Autumn book reviews from South Seas Books

Autumn book reviews

by Mark Laurie of South Seas Books, Port Elliot.

The Salt Path

by Raynor Winn

Published by Penguin Books ISBN 9781405937184 $22.99

Rendered homeless and penniless by an ill-advised investment with a friend, abetted by an unblinking court system, a couple in their fifties face profound economic and social upheaval. Yet these are rendered relatively minor by the terminal medical diagnosis passed upon Moth, the writer’s husband of over thirty years, who is told to expect a debilitating, painful and inevitable decline. Forced from the Welsh farm which had been their home and provided their livelihoods for decades, ‘running from the rupture’ in their lives, they decide to walk and wild camp England’s 630-mile South West Coast Path. It’s a decision borne from a paucity of options and fear of the void, a far cry from the usual selfimprovement or personal identity dross published to breathless acclaim in this social media fuelled age. Setting off illequipped, not even their health intact, the author charts the highs and lows of their journey along the salt path as they battle the elements and a chronic lack of money to survive. Winn recognises that the walk and their life circumstances inexorably changed them from being participants in the ordinary run of human life, to observers. It’s this, coupled with a long-held appreciation of nature, which elevates the book above the general fray of personal narratives into a contextualisation of modern life from its ‘wild edge’. Undoubtedly uplifting, inspirational and liberating as the story is, it’s balanced by some sobering observations for the more sensitive on homelessness, our endlessly growing wants, and the society we’ve become.

Silverview

by John le Carré

Published by Viking (Penguin Books) ISBN 9780241550076 $32.99

A last novel from John le Carré (who died in December of 2020), his twenty-sixth no less, and a worthy memorial to his talent. Here, fittingly, we find him exploring the later years of a group of agents as their careers wind down and they reckon with decisions taken and lives lived under layers of secrecy and deception. Set in a small seaside town over which the titular mansion looms, objectivity is brought to bear by an outsider who has renounced the world of city financier for that of smalltown bookseller. Lines and spaces appear between public duty and private morality. Gradients of duty and loyalty to the Service and to their country are laid bare by realisation that there remains no space for ideals, and that much of their efforts over the last fifty years amounted to no more than ‘a giddy late-life romp through the wild woods of colonial fantasy.’ Some adhere devoutly to the ‘superstitions of [their] tribe’ as others fade to the past, where they ‘can do no harm’ in service of something they no longer recognise. And so, sixty years of masterful storytelling has come to its end. Described as a spy genre writer of the first order, John le Carré was so much more, capturing our preoccupations and uncertainties over all those years through the finely drawn characters who were the foundation of his art. While a prolific historic backlist beckons, we shall miss his talent for eloquent understatement as humanity’s tectonic plates buckle and shear. Vale.

The Lincoln Highway

by Amor Towles

Published by Hutchinson Heinemann (a Penguin Random House imprint) ISBN 9781786332530 $32.99

A narrative journey, beginning like Homer’s Odyssey in medias res – at a midpoint in space and in time – as two youthful brothers seek to understand their past and make a future for themselves. 1950’s America is shrugging off the traces of war and eyeing a prosperous future, although the bright lights of opportunity appear a good way distant from a repossessed farm in Nebraska and their father’s newly filled grave. Like so many before them, Emmett and Billy are drawn westwards to California by a complex amalgam of that innate urge for motion, the search for opportunity and a quest for reconciliation. Before they do so and to ‘have earned the right to hope’, there are settlements to be made and slates cleared in the country’s easternmost reaches in New York, at the beginning of its transcontinental Lincoln Highway. Like Billy’s guiding text, Professor Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers, this book is filled with heroes. However, it’s nuanced heroism, built upon a proclivity for kindness that ‘begins where necessity ends’, sometimes flawed by an excess of virtue or a tincture of vice. A beautifully told, fast-paced road novel from this enormously successful author, brimming with Americana.

Heatwave

by Victor Jestin (translated by Sam Taylor)

Published by Scribner ISBN 9781471199776 $27.99

An acclaimed, prize-winning debut by a young French writer, this novella is narrated from within the confines of a family holiday at a summer camp in the South of France. Leonard hovers on the cusp of adulthood, on the edges of both his family and teenage society, at his most comfortable observing from the beach’s fringing dunes. Sensitive, musical, unsure Leonard seeks love, acceptance and sex in whatever order they may come. A last long-weekend delivers rather more, witnessing a tumultuous loss of innocence from within the uncertainties and awkwardness of adolescence. No stranger to Camus, the book alternates between vigorous, earthy reality and a sort of detached, dreamlike state we all recall from summers past. Even after the noir plot and narrative arc has faded from memory and successor works realise a promising career, what will remain is the author’s resonant skill in capturing and rendering the sense of powerlessness of the age, its lack of life experience, of being swept along by tides which are only, at best, partly understood.

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

by Edward Abbey

Published by William Collins (a Harper Collins imprint) ISBN 9780008283339 $22.99

First published in 1968, this autobiographical paean to the landscapes of the American south-west and plea for their protection has remained in print for more than fifty years, receiving a recent bump in circulation with the tangerine idiot’s (now reversed) rollback of national park boundaries in the area. After falling in love with the desert on a trip west in his youth, Abbey spent several seasons based as a ranger in Utah’s Arches National Monument. Desert Solitaire resulted from this time, his patience and powers of observation, taste for solitude, a burning opposition to the relentless press of development, and the erudition available from wide reading and scholarly achievement. While the language soars when describing the harsh beauty of the desert and its nonhuman inhabitants, this is no travel guide, decrying ‘industrial tourism,’ pavement colonisation and exhorting readers to come, if they must, only in small numbers and on foot. It more closely resembles the retreat-literature style of Walden, transposed a century later from Thoreau’s pond to a vastly different space and scale, mixing adventure and anecdote with natural history, geology, high art, philosophy and environmental activism. Abbey rails against the arrogance of anthropocentricity, revelling in nature’s ‘implacable indifference’ to ‘the little world of men.’ One beautiful chapter describes a trip on the Colorado River through a magical Glen Canyon, capturing the existential distress and collective impoverishment of its impending loss to submersion under Lake Powell, a boating playground. Were he alive today, Abbey’s anarchic nature would be enjoying Lake Powell’s recreational demise to drought resulting from human-induced climate change, and Glen Canyon’s steady re-emergence.