Trans-Mongolian

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By Kenn Taylor:

Lying on my back on a bunk bed, on a very long, very bare train. Going a very long way through a very bare landscape a long way from anywhere.

At this point, I’d been travelling on it for so many days, that whenever the train stopped and I briefly stepped onto the terra firma of a platform to buy food, I had sea legs. Well, train legs. So used to the constant shaking and rhythm of the railway journey that, removed from it, everything seemed unbalanced and off kilter.

Being on a train for so long, there is nothing but time. To be filled in many ways. Looking out for the arresting moments between endless tress and endless desert. Games. Chat. Drinking. Lots of drinking. Someone brought a laptop with downloaded films and music, which in back then seemed over the top and now seems like common sense.

With me always being a late adopter, I’d brought books. Although like everyone else I’d been very affected, if not traumatised, by the animated film, I’d never actually read Watership Down. She had recommended it in her usual passionate way, so I thought, why not get a copy for my travels. In what was no doubt another daft attempt at maintaining a connection.

So, with an incongruity recognised by myself and others, I found myself reading a novel about anthropomorphic rabbits filled with descriptions of the lush, green and wet English countryside, whilst sat on a train going through the depths of dry, summer, eastern Siberia. With this being August, Siberia of course was nothing like the snow covered images of popular culture. A week earlier we had sunbathed near the Kremlin. As you do. It was odd but all the more vivid to be down the, er, rabbit hole, of this book about the loss of an arcadian England, whilst being on the other side of the world in a moving metal box going through a striking but unforgiving landscape.

Of course, wherever you go though, you are still you. I dived into the depths of this book and this journey, trying to concentrate on reading whilst also sucking in the vast stream of everyone and everything going past. On this bunk in the quiet afternoon though, in the world of rabbits as the eternal human struggle, I still found myself thinking of her and the chest pressing gulp of the pain swept back in.

Back then though, the wider world seemed brighter. This journey just another example of it opening up ever further, ever faster. Here we were crossing continents, a multiplicity of backgrounds filled with camaraderie, in a world of expanding global interconnection, dialogue and understanding.

Yet the warnings of how thin a veneer this all was were already on display here. A guide telling us of the racism he experienced all the time. Russians more than happy with Putin telling us ‘we need a strong leader’. The call to Free Pussy Riot provoking indifference, ‘they shouldn’t have behaved like that in a church.’ No one likes us, we don’t care. What now stares us in the face as the growing threat to democracy in the 21st century was all there lurking in the background. We had thought then perhaps that this was just the leftovers of an old world that was dying. Really though, the post 2008 trauma was still just sinking in. The thwarted ambitions and dreams of millions, many struggling now even for a basic standard of living. Their sense of injustice ruthlessly diverted to other targets by those in power, so they could maintain the status quo, despite its diminishing returns for the majority.

The world has turned darker in the last decade. So many of the places we visited then, even if it still possible, we might not choose to now. Borders going back up. Minorities oppressed. Rights shredded. History coming roaring back to bite. Wherever you go, you are still you and you take your experience and culture with you. Sometimes though, what you see when you go elsewhere follows you back home much later.

***

Kenn Taylor is a writer and arts producer. He was born in Birkenhead and has lived and worked in Liverpool, London, Bradford, Hull and Leeds. His work has appeared in a range of outlets from The Guardian and CityMetric to The Crazy Oik and Liverpool University Press. www.kenn-taylor.com

Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

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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

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.

Ravens and Bones – Icelandic sagas and places

Photo: Kai Müller

Photo: Kai Müller

Our books editor Marcel Krueger has a new book out this week – Iceland - A Literary Guide for Travellers is published by I.B. Taurus on the 19 March. In this expanded excerpt he writes of his fascination with the Icelandic sagas and how they influence place names in Iceland today

Islands are places apart where Europe is absent.
– W.H. Auden, Journey to Iceland

Writing about an island should be easy. After all, it is surrounded by the sea, neighbouring lands far away. The boundaries are set. The outlook can only ever be inwards, away from the tides. 

Nothing could be further away from the truth in the case of Iceland. This is an island of many identities, of constant flux, just like its unruly volcanic ground. It was the last place in Europe to be settled, but the first democracy; a backwater under foreign rule, its population almost eradicated by catastrophe and neglect; emerging as a progressive Nordic democracy after the two World Wars; and finally from being one of the poorest members of the European Economic Area to becoming a major global financial player, only to be brought crashing down again by greed and failing banks. Today, Iceland is once again reinventing itself as the one destination on everyone’s holiday bucket list. To say that Icelanders have developed a certain resilience and ingenuity over the centuries, and a very peculiar way to express it, would be an understatement. An island settled by explorers and raiders, the view of its people was never just inward – and it manifested itself in a rich oral and literary heritage, something that to this day links Icelanders past and present. 

