Trans-Mongolian

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

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.

***

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.

The Grey Headlands, from Country Music by Will Burns

By Will Burns:

Green lizards sunned themselves
on the tennis court of the abandoned chalet
with its almost-French name.
Gatekeepers hid themselves in the dying grasses.
Like the ground, the butterflies were dust –
on this island the soil is suffering its own crisis.
The steep fields had once more offered up
their customary, well-protected crop.
Before the end we would beg for rain,
having long forgotten
the words for the relevant gods.

***

Country Music is the debut collection from the poet and friend of Elsewhere Will Burns, published in April by Offord Road Books. We are big fans of Will for how his work captures a sense of place and of memory, and for showing us a way of looking at the world, of noticing things, that informs our own explorations of place and spaces.

The collection is wonderful and a fine addition to any library of place writing. If you want to know more about Will and his work, read our Five Questions… interview or our review of the album Chalk Hill Blue, a collaboration with the musician Hannah Peel.

Ravens and Bones – Icelandic sagas and places

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

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

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.”

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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

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!

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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.