Book Extract: Twisted Mountains by Tim Woods

We are extremely proud to present this extract from the story ‘Offcomers’ from the new collection Twisted Mountains by our very own Tim Woods. Twisted Mountains is a collection of short stories set among the hills of Scotland, England and Wales, with each story telling the tale of someone who has their own reason for being in the mountains, from a vengeful student to a wannabe biker and Wainwright expert with a secret. ‘Offcomers’ concerns an obsessive hotel owner, what money can buy and who owns the views of high places…

It is the most striking view in the country, of that there is no question. Today, exactly one year on from our grand reopening, it is at its most remarkable – a mountain alive with autumn colour. Its flanks are cloaked with russet bracken, which stops sharply at the dark band of woodland. Beyond, the tetrahedral fells melt into one another, each a little hazier than its predecessor. The lake that separates the mountain from me reflects all of this, doubling the splendour.

The first time I saw it, in February two years ago, I knew I had to have it. Although on that day, I would have happily taken any view on offer – anything to distract me from the interminable board meeting in which I was trapped.

The purpose was to agree exactly how many redundancies the company would need to make that year, and our declining prospects were evident in the choice of venue: a run-down hotel set two hundred metres back from the lake. The kind of place that tries to add a touch of glamour by providing cheap sparkling wine with lunch, no doubt trusting its regular clientele won’t realise it is nowhere even close to champagne. The whole charade was utterly tiresome and I resented being part of it, especially as I had already informed my fellow executives of my decision to retire. None of the redundancies would be my responsibility, so there was no need for me to be involved. Yet there I was, trapped in an increasingly aggravated discussion about unions, corporate responsibility and two-yearly forecasts. 

***

I passed the time staring out of the window and across the water. The small thicket of trees on the near shoreline prevented a clear view, yet I was still able to observe how the mood of the mountain opposite changed with each passing hour. Its still-snowy summit accentuated the cold grey-green of its flanks, while the strip of white cloud ravelling down its face accentuated its nuance and depth. Birds glided effortlessly on the hyaline water between us, leaving dissipating arrowheads behind them. As argument and counterargument raged around me, I knew that I had to have this view. To own it. To decide who got to share it and who didn’t. I blocked out all else and began to formulate my retirement plan.

At sunrise next morning, I walked down to the lake. I needed to see it again, at its earliest hour, just to be certain. Passing flower beds showing the first shoots of daffodils – such an uninspiring choice – I headed for the bench a little further up the shore. Unobscured by the trees in front of the hotel, the view from here was even finer and the mountain somehow even more spectacular. The sun crept up behind me, illuminating the eastern face inch by inch and painting it with a fresh palette, one of brown and purple and orange, scorched through with thick black shadows cast by its ridges and folds, a shifting show of shadow puppets. The singularity of this view was confirmed by the photographers jockeying for position on the grass around me, some even waiting in line for their turn in the prime spot. Even the joggers paused to take their own mental snapshots.

It is possible to have everything in life and still want more. Once back in London, I could not stop obsessing about the view imprinted so vividly on my mind. During those long final weeks before retirement, I set out the details of my new project: a fully refurbished hotel, five stars and fine dining in place of the shabby old relic where I’d been forced to stay. Something exceptional for those who not only deserve it, but can also afford it. It was just what the region needed: a taste of the top-end, an overdue injection of style and refinement. An alternative to the washed-out places that still, even now, proliferate around here, somehow surviving on two-for-one weekend deals and ten-pound lunches. By contrast, my hotel would be perfect. And the perfect hotel demands the perfect view.

***

Too many people dismiss us wealthy as being materialistic. It is a lazy insult, painting us as fools who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is also incorrect: we can appreciate the beauty of the natural world as readily as anyone else. The lower classes have long thought they had an exclusive moral right to enjoy the countryside, ever since they set off on their trespass over Kinder Scout. Yet the key word there is trespass: they were not supposed to be there. Would we have defended it so fiercely if we had not also valued it? No, the wealthy have the right to enjoy England’s beauty too. Anyone with money has worked to earn it, or toiled still harder to keep it. We deserve the chance to enjoy what it can buy, and exclusivity is part of enjoyment.

***

The complaints began even before our first month was through. The dining hall had no privacy, said the guests, as the huge windows meant that people passing by could watch them eat. Others said it was too cold in there. Which was nonsense, of course, and I even installed an antique thermometer to assuage their doubts. But a landscape of frost-capped fells can, it seems, make people feel cold, even in the confines of a fully insulated and expensively heated building. And people are so very eager to share imagined discomforts in lieu of any actual ones. Even those who didn’t complain failed to appreciate what they were experiencing, with eyes more commonly fixed on their phones, their food, or occasionally their companions. Anywhere other than my mountain. 

