Guest review by Graeme Fife: STILL - a mindful practice for photographers, by Paul Sanders

 

"Superb account of a mind near broken and repaired, through the curative hard task of art and creativity ... "

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

‘Art is deliberate, peremptory, love and arrogance' - Seamus Heaney

‘I have been to Hell and back, and let me tell you, it was wonderful.’ - Louise Bourgeois

Sanders might well echo what Bourgeois said. Under extreme pressure as a working photo journalist, latterly Pictures Editor of The Times and having to review up to 50,000 images a day in order to choose which to use in the paper, he had a nervous breakdown which led to severe depression and once to the very brink of self-destruction. What ghosts patrol those precipitous cliffs above the sea, whispering their sinister insinuative urgings to the desolate individual, what sinuous provocations and what moral strength to bid them hush. This mental turmoil he describes without compunction but neither is he mawkish. I find what he writes and how he writes very moving not least because somehow he hauled himself back from the edge of this doom and, by the help of his love of photography, with him since childhood, he restored his mental and emotional balance. That in itself is inspiring and this book, featuring a goodly selection of his photographs, contains one image, the first he took after his recovery, which offers a summation of his feelings in sharp terms: a broken post sticking out of the sea, stark black, broad, lone splinter of wood against a hazy white ground. The story that tells is eloquent, I feel, and the very best photography – and examples of it abound, here – tells a story. Photography: in Greek ‘writing with light’.

Citing Cartier-Bresson, who said that we do not take photographs - photographs take us, they are a gift, from who knows where? - Sanders also confronts the grim truth that ‘the battle we have within ourselves is a bloody and unforgiving war’. I am reviewing this book, not only because I find the images it contains arresting but because as a journal of recovery and even redemption from that inner war it is so very compelling and also because Sanders writes in limpid, direct prose of beautiful insight and gives me, as a writer, a parallel to the similar struggles we have with words as he does with light, framing, composition, subject … how to do it, where to stand and at what height, even, how to approach our work ...

Just as we, maybe highly articulate from early on, nevertheless had to learn that whereas words make good servants they are very poor masters, so picking up a camera and pointing it, clicking the shutter, is meaningless, unless there is feeling in the person holding the camera or writing the words, above all sensibility.

The book’s secondary, but to Sanders crucial purpose, the core of his freelance work, after all, is to offer counsel to those who love the camera and are looking to find better ways of expressing themselves through what its obedient lens looks at. Teaching and guiding those eager to learn how to make the camera work for them, through them, is what rescued him financially and spiritually, and the story of how he achieved that is a valuable lesson to each of us, in my view.

There is wisdom here, in the way that Sanders has looked unflinchingly inside himself and his art and brought the two analyses together and I commend it for that reason alone, whether you ascribe to the idea of mindfulness or not. At heart, doesn’t that simply amount, for us all, the vital need in everything we do, see hear, experience, to pay attention, to replace ‘should’ with ‘could’ and see what difference that makes? I think so and however we make it to that decision, the path will have been a good path to tread.

He also emphasises the fact that there is never a perfect answer, never a wholesale solution … at bottom we all flounder, one way or another, and in that floundering, we do, or should do, the difficult thing: we ask questions, of ourself or others, of what we are looking at or thinking about. Out of the comfort zone? You had better believe it, nothing ever got done in the comfort zone. King George III, visiting the royal naval dockyard at Chatham, observed a man standing outside an open air woodshed, staring at the timber baulks on the racks. The king asked a staff member why the man wasn’t doing any work and the man said that he was working, he was assessing the timber for size, by eye. Sanders has a good eye and this book gives a precious opportunity to see and appreciate, feel the worth of, the beauty round us, even in the lonely bullrush and a patch of grass, through that eye.

So much of what Sanders says, both in this superb account of a mind near broken and repaired, through the curative hard task of art and creativity, resonates with me and, as I put it somewhere: ‘There is never a full stop, only ever a hanging comma on which we sit, as on a swing in a secret garden.’

Still is published by Ilex Press.

More of Graeme's choices:

The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters, also by Adam Nicolson

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Go-Between by L P Hartley

Guest review by Paul May: PREFERRED LIES by Andrew Greig

 

"I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to replace it. I give it to people because it is life-enhancing, funny, entertaining, honest, sometimes sad and always very Scottish."

Paul May is a children’s author, musician and former Primary School teacher. These days he writes mainly for his own pleasure. He was about to embark on a bicycling research trip to Northern Italy when the pandemic struck. While waiting for normal life to resume he has been cultivating his allotment. See more on his website. 