My personal fascination with Iceland began, as for many others, with the Norse myths and the sagas, with stories about Odin and Loki, about Víking raids and the discovery of Vínland. Kevin Crossley-Holland says it best in the introduction to Norse Myths – Tales of Odin, Thor and Loki (2017):

When I think about the Vikings or talk about the Vikings my eyes brighten, my heart beats faster, and sometimes my hair stands on end. Energetic and practical and witty and daring and quarrelsome and passionate, always eager to go to the edge and see and find out more: that’s how Vikings were. Their tough and stubborn and often beautiful women managed self-sufficient farmsteads in Norway and Sweden and Denmark and Iceland and Greenland, and were at least as capable and outspoken as their men. And for around three centuries – from the beginning of the ninth to the end of the eleventh – many of their husbands and not a few of their sons and daughters sailed south and east and west in their elegant and superbly made clinker boats as mercenaries, traders, hit-and-run raiders, settlers and rulers. And of course they took their gods and beliefs and language with them.

This is, of course, an idealised view of the Víkings and their mythology; but as the country settled by them is as much shaped by storytelling as it is by tectonic activity, Norse lore always served me well as a beeline into both country and Icelandic literature over the years. After all, its mountains and rivers, shores and valleys have all been named by the settlers and writers recording the tales of the settlement. It is both the otherworldliness of the landscape and the outward-looking culture of Icelanders that has made me return to the island time and time again.

There is some literary evidence that Irish monks, the so-called Papar, arrived in Iceland before the Norsemen somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries; however no archaeological evidence has been found to this day. The real show began in the ninth century, when the first Norwegian travellers and explorers, arrived. Their names and those of the areas in which they made their homes during this so-called ‘Age of Settlement’ were recorded in a number of chronicles written down between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, like The Book of Icelanders (Íslendigabók), The Book of Settlements (Landnámabók) and The Book of Flatey Island (Flateyjarbók). As Robert Ferguson puts it in The Hammer and the Cross (2009):

The Book of the Settlements [Landnámabók] is a full and often dramatic account of the colonisation of Iceland. Based on a lost original from the early twelfth century it contains the names of over 3,000 people and 1,400 places. 

According to the Landnámabók, Iceland was discovered by a man named Naddodd, who was sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands when he lost his way and came to the east coast of Iceland instead. Only observing it from the safety of his ship, Naddodd called the country Snowland (Snæland), The first proper settler however was Hrafna (‘Raven’) Flóki Vilgerðarson, named after the fact that he took ravens with him on board ship and released them periodically. When they didn’t return he knew they’d found food and land. Hrafna-Flóki settled for one winter at Barðaströnd in the southern Westfjords region. His journey and stay did not start out well however: his daughter drowned en route, and then his livestock starved to death during the harsh winter. The Landnámabók records how this led Flóki to give the country its name: 

The spring was an extremely cold one. Flóki climbed a certain high mountain, and north across the mountain range he could see a fjord full of drift ice. That’s why he called the country Iceland, and so it’s been called ever since.

After that hard winter however the whole island started to turn green, making Flóki realise that it was habitable, so he returned to Norway to spread the word about this new fertile island he had discovered – but kept the name. The first permanent settlers after Flóki were Norwegian chieftain Ingólfur Arnarson and his wife Hallveig Fróðadóttir, who arrived around AD 874. According to the Landnámabók, Ingólfur threw his two highseat pillars (crucial parts of a Víking chieftain’s hall) overboard as he neared the island, vowing to settle where they landed. After wintering on the south coast in the first year, Ingólfur sailed along the coast until the pillars were found in a place he named Reykjavík, or Smoky Bay, after the geothermal steam rising from the earth – a place that would become the capital of modern Iceland. He was followed by many more chieftains, their families and slaves, who settled all the habitable areas of the island in the next decades, mostly along the fjords and river plains. These settlers were primarily of Norwegian, Irish and Scottish origin – most of the latter being female slaves and servants raided from their homelands. The stories of the Settlement Age and the next 200 years are recorded in the sagas, the most important Icelandic literary heritage – a fascinating canon of heroic and family stories written down between the ninth century and the fourteenth century, its structure and composition unlike anything written in contemporary Europe of that time. According to the sagas, the new immigrants arriving from Norway were independent-minded settlers fleeing the harsh rule of King Harald Fairhair, a man who makes an appearance in almost all of the Sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur). 

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the power of independent local farmers and chieftains gave way to the growing power of a handful of families and their leaders. This period is known as the ‘Age of the Sturlungs’. The fighting became a proper civil war that ravaged the country. The Age of the Sturlungs also saw a veritable proliferation of sagas being written down, maybe in an attempt to reunite the country by making the stories of heroic deeds widely available. It also saw the emergence of the first giant of Icelandic literature, polymath Snorri Sturluson. A member of the Sturlungs and a politician, he is today best known as the author of the Prose or Younger Edda (Snorra Edda, thirteenth century), one of the two sources that have introduced the Norse pantheon and mythology to the modern world – the other being the Poetic or Elder Edda (Ljóða Edda), an anonymous collection of poems from around the same time. In the Prose Edda, Snorri might have recorded his own assessment of the age he was living in based on a quote he took from the Elder Edda: ‘A sword age, a wind age, a wolf age. No longer is there mercy among men.’

Highly-accomplished literary works of that time include Egill’s Saga (Egils saga Skallagrímssonar), the life of the warrior-poet Egill Skallagrímsson; the Saga of the People of Laxárdalr (Laxdæla Saga, a triangular love story set in West Iceland; the Saga of Gisli Súrssonar (Gísla Saga Súrssonar), the tragic tale of a heroic outlaw in the Westfjords; and the Story of Burnt Njál (Njáls Saga), generally considered the high point of Icelandic literary art, a complex and rich account of human and societal conflicts playing out across the fertile fields of south Iceland. 

