Guest review by Penny Dolan: AN ENGLISH LIBRARY JOURNEY (with detours to Wales and Northern Ireland) by John Bevis

 

 

"Whether to geographers, to history and design enthusiast, to local studies nerds and a mix of casual readers, a useful enterprise ... such fascinating oddments as the photographic pioneer brothers and their very own Stuffed Ox ..."

Penny Dolan is a children’s storyteller and writer. Her last novel for older children, A Boy Called Mouse, was nominated for the Young Quills Historical Fiction Award, and she is currently completing a companion book. She posts on The History Girls, on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure as well as being a regular contributor here, and can be found on Twitter @PennyDolan1.

After a librarian friend suggested An English Library Journey by John Bevis, I borrowed a copy - from my local library, of course.

Although published in 2022, this hardback book has been given a vintage look and cover. A slightly eccentric account, it made an interesting interlude between reading-group commitments and non-fiction titles.

However, to my mind, despite the title and all the library locations, Bevis’s account does not feel like a geographical study: focus on specific landscapes, topography or economic regions. The book is a chronological account of visits to almost two hundred English libraries and what gives the content relevance is that his trips took place between 2010 and 2019.

This was the decade shaped by the Big Crash, the EU referendum, Osborne’s austerity, the ‘Big Society’ idea and the subsequent decline in government and local authority funding, especially to libraries. Bevis’s lightly amusing quest ends by revealing the damage done to the public library service and the success and failures of various cost-cutting initiatives.

The author, it must be noted, is not a librarian but a freelancer. An occasional builder, decorating and gardener, Bevis has also been a typesetter for the V&A, poet and writer, designer, printer and publisher, and bookseller at Whitechapel Art Gallery.

He does, though, respect books and libraries. In his dramatic opening chapter, he describes how, as a nine-year old, he helped when fire broke out in an upper room at the Guildford Royal Grammar school. Though the flames had been doused by the fire-brigade’s hoses, water was running through to the school’s precious library below.

He became ‘part of a human chain stretching the width of the school grounds . . . books were passed hand to hand or cradled four or five at a time . . . I do not remember how many hours we worked but the effort seemed endless . . .All the books that passed through our hands were saved. . . .’ They were all aware of the rare 15th Century chained library nearby but safely out of reach of the fire.

The chapter develops into a short history of library provision , from early circulating and subscription libraries, the library acts, Carnegie’s philanthropic provision and the growth of the public library service during the twentieth century. Clearly, Bevis loves everything about books.

But how did this journey begin? Years later, after a health scare, Bevis becomes his wife’s chauffeur. Once he has driven her to her work at a variety of prisons, he has the middle of the day free. His plan is to find the nearest library’s computer suite and continue with his writing project and commissions.

This is when the eccentricity begins. Bevis must have a membership card to use the computers, but he can only get that by pretending to be “resident”. After outwitting the system a few times, he finds himself the proud holder of five different library cards. Inspired, he now starts on a personal quest to collect a membership card from as many libraries as he possibly can.

An English Library Journey is his account of all the libraries visited on this odd quest, year by year. The locations seem quite unconnected: for example, in Section One, dated 2019, he briefly records visits to Telford and Wrekin; Isle of Wight; Shropshire; Central Bedfordshire; Luton; Essex; Norfolk; Surrey, Nottinghamshire. Some libraries are given only a few lines, while other entries are much fuller than others.

Bevis’s interest is mainly architectural, along with comments on the how the building appears within its general setting. He writes that Leamington Spa’s ‘broad streets and terraces’ remind him of ‘TV and costume drama” and hint at ‘an England that’s too good for the English’. Meanwhile, Milton Keynes’s library ‘had made no space for itself but had blended into the constructed homogeneity of (the) town centre and Darlington Central was ‘a magnificent edifice with an art gallery’ and many ‘bare rooms and the scant library itself rather rattling around in the family mansion.’ It is ‘trying to downsize.’

