The Library: Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnović

Read by: Paul Scraton

In the departure lounge of Ljubljana airport, two hours early for our flight back to Germany, I pulled a book out of my bag and start to read. Two flights and about five hours later I read the final page as the plane made the final approach to Berlin’s Tegel Airport. I had crossed the Alps and the heart of Germany, but really I had been in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, as explored through the eyes of a narrator who has discovered, sixteen years after he believed his father was dead, that in fact that this barely remembered man who was an officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army is actually alive and living in hiding, a fugitive of the Hague as a wanted war criminal. Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnović tells the story of the narrator’s journey to find his father, a journey that causes him to reflect on how the disintegration of his family is tied to the disintegration of the country, and the world, that they used to call home.

I came to this book by coincidence – the man sitting next to me on my flight out to Ljubljana a week earlier was reading (in Slovenian) a book by Goran Vojnović who was then profiled (in English) in a magazine I picked up at the airport, waiting for my bags to appear. I have long been interested in the history of the former Yugoslavia; ever since I was a student in Leeds starting out my degree only two years after the Dayton Peace Accords had brought to an end the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina that had played out on our teatime television screens throughout my teenage years. Reading about Yugoslavia, My Fatherland in the magazine was what led me to a book described by the English publishers as a work that “deals intimately with the tragic fates of the people who managed to avoid the bombs, but were unable to escape the war.”

Goran Vojnović was born in Slovenia in 1980 and is a well-respected director and screenwriter as well as being a bestselling novelist. I would love to speak to him at some point about how much of the background of his protagonist – school experiences in Ljubljana in the 1990s for instance – reflect his own, as the power of this novel is in how Vojnović manages to explore the break-up of Yugoslavia from the multitude of perspectives in the different parts of the former Federal Republic, allowing all voices to have their say without, it seems to me, judgement or bias one way or the other. One of the finest scenes in the book is when his new classmate in Ljubljana, where the teenage narrator has moved with his mother from Pula, Croatia via Belgrade and Novi Sad, explains what is happening in Yugoslavia via the nationalities of the other children in the class.

Throughout the book the narrator remembers the slow collapse of the world of his childhood through remembered scenes in apartments, the tone of the newsreaders on the evening television and the atmosphere in Ljubljana where he lives but never quite feels at home. The other strand of the story is of course the present-day search for his father, and the impact of the knowledge of the crimes he is alleged to have committed in a village in Slavonia. The story is told in a matter-of-fact, sometimes humorous tone, and Vojnović certainly has a flair for set-piece scenes, both in the description and the dialogue, but what is most impressive is how the battle of ideas that reflects battles taking place elsewhere in real life, and the complexity of personal identities both in the time of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and today, are told through the multitude of characters who appear in the book. This is impressive writing, and one of the best tellings of the Yugoslavia story that I have read.

This is a novel about place, about memory, and about how the world of our childhood can be destroyed so that it no longer exists, even if it remains a name on a map. Along the way it deals with a number of signifiers of home and belonging, from the behaviour of guests at a wedding to the differences in language, not only between the Slovene his mother insists on using when they move to Ljubljana and the Serbo-Croatian that has been the family language up to that point, but the differences within the latter, when his Bosnian classmates make fun of the narrator as he speaks the Italian-tinged version of his childhood home on the coast.

Goran Vojnović tells this story in relatively straightforward language, but the more you read the more you realise how complex the novel is as it creates this portrait of a disintegrating country through the personal story of a disintegrating family. It is a reminder of the power of literature, and of fiction, to help us come to the essential truth of history and its impact on people. Much credit must go to the translator Noah Charney and the publishers Istros Books for bringing it to an English-speaking audience as this is an important and powerful book, and one which deserves to be read as widely as possible.

Yugoslavia, My Fatherland by Goran Vojnović, translated by Noah Charney, is available via the publishers, Istros Books.