They also failed to appreciate the master suite. Complaints ranged from the noise of the diners below to the smells from the kitchen, and again the imagined cold. Yet as autumn changed to winter, by far the commonest cause for complaint on those insufferable online review websites was the dining hall windows, my Italian-made, nine-foot-high windows. There’s too much sunlight; the rain is too loud; why are there no blinds to stop people looking in… The unique opportunity to admire the finest view in the land was never remarked upon. Not once.

The final straw came during that first winter. Bookings were below half-occupancy and I had already been forced to lower prices after less than four months of operating. As I passed through the reception on my way to meet, and possibly sack, my manager, I heard someone complaining at reception. He was rich, arrogant and trying to impress a woman who was clearly only with him for weekends away in expensive country hotels. But the nature of his grievance hit me like a fist: he didn’t like the view. For three hundred and fifty pounds, he expected more than just a lake and a mountain. The girl on reception tried to placate him, but I cut her off before she had even completed her sentence. Give them a full refund as long as they leave immediately. I won’t let anyone talk about my mountain like that, especially not in my own hotel. 

It was clear to me by then that somehow, somewhere along the way, I had got it wrong. My vision was wasted on other people, whether rich or poor. I summoned my team of architects once more and explained what needed to be done.

***

The trees I felled and promised to replace have finally taken root, although rather than doing so in a nearby field, they now form a neat row between the old hotel buildings and the sparkling new construction near the water. The latter is now my residence, and quite possibly the most expensive private home in the country. The master suite is my bedroom, and the dining hall – my brilliant, beautiful dining hall – is the office from which I now manage the hotel myself, ensuring it matches the tastes of the lower classes. Once grown, those trees will become a barrier, affording me a little privacy from the riff-raff who now comprise my clientele. More importantly, they will block off all views across the water for anyone except me. Never again will my guests be confronted by a mountain too grand for them to behold, or be disturbed by a majesty they cannot appreciate. That burden is now mine, and one I bear alone. 

***

You can order your copy of Twisted Mountains via Little Peak Press. 

The Library: The Heeding, by Rob Cowen and Nick Hayes

Read by Marcel Krueger:

One and a half years into the current global pandemic, and we now see the first publications of what you could call “Coronavirus Lit”. After a run on Camus' The Plague and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year when it all started, now contemporary writers have begun to engage with the pandemic itself, with quarantine, isolation and living through it - with a varying degree of success. One the one hand there are inspiring projects like the online and offline The Decameron Project of the New York Times Magazine, which brings together such diverse writers like Rivka Galchen, Colm Tóibín, Margaret Atwood and Yiyun Li, on the other German novelist Thea Dorn's whiny Trost. Briefe an Max (Confort. Letter to Max) which barely misses becoming an anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination manifest while pretending to be highbrow literature. 

The Heeding, a collaboration between writer Rob Cowen and illustrator and graphic artist Nick Hayes can definitely be considered Corona Lit, and is thankfully of the inspiring variety. The book contains 35 wonderfully illustrated poems and spans the pandemic from spring 2020 to spring 2021, but this is not a lockdown diary (even though it picks up contemporary themes like the Black Lives Matter movement), but a book about the world as a whole and our place in it. As Cowen says in the introduction, when referring to the trauma World War II his grandfather lived through:

"This book is born out of a different time and trauma, but perhaps it might likewise be thought of as a collection of things, of findings and workings out - if not conclusions - around our relationships with nature, ourselves and each other at another moment of profound change."

The theme of the poems varies immensely, from moors and allotments to living in quarantine with children, family grief, isolation and loneliness to anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and drinking songs, nicely bookended by two poems about duels between hawks and their prey. Nick Hayes' illustrations complement the poems perfectly: the first image the reader encounters before said first poem is a hawk in flight that practically explodes from the page, and really gave me pause. 

The only weak point of this wonderful book is the – for me – sometimes too widely meandering subject matter of the poems. While this wide-angled approach is something that definitely works in Rob Cowen's prose work Common Ground, where walking a part of the edgelands makes the protagonist explore all sorts of interconnections and layers of history, the poems in The Heeding sometimes feel disjointed. But then, is disjointed not what we all felt at some point in the last twelve months? 

