilliant researcher and a vulnerable self-analyser, and for bringing the two elements together so beautifully.

I, Messiah by Donald Southey

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I, MessiahI wonder how many of my readers expect me to write a review – and a positive review, no less – of a sci-fi novel-cum-parable? Full disclosure: the author is a friend of the family, but I had resolved not to write about it at all if I didn’t like I, Messiah (2011). Luckily, and rather to my surprise given my allergy to sci-fi, I thought it a really good book.

Even before we get to the title page, we know this is about robots. Indeed, from the title alone you might have spotted the reference to I, Robot and on the first page (and essential to know before going any further) is a paraphrase of Isaac Asimov’s famous laws of robotics, as follows:

First Law: a robot shall never cause any harm to a human being; nor, by his inaction, endanger or allow harm to come to a human being.

Second Law: subject to the First Law, a robot shall obey every direct command of a human being; firstly of his master, then of any other human.

Third Law: subject to the First and Second Laws, a robot shall always endeavour to preserve his own safety and that of other robots.

I, Messiah is set in a world where robots are fairly common as aids, but their development is still very much a matter of scientific research and subject to change. The narrator, John Smith, has recently gone through a divorce and decides to get a Self Instructing Decision Making Intelligent Cyber Servant, version 3 (SIDMICS-3), known as Sid. A scientist, ‘Davy’ Jones, is in charge of customising robots for buyers, and he is the main contact for John throughout.

From the outset, Sid is immaculately helpful and companionable. He not only follows all Three Laws of Robots, but is something of a friend too. John quickly has him charge himself in comfort in the house, rather than isolated outside, and they have conversations rather than simple command/obey exchanges. Lest you’re thinking this is like the film Her, they don’t fall in love – but things do start to develop bizarrely.

Sid starts to see things in his sleep; they realise he can dream. But it is not this which brings him to John’s side several times in the night…

That night, there was another soft knocking at my door.

“Sid, is that you?”

“Yes, John, you called me.”

“Look, Sid, I did not call you. Go back to your room and don’t disturb me again. OK?”

If you know your Bible, you’ll probably recognise an intentional parallel to the account of Samuel and Eli in 1 Samuel, where the boy Samuel thinks that he is being repeatedly called by Eli. Each time Eli denies having called him, and eventually realises that it is God calling Samuel. The same thing is happening here; it is God (or ‘the voice’) who is calling Sid.

Sid takes this in his stride; he is well aware of his human creators, and it isn’t much of a leap for him to accept God as creator. John Smith finds it much more of a struggle, as an avowed atheist. From here (because I don’t want to give away all the plot) things develop in the direction of tragedy, but with a few twists and turns. It’s not precisely a parable of the account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection – because it is a world where Jesus exists and where Sid could be considered a representation of Jesus – but it works well without falling neatly in either direction. And it’s quite a poignant and moving story, even without a comparison to the Gospel.

So, I’m as surprised as anybody that I enjoyed this – if you can get me on board with a novel about robots, then you’ve done extremely well. You may not think this sounds like your cup of tea (let’s face it; we’re most of us more at home with novels about 1930s housewives gossiping over tea) (I instantly want to read that hypothetical novel) but, if you fancy dipping a toe into new territory, I very much encourage you to give I, Messiah a go. You can find out more about the book here, and buy it there too, if you’d like.