Kowloon Walled City: An extract from 'Fallen Glory', by James Crawford

Photo credit:  ‘Inside the Walled City’, 1998 , © Patrick Zachmann / Magnum Photos

We are extremely pleased and proud to publish on the Elsewhere blog an extract from the fascinating new book Fallen Glory by James Crawford. In it, he uncovers the biographies of some of the world’s most fascinating lost and ruined buildings in a unique guide to a world of vanished architecture. In this extract, James takes us to the Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong – Born 1843, died 1994:

In the aftermath of the Second World War, refugees flooded south to the Kowloon Peninsula. The only trace of the old city was the derelict shell of the Mandarin’s house. Yet people gravitated almost instinctively to this rough rectangle of ground. Perhaps it was the feng shui. The Walled City had originally been laid out according to the ancient principles of Chinese philosophy: facing south and overlooking water, with hills and mountains to the north. This ideal alignment, it was said, brought harmony to a ll citizens. In their desperate plight some refugees may have believed that Kowloon would be a much-needed source of luck and prosperity. Others, however, recalled that this had once been a Chinese exclave in British colonial territory. The stone walls of the ‘Walled City’ had gone, but the refugees were convinced the diplomatic ones remained. 

By 1947 there were over 2,000 squatters camped in Kowloon, their ramshackle huts arranged in almost the exact footprint of the original city. No one wanted to find themselves outside the borders – those on the wrong side of the line risked losing the protection of the Chinese government. The people kept coming, and the camp grew ever more squalid and overcrowded. 

READ THE REST OF THE EXTRACT...

The Library: Climbing Days, by Dan Richards – Review and Extract

Read by Paul Scraton:

We are extremely pleased to be adding to the Elsewhere Library on the blog not only a review of Climbing Days by Dan Richards but also an extract from the book. The co-author of Holloway with Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood, published in 2012, in writing Climbing Days Dan Richards has been on the trail of his great-great-aunt Dorothy Pilley, a pioneering woman mountaineer and author of a 1935 memoir about her adventures in the hills with her husband I.A. Richards that shares a title with this book. Using the memoir as a starting point and a destination list, Dan Richards heads off on a journey of discovery, as he writes a portrait of a remarkable woman and the places she has guided him to, as well as a book which also asks of us the question: why do people climb mountains?

Perhaps it is my own bias of place shining through, but if you start a book with a description of Llyn Idwal in Snowdonia – one of my favourite places in the world – then you have got off to a good start, and the book continues to fascinate throughout thanks some great descriptive writing about people and places; along the way Richards heads off to Cambridge, Wales, Scotland, Catalonia, the Alps and the Lake District. He interviews people who knew her, learns about his own family, and writes a convincing portrait not only of his great-great-aunt but also the society in which she operated, all with a wonderful turn of phrase and a dry sense of humour that you need if you are going to spend a considerable amount of time on the footpaths, hillsides and slabs of British mountains.

One of the strongest elements of the book is the exploration of the position of women, both in Dorothy Pilley’s class and era, but also in the mountains themselves. As Pilley herself wrote: “One had really done something drastic by becoming a climber.” Women such as Pilley were, in Richards’ memorable phrase “stabled more like horses than people,” and in one of the digressions that makes Climbing Days such an enjoyable read, Richards explores the life of Edwardian women and how, if escape for Pilley meant heading for the hills, for one of her friends it meant the Left Bank in Paris and modernist literature. The destination might be different, as well as the means of getting there, but the result was the same: Escape. 

All the while Richards makes use not only of Pilley’s published memoir but also letters and diaries, and it is through these writings that he begins to get towards an answer of the key question of the book – if not, at first, “why do people climb mountains” but “why did she?”:

“Reading Dorothea’s letters and diaries, mountains are always framed as free egalitarian space, territories unencumbered by the ho-hum regimes or social baggage.”

Now, I did not grow up in the same class as Dorothy Pilley, in the same era or of the same gender, but I can recognise what Richards is getting at here. Why do we climb mountains? Walk the hills? Explore the clifftops? What is it about landscape that draws us there, to follow the trodden path or the empty shore? Reading Climbing Days I was provoked into asking these questions of myself, which is a great credit to the book. In the process of that journey, of Richards’ journey and of Pilley’s as well, I was also entertained along the way. Enjoyable, funny and thought-provoking. What more could you want from your mountain literature, or any other book for that matter?

