Mountains of the Mind: A History of A Fascination by Robert McFarlane

A wonderful read that is not just for those who feel the need to climb higher and go further than others have gone before, but also for those like me who are content to learn about the seemingly contradictory addictive drive for glory and zen like pursuit of inner enlightenment that makes up that drive.  This is not just a well written book about mountains, it is about how Western society has changed its attitudes towards mountains through history.  McFarlane speaks of the early accounts of travellers and revelations of Romanticism with its reverence for the sublime and wild, high and remote places.  He speaks of our changing in understanding, from mountains as an antediluvian remnant to the current understanding of deep time and the enormous geological processes that have thrust mountain ranges up and the glacial processes that have worn them down.  This is a truly wonderful book that, as with all of McFarlane's, pivots around the life of a man, in this case Mallory, the man who died on his third attempt to climb Everest, and his internal struggle between beloved wife and the drive to reach the summit.

The Adoption by Anne Berry

In 1948 young unmarried mother Bethan signs over her unborn baby to an adoption agency.  In the present day Lucilla contemplates middle age, her happy marriage, her grown up children, her ageing spaniel and the question over the identity of her mother.  Lucilla raised her children with kindness and strength but her own childhood under her adoptive parents was repressive and grim, marred by a lack of love. Indeed, when at 14 she is told she was adopted all she feels is relief.  Berry traces the lives of three very different women and the choices that made a sadness of all their lives.  Beautifully told but very sad.

Pigeon by Barbara Allen

This is my first of the Reaktion series of monographs on individual species of animals and I was pleasantly surprised, I expected the book to be quite slight and received a lovely heavy 230 odd page book that fits nicely in the hand and is full of colour and monochrome illustrations and photographs.

Pigeons are a much maligned species, villified as 'rats with wings', as pests in interesting contrast to their albino versions, doves. They live in such close communion with us, exchanging their natural habitat of cliff faces for the vertical faces of our cities, that they are easily overlooked. They are assumed to be stupid and dirty, but the truth is very different.

Allen takes us through chapters on the physiology and natural history of pigeons and doves, their social life, intelligence, the physical mutability which made them beloved of Darwin and other pigeon fanciers, and their ability to home. She identifies the history of doves and pigeons in literature, religion and mythology and examines their relationship with humans, as food and as messengers. Her final chapter is on the pigeon species humans have driven to extinction: the dodo, solitaires, and the passenger pigeon, not from competition but rather wholesale slaughter.

There is some repetition between chapters, but in all this was a really enjoyable education, pigeons have companioned humans since the beginning of built civilization and this book elegantly explores how the relationship between bird and human has evolved right up to the present day.

The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane

MacFarlane completes his trilogy of nature writing with a meditation on walking. It can be read seperately but dovetails beautifully with its companions. MacFarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was an exploration of how the cultural concept of mountains has changed over time. The second, The Wild Places, of the concept of wilderness and our need to reach for it. This third book, The Old Ways, speaks of the lost pathways that were used by our ancestors and are almost, but not quite, forgotten, like lost plague villages visible from the air as marks in a field. 

The book is divided into four parts, each covering a different geographical set of wanderings. 

The first section is of MacFarlane's journeys in England, as he traces the Icknield Way from his home outside Cambridge to the Downs and walks the 'most dangerous path in Britain': the Broomway tidal road across the Maplin Sands alongside Foulness Island, traversing holloways, chalk paths and a Roman Road, sleeping out to be woken by skylarks, crunching in the snow and striding toe to toe with his own reflection across wet sands.

Next he goes north to his beloved Scotland, exploring the trackless motorway of the sea road through the Minches to the Shiants, Rona and Sula Sgeir and across peat and granite moors, reflecting on a post glacial landscape ground out by the ice and bearing the signs of early human occupation. 

In the third part MacFarlane travels abroad to walk in Palestine, to follow part of the Camino pilgrim road in Spain and the pilgrim route around the feet of Minya Konka in Western Tibet, the most sacred mountain in Buddhism. In these less familiar landscapes his writing takes on a tone of wonder at new fauna, flora, weather, people and political strictures.

Finally he homes and returns to following the Ridgeway across Marlborough Downs, the South Downs to Eastbourne, circling in a gyre around a subject that McFarlane touches on again and again before focusing on it in the closing chapters. The life of Edward Thomas, killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917, poet, depressive and compulsive walker is addressed directly in 'Ghost', an account of Thomas' life with his wife Helen and his use of walking as a curative for his raging depressions. In the very last chapter MacFarlane opens out again and shows us the evanescent prints of early humans walking across a mud flat, now revealed by the tides. 

MacFarlane's book is not easy to categorise, it mediates on many aspects, some connected with walking such as the drive of wanderlust and the push of the curious mind, some with the wandering trails the mind takes on such a journey, of geology, deep time, human history, companionship, solitude and spirituality. Another wonderful book by an author I turn to with delight.

Torchwood: Fallout by David Llewellyn (AUDIO)

Not the best Torchwood adventure, the best are the radio plays with all the sound effects and the voices of the characters.  This is just an audio book and relatively short, only an hour long.  Only one of the Torchwood characters: Gwen Cooper, features, but then at this point in the chronology of Torchwood she is the only one left.  She, however, is only indirectly involved via telephone from America.  The major lead is minor character Sergeant Andy Davidson, the hapless Cardiff policeman who was Gwen's link to the police force.  When Andy realises that the shooting that he is dealing with in Cardiff has some very strange, distinctly alien, features, he calls Gwen who realises what the object at the heart of the matter is.  Cue race to save the world.  Though it is nice to see Andy come to the front, the whole was a bit flat.

Black Heart Blue by Louisa Reid

Hephzi stands in her sister Rebecca's dress at her grave, struggling with the loss of a beloved sister and the secrets dammed up inside of her. Hephiz and Rebecca were twins but different in so many ways, Rebecca beautiful and sunny, Rebecca's face twisted by a genetic disorder. Home schooled until Rebecca persuades her parents to let them go to college, the new freedoms of this world give Rebecca a taste of freedom and terrify Hephzi, exposed to the stares and taunts of the other student. However, both sisters hide the secret at the heart of their lives, and the truth of Rebecca's death is revealed step by step. Made me cry, and there's not many books do that.

Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro

A gentle set of five stories in which little happens but lives change, the lives of Ishiguro's characters intersect with those of others triggering series of reflections and reverberations through memory, past and future. The stories are beautifully constructed around major life changes narrated in the past tense, striking a minor key of regret and loss. Relationships are pivoting and coming to their closing acts, musicians are recognised by one character but unknown, forgotten by all the others, once shining, glorious and famous, now faded like old photographs. These are stories that haunt and echo, like a melody that awakes memories.