03/12/19: Steve Toltz – Quicksand (2015)

“Humanity’s common goal is to die with dignity and dignified in that context is defined as dying in our own beds, but what if you have a waterbed or Spider-Man bedsheets? What’s dignified about that?”

In some ways Steve Tolz’s second novel is very much like his first, A Fraction of a Whole, in that one unusual Australian writes about another, amassing endless detail about an eccentric character. But this book goes even deeper into the mysteries of existence and is an even richer read.

“I don’t know anything other than that the greatest misconception about the apocalypse is that it is a sudden, brief event. It is not. It is slow. Grindingly slow. It goes for generations.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, Lord, can I borrow Yours? The log-sized one from the Sistine Chapel? Am I insane? Has the pain rewired my brain? Human endurance is absurd. It can take ANYTHING. You know this. Can’t there please be a point where once a person has reached a maximum of suffering they just explode?”

Like Kurt Vonnegut, Tolz is endlessly witty and compassionate. He observes the human condition with philosophical insight and warm humour. The plot is fairly convoluted, but at its heart it sees narrator and cop Liam Wilder building a complex, multi-faceted written portrait of Aldo Benjamin – a disaster-prone paralysed visionary who happens to be his best friend. Liam documents Aldo’s steady decline through endless misfortunes including spells in hospital and prison. He does this with compassion and the blackest humour possible. The book takes you to some disturbing places indeed, but the dazzling use of language is such that you are transfixed as seemingly absurd characters become more and more real before your eyes.

It’s very funny and very sad – certainly a book to read more than once.

It’s also full of remarkable aphorisms, wordplay and clever quips. The book repeatedly quotes from Liam and Aldo’s art teacher, Mr. Morrell, a recurring character in the novel whose book on art is filled with astonishing, pithy truths about the nature of art, reality and existence. You find yourself wanting to read that book too.

08/11/19: John O’Farrell – Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter 1979–1997 (1998)

“Only in Britain are people criticised for attempting to make something ‘a political issue’, when surely everything is a political issue.”

Witty and self-deprecating account of supporting the Labour party when they were at their lowest ebb. It certainly resonates with recent events, as Labour once again appear to have hit rock bottom.

O’Farrell worked as a researcher for an MP and as a press officer for a councillor. Later he wrote satirical and topical jokes and sketches for Spitting Image and Clive Anderson. It’s a genuinely funny memoir.

“I am just someone who feels very strongly that people should take part in every election: European elections, council by-elections – part of me even feels compelled to take part in the Stars in Their Eyes phone vote just because I have a right to do so.”

You feel his pain and he suffers endless Labour defeats and set-backs. The book ends on a note of total euphoria with the Labour landslide of 1st May 1997 and the beginning of the Tony Blair era. With hindsight that wouldn’t be quite the golden era it promised, but the author didn’t know that yet...

26/09/19: Christopher McDougall – Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen (2009)

Brilliantly uncategorisable book about ultrarunning, the Tarahumara people of Chihuahua, Mexico, and a 50-mile desert endurance race that the author himself takes part in.

It’s a rambling, restless narrative covering a lot of ground (literally!), but the writing is razor-sharp and very witty. As well as bring a vital work of ethnography, it’s an almost gonzo journalist account of being a runner that brings to life various colourful characters.

McDougall argues along the lines of the “endurance running hypothesis”, i.e., that humans developed the ability to run for long distances so that they could run down their prey.

Perhaps the most memorable part is chapter 25, in which he details how terrible trainers are for your feet. He investigates barefoot running and provides compelling evidence that trainers offer nothing whatsoever beyond protection from rough surfaces and the cold. In fact, he argues that modern running shoes are actively bad for us – denying the human foot its own evolutionary genius by ironically cushioning it into experiencing even more impact. And therefore making us run unnaturally and harmfully. This, he claims, means that the more “hi-tech” the trainer, the more likely we are to be injured. His argument is backed up with a lot of respectable research and suggests the world is being sold a lie about running shoes.

Born to Run is highly recommended – entertaining, funny and informative. Worth a read, whether or not you yourself run.

08/09/19: Lawrence Block – A Stab in the Dark (1981)

Matt Scudder is a troubled ex-cop with a drink problem. He’s hired to find out more about a murder that took place nine years ago, previously thought to have been the work of the “ice-pick killer” but now suspected to be from a different killer entirely, despite similarities in the crime.

The novel is well-plotted, but the character development gripped me far more that the investigation trail and the whodunnit aspects. Scudder’s losing battle with drink makes for fascinating reading, as does his new relationship with fellow boozer Jan.

This is the fourth novel in the Scudder series. (I also have the fifth and sixth included in the same anthology, which I bought in a St. Andrews charity shop in August.)

15/08/19: Haruki Murakami – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007)

Gently philosophical meditations on being a runner and a writer.

Murakami listens to the Lovin’ Spoonful and ponders the meaning of tackling marathons and triathlons as he grows older.

I found the following passage the most interesting:

“I’m often asked what I think about as I run. Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue.

On cold days I guess I think a little about how cold it is. And about the heat on hot days. When I’m sad I think a little about sadness. When I’m happy I think a little about happiness. As I mentioned before, random memories come to me too. And occasionally, hardly ever, really, I get an idea to use in a novel. But really as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning.