Closely related to the sagas are the Eddas, among the main sources for the knowledge about Norse gods we have today. The Poetic or Elder Edda is a group of more than thirty poems on gods and human heroes preserved in oral tradition until they were recorded by an unknown chronicler (or group of chroniclers). The Prose or Younger Edda is the work of Snorri Sturluson and the most important source of modern knowledge on this subject, and also contains a guide to poetic diction and the kennings, a typically two-word metaphor found in Norse and Icelandic that stands in for a concrete noun: ‘bone-house’ (body), ‘whale-road’ (sea), ‘wave-horse’ (ship), ‘sky-candle’ (sun).

The sagas are still a central part of Iceland’s culture and continue to be taught in its schools, and most people are familiar with a good number, if not all of them. The sagas are certainly known to a much greater extent than British people are familiar with famous works of medieval literature. One key to understanding the power of the sagas lies in their relationship with the landscape itself. The sagas explain how place-names all around the country came to be: some of their explanations about events and characters gave names to natural places – like farms, hills or bogs – and have a historical basis, while others were invented by a saga-author but are nevertheless still used to this day. Because of this and despite their age, the sagas still live on in many of the local areas in which they are set – and have a life over and beyond the printed page. Not only have they served as inspiration for countless modern literary works, art and music, but there are also many new saga trails criss-crossing the country today, and living history museums, saga theatres and cultural centres allow both scholars and visitors to learn about the stories in the actual landscape where they took place. For me, it is often difficult to think of an analogy in another country where a corpus of medieval literature is so close to people’s hearts on a national scale.  It is always a delight to come back to the island and reconnect with its names and places.

Quoyle's Point... an interview with Annie Proulx

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As a companion piece to the second of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – Quoyle’s Point from The Shipping News – we present an interview with Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel.

Interview by Anna Iltnere:

The Shipping News (1993) by Annie Proulx is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of a family moving to Newfoundland and starting to live among local fishermen in an abandoned seaside house, moored to a rock. The house at Quoyle’s Point is a vivid character in the book, dusty, gaunt, despite the efforts, and moaning in the wind. 

I contacted Annie Proulx to ask her four questions about the role of Quoyle’s seaside house in her book and about her own relationship with water.

What is your relationship with water and with the sea? What does the sea mean for you?

Like most people I am attracted to shorelines, whether lake, river or ocean. All of these locales have been severely damaged by humankind over the millennia—wetlands drained, rivers dammed, ocean-shores faced with armored rock walls, estuaries polluted. My interest in today's warming oceans is based on concern as the waters move toward acidity, as coral reefs die, as kelp and eelgrass decline. I watch with trepidation as fish stocks dwindle and the shells of tiny pteropods dissolve. I walk regularly on the shore, picking up plastic as I go and feeling grief at the damages inflicted on these habitats. 

Quoyle is afraid of water and yet he has to overcome his aquaphobia to own a boat and live by the sea. What does his fear symbolize in the book?

I’m not big on symbols. His fear can mean whatever the reader thinks. Books are somewhat cooperative in this way, that a reader can use her or his own experience of life to interpret the actions and thoughts of a book’s protagonists.

What role does the house at Quoyle’s Point play in The Shipping News?

The house is his link with the past—it is the ancestral home of the Quoyles. It also carries bad memories for the Aunt so that what happened in that house a generation before drives the story. And it is a testament to the staying power of Newfoundlanders of the fishing-village period when people lashed their houses to the rocks against the pounding seas and hurricane-force winds. 

Would you agree to spend a summer at Quoyle’s house (if it would be still standing)?

Of course! Where do I sign up?

***

Read Anna Iltnere’s essay about Quoyle’s Point here.

Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Unreal estate No.02: Quoyle's Point

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the second of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Quoyle’s Point from Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Annie Proulx herself.

“The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought.”
- Annie Proulx, The Shipping News, 1993

“There was something about that hard, bare rock, the whistling wind, I found very appealing,” American author Annie Proulx said about her first time in Newfoundland, when she went there on a fishing trip, for a The New York Times interview 26 years ago. “I liked the loneliness and desolateness, the heavily wooded feeling of it. I felt clasped to that stony bosom in a way. I was physically shaken.” 

The idea for The Shipping News, her second book, was born. Annie Proulx fell in love with the landscape on this large island in Atlantic Ocean off eastern Canada, and later even bought her own house in Newfoundland, a cottage where she spent part of the year, dividing time between her other house at that time in Wyoming.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News, published in 1993, is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of a family moving to Newfoundland and starting to live among local fishermen in an abandoned seaside house at Quoyle’s Point, a house that is itself a vivid character, dusty and gaunt, moaning in the wind.

“I feel that stories come out of geography, climate, weather,” Annie Proulx said in an interview for SaltWire, “out of wind and mud, the placement of houses and villages, local landscape markers and anomalies.” 

