The Library: Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson

Review: Paul Scraton

I began to read Imaginary Cities in a bar on a pretend High Street of a make-believe village that was actually an out-of-season holiday camp on the German Baltic coast. From the bar you looked out onto the (indoor) street scene, complete with pretend houses, mock gas lamps and the chairs and tables of cafes and restaurants spilling out onto the “pavement”. The holiday camp was an imagined city of sorts, a self-contained world built in the 1970s for escape by the seaside. And such was the depth of the research and the scale of the ambition of Darran Anderson’s book, I half-expected to turn the page at one point and find a description of this particular imaginary city waiting for me on the other side.

It is a remarkable book, as Anderson takes the reader through and to almost every conceivable city of the human imagination, from the plans for actual cities realised or not, real cities in fictional settings, cities of myth and cities of legend, cities that we can walk through (and some that we could have done, had we lived in another time or place) and cities that have only ever existed in the mind, as a film set, or in the pages of a book. The scholarship involved in such an undertaking is apparent from the very first page, and it is how Anderson that marshals his material that makes the book work. Like a city itself, the book is fractured, with plenty of distractions along the way, and although sometimes you feel like Anderson might have taken you down a dead-end-street, you realise it was actually a diversion that took you to the intended destination by a more creative and interesting route.

As I read, both in the candlelight of the bar and the next day, rain and Baltic winds rattling the window of the apartment, each section of the book brought more to think about and more scribbles in my notebook. I left to go for a walk or a run and found that the book came with me as I attempted to process what I had been reading. And it is a feature of the book, and the quality of the writing, that I found myself writing out (and repeating to myself) direct quote after direct quote. Here are just a few, directly from the pages of my notebook:

On the bias of cartography and the stories maps can tell us… “decisions which haunt us to this day.”

On the law of unforeseen consequences and how pollution helped give birth to impressionism… “the future not only has side effects, it is side effects.”

On historical cities that although we know existed remain imaginary… “we know the dimensions of rooms… but we can only make educated guesses at what transpired within them.”

On the Tower of Babel… “every age built it again according to their own methods and pulled it down for their own sins.”

The book moves ever forwards, towards the next story, the theory, the next city of the imagination. We visit stories of the past told through stone and ruins. We learn about how cities are branded by their cinematic depictions or in books and art. We consider how buildings that once existed “exist little more than the planned buildings that were never built.” We think about the cost of cities, whether the workers who built the Pyramids all those centuries ago or those that built the new cities in the gulf (and are building the stadiums for a football World Cup). We question the politics of cities, and the morality play of meritocracy, where everyone gets the city they “deserve”, whether a villa in a gated community or the favela on the other side of the wall.  And we are forced to confront those places that were born out of the darkest corner of the human imagination to become the worst cities on earth. Places that were never supposed to be known about but whose names resonated through the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Auschwitz. Treblinka. Stalag.

By the time I returned to Berlin from the holiday camp by the sea I had finished the 500+ pages of the book. But it was not the scale of the ambition and the knowledge exhibited in the book that impressed me the most, although impress it did. It was that – like the best writing on place (or the idea of place) – Imaginary Cities influenced how I looked at my own city as I caught the S-Bahn from the main train station and then walked the handful of oh-so-familiar blocks from the station to my apartment building. Any book that provokes us into new ways of understanding our surroundings and moreover leads us to ask questions, about not only how we do live but how we should live is worthy of inclusion in any library of place, whether imaginary or not.

Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson is published by Influx Press.

Follow the twitter feed @Oniropolis for Imaginary Cities updates, debate and musings.

You can read an interview with Darran Anderson in Elsewhere No.03 - available via our online shop here.

The Library: Lost and Found in Johannesburg, by Mark Gevisser

City of Gold and Empty Spaces

Review: Paul Scraton

After a brief prologue that sets the scene for a brutal and frightening home invasion in Johannesburg, 2012 - a story which will be told in harrowing detail later in the book - Mark Gevisser starts his story with a childhood map-reading game called ‘Dispatcher’ played on the pages of the family’s Holmden’s street atlas of the South African city. The young Gevisser would take addresses from the phone book and attempt plot the course of an imaginary dispatcher moving through the city… Only, it was not that simple and his dispatcher would sometimes come up short due to the seemingly illogical nature of the layout of the maps:

“Sets of neighboring suburbs were grouped - in admittedly pleasing designs - as if they were discrete countries, often with nothing around the edges to show that there was actually settlement on the other side of the thick red line.”