Let me just say that I am not a golfer. The closest I’ve come is a few rounds of putting with the children at the seaside. But I promise you, this book is about a great deal more than hitting a ball around a golf course (though it is very much about that, too). Its author calls it “an odd book about being alive, Scotland, transience, fathers and sons, mediated through the practice of golf.”

Andrew Greig is a Scottish poet and novelist who has also written two books about Himalayan mountaineering expeditions and another book, At the Loch of the Green Corrie, which is about his relationship with the poet, Norman MacCaig, about fishing, about friendship . . . it could be described as a companion piece to this book about golf, and is just as hard to pin down.

What Andrew Greig doesn’t tell you about Preferred Lies is that it is beautifully written and often very moving. After a near-death experience which leaves him lying in a hospital bed ‘drifting in some kind of ante-chamber that I thought of as blue shadowlands’, he slowly emerges from the terrifying uncertainty that follows a brain injury, and it’s golf that offers him a way forward. “But through those long ward nights on the edge of panic, when I could no longer hold Lesley’s face in my mind’s eye, it was to picturing Anstruther golf course that I turned.” Lesley is Greig’s wife.

Preferred Lies, it should be noted, is a book about Scottish golf; not about the kind of golf Donald Trump plays, and assuredly not about the kind of golf courses Trump owns. You can read about them in another great read — Commander-in-Cheat by Rick Reilly – hundred-foot-high waterfalls, anyone? Three of them on one course?

This book opens on the tiny island of North Ronaldsay, outermost of the Orkney islands:

“Pop. C62, plus 3,500 rare-breed North Ronaldsay sheep . . . The ‘clubhouse’ is a battered shed perched on breeze blocks. It is slightly skewed, and faded and tattered as everything is here by wind, salt and light. There is no starter, no tee-off booking, no queue at the first tee. In fact, there is no identifiable tee. There are also no golfers.”

As Greig plays a series of golf courses, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of old friends, sometimes with people he meets along the way, he is also constantly in the company of ghosts. They are with him from the moment he finds himself close to death, floating in those ‘blue shadowlands’ where his father talks to him about playing golf and his friends share stories and laughter. “It didn’t strike me as odd they were all dead.”

And so the book becomes a kind of memoir, too, and Greig’s father is perhaps the most vivid character in it. Not that you won’t meet plenty of other great characters here, some alive, some dead. Greig reflects on his life and on his future, as befits a man who is himself a kind of revenant. He also manages to slip in a considerable amount of information about the history of golf in Scotland.

He is often funny. He speculates at one point that Yeats may have been a golfer: “For surely only a man who has watched a smartly struck long put run across the green, swerve then clatter into the hole, could write: ‘So great a sweetness flows/ I shake from head to foot.’”

I’ve given copies of Preferred Lies to friends several times, partly in order to see the looks on their faces when I recommend them a book about golf. It’s the kind of book you might pick up in a holiday cottage or second-hand bookshop, wonder what it’s about, and find yourself still sitting there, reading, a couple of hours later. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to replace it. I give it to people because it is life-enhancing, funny, entertaining, honest, sometimes sad and always very Scottish.

Walking back across North Ronaldsay after his round of golf Andrew Greig has the idea for his new project: “It may not be a good career move – I really should write another novel – but from the outset it’s not a career but a life I’ve been after . . . Golf isn’t life. It’s just a small, radiant corner of it, like a chip of mirror glass, the kind where if you bring it close enough and examine carefully from a number of angles, you can see the whole of your eye, and a surprising amount of the world around you.”

Preferred Lies is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.  

Guest review by Sue Purkiss: THE SALT PATH by Raynor Winn

"They were living right on the edge in more ways than one ... this is a remarkable book."

Sue Purkiss writes for children and young people. She has been a Royal Literary Fellow at Exeter and Bristol Universities, and has also taught English and worked with young offenders. Her latest novel for children, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley, is an adventure story set in the Himalayas at the end of the 18th century, featuring plant hunters, a sacred mountain – and its mysterious guardian! For more information, see Sue's website. She also has her own literary review blog, A Fool on a Hill, and is a contributor to The History Girls, blogging there once each month.

On one level, this is a book about a couple who walked the South West Coastal Path, non-stop – all 630 miles of it. As you can see, it has a beautiful cover whose design places it firmly in the section of bookshops with books about nature and our relationship to it.

And indeed and of course, it is about nature – but not primarily so. It’s not a piece of finely judged, carefully crafted nature writing, though there is some of that here too. It’s the searing story of a couple whose home and livelihood and hopes for the future are suddenly torn away from them, and who decide, pretty much on impulse, that the only thing they can do, the only way they can literally and figuratively move on, is to walk, carrying with them all that they have – which is almost nothing.