What I like about this beautiful book is that it treats the Covid-19 pandemic not as a once-in-a-lifetime event that we all have to make it through to get back to like everyone was before. It references extreme heatwaves and human failure to show humility in the face of nature, and that makes it more an example of the first contemporary plague literature than a look back at a unique event. As I write this the plague is still ongoing, and there are countries on the planet that have not even seen one single vaccine dose making its way there. And as things stand, this will not have been the last global pandemic in our lifetime - it's just a question if we can learn to better tackle these in the future. There will be more floods and droughts and heatwaves and fires and bumbling politicians failing, but maybe we can find hope and inspiration to face and change these in books like The Heeding. Or if not hope, then at least compassion for our fellow man and nature. It is sure needed. As Rob Cowen says in his poem ‘The End of This (Drinking Poem)’:

Pass me a glass. Give me courage
to start over. And be better.  

***

The Heeding is published by Elliott & Thompson.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

The Library: Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

By Marcel Krueger:

According to German writer Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) and his "Irish Journal" first published in 1957, "the people of Ireland are the only people in Europe who have never invaded other countries [...]". Since the publication of his book, this view has been the mainstream view of Ireland from Germany for decades, fuelled by countless media campaigns of Fáilte Ireland , the Irish Tourism Board: a twee, harmless island of green fields, dramatic cliffs and pubs with open fires, peopled by jolly fiddlers, naive artists and buxom ginger maidens. The dark and martial history of Ireland as a whole is often swept under the glossy rug made of postcards or Instagram reels from the "Wild Atlantic Way", or only ever mentioned if it can be commodified and packaged into something visitors can consume, like swashbuckling stories of Grace O'Neill or the conflict in Northern Ireland only made accessible through guided tours of murals and "Peace Walls". The fact that Ireland did invade other countries, its soldiers employed as mercenaries by European powers for centuries, or that its people have been slaughtering each other for a hundred years with bullets and bombs, is all glossed over. 

I hope that many people from Germany will read “Thin Places” by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, which in its complexity addresses the violence all over Ireland, and offers a way of understanding and a potential way out of the spiral of violence that engulfed the north of the island for so long. Coincidentally, the German feuilleton often uses the term Seelenstriptease, literally a “soul striptease”, for a work of art, a book, an interview, a movie that reveals deeply personal and intimate details about the creator of that work, or the subject. I don't really like the word, but it is the first I thought about when finishing Kerri's wonderful work, that this book is very much a soul, and a country, stripped bare.

The book is about many things: Brexit, place, trauma, alcoholism, grief, hope and fear, and uses the structure of memoir to follow the life of the writer: from her growing up as the child of a Catholic mother and a Protestant father in Derry/Londonderry, firebombed out of her home during the “Troubles”, the civil war in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998, and then moving away to Scotland and England before finally returning to her hometown in her 30s. Whereas the many excellent essay collection that have come out of Ireland in recent years, like Sinéad Gleeson's "Constellations" or Ian Maleney's “Minor Monuments” use personal stories as starting points to establish the theme of single essays, "Thin Places" is a book-length essay in itself, one that drifts of into certain themes but always circles back to the main structure of handling trauma - and failing in doing so.

This is not a book that is easy to read. Not because of the complexity of writing or the darkness it explores, but because it does not offer easy escapism, or just food for thought that makes you utter "Interesting!" and then put it aside. Many things that Kerri writes about in here are so profound and moving that I literally had to pause after a few paragraphs, put the book down and explore what her words had caused inside of me. Sometimes I got confused by the many places and (life) times the author jumps back and forth between, but then the key themes and the overall structure remain clear and always allow the reader to climb back in.   

This island on which I was born is a wild, ancient and stirring place - a place so ethereal as to take a given moment in time and bathe it in the light of something divine, a place that was eternal and holy long before those words ever had need for voicing. [...] Ireland - this ethereal and mythical island, set down in the heart of the ravenous, tumultuous Atlantic Ocean - is black, too, coal-black, as black as to be the making of the crows. Black is the colour of many of our true loves' hairs on this island but it is also the colour of sorrow and fear - of mystery and the unknown, of so much death, and of the unimaginable depths of our grief.

The book ends on a note of hope, with the image of the winter solstice and the conviction that there is always light ahead when it is darkest, but I don't think that that is necessary. Looking at the pictures coming from Northern Ireland in April 2021, it is clear that the important thing here is balance, balance in the peace process and the self. There are only ever small victories possible for all of us, and we have to fight every day so that the needle does not  tilt back to the dark side again. “Thin Places” is a deeply personal work of art and at the same time a timely portrait of the (still) hurting island of Ireland that everyone should read. Especially in Germany.  

***

Thin Places is published by Cannongate.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

By Paul Scraton:

Sometime around 2011 or 2012 I was in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, browsing the shelves of the Grove Bookshop. There, in a section devoted to nature writing and the outdoors, I found a slender volume called The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. This book, written around the end of the Second World War and first published in 1977, has become a touchstone of landscape and place writing in the decade or so since Canongate published it in a new edition with an introduction from Robert Macfarlane. It has been translated into a number of different languages and its author, who died in 1981, now graces the Scottish five-pound note. Quite the result for a book that had sat, quietly in a drawer, for more than three decades after Shepherd wrote it.