I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void. But as you might expect, an occasional thought will slip into this void. People’s minds can’t be a complete blank. Human beings’ emotions are not strong or consistent enough to sustain a vacuum. What I mean is, the kinds of thoughts and ideas that invade my emotions as I run remain subordinate to that void. Lacking content, they are just random thoughts that gather around that central void.”

08/08/19: David Thomas and Helen Krasner – Travels with Cookie: Narrowboat Cruising with a Cat (2014)

The author learns that he has terminal cancer and decides to fulfil his lifelong ambition to buy and live on a canal boat. He does this with Cookie, his large, fluffy, white cat.

During their four years afloat, David saves a woman stuck in the mud and meets a seal, while Cookie – perhaps not the brightest button in the box – falls in the water a few times. But otherwise, not a great deal happens beyond boating up and down England and Wales. This is no way prevents it being an enjoyable read.

I came to this book via its co-author, Helen Krasner, whose Midges, Maps & Muesli: An Account of a 5,000-Mile Walk Round the Coast of Britain I enjoyed recently. The story of how David meets and falls in love with Helen is touching. They end up living together (she has five cats of her own) and his health miraculously improves.

I would have liked a bit more Cookie and a little less boating, but it’s to the authors’ great credit that this doesn’t become yet another sentimental “me and my pet” memoir.

31/07/19: Gavin Boyter – Downhill from Here: Running from John O’Groats to Land’s End (2017)

“What better way to celebrate a country than by passing a continuous strip of it under your feet, literally feeling the entire terrain of a top-to-bottom treadmill composed of tarmac, earth, sand and grass?”

You can tell what this is about from the title. It’s the story of the run and also of the author’s attempts to make a film about the experience – a complicated project indeed. He secures the help of his father (who operates a drone to film aerial shots) and various drivers to meet him at the end of each day’s journey.

He gets lost a lot. He gets his film equipment stolen. He suffers various injuries. At times it’s a standard John O’Groats to Land’s End (JogLe) account, with moments of tedium and frustration.

Occasionally Gavin can sound oddly Alan Partridge-like:

“I often try a thought experiment, imagining what it would be like if I was ‘parachuted in’ to a random workplace and asked to muck in. I imagine myself in those factories, workshops and offices; I hope I’d be able to fit in amongst my fellow employees in these theoretical work placements. Such empathic daydreaming whiles away hours on an urban trail. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.”

See also the passage in which he writes:

“You can’t have your loft conversions, fridge-freezers, fork-lift trucks and basic, functional sanitation without a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes.”

But maybe that’s harsh. He follows this latter observation with the wiser and more insightful: “We are drawn to watercourses because they seem to embody life, even when as comparatively still as a canal.”

He gets there in the end and his document of that experience is worth reading.

14/06/19: David Quantick – Go West (2018)

This short novel is an entertaining romp that deals with the world of forged antiques. The plot escalates into something fairly involved and ends excitingly. For me, though, the best sections are those in which the hero, Charlie Bread, drives west across Britain listening to tapes of John Peel radio shows with his glamorous new friend Penelope.

The most amusing moment is when he pretends to be tour guide and bluffs an entire bus tour of Exeter.

Go West is that rare thing: a road-movie-type narrative successfully set in the UK.

09/05/19: Steve Toltz – A Fraction of the Whole (2008)

A long (700-page), shaggy-dog story of a book that stretches from Australia to France to Thailand and back to Australia, this covers three generations of the Dean family, focusing on Terry (a vicious murderer), Martin (Terry’s genius-madman brother) and Jasper (Martin’s equally eccentric and rebellious son).

As with the work of Kurt Vonnegut, this is very funny and full of philosophical questioning and insight about life, love and religion – but in such a dry, self-deprecating manner that it never feels ponderous or remotely preachy. It’s also quite savage in its social satire. It’s a novel that praises individuality and rages against conformity.

There’s huge intelligence and wisdom at work that challenges lazy thinking. I wanted to copy out several passages because what they communicated was so profound. I also want to read it again.

10/04/19: Penelope Lively – Heat Wave (1996)

Middled-aged copy-editor Pauline was once cheated on by her husband. She now sees the same thing happening to her daughter.

This is a clever novel that weaves together a mother/and-daughter story, a saga of past and present relationships and a study of rural vs. urban living. It’s set in the English countryside and the nature around the characters is vividly brought into being as a metaphorical mirror of what is happening to them.

It's such a slow-burner that I was surprised when it concluded in a moment of sudden action, albeit a satisfying one.

05/04/19: Deborah Levy – Early Levy: Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography (2014)

This is a bind-up of two short, early novels.

Beautiful Mutants (1989):

A bunch of seemingly unrelated characters often given nicknames (The Banker, The Anorexic Anarchist, The Innocents and so on) float through the narrative seemingly without purpose.

This is an unusual novel in that it seems so disjointed, with surreal and often violent episodes depicted in poetic language. The way the characters speak is completely unrealistic – and presumably intentionally so:

“This fish has the possessed eye of a poet and tastes just as useless. In fact it tastes like a melancholy misfit. I have always hated poetry, I prefer hard mathematics or even hard drugs. Do you really think that in consuming this pescado I would consume its ideas? I have spat them out again and again. And what is The Idea? That there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird? Give it to me, I’ll take it to the market and show you sixty ways of looking at it. Poets are fuckwits. They try and legislate with language but they don’t have the roubles to bribe. On my aunt’s salmon farm they stroke the belly of hen salmon to squeeze out their eggs for breeding. Well, I have squeezed you out too.”