Extract from Climbing Days by Dan Richards:

The Pinnacle Club is a women’s mountaineering club founded in 1921 and of which Dorothy Pilley was one of the first members. In an early chapter, Dan Richards heads to the club’s hut in Wales to meet present-day members, climb with them, and explore the pioneering role of the Pinnacle Club in the years between the wars:

We arrived at Ogwen car park in light drizzle. It was good to be back but the sky looked foreboding so we hastily unloaded our kit from the boot and regrouped in the shiny new visitor centre.

Left alone in the atrium whilst the others went to the loo, I began to mull the coming hours, automatically picking up Hazel’s rope, which she’d earlier noted was badly wound. Rewinding it about my neck, I drifted off, pondering how the slopes above would be, whether the weather would clear up, how dark the valley would be this time, should I put my over-trousers on?

I came to with a jolt to find Hazel returned and staring at me with a face like thunder. She blinked and, raking me a look somewhere between revulsion and pity, advanced and took her rope from around my shoulders, before rapidly relooping the line with the deft automatic movements of a seasoned pro. In no time at all she’d formed a neat, symmetrical, unkinked spool devoid of twists – the opposite of what I’d done. Her idea of ‘badly wound’ I now realised would have been a major accomplishment for my ham hands.

The silence that followed was loud.

Emily and Margaret had now returned too – mourners at the wake of my self-respect. Even the day trippers inspecting the scale models and video displays around us seemed to be holding their breath.

Rain spat on the roof.

‘Shall we go?’ suggested Margaret.

#

The four of us walked out from the tourist centre into strengthening, blustery rain.
I carried some kit in a nylon bag which got steadily saturated and heavier as we went. Margaret had already raised the question of whether I was going to carry my kit in ‘that bag, like that’ and I had replied cheerily that ‘yes, yes I was’. Now it was becoming clear that I had made a bit of an error but, determined to brazen it out, I strode on, arm aching, implausibly jaunty.

We stepped up our pace along the stone path which follows round the lake. Wind swept past like buses, pushing us off balance. It became obvious to me that, after the rope incident, someone was now going to fall into the lake and die. Probably Margaret. That was all I needed.

First the rope debacle, now a death.

Hazel would never forgive me. It would be written up in the Pinnacle journal and I would not be allowed back to the hut, or Wales, ever again.

I walked on in resigned dudgeon and drizzle.

Earlier on our group had passed a man coming down the path who knew Hazel and Margaret. Wherever were we going? he asked, bemused. ‘To climb the slabs!’ we’d chorused, brightly . . . over-brightly perhaps. ‘It’s good practice to carry the kit up and back anyway,’ said Hazel with a tight smile.

That’s it, I thought to myself as we stumped wretchedly on, that’s what they’ll write: ‘Humouring the idiot who’d already destroyed a perfectly serviceable rope, the put-upon representatives of the Pinnacle Club carried all their kit up to Hope in a monsoon, during which fool’s errand Margaret drowned, Emily froze to death from shame and only Hazel’s volcanic rage spared her serious injury . . .’

#

At the slabs the weather was horrendous. The wind was blasting a vuvuzela cacophony. The rain thumped about and water sluiced down the sliding face. The rocks looked slick and soapy. We were not climbing here, that was clear. Yet we still stopped and took in the scene rather than turning on our heels and I was suddenly grateful for everyone’s forbearance. Emily took a hopeful stance upon a low flake pitch but the sodden ropes stayed bagged and looped about shoulders. A Promethean Joe Brown might have shinned up the glassy rock in socks without a backwards glance, but he was not around so, stopped, we stood. Too wet to sit down, we huddled to discuss how one might have gone about the slabs on another day – were the day a better day; were the day not bloody awful. Then we turned and started down, back the way we’d come. It was too miserable for the scenic route – a bloody awful day to be out.