In the Canongate edition, The Living Mountain is only just over a hundred pages long, and yet within that short space Shepherd creates a richly detailed portrait of a place that was so important to her throughout her life – the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. If I remember correctly, I read it in one evening at my mum’s house in Menston, and as so often happens with a book like this, it became connected in my imagination not only to the place it is actually about, but also the place where I read it.

I don’t know the Cairngorms very well. I have only been to that corner of Scotland a couple of times, both in childhood, and so I cannot be sure if my memories of the landscape are real, or based on other sources, not least Shepherd’s wonderfully descriptive prose. But picking up the book again this week, I found myself reminded not only of the Scottish landscapes I have known, but also the moors above my mum’s house and the walks we took during that visit nearly ten years ago, with Shepherd’s words still echoing around my head.

Indeed, it is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to The Living Mountain is that a piece of writing so deeply connected to and rooted in a specific place, can have such resonance with someone who has nearly no personal experience of it. Perhaps it is because all of us who love the outdoors have our own version of what Shepherd felt when she walked out once more into the Cairngorms. For us it might be the Welsh hills or the Baltic coast, a Yorkshire moor or a Brandenburg forest, but we understand Shepherd’s depth of feeling because we feel it too. 

The cover artwork of ‘The Living Mountain’, the new album by Jenny Sturgeon, photo by Hannah Bailey

What is true of books is even more true of music. There are so many songs and albums that are connected in my brain to a certain moment, a time of my life and a particular place. A youth hostel room in Slovenia, the snow falling at the window. A border-crossing in Switzerland, in the middle of the night. A road trip through Spain and the volcanic landscapes of Cabo de Gata. Of course, these songs are not about those places, but they became forever linked with them in my imagination. So I was intrigued to see what happened when I listened to a new album by the singer-songwriter Jenny Sturgeon, who has written and recorded her own The Living Mountain, a collection of songs inspired by Nan Shepherd’s book.

As well as the album, released earlier this month, there will also be accompanying films by Shona Thomson which will be hopefully toured next year, and Sturgeon has also found time to record The Living Mountain Podcast, a series of conversations with artists, writers and ecologists about their own connections with the mountains, outdoor places and how they inspire and influence their work.

It often feels, with projects like this, that the great test of the work of art inspired by another is whether it can stand up on its own right. And while it is certainly true that, listening to Jenny Sturgeon’s songs with Nan Shepherd’s book at your elbow, it is easy to hear the conversation between them, the strength of The Living Mountain (the album) is that the songs work in and of themselves. It was a long time since I’d read the book when I first listened to Sturgeon’s album, and what I heard was something poetic, beautiful and haunting, and I think this would have been the case even if I had never read Shepherd’s work at all. 

At the end of Sturgeon’s podcast episodes she asks her guests if they have a piece of music that connects them to the landscapes and places they have been talking about in their conversation. The greatest compliment I can give The Living Mountain as an album is that I have continued to hear it, echoing in my head as Nan Shepherd’s prose did before, long after the album has finished and I’ve left the house to go for a walk by the river or in the woods. Something tells me that Sturgeon’s voice and songs will be with me for a long time, and will take me back to these autumn days in Berlin and Brandenburg, forever linked to this particular time and these particular places. It’s quite a way from the high plateau of the Cairngorms to the flatlands of northeastern Germany, but for this listener at least, they are now connected through the words and music of Jenny Sturgeon. 

***

You can find out more about Jenny Sturgeon and the Living Mountain project, including the podcast, on her website. The album was released in October 2020 by Hudson Records. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is published by Canongate. Order it through your local independent bookshop.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His next book, In the Pines, is a novella about a lifelong connection to the forest and will be published by Influx Press in 2021.

The Library: Unofficial Britain by Gareth E. Rees

Read by Marcel Krueger:

During the first weeks of Coronavirus lockdown in the Republic of Ireland, where I live, everyone was confined to a two-kilometre radius around our houses to help prevent the spread of the virus. I was lucky to have an obvious sliver of Irish history within my 2 km-circle, a sliver that shows that even a small town like Dundalk has its place in history and displays that proudly when you know where to look: on my street is Seatown Castle, actually the bell tower of a 13th century Franciscan monastery. It was once plundered by invading Scots, Scots brought over by Edward the Bruce in 1315 in his claim for the Irish crown. He crowned himself High King of Ireland in Dundalk the same year, just a few streets away, where today Micheal McCourt’s pub can be found.