Certainly no one speaks like this:

“I own a prestige apartment facing the sparkle of the river, with south-facing views, a private car park, porter, video security, entry phone, swimming pool and a sauna to nurture my health, which is after all my wealth. I am given all this for good reason. I am valued; I am an irresistible proposition to men in parliaments and tycoons on committees and entrepreneurs of all kinds; my condom case bulges with the promise of liaison and adventure. I am the new pioneer; the great adventure of my generation is to destabilize everything and everyone.”

I don’t think it’s meant to be realistic. It’s a novel of ideas, constructed out of experimental language, jamming in jarring images, phrases, situations and thoughts. But I found it too incoherent to get much out of it, which I accept may be my failing as a reader.

Swallowing Geography (1993):

The second novel is no more rewarding. J.K. (a reference to Jack Kerouac) travels through seemingly unrelated scenes and locations. Again, it’s very disjointed. If anything, it becomes even more abstract as it goes on. There are characters called B, H, X, Y and Z. Levy may be trying to deconstruct identity and reveal it to be fluid and ever-shifting. But once that point has been made, what of it?

Again the language is poetic and even beautiful, but the fragmentary conversations and observations don’t add up to a great deal.

I loved Swimming Home, The Cost of Living and Hot Milk, so found this very disappointing indeed.

01/04/19: Helen Krasner – Midges, Maps & Muesli: An Account of a 5,000-Mile Walk Round the Coast of Britain (1998)

“I wasn’t particularly interested in fulfilling an ambition, nor did I want the great feelings of achievement people thought I must be seeking – this just wasn’t the way I looked at walking, or indeed at life.”

In 1986, Helen Krasner became the first woman to walk around the coast of Britain. This is her tale. Rather than present a day-by-day account, she simply reports back on the interesting bits – a wise decision, as this makes for a far more compelling narrative. There’s a visit to Sellafield nuclear power station, where she commits the faux-pas of carrying a camera. She passes Paul McCartney’s farm at the Mull of Kintyre. And she looks for the monster at Loch Ness.

She is unpretentious and easy to like, with a relaxed view about the “rules” of the walk. She undertook the journey for pleasure, not for the sake of setting a record. Plus, there can be no definitive route. It’s not as simple as keeping the coast on your left. How literally do you take this when paths come and go? Even if the path followed the coastline strictly, where is the “coast” anyway? It depends on dynamic factors including tides, ocean currents, times of year, weather and erosion – an infinitely complex matter. You realise that she is absolutely right to interpret the route the way she does.

She only suffers one blister on the entire trip and the book is refreshingly free of gripes about the pain of endurance. She does it for fun, and that cones across well.

Along the way she depicts an older and more innocent Britain – one without computers, GPS technology and mobile phones. On one occasion she has to call for some medical results (foot X-ray to rule out suspected fracture) and only had 10p to use in a phone box. Keen to hear about her walk, the radiographer is slow to get to the point and reveal the good news: “She had told me in the nick of time. The pips went, and we were cut off.” There must be generations now who have no idea what the pips even means.

I particularly liked the way she refuses to play the role others expect from her. By the time she completes the walk, returning to Brighton, she has become weary of retelling the same story endlessly and generally disappoints the press by not issuing the kinds of memorable statements they expect to hear.

Only one real criticism: the book would have greatly benefited from a map showing Helen’s route route. Amid the barrage of obscure place names, I found I was often looking up locations online to see how far she had travelled. That said, she does end with a day-by-day listing of each stretch she completed and a running tally of distances covered – in fact, a journey of 4,922 miles from the start of March 1986 to the end of January 1987.

26/03/19: Nicholson Baker – The Mezzanine (1988)

It was interesting to read this classic after working through much of the author’s other work. His first book, The Mezzanine is an astonishing achievement that slows down time to detail the events and – in particular – the thoughts that took place in a single office lunch break.

There are super-detailed analyses (with long digressive footnotes) on shoelaces, drinking straws and ice cube trays. Baker really gets inside the mundane reality of objects – almost down to the atomic level – and makes you see them afresh. He finds sensual pleasure in exploring the most ordinary and familiar things.

One brilliant section offers four reasons why you should feel less upset about the death of brain cells as you age. Another astounding passage describes the ways that “staplers have followed, lagging by about ten years, the broad changes we have witnessed in train locomotives and phonograph tonearms, both of which they resemble”.

Whether delighting in the joys of perforation or contemplating what people do while alone in lifts, this novel (which isn’t really a novel at all) amounts to a terrific rendering of consciousness.

22/03/19: Tony Hobbs – One Pair of Boots: Land’s End to John O’Groats (2000)

I was very keen to read about a journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats (a.k.a. the LeJoG), but this wasn’t quite the account I was hoping for. The author generally fails to inspire with his descriptions of the physical feat of undertaking the walk, which he completes slowly over nearly 15 weeks. Nor does he especially engage the reader with descriptions of people and places along the way, although it’s touching when he seems to make a friend called Nicky:

“She was tall, with a mop of thick light brown hair, spoke with a soft Devon accent, and was reading John Paul Sartre’s Nausea...In the dark we left the pub and walked the half mile to where Nicky was camped. She held a torch while I put up my tent, and then we looked at the stars, she pointing out the Plough and North Star.”