Climbing Days by Dan Richards, is published on 16 June by Faber & Faber (£16.99)

The Library: The Wander Society, by Keri Smith

Review: Marcel Krueger:

I chanced upon the sturdy yellow-and-grey cover of The Wander Society in the too-small English section of a German chain bookstore in a shiny suburban mall. It almost looked like an anachronism in between the Tom Clancy and Cecilia Ahern novels, and as I opened it and found a picture of Fernando Pessoa overlaid with a Ludwig Wittgenstein quote, it intrigued me even more. I also followed the instructions on the back, which talked about a secret underground movement dedicated to conducting research 'on your immediate surroundings' and 'complete a variety of assignments'.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of Keri Smith's Wreck This Journal, that mainstay of countless Urban Outfitter accessory tables around the globe. In my opinion there are better and less forced ways of making a book interactive, to entice creativity. As Tim Parks puts it in his essay 'A Weapon for Readers' where he defends the use of pencils and annotations: “We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us.” And deliberately dropping a notebook in the bath or smearing it with dirt does little for that awareness, in my opinion.

Nevertheless, following Wreck This Journal, I also purchased Smith's How to be an Explorer of the World, a book of assignments meant to stir up interest and exploration of everyday urban surroundings and found it much more to my liking - after all, I love to walk around with my eyes open and some of the exercises in here I was already undertaking, sometimes involuntarily. So I first perceived The Wander Society as a continuation of that idea, albeit one with a new visual approach, less colorful than 'How to be…', with a distinct retro touch to it: all seemingly pasted and glued-together pages and images in brown and black and white. The Wander Society is an approach to the fictional (?) Wander Society, a “nascent and continually growing group with its own aesthetics, values, art, literature, and even its own dialectic language”, as the equally fictional (?) professor J. Tindlebaum states in his introduction. Smith states that all material in the book is based on existing literature found relating to the group. Here's what I found on the first page, where the instructions on the back led me:

The book then goes on and charts the history and philosophy of the group, and also contains assignments and ideas for field research related to deceleration and exploration of what may at first seem dull and uninteresting neighbourhood areas. There is no need to follow all the assignments and activities in here, and some can be somewhat cheesy, for example 'How to Invoke the Inner Wanderer in Any Situation' or 'Create a Temenos', but then there also also many practical activities like 'How to Knit a Wrist Cuff' or 'How to Sew a Neck Pouch', things intended to help group members while exploring and something that might appeal to all those who are more versed in handicraft than I am.

But maybe it is that somewhat simple and playful approach to walking/wandering that I like most about the Wander Society and their ideas and manifestos. While key flaneurs, psychogeographers and deep topographers like Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and Will Self are mentioned throughout the book, there is never any academic approach to these themes. The Wander Society truly is for everyone, and I have the feeling everyone can do with it what they want and as they please. Maybe it is fitting then that the patron saint of the Wander Society is not an academic and critic, but a poet instead: Walt Whitman and his ‘Leaves of Grass’ are among the key works used by the society to explore our direct surroundings and guide them on their wanderings.

I tend to forget that walking and wandering in our capitalist societies around the world often is an activity no longer encouraged or even accepted. As Rebecca Solnit points out in Wanderlust, her history of walking, referring to gyms and treadmills: "In those buildings abandoned because goods are made elsewhere and First World work grows ever more cerebral, people now go for recreation, reversing the inclinations of their factory-worker predecessors to go out - to the outskirts of town or at least out-of-doors - in their free time."  So any book that encourages a reader not only to interact with the physical item ‘book’ but also with their surroundings in a playful and creative way while walking is a good book; of which too few are being published at the moment.  It is good to know that the Wander Society is out there.  

Solvitur ambulando.

The Wander Society by Keri Smith published by Penguin.

The Library: Stefan Zweig's Journeys – On memories and places

Review: Paul Scraton

Throughout his life Stefan Zweig was a traveller. The Austrian writer made numerous journeys in Europe, criss-crossing the continent by train. They began as trips of leisure and inquiry, for the summer season of 1902 in Ostend or a trip in 1904 to explore the ancient streets of Bruges. By 1934 he was travelling for a very different reason; a Jewish writer in exile following the rise to power of the Nazis. First to England and then to the United States, before one, final, journey to Brazil where he committed suicide with his wife.

This collection of travel essays does not take Zweig beyond Europe, beginning as it does with that trip to Ostend in 1902 and ending, in England, with the ‘Gardens in Wartime’ of 1940. Presented chronologically, the essays that make up Journeys comprise a journey as a whole, through time and a changing Europe, one which begins with the security and stability of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of Zweig’s childhood and early adulthood and that passes through World War I, the flux of the aftermath, the rise of the Nazis and the (beginnings) of the horrors to come. 