But just around the corner from that pile of medieval stones, on Mill Street, is another reminder of history, one that is not as flashy as the Seatown Castle but maybe as equally important for the town. Sitting in the sidewalk is a rusty-brown water meter cover, one that must have been set here at some point in the 1980, when (long before water meters were a political issue in Ireland) someone in Louth County Council bought these from Wabash, Indiana, a small town of 10,000 inhabitants which produced the hexagonal water meter covers that to this day are strewn around this equally small town on the east coast of Ireland and proudly bear the inscription “Ford Meter Box Co., Wabash, Indiana U.S.A.”.

In his latest book, Gareth E. Rees equally focuses on these unobtrusive landmarks of the quotidian (albeit more bigger ones), landmarks that form the backdrop to our lives every day that might get unnoticed by many but are, after a fashion, holding the fabric of the world together. While in his previous books, Marshland (Influx Press, 2013), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), Rees mainly focused either on a specific place - the  Hackney Marshes or Hastings - or on an ultra-local theme like that of car parks, Unofficial Britain is a more wide-reaching book that covers most of the island of Great Britain in search for what the author calls “anaologue relics of a bygone era before digital technology, mobile phones and the internet“, the structures of modernity that have existed for the last seventy years everywhere around us: electricity pylons, power stations, multistorey car parks, suburban housing estates. 

The book is divided into nine chapters plus introduction and epilogue, each dedicated to the “non-places” of today and their mythology, located in Scotland, England and Wales. By mixing architectural details with urban legends, ghost stories and bits and pieces from his own biography when writing about ring roads and roundabouts, flyovers and underpasses, Rees – who is also the founder of the Unofficial Britain website that was around long before the book and equally dedicated to the mysteries of the quotidian - shows us that these locations and buildings are as important as the holloways, medieval churches and cursed oaks of a British countryside. And even more important than the idea of a countryside that in many cases only exists in the imagination of over-romantic nature writers and the xenophobic fever dreams of UKIP and Britain First, like when he writes about the Redcliffe Flyover that existed in Bristol from 1967 to 1998:

Like the Eiffel Tower, built as a temporary structure never intended to be an enduring Parisian landmark, the Redcliffe Flyover became totemic. It came to represent fun, thrills and amusement; rare moments of child-like wonder in the midst of a tough, troubled city. A similar process of appropriation can happen to other unlikely landmarks such as chimneys, communication masts and factories. As we grow up among them they become ingrained within our memories and shared history. What can seem at first ugly and soulless can gradually come to accumulate emotional resonance through the sheer power of persistence.

At the same time Rees is stocktaking: with Unofficial Britain, he has created the standard reference for landscape punk and urban place writing in Britain 2020. Besides his own concrete experiences he uses examples of the works and lives of other important urban explorer artists like Salena Godden, Gary Budden, Nick Papadimitriou, Olivia Laing or Clare Archibald, a veritable who's who of deep topographers. With its honest narration and its accessible language this is the perfect introduction for anyone wondering what the whole psychogeography hogwash is all about; a wonderful ramble through the Brexit Britain of today - warts and all.

But isn't this how we experience a place? For a place is more than bricks and mortar. More than a map. More than a bunch of articles about social deprivation and sneery lists of Britain's worst towns. A place is made of stories and you read and rumours you hear. It is made of prejudices and anxieties, shaped by our past experiences. It is an atmosphere - a synchronicity of light, sound, smell, texture and temperature. 

The only thing I wish Rees would have done was to include Northern Ireland - as wide-reaching as his account of unofficial Britain is, I would be curious to see what the Troubles meant and mean for the urban fabric of the quotidian in this part of Britain across the water; and if what he might have found here made would have been vastly different to those in Scotland, Wales and England. 

For the time being, we keep on living in the pandemic dead future of the 60s and 70s in a time where the future only seems to promise more ruins, more cracked concrete and more neglected estates as government funds run out or are shovelled into offshore accounts while the sea levels are rising. This book is a sober account of the dreams and nightmares of our environment, of the bridges and buildings that really form the fabric of our lives and not the rose-tinted utopias of the past that all the right-wing nincompoops try to sell us; and it will all be just more water meter covers, more concrete poured into flood defences and refugee camps from here on. 

***

Unofficial Britain is published by Elliott&Thompson. 

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

The Library – The Motion Demon by Stefan Grabiński

Read by Marcel Krueger:

The main train station in Przemyśl looks splendid. It's Neo-baroque exterior resembles Vienna Central, and is a reminder of the time when it was one the stops on the Galician Railway of the Austro-Hungarian empire, built in 1861 and connecting Przemyśl to Vienna, Kraków and Lwów (Lviv). It was restored in 2012 and must be one of the most beautiful train stations in Poland today.