The House

Quoyle’s Point is an imagined place in Newfoundland. For forty-four years a house has stood there empty, until the protagonist Quoyle, born in Brooklyn and “thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love”, travels to Newfoundland with his two little daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, and aunt Agnis Hamm, who was born in the house years ago. Quoyle’s faithless wife, and the girls’ mother, dies in a car accident after selling her two daughters to a sexual molester. Quoyle gets his girls back and they are ready to leave the broken life in New York and start anew. Aunt isn’t sure if the house is still standing, but inwardly believes that something had held, “that time had not cheated her of this return”. For Aunt the house is filled with good and bad memories.

The house was built a long time ago on Gaze Island (also a fictional place), where all Quoyles once lived. They were pirates that lured ships onto the rocks. When Gaze Island became flooded with Christians, the Quoyles dragged the house over a frozen bay to the shore and put it “like a hat on a rock”. In the beginning of the book it is hard to imagine that Quoyle’s ancestors were pirates. He is afraid of water and is described as a failure at life. On the ferry to Newfoundland, to his new life, Quoyle sits seasick, his face “the color of a bad pearl”. 

On the western side of the fictional Omaloor Bay, the Quoyle’s Point thrusts into the Atlantic Ocean like a bent thumb. Aunt left the house behind when she was fifteen. She wonders now which has changed the most, place or self? “She leaned on the rail, looking into the dark Atlantic that snuffled at the slope of the past.” When a ferry approaches the coast, Aunt suddenly has a glimpse of the building into the stirring mist. “I saw the house. The old windows. Double chimneys. As it always was. Over there! I’m telling you I saw it!” 

When they arrive at the Quoyle’s Point, it is all foggy until the wind goes under the fog and drives it up. The gaunt building appears. The house is the green of a grass stain. Bunny hates the colour, it makes her nauseous. The distinctive feature of the house is a window flanked by two smaller ones, “as an adult might stand with protective arms around children’s shoulders.” Half the panes are gone. Paint flakes from wood. There are holes in the roof. “Miracle it’s standing. That roofline is straight as a ruler,” Aunt says. Quoyle wants to check inside, if floors haven’t fallen into the cellar, but Aunt laughs. “Not likely,” she says joyfully. “There is no cellar.” 

The house is lashed with cable to iron rings set in the rock. The cables bristle with broken wires. Long before Aunt was born, there were no cables. The house rocked in storms like a big rocking chair, back and forth. “Made the women sick, afraid,” Aunt tells Quoyle, “so they lashed it down and it doesn’t move an inch but the wind singing through those cables makes a noise you don’t forget. Oh, do I remember it in the winter storms. Like a moaning.”

“Even when fresh the rooms must have been mean and hopeless,” Quoyle thinks, when exploring the inside of the abandoned, dusty house. Through the windows he sees the cool plain of the sea. “The bay rolled and rolled.” Square rooms, lofty ceilings. The floorboards slant under the feet, wood as bare as skin. “And three lucky stones strung on a wire to keep the house safe.” 

In a couple of weeks with the help of a local carpenter Dennis Buggit the house is fixed as far as to be safe to move in. “Dad, I thought it was going to be a new house,” says Bunny, when they arrive with bags. “That Dennis was making it new. But it’s the same one. It’s ugly, Dad. I hate green houses.”

No matter what they did to the house, it kept its gaunt look, never altered from that first looming vision behind the fog. “How had it looked, new and raw on Gaze Island, or sliding over the cracking ice?” Quoyle wonders. The idea fixed in him that the journey over the frozen bay had twisted the house out of true, wrenched the timbers into a rare geometry. At one point in the book he visits the Gaze Island and finds a place of flat rocks laid out, where his house once stood. 

They had started to live at Quoyle’s Point in May; the end of September is the first time Quoyle is alone in the green house. He stomps around the still underfurnished rooms as “dusty air seemed to wrinkle as he moved through it”. At night the wind moans through the house cables, a sound that invokes a sense of hopeless abandonment. But he pulls the sleeping bag corner over his upper ear and sleeps again; “Getting used to nightmares.”

When winter nears, Aunt becomes worried. Snow could keep them trapped inside the house, quite far from everything. She encourages them to move across the bay to the city for the winter. “Consider this place a summer camp,” she says. “We can move out to the green house again in spring, as soon as the road is open. It’ll be the sweeter for waiting. I mean, if you still like it here. Or maybe you’re thinking of going back to New York?”

They can’t buy a new house for the winter season, because Quoyle has put a lot of money into the old house. He doesn’t have much left. They have to rent a place to stay. Quoyle returns to the green house, to pick up the rest of the things. The gravel road to Quoyle’s Point, had never seemed so miserable to him. Inside the house the abandoned silence. The stale smells. As it was the first time. As though they had never lived in it.

“The house was heavy around him, the pressure of the past filling the rooms like odourless gas. The sea breathed in the distance. The coast around the house seemed beautiful to him. But the house was wrong. Had always been wrong, he thought. Dragged by human labor across miles of ice, the outcasts straining against the ropes and shouting curses at the godly mob. Winched onto the rock. Groaning. A bound prisoner straining to get free. The humming of the taut cables. The vibration passed into the house, made it seem alive. That was it, in the house he felt he was inside a tethered animal, dumb but feeling. Swallowed by the shouting past.”