Zweig’s own feelings about the transformation of the continent in those first decades of the 20th century can be read in his 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday - completed the day before he committed suicide – but it can also be felt in this collection, as the excellent translator Will Stone comments in his fascinating introduction to the book:

“It would probably be true to say that as Zweig gains experience as both a traveller and a writer, especially after the trauma of world war, his essays exhibit more depth and his concerns take on more urgency.”

And it does feel, as in his later memoir, that World War I is a defining period in Zweig’s life, such a violent upheaval that transformed the world he knew into the World of Yesterday, changing him as both man and a writer. On a personal level, as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about place and memory, and places that become ‘sites of memory’, it is the essay on Ypres that I return to time and again.

The essay is written in 1928, ten years after the end of World War I and in it Zweig is reflecting on the nature of how the battlefields of Flanders had become a tourist destination. The first Thomas Cook tours had begun barely months after the cessation of the hostilities, with the guns still warm and the landscape still scarred. Stefan Zweig writes:

“Presently the name of Ypres, the ville martyre, shouts from all the posters, from Lille to Ostend, from Ostend to Antwerp, and far into Holland. Organised tours, excursion by automobile, individually tailored visits; it’s a veritable bidding war. Every day some ten thousand people (perhaps more!) come to pass a few hours here: Ypres has become Belgium’s star attraction.”

This is something that I think about a lot, especially here in Berlin where it feels as if there is a memorial on nearly every corner; where it is possible to watch people climbing on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, playing hide and seek or holding fashion shoots among the columns; where it feels, like Ypres does to Zweig, that the whole city is a ‘site of memory’. I have long come to the conclusion that this is a necessary process, and indeed when I have written about the subject of tourism and sites of memory it is a Zweig quote from this collection that always comes to mind:

“Nevertheless: it is good that, in some places on this earth, one can still encounter a few horrifying visible traces of the great crime. Ultimately it is something good too when a hundred thousand people, comfortable and carefree, clatter through here annually, and whether they care for it or not, these countless graves, these poisoned woods, these devastated squares still serve as reminders… All that recalls the past in whatever form or intention leads the memory back towards those terrible years that must never be unlearned.”

Sadly, this is the other power of this collection. Alongside his sharp observations, well-written descriptions and thoughtful reflections, as the essays progress there is something else at work that has nothing to do with the writer and everything to do with the reader: our knowledge of what is to come, especially in the later essays. For however comfortable and carefree those visitors were in 1928, there would soon be more graves, more woods poisoned and more squares devastated. The lessons were indeed unlearned. It is perhaps this realisation that led Zweig to take his own life across the ocean as the continent he loved was consumed by war once more. And it gives these essays a melancholy power, beyond simply the nostalgia for times gone by and places changed beyond recognition. It is not so much that they have changed, but the how and the why. 

Journeys by Stefan Zweig, translated by Will Stone, published by Hesperus Classics, 2010.
Tourism and Sites of Memory, an essay by Paul Scraton appears on Traces of a Border.

Elsewhere No.03 featuring writing on place, interviews and reviews, is out now and available via our online shop.

The Library: While Wandering, edited by Duncan Minshull

Review: Marcel Krueger

Next day I rose early, cut myself a stick, and went off beyond the town gate. Perhaps a walk would dissipate my sorrows.
Ivan Turgenew, First Love (1860)

When it comes to physical activity, I am hardly ever fazed by the fact that sweating and cursing on, say, a football pitch or in a gym smelling of old socks could be beneficial for my health. I prefer to exercise in an armchair, holding a book with one hand and occasionally raising a tea cup to my mouth with the other. The only exception I make is when it comes to walking. The reason for that may be that I come from a family of walkers: my grandmother, after growing up on a farm in the 1930s and crossing half of Europe after World War II, always spurned cars, buses and trains and preferred to walk, taking me on long hikes to chapels in the middle of nowhere when I was six or seven; my father and stepmother share a love for hiking the Alps, while my mother runs forest walks for the German Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union.