Also due to its importance as a railway hub, Przemyśl was surrounded with a large ring of forts, which were besieged by the Russian armies during World War I, and the city occupied by the Tsarist troops from March to June 1915, when the city (and the railway) was reconquered by the troops of the Emperor. 

Throughout World War I a tall and thin, sickly looking gentleman with a nice moustache was frequenting the main station. He was no soldier or employee of the railways, but instead kept taking notes. Nevertheless, he even had a special permit from railway authorities to visit restricted areas of the station normally off limits for civilians. He worked as a teacher, and later his pupils would recall seeing him often on the viaduct over the rail tracks. 

This was Stefan Grabiński (1887 - 1936) a writer who has been called the 'Polish Edgar Allan Poe', and his work was one of the precursors of fantasy fiction in Poland. Stefan graduated from University in Lwów (Lviv), and then worked as a teacher of Polish in the city and later in Przemyśl. He also had a weak constitution, suffering from severe tuberculosis over many years. Throughout his time working as a teacher, he wrote novels, plays, and short stories, and also published articles and stories in newspapers and magazines. A collection of short stories, Exceptions: In the Dark of Faith (Z Wyjątków. W Pomrokach Wiary), written under the pen name Stefan Żalny, was self-published in 1909, and a second collection of short stories, On the Hill of Roses (Na Wzgórzu Róż), followed 9 years later. The book that however firmly established Stefan as an author of the fantastic in Poland of the interwar years was his short story collection The Motion Demon (Demon Ruchu) that was published in 1919. 

It is this collection that I read with delight during the travel- and train-less lockdown we are still undergoing here in the Republic of Ireland where I live. Published in paperback by the NoHo Press in 2014 with a fantastic cover illustration based on a lithograph by Margit Schwarcz from 1931, this is a wonderful small book and, despite the fact that it is a hundred years old, essential rail reading. Stefan's stories are firmly rooted in the reality of train travel as he saw it in the early 20th century, but then - as told by a potentially unreliable narrator - there is always an added layer of madness and horror which might either be psychological or truly supernatural. There are no speaking ravens or tentacled ancient gods in these stories, but instead railway catastrophes caused by phantom trains, lunatic railwaymen and train demons that might only exist in the minds of the protagonists. He displays both a fascination of the speed of trains and in the secret world of railway- and signalmen that travellers normally do not see, and at the same time weaves in a luddite criticism of travelling too fast that would not go amiss in today's slow travel movement. Mirosław Lipiński has finely translated Stefan's sumptuous prose for the English edition, exemplified by the first paragraph of the title story:

“The express Continental from Paris to Madrid rushed with all the force its pistons could muster. The hour was already late, the middle of the night; the weather was wet, showery. The beating rain lashed at the brightly lit windows and was scattered on the glass in teary beads. Bathed in the downpour, the coaches glittered under roadside lamp-posts like wet armour, spewing sprightly water from their mouldings. A hollow groan issued forth into space from their black bodies, a confused chatter of wheels, jostling buffers, merciless tramped trails. Frenzied in its run, the chain of coaches awakened sleeping echoes in the quiet night, enticed dead voices along the woods, revived slumbering ponds. Some type of heavy, drowsy eyelids were raised, some large eyes opened in consternation, and so they remained in momentary fright. And the train sped on in a strong wind, in a dance of startled air, while smoke and soot clung lazily to its rear; the train rushed breathlessly on, hurling behind it the blood-red memory of sparks and coal refuse…”

Stefan remained in Przemyśl and near its station until 1931. He had to leave the teaching profession because of worsening health in 1927, and as his tuberculosis worsened he was forced to spend more for treatment. He nevertheless kept on writing and publishing, again mostly focussing on supernatural, psychological short stories, with a lesser focus on rail travel though: the collections Pilgrim’s Madness (Szalony Pątnik, 1920), An Incredible Story (Niesamowita Opowieść) and The Book of Fire (Księga Ognia, 1922) were followed by his longest prose work, Passion (Namiętność), which was published in 1930 and inspired by a trip to Italy. 

In 1931, he settled in the resort and spa town of Brzuchowice (now Briukhovychi) where, despite some recent financial return for his writings, he increasingly fell into obscurity and was abandoned by most of his friends. In 1936, he died in utter poverty and isolation in Lwów (Lviv) and is buried there. His life and work was mostly forgotten for the next 70 years but in recent times, also due to the tireless efforts of his translator Mirosław Lipiński, has been discovered as an important part of the literary canon of Poland and translated into German, Italian and Japanese as well. Stefan Grabiński is now regarded as one of the first of his countrymen who found both horror and delight in the quotidian of his time, in places where other writers never bothered - or dared - to look. The Motion Demon is a wonderful and flavourful book with a slight hint of madness that I can't wait to take with me on the rails once I can travel again.