Some of the maps are recreated in the book, showing little islands of streets surrounded by empty spaces, the compass arrow marking north pointing this way and that. And sometimes those settlements on the other side of the red line were not to be discovered anywhere in the book, not even on a different page. For the Holmden’s Register of Johannesburg not only presented the city on the whim of a creative designer, but also erased entire black townships or else presented them as if on another planet. Attempting to dispatch a courier from his home to an address in the black township of Alexandra, Gevisser came up against uncrossable white space. The destinations may have been only two pages apart in Holmdens, but there was no route between them:

“The key plan might have connected the two pages, but on the evidence of the maps themselves, there was simply no way through.”

It might have been geographically inaccurate, but the atomisation of the city through these maps did reflect the divisions between black and white, rich and poor. Through this game played on the pages of Holmden’s in the back of his father’s Mercedes, the young Mark Gevisser begin to come to terms with the reality of life in his home country. It was, he writes, the start of the development of his political consciousness.

This rediscovery of his childhood cartographic games leads Gevisser to take a step further back, to explore the first commercial street guide to Johannesburg published by W. Tompkins in 1890, just a couple of years after the discovery of gold in Witwatersrand. This map was as much a fantasy as it was a reflection of the facts on the ground… many of the neighbourhoods laid out their in neat rows on the map were speculations, and some of them would never even be built. But the most meaningful discovery for Gevisser is the two small patches of land plotted out south of the railway tracks. Like islands in the open veld, one portion was allocated to “coolies” (workers of Asian descent) and one to “kaffirs” (black labourers).

This speaks to the viewer in two ways. Firstly, that “apartheid was embedded in the development of Johannesburg from the very start”. And the second was that all the workforce that would be needed to build this new city could be contained in twelve city blocks. “Here, then, represented by the Tompkins map, is the folly of apartheid capitalism and the reason why it was destined to fail, even if it took a century to do so.”

From this point on Gevisser, not only through his words but also through maps, photographs, newspaper reports and other documentary evidence, tells the story of the city and of his own family, who came from Lithuania as Orthodox Jews and ended up in a rich white suburban neighbourhood in South Africa. He tells the story of his own personal political development, in the bohemian corners of bookshops and bars, of his own sexuality and the lives of gay men under apartheid, and the many, myriad ways in which people were kept apart - and not only through the white spaces on a map.

The writing is gentle and fluid, leading you through the pages like he once led his imaginary dispatcher through the city streets, only with no dead ends along the way. Gevisser is excellent in its descriptive powers and with a creativity that can conjure entire imaged scenes from a single photograph.

In parts it is a gripping tale, especially when we get to the story of an attack on the apartment of his friends whom he was visiting at the time. It is brutal but could, in Gevisser’s own reflections, been worse (and what does that say?), whilst the aftermath paints a less than positive impression of the South African judicial system and the investigatory powers of the police. And while this is going on, Gevisser is self-aware enough to consider the classic reactions of guilty white liberals when faced with such a crime.

In this he is reflecting on contemporary South Africa, contemporary Johannesburg, and how the present - especially the new boundaries that have developed in the city, those new spaces between people that have been thrown up in the twenty years since the euphoria of those first democratic elections - are still being shaped by the divisions of the past. And yet he finds hope for his hometown, despite the continued difficulties and the challenging realities of everyday life, in one of the world’s most complex and fascinating cities.

Mark Gevisser's website

Elsewhere No.02 is out now, featuring great writing on place, reviews, photography, illustration and interviews. You can find out more information and order your copy online here.

The Library: Irish Journal, by Heinrich Böll

Review: Marcel Krueger

A lanky man in a raincoat and hat walks along the deck of the steamer bound for Dun Laoghaire. Irish families, travelling as cheaply as possible, have bedded down for the night, their possessions piled around them like tiny fortresses. The man overhears hushed conversations; between families, laundresses on their way home from London, priests. Sometimes he stops and leans against the railings, pretending to smoke but instead listening to the Irish complain about God and their fate. He is going to put them in a book.

Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) was always a political writer. A member of the famous German writers’ collective Gruppe 47, he started publishing novels, short stories and essays in 1949. Böll received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1972. His ideals were comparable to those of George Orwell: fiercely contesting totalitarianism, narrow-mindedness and prejudice. However, the further away from Germany he travelled, the more Böll the political novelist became Böll the explorer. And it was in this latter incarnation that he composed one of the classic works of German travel writing: his Irish Journal.

Böll and his family visited Ireland often, spending most of their summer holidays in the 1950s on Achill Island, Mayo. Appearing first as serial in Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, the collection was published in 1957 as Irisches Tagebuch, or ‘Irish Journal’. The journal is a series of sketches about life in Ireland, at that time a country of extreme poverty, strict Catholicism and torrential rainfall. As well as eavesdropping on conversations aboard the ferry from Holyhead, Böll strikes up conversations in pubs and, being German, marvels at how things are run without the slightest nod towards efficiency and yet still get done.