You wonder if he is somewhat smitten, although he misses the chance to use an obvious joke about carrying a torch.

His interlude aside, the book, like the journey itself, seems to lack passion and purpose. There’s a charity angle (£2 goes to the MS Society for every copy sold), but this is only mentioned when he’s close to finishing. It’s not presented as a motivating factor for his walk. He visits a lot of churches and takes a lot of wrong turns, but you don’t really learn how he feels about anything.

For a narrative like this to succeed, it cannot simply be a list of places trudged through, meals eaten and places camped at. It needs to do something with that information to give you a reason to invest your time in the story and experience it for yourself. He could have taken one aspect – such as the fact that he “consumed 285 pints of beer of 83 different varieties” – and framed the entire narrative around that. It could have worked so much better as Land’s End to John O’Groats in 285 Pints.

But despite all this, I grew to like the author and found myself wanting to get to the end to see him finish his journey – even if the huge achievement of his reaching that point fails to even warrant a new paragraph in the text. There’s something about the sheer ordinariness – the complete lack of pretension – that makes this book difficult to dislike.

13/03/19: Phoebe Smith – Extreme Sleeps: Adventures of a Wild Camper (2013)

This was free from the Totteridge & Whetstone book exchange – the wonderful “Leave one, take one” scheme run from the waiting room on the station platform.

Believing that you don’t need to travel far to find real wilderness, Phoebe Smith hikes to obscure and remote UK locations and then camps in them. Each chapter covers one such location and details what happened when she travelled and slept there. Sometimes it’s fascinating (camping beside the wreckage at the crash site of a World War II bomber) and sometimes it’s a little mundane and repetitious.

There are quite a few typos and sometimes the grammar doesn’t work. See, for example, this awkwardly dangling sentence: “Looking at the map, the River Liza which feeds the reservoir, should have been nearer to where I was standing.” This implies that the river is looking at the map. The commas are in the wrong places, too.

That said, Smith’s cheery and energetic writing bounces along. It's friendly and upbeat – an amiable read.

04/03/19: Deborah Levy – Hot Milk (2016)

“I was beginning to understand Ingrid Bauer. She was always pushing me to the edge in one way or another. My boundaries were made from sand so she reckoned she could push them over, and I let her. I gave my unspoken consent because I want to know what’s going to happen next, even if it’s not to my advantage. Am I self-destructive, or pathetically passive, or reckless, or just experimental, or am I a rigorous cultural anthropologist, or am I in love?”

I enjoyed The Cost of Living so much that I wanted to read more Deborah Levy. This Booker Prize-shortlisted novel features more of the same dry wit. And it has a similar “voice”.

Excellently plotted, it details what happens when anthropology student Sofia accompanies her mother from England to Spain for treatment at a specialist health clinic. In the sultry idyll of the hot beaches where jellyfish sting swimmers, Sofia begins two relationships – one with a man and one with a woman. As her mother’s mysterious ailment is explored by the enigmatic Mr. Gomez, Sofia reflects on her relationship with her mother and her place in the world.

It’s the best novel I’ve read for a long time. Deborah Levy weaves the threads together with such subtle humour and expanding richness that it’s a joy to read. Recurring motifs – the medusa jellyfish, an embroidered shirt, a taxidermy exhibit, the screensaver image on a broken laptop – resonate throughout and become increasingly laden with symbolic meaning. They combine to create something that feels mythically powerful.

26/02/19: Lauren Elder with Shirley Streshinsky – And I Alone Survived (1978)

Back cover: “Lauren Elder set out in a light aircraft in company with the pilot and his girlfriend. It was going to be a joyride, sightseeing over the mountainous splendour of the Sierra Nevada range. 

The Cessna hit the mountain fifteen feet from the crest. The joyride had turned into a nightmare. 

After a night of sub-zero temperatures Lauren was the only one of the three left alive.

She faced the terrifying prospect of climbing down to safety, wearing only a jacket and skirt and fashionable boots, down 8,000 feet of fearsome, precipitous mountain to the desert below...”

I love that reference to “fashionable boots”...

The opening pages are written like a racy novel, which added a certain distance for me: somehow it wasn’t very engaging. From the moment the plane hits the mountain ridge, the book becomes hugely compelling. After a frozen night huddled in the wreckage with no underwear and crammed in a tiny space with the one other survivor, she finds herself alone as her second companion dies from injuries and exposure. Sensing rescue was unlikely she begins the long climb down the snowy mountain, despite serious wounds and the onset of hallucinations. The account of her long trek to safety is interspersed with details of the rescue mission launched by her boyfriend.

The most fascinating sections of the book involve her describing how she felt during the ordeal: “From the moment I had lowered myself over the side of the crest early that morning I had been aware of a feeling of pure physical strength. But it was really more than that. It was strength tempered by balance, a kind of power that seemed to spring from some untapped well. It was as if I had been granted an unlimited supply of energy, and I was amazed and confounded by it.”

This energy – a sense of purpose and defiance – saves her life: “I had known the feeling before. I had it sometimes when I was surfing. I would catch a big wave and ride it on and on, sensing that I was part of the sea. I didn’t have to think or even make an effort. We just flowed together, my body responding without any command; And it happened to me at other times – the best times when I was jumping a horse. Then everything was so finely balanced that I knew I could do no wrong, that whatever move we made together was right. But I could not believe I that I had this feeling on a sheer granite cliff in a mountain wilderness.” 