Bevis includes the history of many buildings, noticing the architecture and occasionally the architectural firm. Newport, Shropshire, has a ‘modern generic fit-out . . . but the upper storeys are a family at war: the left hand building stolid in its plain stay-at-home Neo-Georgian brich while to the right is the crazy cousin, A Gothic stone gateway with castellated battlements (is) all that’s left of an 18th Century folly that housed a wool merchant and a draper. ‘ Luton’s influential Central library is ‘a pale floating box on peg leg pillars’; March (Cambridgeshire) has a feisty glass wedge of a building, now it its tenth year and, after a run of depressing visits, he finds that Slough is unexpectedly ‘bucking the depressing trend. . . A wrapped aluminium and glass cultural flagship.’

Although rather startled by the noise and the range of activities – music sessions for babies, Knit and Natter groups, the strange behaviour of some computer users - he is very conscious of the design of the interior of some individual libraries, the layout of space and shelving, the windows and light and atmosphere, as well as the ease and kindness with which he gets his card.

The book has a slightly uneven style, with some visits clearly more interesting and longer than others. Occasionally, as part of his quest, he tries visiting two or three libraries in one day. Yet, gradually, as the journey continues, Bevis’s observations darken. The design and lettering on his library cards also leads him into the history of library unions and consortiums around London, particularly the subsequent withdrawal of richer authorities, unwilling to keep sharing their stock. He draws attention to private providers, describing how one giant company went bankrupt, with several library contracts taken back in house by local authorities.

He notices the publicity given to Little Free Libraries, and telephone box libraries, pointing out that not only are they not true libraries, they rarely occur in areas that are without library provision. To them that have, more shall be given? He highlights the hub model (where a single, central librarian looks after smaller, mainly volunteer run-libraries) as a way of cutting staff costs, the council’s biggest worry. Alongside, he notes that volunteers come from a certain age and class, creating a model that works in prosperous areas but not in poorer communities.

Bevis also notes cuts in hours, the growing use of self-service tills, the long term thinning of library book-stock, in number and in depth and the practice of proudly including a “library” among several council services within one site, mainly because the library is often diminished by the practice. When he visits the ‘Rowntree Library Cafe’ in York, he seems appalled by the meagre offer of three sets of shelves. How can this shadow be publicised by the council as a valid library?

Revisiting one site, several years on in the decade, he finds the library that was always so busy has no more than a dozen users during the time I was there. . . It is the result of some other order of catastrophe.’

Of course, along with his descriptions and interactions with local people, Bevis does discover successful locations and libraries, such as the provision in Richmond on Thames, although even then he points out that the authority is ‘fortunate to ride austerity with the wealth of its populace and a below-average social fund budget.’

An English Library Journey was a slightly uneven experience for this reader. At times, I felt cross that Bevis’s card-collecting wheeze was wasting staff time and resources, that some visits were too brief, simply a chance for him to tick off that card, and also that his attention was more focused on his work in the computer suite rather than the work within the main areas of the library and books as a whole. I would have liked more about the books on offer in these libraries.

However, re-reading it, I felt that Bevis’s account, with its growing emphasis on spreading the word about our libraries, whether to geographers, to history and design enthusiast, to local studies nerds and a mix of casual readers, was probably a useful enterprise along with such fascinating oddments as the photographic pioneer brothers and their very own Stuffed Ox.

Additionally, although Bevis’s journey is two, three or more years out of date, An English Library Journey could also be a useful reminder about the need for extra vigilance about the coming rounds of cuts.

An English Library Journey is published by Eye.

More reviews by Penny:

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders

The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

Guest review by Graeme Fife: HOMELANDS by Timothy Garton Ash

 

"Garton Ash addresses the thicket of countervailing opinions and actions with superior skill and clarity. But what to do about blatant deceit and bluster, the poison which menaces democracy?"

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.

Are you sitting comfortably?