Winter in Newfoundland is savage cold. Early spring brings a huge storm. Wind noises at night causes nightmares to Bunny. She sees the green house being blown away by the wind. “Each of the taut cables shouted a different bull-roarer note, the mad bass driving into rock, the house beams and timbers vibrating. The walls chattered, shot nails onto the heaving floors. The house strained towards the sea.” Then cables snap one after another in her nightmare, caused by the real storm outside. Glass burst in her dream. House lifts in wind at the freed corners. “The last cables snapped, and in a great, looping roll the house toppled.” 

Was it just a dream? What Bunny saw turns out to be prophetic.

“You know I believe your ’ouse is gone. Take a look.” Archie says on the next morning with cigarette in his mouth and hands to Quoyle his old-fashioned binoculars. “No, you won’t find ’er for she’s not there. I looked out for ’er this morning, but she’s not where she was. Thought you might want to go along down and see if she was just tipped over or sailed away. Was some shocking ’ard wind we ’ad. How many years was them cables ’olding ’er down?” Quoyle didn’t know. Since before the Aunt time, what sixty-four years and many more. Since the old Quoyles dragged the house across the ice. 

“The great rock stood naked. Bolts fast in the stone, a loop of cable curled like a hawser. And nothing else. For the house of the Quoyle was gone, lifted by the wind, tumbled down the rock and into the sea in a wake of glass and snow crystals.” 

Good thing, Aunt had insured the green house, first thing she did when they arrived in Newfoundland. Quoyle didn’t know that. Aunt didn’t worry too much about the loss and planned which place to buy for the insurance money, for Quoyle and Wavey, his new love that he will marry, and girls. 

“In a way it’s a blessing the old place is gone.”

***

About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

Shruff End… an interview with Miles Leeson

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As a companion piece to the first of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – Shruff End from The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch – we present an interview with Miles Leeson, lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review:

“Having lived all my life near to the sea I’m in the same mind as Murdoch; the importance of the sea to mental health and wellbeing, and to freeing the creative part of the mind. Iris Murdoch always wishes in her letters to friends that she could have a cottage by the sea and one wonders why she didn’t as she could have afforded one.”
– Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester

Interview by Anna Iltnere

What was Iris Murdoch’s relationship with water and with the sea? What the sea meant for her?

A very long relationship! I can’t think of any novels in which water isn’t mentioned or used as a symbol in some way. It’s always connected with boundaries, whether it’s the Thames that Blaise crosses to meet his mistress Emily, or the gap between reality and the unconscious in The Sea, The Sea which Charles constantly struggles with. Iris herself was, as we know, drawn to the sea throughout her life and regularly swam in the wild – near Oxford, in lakes, in the Sea, or indeed in the pond in the back garden at Steeple Aston! It’s her most enduring image I think, and one which the film Iris from 2001 makes much of as well.

 “To be able to swim, for Murdoch, is within her fiction almost to possess moral competence,” Peter Conradi writes in his essay “Iris Murdoch and the sea”. Is there more to swimming, near drowning and drowning in Murdoch’s books than just thrilling plot turns?

As I’ve hinted at above water is much more than just a useful fictional device for Murdoch. Peter is right of course, a sense of the moral life is tied up with images of confidence, or lack of confidence, in water. We remember that early scene in The Unicorn when Marion has her experience on the beach below the cliffs at Gaze, she meets the seal perfectly happy in his environment whereas Marion is very much a fish out of water in the space she now finds herself in. Effingham in the same novel and his revelation as he sinks slowly into the bog. Quite often our male protagonists, Blaise, Charles, Bruno in Bruno’s Dream, Tim Reed in Nuns and Soldiers, and others have a complex relationship with water and find themselves faced with set-pieces – who could forget Tim’s near-drowning in France? – that force them to face reality. 

What role does the seaside house Shruff End play in The Sea, The Sea?

Oh, Shruff End, and the immediate landscape, is the setting for all of the central action; it’s very much the ‘stage’ and everything else really happens ‘off stage’ in a sense. What is little known is that Murdoch wrote a stage version of The Sea, The Sea that was never put on in her lifetime. Much has been said about what Murdoch takes from Shakespeare and here, of course, it’s The Tempest. We have our Prospero who has, of course, recently retired from the Theatre and his ‘court’ who end up following him out to the seaside. One way of reading the house is the mind of Charles writ large; how the rooms relate to his conscious and unconscious thought and so on; especially once he captures Hartley. That’s only interesting in part I think, we lose much if we give a simplistic psychoanalytic reading to the text; it should be enjoyed as a comedy in form, with Charles as a quasi-tragic figure.

Would you agree to spend a summer at Shruff End? Why or why not?

Oh, I think so, so long as Charles was no longer resident! The setting is rather bleak in some ways but at least I could get down to some serious writing. Having lived all my life near to the sea I’m in the same mind as Murdoch; the importance of the sea to mental health and wellbeing, and to freeing the creative part of the mind. Iris Murdoch always wishes in her letters to friends that she could have a cottage by the sea and one wonders why she didn’t as she could have afforded one with John if she wanted to; especially after the success of the 1970s. Shruff End probably needs some major updating and renovation in any event; I certainly don’t remember it having central heating!

***

About Miles Leeson: As well as being the lead editor of the Iris Murdoch Review, Miles also published Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist in 2010, the edited collection Incest in Contemporary Literature in 2018, the festschrift Iris Murdoch: A Centenary Celebration this year and is currently writing Iris Murdoch: Feminist

About Anna Iltnere: Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Unreal estate No.01: Shruff End

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the first of a new series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to Shruff End from Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea. Each essay will be about a different house, illustrated by the artist Katrina Gelze. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester. 