She also comes to terms with death as being “neither dramatic nor even alarming”, simply something that “is”. It's impressive how wise and mature she is, and her will to live is inspiring: “I had also discovered, that spring day, that there is little that cannot be endured. Much of the time I had felt as if I’d been possessed of a special grace. That is all I could think to call it, grace. It was as if a transcendent power had been loosed in me as I made my way down that mountain. At times during the day I’d been filled with a peculiar sense of well-being, of elation. I had fallen out of the sky, had in the most primeval sense been lost in the wilderness, and it had not overwhelmed me. It had been, even, exhilarating.”

22/02/19: Deborah Levy – The Cost of Living (2018)

“The writing life is mostly about stamina. To get to the finishing line requires the writing to become more interesting than everyday life...”

This little hardback was free from the Totteridge & Whetstone book exchange – the wonderful “take one, leave one” scheme run from the waiting room on the station platform.

It’s a short, philosophical memoir about writing, the break-up of her marriage and the death of her mother. Levy writes beautifully, in clear, concise sentences. The structure seems abstract – rambling even – but then she loops back to certain individuals, themes and ideas and you realise how cleverly constructed it is.

A work of philosophy and gentle wit, she flits between playful and profound with graceful ease.

19/02/19: Karl Pilkington – An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington (2010)

The tie-in book of the first Sky TV series of the same name. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant send their friend Karl to witness the Wonders of the World, and Karl – a man who dislikes travel and is well out of his “comfort zone” – responds to these alien experiences in his usual deadpan manner.

Written down, it’s considerably less funny. You can still enjoy Karl’s unique slant on things, but it seems one-dimensional without hearing his voice (so familiar from podcasts and radio shows) and seeing his face. Another disappointment is that the little drawings are not by Karl, but by an illustrator and made to look as if they are Pilkington doodles. Despite some funny sentences, the whole book has a child-like quality that makes it oddly unsatisfying.

It’s undoubtedly lightweight, but there’s still a certain pleasure to be had in reading about these adventures – however flimsy. Despite his many prejudices, Karl mostly emerges as a kind and likeable character. You wouldn’t necessarily want to travel with him, though.

18/02/19: Deborah Scaling Kiley and Meg Noonan – Albatross: The True Story of a Woman’s Survival at Sea (1994)

“I opened my eyes and felt the sting of salt water. I waited for my vision to clear. When it did, my stomach contracted. A cold sword of fear stabbed through me. I didn’t believe what I was seeing. I didn’t want to believe it. Now I knew what had been bumping Mark’s legs. Sharks. There were sharks everywhere. Dozens, no, hundreds of them – as far as I could see. Some were so close I could see the membrane hooding their lifeless, clouded eyes. Others were just slow-moving angular shadows spiralling into the depths.”

Another raft-survival memoir, which I was inspired to read following the accounts of Steven Callahan and Maurice and Maralyn Bailey. The blurb on the dust jacket pretty much tells you everything:

“From the moment Debbie Scaling left Southwest Harbour in Maine she had misgivings about both the crew and the 58-foot Boothbay Challenger yacht. Yet, although she was an experienced sailor, she ignored her instincts and embarked on the voyage to Florida to deliver the boat – the aptly named Trashman – to its owner. They never made it.

Halfway through their voyage, the Trashman sank in a ferocious storm. Debbie and her four crew-mates were left on a tiny rubber dinghy in the middle of a raging ocean. They spent the first night in the water, under the upside-down inflatable, trying to keep warm. In the morning they discovered the water was infested with sharks. Back in the dinghy they covered themselves with seaweed for warmth – but were bitten by the creatures in it. They were attacked by birds, developed hideous sores, and with no food, no water, and inadequate clothing they began to hallucinate. Driven beyond endurance, two of the crew drank seawater and, little by little, went mad. With the others too weak to stop them they swam off and didn’t survive. The skipper’s girlfriend also died – of exposure and gangrene.

After days of this living nightmare, and resigned to their fate at the mercy of the sea Debbie and her only surviving crewmate, Brad, were rescued by a Russian ship.”

It’s a fairly harrowing read, not least because the incompetent “crew” (including two men with drink problems) are constantly at each other’s throats. There’s little unity, making a scary situation even more terrifying: “Then Meg was shouting at John again and John was shouting back and Mark was ranting and I felt myself drowning in the sound of their voices, the whining, the shouting, the crying, the complaining. Why couldn’t everyone just be quiet? I saw John kick Meg. He was doing it on purpose. She wailed and he kicked her again.”

The horror doesn’t end with the rescue. Deborah endures a decade of post-traumatic stress disorder and battles bulimia and depression as she struggles to comprehend what happened. She also files a lawsuit against the US coastguard, who she considers negligent. Inexplicably, the official reports claimed that the Trashman had arrived safely at its destination.

With marriage, motherhood, the writing of this book and a return to sailing she eventually starts to move on with her life. An extremely gripping story, it makes for a sobering read.

Postscript: it’s heartbreaking to learn that the tragedy continued. Debbie’s marriage ended. Her son John Coleman Kiley IV died by drowning in 2009, aged just 23. And Debbie herself died in 2012, aged 54.