His portrait of Ireland is partly fictionalized, an idealistic rural alternative to life in industrialized Wirtschaftswunder West Germany. Böll was captivated by what he saw as a friendly, classless society living at a more leisurely pace. The contents of this short book, with an epilogue written 13 years after his first visit, is a reflection on the essence of the place that has, for some, become evergreen – in every the sense of the word. His words still reverberate with the many Germans who visit Ireland today:

“… here on this island, then, live the only people in Europe that never set out to conquer, although they were conquered several times, by Danes, Normans, Englishmen – all they sent out was priests, monks, missionaries who, by way of this strange detour via Ireland, brought the spirit of Thebaic asceticism to Europe.”

Maybe it is this idea of an innocent haven that has always drawn the visitors here. After all, Ireland was neutral during the Second World War; for the first German visitors after the war, the difference in landscape and mentality must have been striking. And maybe this fascination was somehow transported to Germany’s subconscious, and is what makes Ireland one of the favourite destinations for Germans even today.

Böll certainly plays with this perception of an innocent place steeped in mythology, and it seems to prevent him from engaging fully and critically with the Irish and their history. Some of his characters are almost stereotypically flat: the priest, the doctor’s wife, the drinker. Böll is fascinated by the poverty he sees, but to him that poverty is honourable, resulting as it does from overcrowding and a lack of resources, rather than from war and megalomania. Not once does he question the origin of this poverty, or dare to criticise the priests – he was a good Catholic himself. In his epilogue Böll even comments with horror on the arrival of the pill in Ireland. While admitting that it might liberate women and save the country from overpopulation, he writes “… this absolutely paralyzes me: the prospect that fewer children might be born in Ireland fills me with dismay”.

But this book, now 50 years old and smoothly translated by longstanding Böll translator Leila Vennewitz, was never meant to be a strict non-fiction travel report from an unbiased observer. Rather, it is a novelist’s way of both recording and making up his favourite country. Böll himself admits as much in his first sentence: ‘This Ireland exists: but whoever goes there and fails to find it has no claim on the author.” We have been warned.

This review originally appeared in our “zero edition” for the crowdfunding campaign.
Elsewhere No. 01 is out now - featuring writing from the Romney Marsh and Loch Fyne, Gyttorp and the Oderbruch, Bankstown and Nowa Huta, Arniston Bay and Prespa - get your copy via our online shop.

The Library: 60 Degrees North, by Malachy Tallack

Review: Paul Scraton

What does home mean to you? This is a question that we ask all our contributors in the series of interviews on the Elsewhere blog, and it is a question that shapes an awful lot of writing on place. In 60 Degrees North, Malachy Tallack follows the sixtieth parallel from Shetland to, well, Shetland. Along the way he passes through Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway, always following that invisible line, reflecting not only on what he discovers along the way but also on his own personal story, starting with the sudden death of his father, just at the moment he had moved to England to live with him, a moment when he thought he had left Shetland behind.

It is the loss of his father that is the starting point for Tallack’s changing relationship with Shetland and his eventual journey along the sixtieth parallel, and it is fair to say that loss is a central theme of this book. In Greenland he reflects on the loss of culture and tradition, and the complex issue surrounding increased opportunity via education for young people that, simultaneously, presents a threat to an old way of life. Another theme, also that he begins to discuss in Greenland but which follows throughout the book, is the question of our relationship to place and to land.

In Canada, he reflects on the people who live in the area around Fort Smith, one third of which are Dene – a group of northern First Nations, one third Metis – aboriginal people of mixed European and First Nations descent, and one third ‘white’. As in Greenland, Tallack leaves with a sense of a people for whom the connection to place is different to that in Europe, and one which is linked to existential factors such as how life is lived and how society is organised. In Greenland, all space is public because it is a society of hunters, not farmers. The notion of private property developed alongside agriculture, a process Tallack describes as a colonisation, an attempt to tame, to fence it off in order to harness the resources it offers. In Fort Smith, he finds a similar attitude at work:

“For the Dene, the land is not a resource, it is a presence; it is not something separate from their community, it is integral to it.”

This connection to land and place can be found all along the sixtieth parallel, perhaps because of the harsh reality of existence in the north. And Tallack leaves Canada with more questions than answers, for if “we” as Europeans have lost this connection to land and place, then can we ever truly be at home? This is one of many questions provoked by the journey around the sixtieth parallel, and it is no criticism of the book to say that Tallack does not have all the answers. Indeed, it is instead a strength of the book that it asks questions of its readers, and provokes a response that will be as individual as the circumstances of the person holding it in his or her hands.