The story begins, Ray tells us, when she and her husband Moth lose everything at the end of a court battle after an investment goes badly wrong. What makes this even worse is that Raynor eventually finds a document which she believes will prove that they are innocent of blame, but doesn’t submit it in time or according to the correct procedures: they cannot afford legal representation (and of course, legal aid was pretty much abolished some years ago), and they fail to find their way through the complexities of the law without it. And even worse than that: the person who recommended the investment to them and is now suing them is an old and dear friend of Moth’s, so that he feels a sense of hurt and betrayal. As a result of losing the case, they lose their home, a Welsh farmhouse which they have lovingly restored over many years; and the livelihood which goes with it.

And as if this isn’t enough, just after the verdict, Moth is diagnosed with a terminal, degenerative illness: they are in their early fifties.

Raynor Winn tells the story of how, as they hide from the bailiffs in the cupboard under the stairs, she notices a book in a packing case. It’s called Five Hundred Mile Walkies, and it’s about a man who, many years before, had walked the South West Coastal Path with his dog. And it’s this that gives them their idea.

When I read this, it seemed quite shocking to me – absolute madness. Moth is in constant pain, sometimes he can’t even get up. They have the grand sum of £48 a week coming in, they have virtually no other money: they can’t afford even to buy decent equipment. Neither of them is strong enough to carry much weight – in fact it’s practically a military manoeuvre even to get their rucksacks onto their backs. And yet, and yet… what else can they do? And what sort of an indictment of our society is it that they face such limited choices? Their two children are at university and in no position to help (though, in a reversal of the normal rôles, their worried daughter sends them a new phone and instructs them that they must keep in close touch); friends do what they can and offer temporary accommodation, but cannot, in the end, give them their lives back – this at least offers them a reason to move on, literally as well as metaphorically.

And so off they go. With a flimsy tent, inadequate sleeping bags, a single change of clothes, a thin towel and a toothbrush – and Moth’s battered and beloved copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf: a fitting companion, with its theme of a battered hero fighting against evil monsters and against time itself.

It’s very sobering, to read of how difficult it is to live on so little. They can only afford to buy the most basic foodstuffs – meals are delights such as pot noodles, or rice and a tin of peas or mackerel. Sometimes, even water is difficult to come by. Washing is usually impossible – there’s plenty of sea, but for one thing that’s salty, and for another, the cliff path is usually high above it. I’ve seen bits of that coast path, and it’s very precipitous. There are endless setbacks, yet even so, somehow they don’t just keep going, but Moth becomes stronger; and the experience of being so very close to nature teaches them to live in, and treasure, each moment. They have numerous encounters along the way, some of them strange, many of them comic. Quite early on, they ask for information at a tourist office in Combe Martin – and are puzzled by the reaction of the ladies behind the counter.

     'The ladies shuffled, nudging each other, giggling.
     “Of course, it’s a pleasure to help. Just go to the grocery store up to the left. They’ll do cashback for you, Mr Armitage, but they weren’t expecting you yet.”
     “Sorry, I’m not Mr Armitage.”
     The ladies looked at each other conspiratorially.
     “No of course not, that’s okay, our secret, we won’t say a word.”
     Moth looked back in bemusement…'

This keeps happening: people keep mistaking Moth for this mysterious Mr Armitage. Well – Moth might have been bemused, but I wasn’t. In 2015, the poet Simon Armitage published a book about his travels along the South West Coastal Path. The idea was that he would walk a stretch, and then pay for his board at a pub or whatever by doing a reading of his work. He’d done this before in the Pennines. I bought the book, because I’m familiar with some bits of the path, particularly the first part from Minehead, but to be honest, much as I admire his other work and the TV programmes he’s done, I was a little disappointed in this book. It felt as if he was just going through the motions (sorry!): as if he was doing it because it seemed like a good idea for a book, not because it was something he was really enjoying. And the reaction of the people Moth and Ray meet, as well as the book itself, make it clear that the whole thing was very carefully planned and organised for the poet: there was no jeopardy involved. But for Moth and Ray, there most certainly was. They were living right on the edge in more ways than one.

This is a remarkable book: it’s a searing reflection on what is to be homeless and poor; an account of a first-hand experience of being as close to nature as you can get; and a tender story of a relationship which survives some incredibly difficult tests. In the end, one of the people they meet offers them a place to live: they come through. The last word belongs to Raynor herself.

     'At last I understood what homelessness had done for me. It had taken every material thing that I had and left me stripped bare, a blank page at the end of a partly written book. It had also given me a choice, either to leave that page blank or to keep writing the story with hope. I chose hope.'

The Salt Path is published by Penguin.