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The Motion Demon is published by NoHo Press

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

May Book of the Month: Minor Monuments by Ian Maleney

Minor Monuments - Essays
by Ian Maleney
Published by Tramp Press

Review: Marcel Krueger:

Ireland is not always the country of gentle hills, Atlantic ways or peat fires in pubs that German tourists in Goretex seek out. This is a country of shibboleths and tribalism, of bullets on wets streets, hunger strikes and bomb blasts. And for me these things are as apparent on the streets of Belfast and Dublin as they are out on the tourist coasts, as apparent along the Grand Canal as they are out in the Midlands. For me as an outsider who has lived over a decade on the island of Ireland now, there are few lines of text that describe my feelings for this country better than the last stanzas of Seamus Heaney's 'The Tollund Man':

Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

Maybe it is no coincidence that on the first few pages of his essay collection 'Minor Monuments', Ian Maleney recalls his partner taking a picture of him overlooking the bog near his family home in Pollagh in County Offaly and adding the same lines of Heaney to that image: Maleney is aware of the same darkness.

Together with Emilie Pine's 'Note to Self' (also published by Tramp Press) and Sinead Gleeson's 'Constellations', Maleney's 'Monuments' forms the spearhead of a new wave of Irish essay writing. Where in the past fiction was the order of the day, these days a new wave of Irish writers is again concerned with navel-gazing in the best sense of Michel de Montaigne: of looking at places, the country and oneself without the added filter of fiction.

Maleney's book is a rare kind of thing, as it finely weaves together three-layers in his (essay) writing: it contains 12 essays, each aligned topically: 'Shelter','Machine Learning' and so; and at the same time charts the descent of Maleney's grandfather John Joe into Alzheimer's and death; and this is also a book about Maleney literally leaving the bog and the established community and family structures of his home place - and observing them from the outside.

The main setting throughout the book is the home of Nana and John Joe, especially the kitchen ('a room where you can really feel the night falling.'), and the overall rural environment of the family houses and the ever-present bog at the periphery. Maleney, who also edits and designs Fallow Media, one of the finest examples of new online publishing in Ireland, not only talks about the meaning of the bog as energy supply and source of income for the community (Bord na Móna, the Irish Peat Board, built a peat-operated power station here, and John Joe and many others worked in peat harvesting), but also as the wild living thing it is:

The boundaries between bog and farm seemed to break down entirely. Houses, sheds, and farmyards appeared out of nowhere, perched on the edge of the blackness beyond. It was as if they'd carved a little bit of calm out of the bog many years previous, and had spent all the time since being attacked and undermined by feral wilderness. Whatever civilising sense they had was porous and partial. Nothing grew straight. Every bush and tree was a mass of tangles and nothing man-made remained square for long. Fences and gates were crumbling, and the breeze block walls of tin-roofed sheds sagged into the soft ground at incongruous angles. The road itself was one long twist punctuated by jagged potholes. The leafless branches of the hardy roadside trees reached out towards us, desperate and lonely. This was Turraun.

Maleney also talks about the distance that the writer as an outsider writing about history has to the lived memory that keeps community and place together, from which he willingly removes himself, with the help of other artists. Seamus Heaney makes multiple appearances, as do Richard Skelton, Rebecca Solnit or Susan Sontag. But Maleney's writing is strongest when he approaches the slow disappearance of John Joe and tries to examine what Alzheimer's means for the human suffering from it and their family and carers, which he beautifully does in 'Pneumonia':

Often the sea is literally wide, but sometimes it is more ambiguous than miles plotted on a map. Sitting in the kitchen with John Joe, I was struck by the resonance between two different experiences of exile; the emigrant and the amnesiac. As the past grew more distant and foggy in his mind, gradually disappearing over some unrecoverable horizon, the songs became more important and more accurate too. They were a link with that past, that foreign country, even as they dramatised the experience of losing it. John Joe sang like a man whose boat was rapidly filling with water. He had a very wide ocean to cross, one he could not swim over.

The place where Maleney and I live these days is still a dangerous and dark island, one where murder, pollution and cronyism prevail. It is good that we have writers like Ian Maleney laying himself and the country. For a clear and honest look at the sensitivities of Ireland and its people there are few better books out there at the moment.       