Interestingly, one conclusion Tallack does come to as his journey progresses is that our attachment to place – and thus a feeling of being “at home” in a place – is not something innate, that we are born with or carried in our DNA. On reflecting on his own background and family history, Tallack is is clear:

“Certainly it means nothing when compared to the connections I have made in my own lifetime. For culture and history are not carried in the blood. Nor is identity. These things are not inherited, they exist only through acquaintance and familiarity. They exist in attachment.”

So although 60 Degrees North is a book about a journey, and a very personal journey at that, it is one which provokes in the reader their own internal discussion about place, attachment, and what it means to be home. For this reviewer, it meant putting the book down for a moment or two to be transported to a back garden in West Lancashire, a cliff top on Holy Island with a view across to Snowdonia, or walking the coastal path along the Baltic Sea in northern Germany. It asks big questions about humans and their connection to and impact on the land we live on, but it gets its power from the questions it asks of us as individuals and our own relationship to place. As a writer asking these questions, Malachy Tallack can only answer them for himself. For the rest of us, we have a lot to think about when we turn the final page.

Elsewhere No. 01 is out now - featuring writing from the Romney Marsh and Loch Fyne, Gyttorp and the Oderbruch, Bankstown and Nowa Huta, Arniston Bay and Prespa - get your copy via our online shop.

The Library: Scarp, by Nick Papadimitriou

The Library is a new feature on the Elsewhere blog, where we explore some of the books and writers that have inspired us. We start with a review that first appeared in our “zero edition” of Elsewhere, created for the crowdfunding campaign, and it takes us to Scarp, by Nick Papadimitriou.

Review: Marcel Krueger

scarp
Pronunciation: / skɑ ː p
Definition of scarp in English: very steep bank or slope; an escarpment

On the north Middlesex/south Hertfordshire border sits a 17-mile escarpment. This ridge, part of London’s outward-growing suburbs, is an unremarkable place of motorways, council flats and gas stations. And yet for over 20 years Nick Papadimitriou has made it his playground, his emotional and topographical heartland. Two decades of mental and physical exploration have provided him with all the material he needs to write an extraordinary book about the escarpment, or as he calls it, ‘Scarp’.

Hailed by his walker-writer friends Ian Sinclair and Will Self, the book explores both personal histories and fictionalised accounts of the people who have made Scarp their home, as well as those who have simply passed through. Unlike W.G. Sebald, whose explorations of past and place are always rooted in calamity and dread, Papadimitriou is a more distant observer – albeit one with an extremely fine focus. At one point, he switches from describing the decapitation of a former beauty queen in a car accident in 1958 to the experiences of a small rat observing the carnage from roadside shrubbery. It is an outstanding feature of both his observations and his writing that he never gives human stories prominence over those of animals, rivers, or the landscape itself.

It is sometimes a challenge to follow the more streamof-consciousness parts of the book, especially as they are always interlinked with a real yet obscure place that Papadimitriou knows intimately. In one section he starts as himself on Welham Green in the 1960s and becomes Gloria Geddes, queen of the Psychedelic Ancients of Middle Saxony with a preference for LSD and sex with her yogi lover. Transformed by the drugs, she passes “through the eye of the land” to become a hornet, which is in turn swatted by a copy of the Times wielded by Reginald Maudling, MP for Barnet … and so we move on, through time and place, never quite sure what will come next as we turn the pages.

Papadimitriou’s autobiography does not lack sorrow, and it is in those parts of the book, where he interweaves his story with the wider historical context as he walks Scarp from west to east, that he connects with the land the most:

“Perhaps it is a sense that I have of the east as being somehow colder or more spiteful than the other cardinal points. East London, with its desperate estates and vicious villainy; The Eastern Front during the Second World War, where armies were swallowed by the snow, and whole people ravaged by famine; East Finchley, where D-- lived and I once got fined two quid for an overdue library book. The very word, when seen on the page somehow suggests bared teeth and impending skinhead violence: EAST.”

Papadimitriou’s structure might be chaotic, but it is engaging throughout. Years of study, research and the creation of a Scarp library have led him on a series of fantastic trips over, through and around Scarp, giving voice to its living and its dead, its animals, plants, buildings – indeed, to all its residents. Here are the travels and travails of a man happy in his knowledge of the area’s ghosts, car accidents, floods and highwaymen, down to the wildlife growing in the cracks in the concrete. This is not a book that easily enables the reader to actually follow in the author’s footsteps around Scarp; yet it is reassuring to know that Papadimitriou is still out there, walking. And that he has written about it.

Elsewhere No. 01 is out now - featuring writing from the Romney Marsh and Loch Fyne, Gyttorp and the Oderbruch, Bankstown and Nowa Huta, Arniston Bay and Prespa - get your copy via our online shop.