“...the ocean us like a snarling dog,” she writes at one point; “it can sense when you are afraid.”

13/02/19: Stuart Stevens – Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure (1989)

“You would have to be out of your mind to go anywhere with Stuart Stevens, but when the travel is only mental, he is the perfect companion: brave, funny and ever-watchful” – Martin Amis

Amusing account of the author’s attempt to cross Africa by car, from Bangui in the Central African Republic to Algiers. His does this with his glamorous, remarkably laid-back companion Anne. Intriguingly, the exact nature of the pair’s relationship – not romantic – is never explained.

Their efforts are continually thwarted by local corruption, a lack of roads, failing equipment and poor living conditions. It’s to his great credit that Stevens finds so much humour in a situation that continually veers between maddening, desperate and scary.

According to the book blurb, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Mali, all of which he drives through, are “bizarre places where the vestiges of colonial folly, idiosyncratic enterprise, bribery and endless, pointless bureaucracy are the stuff of life”. Indeed, the frustrations of bureaucracy are such that the actual road journey only begins halfway through the book – and even then not in his friend’s Land Rover, as planned, but in a completely different vehicle. The section detailing the Toyota Land Cruiser breaking down during their attempt to cross the Sahara is genuinely hair-raising. It had to be locked into third gear and then driven in a continuous session without stopping, whatever the terrain.

It’s a miracle that they survived to tell the tale.

05/02/19: Maurice and Maralyn Bailey – 117 Days Adrift (1974)

M and M hit a sperm whale and their boat sinks off the Galápagos Islands. They drift for nearly four months in their raft and dinghy, surviving on turtle meat and raw fish.

This book lacks the lucid poetry and existential insights of Steven Callahan’s Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea (1986). However, it does have a special charm of its own. Alternating between narrations of husband and wife, the presence of not just a second person but a spouse gives their account a special “domestic” dynamic. They keep each other going, whether it’s mutual support in killing sea creatures or – in the early days of the ordeal – reading out loud to each other and improvising games of dominoes and cards with paper to pass the time (“We spent many hours during the next few weeks playing whist”).

The rather matter-of-fact way its written means that the book is surprisingly low on drama. Some important details are almost glossed over: toilet arrangements are not mentioned until page 95.

“In some weird and detached way we found peace in our complete and compulsory isolation. We talked without the encumbrances of modern living; we explored the hidden depths of each other’s character, we threw away the trappings of so called civilization and reverted to a simple prehistoric way of life. We had our ‘lair’, the raft, and only emerged to hunt our food. Life was simple, but not secure.”

While they revert to a primitive state, it’s remarkable that there seems to have been very little tension between the couple: “We were now existing at a primeval level where the layers of civilization had been stripped away from us. We found our bodily functions unembarrassing and it was surprisingly easy to stay clean. We would wash in sea water, clean our teeth and comb our hair, and in my case, my beard. It was usually far too cold to sit out in the rain and we did not often take advantage of the frequent downpours for bathing.

They lose weight and suffer medical problems, but manage to fish and collect rainwater at such a rate that they mostly avoid serious physical and mental harm. They are eventually saved by a Korean fishing boat – the eighth ship they saw.

Appendices include thoughts on the design of the raft and dinghy, medical evaluation of the couple by Surgeon Captain John Duncan Walters and a list of all the boats that didn’t stop to save them.

01/02/19: Cheryl Strayed – Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found (2012)

“Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren’t things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.”

When her mother dies and her personal life unravels (one-night stands, divorce, heroin), Cheryl Strayed decides to walk the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail) from Mohave, California, to the Bridge of the Gods on the border of Oregon and Washington. Even with sections of the route being missed, it ends up being a journey of 1,100 miles.

Along the way she evades rattlesnakes and bears, struggling through parched deserts and deep snow. She has excruciating foot pain and loses toenails, but meets kindly strangers, makes some hiking friends and starts to come to terms with her past.

It’s hugely readable. The film made in 2014 is a fairly faithful adaptation of this text, but suffers from condensing such a detailed narrative into a couple of hours and somehow seemed a more disturbing tale overall. It’s also harder for a film to show an emotional transformation, which is perhaps the real subject of Wild.

The book is far more varied in tone, with plenty of gentle humour amid the soul-searching and recollection. You end up admiring her spirit and determination. And if you like walking, as I do, it leaves you yearning to undertake your own epic journey.

26/01/19: Richard Mabey – The Unofficial Countryside (1973)

Now regarded as a pioneering classic of psychogeography, but written before such a thing was fashionable, The Unofficial Countryside remains a luminous and visionary work.

It was revolutionary at the time of first publication for the way it refused to accept the standard definitions of “urban” and “rural”. Mabey found and observed nature in the marginal spaces defying categorisation between the two. This wonderful book celebrates the wildlife that others overlook or condemn, and expands at length on the notion that “a weed is just a flower in the wrong place”. His outlook is liberating. There’s a sort of poetry about his observations that – as Iain Sinclair notes in his introduction to this beautiful edition created by Little Toller Books – isn't far from J.G. Ballard’s ability to see possibilities in ugly and abandoned spaces: “...a sliver of land left over between two strictly rectangular factories, a disused car dump, the surrounds of an electricity substation. Nothing can be done with these patches. They are too small or misshapen to build on, too expensive to landscape.” Ignored, they therefore “form some of the richest and most unpredictable habitats for wildlife to be found in urban areas”.

