3 beautiful books about place

Recently, I have been more and more preoccupied with place in the books I read.

Coinciding with an increasing love of long walks (along with a growing awareness of a tiring, urban ennui particular to London), I increasingly value books that are rooted in particular places, that reflect on or take inspiration from the specific environment around their being written.

Here are three books that - for very different reasons - I enjoyed for their centredness on place and the beauty of their writing.

Olivia Laing - The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (2016)

All cities can overwhelm and isolate. Their simmering ‘muchness’ hinders intimacy, cuts the unconnected adrift.

In The Lonely City, Olivia Laing reflects on the connection between loneliness and the city, inspired by her time living in New York and experiencing a particularly crushing period of urban loneliness. The book is not about place as such, but is entirely informed by it.

Laing examines how visual artists of different media have responded (consciously or unconsciously) to loneliness and the city. The compulsive filmmaking of Andy Warhol, the moving anger of David Wojnarowicz, the eerie canvases of Edward Hopper; art about loneliness is shown to have an ‘odd negotiating ability’, a ‘way of healing wounds’.

Throughout The Lonely City, there are evocative descriptions of New York, ‘that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass’, and reflections on how certain places within it affect Laing’s mood.

‘Sometimes as I walked, roaming under the stanchions of the Williamsburg Bridge or following the East River all the way to the silvery hulk of the U.N., I could forget my sorry self, becoming instead as porous and borderless as the mist, pleasurably adrift on the currents of the city.’

Laing enjoys the city almost as a flȃneur, floating through the city aimlessly, responding to the energies of crowds and buildings.

Laing is particularly moving when weaving the personal into her analysis in this way, and reflecting on how the experiences of different artists helped her through her own inner turmoil. Another of her books, To The River, also has this quality. Although she has recently published a novel, Crudo, Laing’s non-fiction writing has an emotional focus and energy that I love. She is perhaps inspired by the writing of Rebecca Solnit, sharing her eclecticism, sense of place and autobiographical slant.

W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn (1998)

I came to W.G. Sebald embarrassingly late, first reading The Rings of Saturn in 2017.

His books shuffle between autobiography, memoir, travel writing, stream-of-consciousness reflection, cultural history, natural history, and fiction. The elegance of the writing makes quibbles over genre distinctions even more immaterial than usual, however. Out of this idiosyncratic mix he spins delicate, meandering narratives, physical journeys provoking imaginative ones.

Born in Germany, he moved to England in 1966, where he initially lived in Manchester before settling in Norfolk while teaching at the University of East Anglia. He died in a car crash in 2001, at the age of 57. All his books were initially written in German, but he worked closely with his translators - in this case Michael Hulse - when releasing them in English. Their ‘German-ness’ is clear though - long, multi-clausal sentences, and earnest declarations of emotion and mood.

The Rings of Saturn recounts a walk along the coast of Norfolk and Suffolk, passing through desolate landscapes dotted with old wind pumps and windmills -  ‘like relics of an extinct civilization’ - and stopping at towns of faded grandeur. The narrator (maybe not entirely Sebald himself?) confronts the ‘traces of destruction’ he finds on his way, sending him off on countless mental tangents, tramping down avenues of the past.

The book is partly an exercise in sustained pathetic fallacy, the landscapes and skies of the walk reflecting the sombre mood of the writer’s mind: a journey of greys, dislocation, confusion, uncertainty.

The places he visits are often far from happy, and not quite beautiful. For example, he visits Orfordness - once a military installation - and his walk there is characterised by an almost overpowering sense of displacement, irreality.

‘To me too, as for some latter-day stranger ignorant of the nature of our society wandering about among heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery, the beings who had once lived and worked here were an enigma, as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings inside the bunkers, the iron rails under the ceilings, the hooks on the still partially tiled walls, the showerheads the size of plates, the ramps and the soakaways. Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words.’

The Rings of Saturn, more than perhaps any of his other books, has Sebald grappling with a place’s capacity to unsettle and provoke, and is quietly, simply beautiful.

Philip Pullman, La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust Volume One (2017)

All of the books in the His Dark Materials universe, for which The Book of Dust is the prequel, feature either a real or imagined version of Pullman’s native Oxford. In La Belle Sauvage, the first volume of the prequel, it is the imagined version that takes centre stage again.

The liberties afforded by an imagined parallel universe allow Pullman to toy with the Oxford as we know it. For example, in this universe the Dissolution of the Monasteries never took place, as the power of the Catholic Church became even more dominant over Europe, so Godstow Abbey at Wolvercote survived, standing snugly by the bank of the Thames. Not much is really so different though. The Trout Inn - ‘an old stone-built rambling comfortable sort of place’ - is there intact, a warm and generous mingling of the real with the imaginary. Down the river into Oxford, the towpaths and boatyards of Jericho are given new vibrancy, the setting for the discovery of murder and conspiracy, the beginning of an adventure. The spires are there, the cobbled twists and turns of the medieval town-centre, a few colleges survive the transition to this parallel world, a few don’t, some are invented (though unfortunately no sign of Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scone College’…).

Indeed, the whole novel is a testament to the power of literature to reinvent a place, to transform our expectations. So the banks of the Thames burst in a biblical flood, seemingly unleashing all the spectres, myths and demons of Albion. So Oxford - elsewhere in literature the scene of scholarly calm or unhurried leisure (alright, there are a few murders) - is here the centre of a sinister plot, before being sunk by the deluge.

Oxford, and the route up the Thames from London to it, are places that hold a special place in my heart, as I’m sure they do for many people. Their magical reimagining here let me experience them in a new way, connect the dots between Pullman’s magical journey and my own experiences - rather more mundane but just as vital for me - and remember that all places can possess a kind of magic.