So, I was raised a walker and have always walked since. I was also raised a book lover, and soon started reading what others thought about my favourite  - and only - physical activity. I read Fontane and about his ramblings in Brandenburg, followed Josef Martin Bauer through Russia in As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me, and escaped over the Himalaya with Sławomir Rawicz in The Long Walk. Over the years, two books on walking have stayed with me, my copies now dog-eared and mud-crusted from many days on the trail: one is Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, the other Duncan Minshull’s beautiful anthology While Wandering.

In this 400-page book Minshull has summoned 200 writers past and present from around the globe, all who have written about the act of walking. In here are novelists, poets, film directors; among them the Brontë Sisters on the heath, well-known flâneurs Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, hiking veterans Robert Louis Stevenson and Bruce Chatwin, and psychogeographer Ian Sinclair. Some writers are represented in excerpts from longer works, some with poems, others with whole short stories like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd (1841) or Daniel Boulanger’s The Shoebreaker (1963). Minshull has sorted all these excerpts topically, with chapters named “Why Walk”, “In The City”, “Tough Tracks”, or even “March Parade Procession” - all chapters posing questions to the walker that Minshull himself has answered in giving the excerpts new titles. Here an example from “Why Walk”:

WARDING OFF MADNESS

I am told that when confronted by a lunatic or one who under the influence of some great grief or shock contemplates suicide, you should take the man out-of-doors and walk him about: Nature will do the rest.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, 1922    

There are a thousand and one reasons for setting out, be they physical, psychological or spiritual. And that, for me, is the beauty of this collection (which, despite being in hardcover, has the perfect size for rucksack and duffel bags) - everyone who walks will find himself reflected in here, with all the positive and negative aspects the activity brings with it: setting out early on an autumn morning, the mountain trails waiting; the hundreds of impressions that even the shortest city stroll will convey; the misery of rain, blisters, and exhaustion. Even though I’ve read it over and over again, I know that whenever I open it anew will find something in here that connects me with other writer-walkers, reminding me that walking gives rise to thought, which in turn might lead to expression. Or sometimes just cursing on a hillside - which I prefer to cursing on a treadmill.  

As Robert MacFarlane writes in his introduction, “What I mean in sum to say is that this is the best anthology I know about an activity I cannot live without.” I do thoroughly concur.

While Wandering on the publisher’s website. Support your local bookshop!

The Library: The Moor, by William Atkins

Review: Paul Scraton

What do we read when we look at a landscape? What do we see, and perhaps as importantly, what do we feel? I have lived in Berlin for a decade and half, a move eastwards from my childhood home in West Lancashire first to Leeds and then to the German capital. Until I left England the landscapes of my imagination were always raised ones – the sea cliffs of Anglesey or the mountains of Snowdonia – and in Germany I had to learn to love the different and distinct attractions of the flatlands, the forests and lakes of Brandenburg or the big skies and low dunes of the Baltic.

Alongside the mountains and cliffs of North Wales, the other landscape of my imagination and the one that I would think of when I thought of “home”, was the moors. Living in Leeds for four years and returning ever since to visit family and friends, moorland spotted through a car window on the drive from Liverpool or Manchester airport gives me that first feeling of a sense of return… to land at Leeds Bradford is to play “spot the rocks”, searching through that tiny cabin window for a glimpse of the Cow & Calf above Ilkley and the brooding expanse of moors squatting above the towns and villages of Wharfedale below.

So it was not surprising that, standing in an English-language bookshop in Berlin, I was drawn to William Atkins’ The Moor and its cover image of boggy ground and tough grass. Subtitled A journey into the English wilderness I reached for the book as a salve to a bout of homesickness that comes every so often. What I found when I opened the pages was a captivating journey from south to north, from Bodmin Moor to the White Lands of the Otterburn Training Area, and a book that combines travelogue, history, ecology, literature, folklore and reportage in the way of the very best writing on place.

There is much that is thought-provoking about Atkins’ book, not least the fact this very “English wilderness” has been, for thousands of years, shaped by humans. From the Mesolithic tribes to the Romans, humans cleared and burned the uplands that would grow ever more hostile as global temperatures cooled. And so the people moved ever lower, felling more trees and clearing more land as they did so, the moors following them ever deeper into the valley.