“What madman built it?”
– Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea, 1978

“My imagination lives near the sea and under the sea,” Iris Murdoch said in 1978. She had never lived by the sea herself, but water played a big role in her books and her life.

A passionate swimmer and with characters who are thrown into water by her pen, Iris Murdoch was fascinated by the sea. Shruff End is one of the seaside houses of her mind, enlivened in her book The Sea, The Sea

“Water had a quickening effect on Iris Murdoch’s imagination,” writes Olivia Laing in her book To the River, “for her novels brim over with rivers and pools and chilly grey seas.”

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1919, as the only child of a singer and a civil servant. When Iris was a few weeks old the family moved to London. She would go on to study philosophy and wrote 26 novels, before being diagnosed with Alzheimers disease in 1997. Iris Murdoch died in 1999 aged 79, her brilliant mind relentlessly erased by dementia during the last two years of her life.

Iris Murdoch’s book The Sea, The Sea was published in 1978 when she was 59, was her nineteenth novel and the one which brought her the Booker Prize. The story is about a retired middle-aged actor, playwright and director Charles Arrowby, who leaves glittering London and moves to a house by the sea to write his memoirs. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.  

“Strange novel”, writes Philip Hoare in RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. “Faintly ridiculous” admits Olivia Laing, but this tragi-comic drama sinks in, and you become soaked in its story just as Shruff End remains forever dampened by the mysterious sea.

The House

Shruff End is a fictional house on an unidentified English coast. Charles Arrowby buys it in a fever of haste, selling his big apartment in Barnes, London, by the Thames. The sea-house takes most of his savings, but Arrowby imagines living simple, hermit days here, far away from his previous life on the London stage. But this dream that has come true soon turns into a strange nightmare, and Shruff End has its own role in the gripping story.

Shruff End is perched upon a small promontory, not exactly a peninsula, and stands on the very rocks themselves. “What madman built it?” Arrowby wonders. The facade, looking out onto the road, is “not in itself remarkable”, but in its lonely situation is strangely incongruous. The house would scarcely attract notice in a Birmingham suburb but all alone upon that wild coast it certainly looks odd. “Exposed and isolated,” writes Arrowby about his first impression. He falls in love with it.

The house is a brick, ‘double-fronted’ villa, with bay windows on the ground floor and two peaks to the roof. From the upper seaward windows the view is almost entirely of water, unless one peers down to glimpse the rocks below. From the lower windows the sea is invisible and one sees only the coastal rocks that surround the house, elephantine in size and shape. “How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life,” Charles Arrowby writes of the view. 

The pale buff-coloured blinds, which hang in almost every room, are “in excellent condition”, with glossy wooden toggles on strings, silk tassels, and lace fringe at the bottom. When these blinds are drawn down, Shruff End, as seen from the road, has a weird air of complacent mystery.

The bricks are dark red. The back of the house has been horribly “pebble-dashed” against the weather. “Little do they realise how ardently I look forward to those storms, when the wild waves will beat at my very door!” Charles Arrowby is rather exalted in the first pages of his memoirs: “What a paradise, I shall never tire of this sea and this sky.”

Mr Arrowby lives entirely on the seaward side of the house, upstairs in his bedroom and what he calls his drawing room, and downstairs is the kitchen and a small den next to it known as “the little red room”, where there is a fireplace. On the other side of the house are the the book room, where he has put the crates of his still unpacked books, and the dining room, where he stores his wine. 

The chief peculiarity of the house, and one for which Charles Arrowby can find no rational explanation, is an inner room found on both floors.They are rooms with no external window, but lit by internal window giving onto the seaward rooms. These two “funny” inner rooms on two floors are extremely dark. Throughout the book they seem to be a rib-cage containing the soul of the house. 

The house is “mysteriously damp”, its floor is “curiously damp”. The large – and damp – larder is full of woodlice. “Is it conceivable that the sea could be rising up through a hidden channel under the house?” Charles Arrowby prises up some linoleum in the hall, and replaces it with a shudder. There is a salty smell, he observes. At the end of the book he tries to get rid of the house, and admits that no one seems to want to buy the place, “perhaps because of the dampness, perhaps for other reasons”.

The sea becomes a canvas for Mr Arrowby’s own inner demons. “It is after tea and I am sitting at the drawing-room window watching the rain falling steadily into the sea. There is a terrible grim simplicity about this grey scene. Apart from an iron-dark line at the horizon the sea and the sky are much the same colour, a muted faintly radiant grey, and expectant as if waiting for something to happen. As it might be flashes of lightning or monsters rising from the waves.” 

One morning he does see a monster rising from the waves, while the sea also mysteriously and repeatedly unties the rope that he ties to the shore to help himself get out of the water after his daily swims. It provides one of the most quoted lines from the book: “Time, like the sea, unties all knots.”

The house starts to play tricks on his mind. Is the house haunted? He asks about a poltergeist in a nearby bar. “Any house might be haunted,” someone answers. At first it is a vase that falls down and is smashed to pieces. Then – a mirror. And then there’s a face he sees in the window at night. Or was it moon?