The book is a reassuring reminder of how resourceful life can be – what he calls nature’s “perennial opportunism and exuberance” – with birds and other small creatures often finding ingenious means to sustain their threatened communities.

There are musings on the life-giving properties of abandoned gravel pits and the English canal system. Plus, there are brilliant passages on the ingenuity of urban pigeons and the demonisation of foxes: “Our attitudes towards urban wildlife, our readiness to tolerate pests, is conditioned more than anything else by whether the creature in question will eat, both literally and metaphorically, out of our hands. No doubt foxes would be regarded as acceptable if they came sweetly, by day, to lap milk from doorstep saucers. Being lone wolves, midnight ramblers, prowlers and looters, they are branded as outlaws. It is homo sapien’s old chauvinism again: we are the stewards; animals should live by our rules, not those of the jungle. It’s not one of our most consistent attitudes.”

Mabey despairs at the sorry state of our parks, but marvels at the urban/rural idyll that is Hampstead Heath. It’s delightful to read of how he looked for a rare orchid on a golf course: “I quartered the slope carefully, eyes close to my feet, and going down on hands and knees in the more promising patches...I didn’t notice whether in fact it was the ninth and final green where I struck lucky, but my patience was running out and it was certainly the last one I was going to play. But there, nestling under a foot-tall birch shrub, I spied a couple of skulking frogs. I crawled about the area, expecting a horrified ‘fore’ to ring in my ears at any second, and found a couple of dozen plants growing in an area not more than two yards square.”

I particularly admire the way the book is organised, moving fluidly between topics without you really noticing. It’s a more satisfying approach than if it had been rigidly structured into sections.

The author largely avoids the topic of insects: “I think we may be lucky that insects are too small and remote ever to have entered our understanding in the way that birds and flowers have. If we saw their lives for what they really are I think it might be too much for us to bear.” He also writes surprisingly little about the vast volume and ubiquity of litter spoiling wild land everywhere, but then this is a problem that has grown since the book’s original publication. There was far less plastic debris in our midst in 1973 than there is today.

Whether he’s looking for wading birds at sewage farms or admiring the natural riches at landfill sites, the book is a joy to read because of his gentle wit and empathy for all living things. It’s a real pleasure to see the world through his eyes.

20/01/19: Anne Scott – 18 Bookshops (2011)

I love books and I love bookshops, so it’s difficult to say why this account of 18 “significant” bookshops seems so uninvolving. Perhaps it’s the dry way the author relates history, or maybe it’s just that her writing lacks character. Either way, I found myself wondering why I was reading about the ephemeral aspects of books rather than actually spending time reading something life-enriching. There were quite a few typos, too. It also annoyed me that this edition is printed without page numbers. It seems over-designed in general – intended to be a beautiful object, no doubt – but its usefulness is diminished as a result.

Trivia: Anne Scott is the mother of Mike Scott of The Waterboys.

16/01/19: Steven Callahan – Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea (1986)

“Sailors may be struck down at any time, in calm or in storm, but the sea does not do it for hate or spite. She has no wrath to vent. Nor does she have a hand of kindness to extend. She is merely there, immense, powerful, and indifferent. I do not resent her indifference, or my comparative insignificance. Indeed, it is one of the main reasons I like to sail: the sea makes the insignificance of my own small self and of all humanity so poignant.”

While sailing from the Canary Islands in January 1982, Steven Callahan’s ship, Napoleon Solo, was hit by something and swiftly began to sank. Callahan launched his inflatable life raft and had a few minutes to retrieve emergency supplies from his boat before it went down. This raft would become his home for 76 days, drifting 1,800 nautical miles.

He suffered hunger, thirst and countless other medical problems but survived by extraordinary resourcefulness. When he was eventually found by three sailors off Guadeloupe, he had lost 44 lb and was unable to walk. 

The book is both poetic and philosophical. He has a real way with words:

“The bag is freed but seems to weigh as much as the collected sins of the world.”

“I arise for a gulp of air. There is none. In that moment I feel as though the last breath in the galaxy has been breathed by someone else.”

“I dive into the raft with the knife clenched in my teeth, buccaneer style, noticing that the movie camera mounted on the aft pulpit has been turned on. Its red eye winks at me. Who is directing this film? He isn’t much on lighting but his flair for the dramatic is impressive.”

There is indeed plenty of drama, from shark attacks to accidentally puncturing his raft and having to constantly pump air into it. He sees nine ships but none of them see him – or if they do, they don’t stop to help. He is utterly alone at sea (“That torn blue desert”) with only his intelligence and unbreakable spirit. 

Surprisingly, some of the most interesting passages are those in which he details the minutiae of his survival equipment – the spear gun with which he catches fish, a still with which he desalinates water and so on. These items are illustrated by his own sketches. His technical skill is remarkable and this is clearly one of the things that saved him. 