It’s complicated: Europa, (Greek ‘wide-eyed’) beautiful maiden carried off to Crete by a priapic Zeus as a bull, there raped to give birth to a man who will become king of Crete. The story darkens … his wife, enamoured of a bull (genes will out?), bears a hybrid man-bull, the Minotaur, for whom a labyrinth is constructed as a lair. Lying Brexiters darkened their own mendacious hybrid story to construct another labyrinth in their own detested Europe.

Europe, the subterranean maze and how to find the way out into the light…Garton Ash hints how. He began his exploration of Europe, the fact and the idea, as a student in East Germany and recounts his experiences as a western youth in the eastern world in The File, also his delving into the voluminous files assembled by the countless informers feeding the Staatssicherheit STASI including their surveillance dossier on him. The information gathered by the army of secret police snoops – more per capita of population than any other undercover agency – often delivered risibly inane details: ‘Today, Frau Mecklenburg took her two attractive daughters to Mass,’ (told me by one of those daughters).

Garton Ash travelled widely, made lasting friendships with young men and women destined, like him, to share in uniting the diverse nations of post-war Europe, his ‘kaleidotapestry’, to establish a peace that had eluded Europe for aeons: in varietate concordia, among them a fiery radical Viktor Orbάn now an unashamed, intransigent illiberal populist.

His study is far-reaching. He outlines the way political and economic forces within Europe are at odds and how this complicates the central issue of common purpose; the rise of terrorism, extremism, populism, a concatenation of -isms which challenges received wisdom, and maybe should. There is, too, the growing problem of refugees and belligerence stirring antagonistic attitudes, the proliferation of the various means of lying, distorting fact in spurious claim, fake news, social media, a hostile press bereft of journalistic integrity … the dream of solidarity which led to the miracle of an apparently united Europe collides with ever-tightening new tensions that threaten the very reverse. Garton Ash addresses the thicket of countervailing opinions and actions with superior skill and clarity. But what to do about blatant deceit and bluster, the poison which menaces democracy? Populism has surged on to dominate in a way not seen since before the war, and the security of common purpose lies exposed by disregard for the general good against the individual gain. Garton Ash does not skip over this perilous trend and proffers no answer because, perhaps, there is none. Nationalism has its place and it was so long denied to the oppressed and the overridden. Flag-waving by those who never did anything to earn it merely serves, often, to mask their own personal agenda whilst pleading quite another cause, that of ‘the people’. But in those countries of the great territory of Europe which were for centuries treated as mere grabs by nations of power, being recognised as part of a union is of deep significance: it brings them home, their home. The lies bandied about by English politicians to dupe an electorate into supposedly protecting their own ‘home’, its so-called ‘sovereignty’, make their professed defence of liberty, true belonging, as fought for and won, across the Channel, embarrassing if not downright shaming. In addressing the overlapping time-frames of post-war and post-Wall Europe, Garton Ash lays out the fact and circumstance as they influence human affairs, not in some abstract of political debate, but as indication of how urgently settling the matter of Europe was needed after so much bitter and nationalist conflict.

Prince Potemkin, from 1775 governor-general of Russia’s appropriated southern Black Sea provinces, made ports for the main Fleet, and ordered construction of painted façades of pretend villages (Hollywood film sets …?) populated by happy well-fed villagers to fool visiting officials. This concrete form of propaganda is now imitated by populists, (the NHS bus?) not only in Russia but in Hungary, Poland and, to a degree, in this country, by-passing democratic institutions and undermining the principles of a united Europe formed as a defence against the resurgence of authoritarianism, nationalism, corruption and conflict.

If you seek to understand more fully the multifarious Europe of which this nation, sans Empire, is and ought to be an integral part, verily our homeland, then read this captivating book, no matter the heartache and headache it may provoke, rich as it is in personal experience, insight and story written by someone who has studied Europe and lived it. Garton Ash is one of those rare historians who not only knows his subject but feels it, ‘wide-eyed’ indeed; the agreement that may emerge from various sources and people … in varietate concordia.

Homelands is published by The Bodley Head.