20/07/18: Anna Kavan – Ice (1967)

From the blurb on the back: “No one knows why the ice has come, and no one can stop it.”

This short novel – £1 from the Octavia Foundation on High Street Kensington – really annoyed me. A chronicle of unexplained obsession set during an unspecified disaster, it frustrates on every page.

Ice is creeping across the world. A man pursues a woman. Beyond those basics, it quickly becomes evident that none of the events described can be assumed to have definitively taken place:

“Reality had become something of an unknown quantity to me,” says the narrator. And: “The drugs prescribed for me produced horrible dreams”. Because of the constant blurring between “objective” events (if there are any) and the narrator’s visions, you end up not believing in any of it. Indeed, the narrator’s unreliability is hammered home with tedious frequency. The nature of reality is an interesting theme that has been explored by countless authors in more engaging ways. 

“My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.”

Yes, we get it! But two pages later he reports “an odd sort of fragmentation of my ideas”. But this goes on and on: “it dawned on me that this was the reality, and those other things the dream. All of a sudden the life I had been lately living appeared unreal: it simply was not credible any longer.”

“I fled from the room in utter confusion,” explains the narrator at one point, summing up the exasperating novel in a nutshell by adding that he “did not know what had happened, or if anything had”. 

“All this was real, it was really happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.”

The characters are vague and sketchy. What we do learn of them shows them to be too unpleasant to care about. The “plot” does gather pace towards the end and it finally becomes engaging. I tried to read this while waiting for a delayed flight and it was absolutely not the engrossing book I hoped it would be – or needed in that situation. There are curious typos, as well. In two places, the word “re-started” is printed as “re-tarted”. You can only assume that Penguin scanned an old copy of the book and failed to check the results.

14/07/18: Geoff Nicholson – The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, Literature, Theory and Practice of Pedestrianism (2008)

“I feît that Oxford Street needed to be redeemed. I thought it might be a good place to do my particular, strange, walking project. I came to a decision. I would make six transits of Oxford Street, there and back, from Tottenham Court Road tube station at the east end of the street to Marble Arch at the west, and back again. I would spread them out over the course of one day. I would see how the street and my walking changed.”

The title sums it up pretty well. The book examines every aspect of walking – a particular passion of the author – from competitive and historical walkers, to spiritual matters and walking in graveyards. Although he meets Iain Sinclair, who rightly describes Canary Wharf as one of the worst areas for walking, Nicholson is fairly dismissive of the label “psychogeography”, stating: “It occurred to me, not exactly for the first time, that psychogeography didn’t have much to do with the actual experience of walking. It was a nice idea, a clever idea, an art project, a conceit, but it had very little to do with any real experience of walking. And it confirmed for me, what I’d really known all along, that walking isn’t much good as a theoretical experience. You can dress it up any way you like, but walking remains resolutely simple, basic, analog. That’s why I love it and love doing it.”

The book is good for alerting you to cultural reference points. There’s plenty on J.G. Ballard, whose work I already love, but it was useful to be made aware of Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice and Steve Gough’s naked walking projects, which led me to view the excellent BBC documentary One Life: The Naked Rambler.

I also respect Nicholson for his dislike of a certain sport: “My hatred of golf knows few bounds. It seems to me that golf isn’t merely a good walk spoiled, but rather a good piece of walking territory made inaccessible, annexed by fuckwits in pastel clothing.” Well said.

The least successful part of the book involves his thoughts on walking and popular music. It’s all very well listing songs with “walk” in the title, but he fails to examine them on any deeper level – for example, “I Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash really isn’t a song about walking. The metaphor could have been explored but that opportunity isn't taken. A few typos and errors along the way (there’s no Bob Dylan song called “Tom Paine”) also lose him points, but in general this is well worth your time.