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Wherever possible we recommend that readers of Elsewhere buy their books from a bricks and mortar bookshop or direct from the publisher.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and the upcoming Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

April Book of the Month: The Border by Diarmaid Ferriter

The Border - The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics
by Diarmaid Ferriter
Published by Profile Books

Review: Marcel Krueger

It's quiet as I cross the border. The Enterprise emerges from the granite flanks the Gap of the North, for a moment there is the small grey hulk of 17th-century Moyry Castle visible to my left, and then the train chugs into the fields and hedgerows inside the Ring of Gullion. I've slipped into the North. While there is no visible sign of it, there is always a moment however that indicates the division between the Republic and the United Kingdom: when the phone networks change and the onboard wifi skips for a moment. A few phones across the almost empty carriage of the afternoon train start beeping, but that’s the only indication of a chance in jurisdiction. I could pay my tea in Pound or Euros all along the way anyway.

As I write this, the ship of fools that the House of Commons in Westminster has become is with every day producing new proof that as a parliament it is no longer functional and increasingly declaring its own bankruptcy over the issue of Brexit, and as Professor Tanja Bueltmann put it on Twitter: 'As a historian I am fascinated by watching a democracy dismantle itself.

As an EU citizen I am worried about what is happening to my home. As an observer I am facepalming basically every minute now. Never forget: everything that is happening is a *choice*, not a requirement.' And one of the things that is, unsurprisingly, seemingly confusing the British parliament is the border on the island of Ireland, the one I cross so often, quietly, on the train. If they would have time in between voting down any constructive motions for any progress, I would make historian Diarmaid Ferriter's latest book mandatory reading for every single Westminster MP. It's a small book, just 184 pages, but it concisely and understandably lines out the history of the Irish border from its creation in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act to the present day with (or without) its Backstop.

In 7 short chapters, Ferriter charts the negotiations between the Irish revolutionary government and the British Crown that lead to the Anglo-Irish treaty (and subsequent civil war in the south) and the creation of the border; and the often bizarre details of its inception, for example that the newly created border in Silesia between Weimar Germany and the new Polish Republic served as one of the blueprints for the Irish one. From then on he (literally) follows the border and its political implication for the leaders in Dublin, Belfast and London over the next decades, into the conflict in the North and how the subsequent opening of the border as part of the Good Friday Agreement helped overcome division and sectarian hatred and slaughter.

But this book is not purely historical or political non-fiction. Ferriter also weaves in voices from all areas of society and what the border meant and means for them, and how much the two countries on this island are interconnected: there's the Irish Football Association/Football Association of Ireland and Gaelic Athletic Association history of a divided and yet united Ireland (in sports at least) and the perspective of writers and poets; like Eugene McCabe (who's farm driveway crossed from Monaghan into Fermanagh) describing the borderlands as a '"dim, hidden country, crooked scrub ditches of whin and thorns stunted in sour putty land; bare, spade-ribbed fields... housing a stony-faced people living from rangy cattle and welfare handouts... To them a hundred years was yesterday, two hundred the day before."' And then, a few decades on, there's also the man who owns a bridge across the border and decides to plant his chip van smack-bang in the middle, avoiding taxes North and South. As Ferriter puts it, when referring to the shared commemoration of the Irishmen who fought in World War I: 'Such attention to inclusive commemoration, alongside the peace process and the sense of an "invisible" or "soft" Irish border, greatly improved relations between North and South; ultimately, up to 30,000 were travelling over the border each day, and that was convenient and valuable for both jurisdictions.'

What's most striking in this book is the crystal-clear analysis of past and contemporary blunders especially in London. The last few pages addressing the implications of Brexit on the Irish border are interspersed with recent quotes by English politicians who seem to have unlearned everything that should have been the lesson of the almost 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland followed by twenty years of peace. It hurts to read these bon mots of buffoonery collected in one place, and Ferriter's analysis sadly only increased the clinching of my guts and the fear of what mini-Trump Boris Johnson or the living cartoon Jacob Rees-Mogg might do if given free reign over politics that have a direct and immediate impact on the communities on this craggy island.

But there was, it seemed, a return to the politics and and ignorance of the past over the course of next two years as a succession of clownish Tories revealed the depth of their ignorance and contempt when it came to Ireland, none more so than Boris Johnson, foreign secretary from July 2016 to July 2018, who embarrassingly suggested the invisible boundary between the London boroughs of Camden and Westminster as a possible model for a post-Brexit border.

Ferriter has no solution for the dilemma of Brexit, but ends his book with a quote by Benedict Kiely, 'the most that can be hoped  for is that all Irishmen will some day learn to view the past without passion, ...'

The next time the House of Commons suspends its sitting amidst a crisis that has implications for millions of people because of a leaking roof or sewage leak, every single MP should a) receive a slap with this book (as I said, its relatively small) and then read it. The border with its past tragedies and current hopes must stay open.     

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Wherever possible we recommend that readers of Elsewhere buy their books from a bricks and mortar bookshop or direct from the publisher.

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and the upcoming Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2019). You’ll find him on twitter here.