Shruff End seems to have not only its own ghost, but also its own climate, independent from the weather outside. It feels cold even on warm days. One day Arrowby comes in from the brilliant light outside and the air in the house seems grey and thick. The house is gloomy, and there are strange sounds too, or perhaps it is just the bead curtain clicking in the draught from the open door...

“The house was still acting up, but I felt by now that I was getting to know its oddities and I was more friendly towards it,” writes Arrowby. “It was not exactly a sinister or menacing effect, but as if the house were a sensitized plate which intermittently registered things which had happened in the past – or, it now occurred to me for the first time, were going to happen in the future. A premonition?”

When Mr Arrowby puts Shruff End up for sale and runs back to London, he moves to “a peculiar miserable derelict” new flat. If he ever wanted to live as a hermit, retired from the world, then this – he concludes – would be a far better habitat. “It is oddly enough easier to write here, amid all this cramped chaos, than in the open spaces at Shruff End.” 

In the end, he hadn’t been able to concentrate in a house by the sea. 

“Throughout the book water runs like a spell or a curse. The sea of the title is not just a background or vista, it is a character,” writes Daisy Johnson in the introduction of a special edition of The Sea, The Sea. It was published by Vintage Books in the summer of 2019 to celebrate the 100th birthday of Iris Murdoch. 

***
About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

Beautiful Place: A novel by Amanthi Harris

9781784631932_grande.jpg

We are extremely pleased to present an extract from the new novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE by Amanthi Harris. Set in Sri Lanka, this is a novel about leaving and losing home and making family, about being oppressed and angry and wanting a better life. 

‘In quiet distilled prose, Amanthi Harris takes a moment of change we all experience and brings it into poignant, evocative focus. Her story resonates like a personal and deeply felt memory.’ —Preti Taneja

***

The van followed the bay, passing through villages of houses with dark empty porches. Light shone deep inside in rooms where families had gathered to gossip and tease and worry and scold away the last hours of the night. Soon the van left the villages behind and the sea came nearer, blackly glistening past coconut groves of slanting trees silvery in moonlight. The van stopped at the edge of a grove and they stepped out to the roar of sea and cold rushing winds. Ria put on her jumper. High above her, the coconut trees swayed and bowed against a blue-black sky, the stars a dusty spray of sparkling white. 

“I’ll come back in two hours,” the driver said and gave Louis his card. “Hope you see some turtles.” 

“But where are you going?” 

“I’ll just be nearby – call me if you want to stay longer.” 

“You never said you’d be leaving us,” Louis protested, but the driver was already in the van. “Hey!” Louis cried, but it was too late, the van drove away. 

“How come there’s no one else here?” Ria said. 

“Maybe we’re too early.” 

“Or too late,” she replied. 

There was a glow through the trees from a thatch hut. They walked towards it. Over the door was a sign: ‘The Turtle Watch Museum’. An electric bulb swung from the rafters in the wind, dancing its glowering light over framed photographs of turtles lumbering onto night time beaches, digging in sand, or straining, legs splayed, squeezing out eggs. Louis read every sign, every caption, excited again. 

“This place is great – they’re a charity employing ex-convicts. They teach them about conservation.” 

“Ex-convicts?” 

“Good evening, sir-madam!” A short stocky man bounded into the hut and grinned at them. His eyes lingered on Ria. The man’s face was pockmarked and puffy, the skin yellowed and tough, the nose broken; eyebrows interrupted by the scars of old stitches. His smile though was joyful, unconnected seeming to the damaged features. 

“In our turtle watch we don’t steal turtles’ eggs – we’re not like the people down the road,” he told them. “Those people steal the eggs and grow turtles in tanks. Sometimes they eat the eggs. They’re very bad people, don’t ever go to their turtle watch, sir and madam.” 

“Where can we buy tickets?” Louis asked. 

“No need of tickets, sir – it’s all free at our turtle watch. You only pay if you see the turtles.” “Wow! That’s great!” Louis approved. 

“So let’s go and see if they come! This way, sir-madam!” 

The ex-convict came up beside Ria as they left the hut. 

“Sinhalese?” he murmured, his voice turned low and adult, a secret voice, brought out for the real conversation. She pretended not to hear. He pretended not to have spoken. 

“This way sir, follow me!” He darted away, become the happy child again. 

The ex-convict shone a torch ahead and they followed him, winding past coconut trees, their great hooves of trunks stamped in the ground. Ria took off her shoes and the sand was silky-cold and dry, slinking around her feet with every step. A half-moon cast its pale gleam over a wide empty beach. 

“No turtles yet, sir-madam,” the ex-convict declared, scanning the sea with binoculars. 

“When do the turtles come?” Louis asked. 

“It can be anytime, sir – soon, hopefully, soon! Dear God, please let there be turtles for sir and madam! Just keep watching the ocean. I will go closer and look for you.” 

He ran down to the water’s edge and strolled through the waves swirling idly in. He walked around a rocky outcrop and disappeared. 

Ria sat down on the beach, a sandy bank firm at her back. Louis sighed and sat down beside her. 

“Do you know anything about this place?” he asked. 

“No.” 

“Does your family ever come here?” 

“I’m not sure.” 

“You don’t know where your family goes?” 

“I know very little about them, it turns out.” 