It was man, then – man, with the climate, but not ‘nature’ alone – that made the moors. And it was man who continued to shape them: sheep grazing under the abbeys discouraged the resurgence of all but the least palatable vegetation: mat-grass, purple moor-grass, cotton-grass.

In recent centuries the moorland streams were dammed to create reservoirs to provide water for the ever-expanding cities of the industrial age, and heather was encouraged for the raising of grouse to be shot by guns of the great and the good. Indeed, it is only in exploring a restricted zone that had been declared around a military base over halfway through his journey that Atkins finds an expanse of moorland that has not been burned, grazed or afforested.

If man was to be eradicated, here was what would happen.

The other big question that The Moor inspires the reader to ask is that of land ownership and the impact of this human influence, not just on the moorland itself but for the communities below. I read The Moor as much of northern England was under water, as those “hundred-year floods” returned for the second or third time in recent memory, and the book explains exactly how burning and land management above, in order that a few rich folks can shoot a Land Rover’s boot-full of birds, can have catastrophic impacts on the people living below.

These are just a couple of aspects of what makes The Moor such a fascinating read. There is also plenty of literature, for one of the great gifts of the English moorland has been its inspiration for writers and poets. Atkins is no different, and as he describes the wildlife or the people he encounters, tells the stories and legends of the moors, or reflects on the politics of land and its uses, he does so with lyrical writing that certainly does justice to the melancholy and mysterious nature of these places that are, to my mind at least, both forbidding and appealing all at the same time.

William Atkins’ website

The Library: The Island that Never Was, by Robert Alcock

Review: Paul Scraton

As stories go, the building of the Zorrozaurre peninsula in Bilbao is a fascinating one. In the 1950s and 1960s a canal was dug to improve access to the Euskalduna shipyard as part of Franco’s policy of industrial expansion. Many of the residents of the area had already been rehoused when the plans changed and the project ground to a halt. The canal, that would have created an island, never reached its destination. And as Robert Alcock explains in his short but fascinating The Island that Never Was:

“Instead of an island, after the economic collapse of the early eighties the peninsula had become a lost world, forgotten by the rest of the city. Most people had no idea that four hundred residents still clung on.”

It was into this forgotten neighbourhood that Alcock moved in 1999 with his partner, and overthe course of the nine chapters that make up this book he creates a portrait of a community, of his neighbours and their worries and concerns, of the graffiti and where it came from, of its plant- and wildlife, and crucially how different people – some important and listened to, others not – had plans for Zorrozaurre that would completely transform the peninsula and by definition the lives of those people who called it home. Faced with a development master plan that would see many of them evicted, the locals were finally roused into action, including forming a residents association and taking to a bit of street-art themselves to paint a mural depicting life in the neighbourhood:

“It was a reminder that the neighbourhood existed – a fact of which, even now, most people in Bilbao remained ignorant – and a collective nose-thumbing at the authorities. It wasn’t only the squatters who could paint walls.”

It is not simply the story of an anonymous neighbourhood and its struggle for recognition and self-determination that makes this book interesting, although it most certainly does. It is the fact that it reminds us once again that everywhere – every district, every estate, every village, every town – has its story and there is a value to listening to what it is. It is the fact that it reminds us once again that communities develop on what seem, on the face of it, unlikely and perhaps even unappealing locations. And that what makes a community is worth fighting to protect.

Although it is not explicitly stated, the fact the The Island that Never Was has been published in a tri-lingual edition – English, Spanish and Basque – would suggest that Alcock’s intention was to make sure his neighbours in Zorrozaurre have access to this telling of their story. I am sure that they would be very proud.

Robert Alcock is a writer and ecological designer who moved to Bilbao in 1999 to undertake fieldwork for a PhD in marine ecology. He and his partner lived in Zorrozaurre for several years and were founder members of the Forum for a Sustainable Zorrozaurre. They still keep active ties with the neighbourhood. You can order The Island that Never Was via the Abrazo House website, where it is also possible to purchase an Ebook version.