There was no way on earth her family would have come to such a place – in the middle of the night, to look at turtles. 

“You should have asked Padma about this place,” he accused. 

“You arranged it!” she retorted. 

The ex-convict appeared on top of the rocks, walking a little unsteadily. He stood looking out to sea. The pale beam of his torch reached over the waves. 

“Something’s weird about this,” Louis said. 

Across the water, at the other end of the bay, lights shone in the town where life went on unknowing of them. It was the first time Ria had been anywhere so deserted in Sri Lanka, so far away from the places she knew, and everyone. The trees leaned over velvet rocks and the pale soft sand of a primal Sri Lanka, a pre-world of hushed dark beaches and a muted rocking sea sweeping the shore all through the night – long still nights, full of unknowable secrets. These were the beaches where war bodies would wash up, maimed and distorted after night-time abductions – even now, in peace-time, the abductions went on for different, more secret reasons. It seemed impossible to end the savagery; it seemed a part of the unreal beauty of the island, so spoiled and churning under the surface. 

But here was its raw splendour, its secret night-time source, potent and untainted before it was lost in the world of people. 

“Why aren’t there any other tourists here?” Louis demanded. 

“Maybe they didn’t want to see turtles.” 

He made an exasperated noise and glanced at her impatiently. 

“It’s better like this, don’t you think?” Ria said. 

“It feels like a scam.” 

“I don’t see how. We haven’t given the guy any money.” 

“Everything in this country is a scam – that’s why my friends left, they’d had enough. It was always the same: hire cars, safaris, Buddhist temples – you name it, there was always a way they could con you.” 

“But we don’t have to pay unless we see turtles.” 

Louis jumped up, full of a new restlessness, a fierceness in him. “Hey!” he shouted to the ex-convict. 

The ex-convict spun round. 

“Where are your turtles?” Louis yelled. “Are they coming any time soon? I’m getting tired, I want to go home!” 

The ex-convict tensed, his round belly turned solid, thin legs locked. Like a fat sparrow, Ria thought. But dangerous. 

“I think I might just call the driver!” Louis taunted, waving his phone. 

The ex-convict scrambled down from the rocks and came running. 

“The turtles will come, sir! Just wait and see – just a few more hours. Madam – you tell sir, to wait a little!” he panted. 

“What’s it to you if we leave?” 

Louis stood taller than the ex-convict. He looked down with a cold angry smile at the ex-convict’s pitted fleshy face. Louis’ hair shone in the moonlight, swept back from his fine-boned face, the perfect lines of jaw and chin and lips. Ria looked away from that perfection, winning so easily above the beaten face below. Louis was so much stronger, so much luckier than the fat-sparrow ex-convict. Louis started to type a number on his phone. 

“No sir! Please sir, stay!” the ex-convict cried. “The turtles will come! You just have to wait – how can I know what time they will want to lay eggs?” 

Louis went on typing then put the phone to his ear. The ex-convict grew still, watching in silence – no more pleading, no more explaining about the turtles. The torchlight made his cheeks seem waxy and hard. ‘Tourists missing from Turtle Watch Beach’ – Ria could already see the headline. A small square of text with their names, ages and occupations and an inaccurate account of what had happened. 

“The driver will be back in an hour, let’s just wait till then,” Ria insisted. 

“Yes, wait!” the ex-convict agreed. 

“Maybe the turtles will come later,” Ria added. 

“Yes, later! The turtles will come later!” 

“Yeah, right.” Louis ended the call and sat down again, looking away. 

The ex-convict jogged away to a distant spot at the water’s edge. Ria sat down beside Louis. He didn’t look at her. She watched the sea alone, feeling his silence for the first time and him closed to her. He checked his watch. His arm touched hers and she felt the muscle hardness of him under the softness of cashmere, and he felt apart and other. He would always be other, separate from her; she would never truly know what he was thinking – why he had smiled at her that first afternoon on the veranda, why he had asked to join her for dinner. How did you ever know when you knew someone, when it was safe to allow that last private door inside you to open? She understood now why people had horoscopes read before marriages – even the arrangements of stars in their constellations were a comfort faced with the unknown of another’s mind. She watched the night-time sea surging in surly bursts onto the beach.

“The sea looks so different at night,” she said. 

The waves slicked back in an oily sweep, receding into themselves – another sea altogether from its joyful, spraying, sparkling, sunlit self, dazzling all day. 

“It looks so pure in the mornings,” she reflected. 

“You shouldn’t have undermined me in front of that guy,” Louis said. 

“What are you talking about?” 

“You should be on my side, not his.” 

“I didn’t want to antagonise him.” 

“It was up to us when we left. What could he have done about it anyway?” 

“I don’t know . . . He might have friends nearby. Or he might have a knife or a gun – who knows? I didn’t want to risk it.” 

“That’s crazy! You’re always so afraid of everything!” His eyes were a scornful pale glare in the tan of his face. 

She glared back at him. He turned away.

***

PHOTO: Maxi Kohan

PHOTO: Maxi Kohan

Amanthi Harris was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and has degrees in Law and Chemistry from Bristol University. As well as her novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE, her novella LANTERN EVENING won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 and was published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published by Serpent’s Tail and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Beautiful Place - Salt Publishing (UK)
Beautiful Place - Pan Macmillan India
Amanthi Harris’ website