You can tell he has the psychology of a survivor because of the way he adapts his thinking to the extremes of the situation:

“ln these moments of peace, deprivation seems a strange sort of gift. I find food in a couple hours of fishing each day, and I seek shelter in a rubber tent. How unnecessarily complicated my past life seems. For the first time, I clearly see a vast difference between human needs and human wants. Before this voyage, I always had what I needed – food, shelter, clothing, and companionship – yet I was often dissatisfied when I didn’t get everything I wanted, when people didn’t meet my expectations, when a goal was thwarted, or when I couldn’t acquire some material goody. My plight has given me a strange kind of wealth, the most important kind. I value each moment that is not spent in pain, desperation, hunger, thirst, or loneliness. Even here, there is richness all around me. As I look out of the raft, I see God’s face in the smooth waves, His grace in the dorado’s swim, feel His breath against my cheek as it sweeps down from the sky. I see that all of creation is made in His image. Yet despite His constant company, I need more. I need more than food and drink. I need to feel the company of other human spirits.”

Moments of occasional euphoria aside, it’s mostly a horribly painful and bleak experience. See day 71, in his final week of solitude: 

“Maybe I am the Flying Dutchman, doomed to sail the seas forever and never rest again, to watch my own body rot and my equipment deteriorate. I am in an infinite vortex of horror, whirling deeper and deeper. Thinking of what I will do when it is all over is a bad joke. It will never be over. It is worse than death. If I were to search the most heinous parts of my mind to create a vision of a real hell, this would be the scene, exactly.”

And yet he does survive. It’s hugely inspiring.

11/01/19: Dion Leonard with Craig Borlase – Finding Gobi: The True Story of a Little Dog and an Incredible Journey (2017)

I picked this up at the “donate one, take one” book stall in Totteridge & Whetstone tube station.

Dion is an ultramarathon runner. While racing in an event in the Gobi Desert, he is “adopted” by a small dog who runs nearly 80 miles of the way with him. Before leaving China to return home to Edinburgh, the smitten Dion decides that he will bring Gobi back to live with him. A crowdfunding page is set up to pay for this (importing a pet is a complex process), but Gobi goes missing in the streets and Dion returns to China to help look for her.

He is eventually reunited with the dog, of course, but there are many struggles before they can come home and live happily ever after. He is followed by sinister men in suits, for example, and has to live in a state of paranoid seclusion.

Inevitably, this becomes a heartwarming tale about man’s best friend and how rescuing a dog “healed wounds I didn’t know were within me”. The book is slightly diminished by occasionally drifting into self-help territory, making some fairly obvious statements about personal belief and overcoming failure. Perhaps there wasn’t enough to say about the dog to fill 254 pages. And although it’s a device to set the scene and provide an emotional/psychological context (father died young, turned out not to be real father), I could have done without the childhood recollections – how much did we really need to know of Dion’s youth? – which risk turning this into a “misery memoir”.

On the plus side, Finding Gobi benefits from details of running a 155-mile ultramarathon. His accounts of the extremes of the race and the performance of the runners in dangerously scorching desert conditions are probably the best part of the book.

07/01/19: Joe Simpson – Touching the Void (1988)

This remarkable and moving memoir details Joe Simpson’s 1985 climb of the 6,344-metre Siula Grande in the Andes. He was accompanied by his friend Simon Yates, whose far briefer account is also represented here with italics interspersed between sections of Simpson’s narrative.

The pair became the first to ever reach the summit, but were unprepared for the extremes it offered. Simpson broke his leg on the descent and – despite Yates heroically winching him down the slopes in incredibly dangerous conditions – plummeted off a cliff and was left dangling. Fearing Simpson dead or doomed and certain that he was about to plummet himself, Yates considered he had no choice but to cut the rope...

The book tells the astonishing and unlikely story of how both men survived. Simpson lost a third of his body weight during the ordeal and was close to death at the point he finally made it back to base camp after dragging himself and his smashed leg back across crevasses, glacier ice and boulders.

Touching the Void is fascinating on so many levels. Simpson vividly articulates the absurd degree of human suffering he endured to stay alive. He also probes deeper questions about life, death and consciousness, all of which he was brought into close proximity with. His relationship with Yates is also key. He immediately and lastingly “forgave” him for giving up on his survival – even dedicating the book to him “for a debt I can never repay” – but Yates was nevertheless demonised as “the man who cut the rope”.

In the 2003 film adaptation of Touching the Void, Simpson and Yates both speak direct to camera about their experiences. It’s sad that the passing of time and the fame/notoriety of the events seem to have permanently damaged their strained relationship. But the film remains the perfect complement to the book, with different insights gained by the perspective of those passing years. Whichever way the story is told, it’s emotional and unforgettable.

03/01/19: Raynor Winn – The Salt Path (2018)

Raynor Winn and her husband “Moth” have financial and legal problems that cause them to lose their home. Moth then receives a diagnosis for terminal brain disease. With no money, nowhere to live and seemingly no future, the couple decide to walk England’s South West Coastal Path. They do this in two sections, with a few months in between, and cover all but 40 of the 630 miles.

The story of that walk works as an amiable travel book, but there’s so much more to it. Living on the outsides of society, they encounter prejudice and fear whenever anyone hears about their situation. Often perfectly friendly members of the public recoil from them when they discover that the hiking couple are homeless, with the “h” word itself seeming to carry a lot of stigma.

There’s some pretty writing about nature and wildlife and there are quite a few laughs (or smiles, at least) – such as a running joke about Moth being mistaken for Simon Armitage, who was walking the same route.

There’s obviously a tragic element, too. Moth’s wellbeing and longer-term options are always in doubt. Paradoxically, the extremes of the walk seem to improve his health, but the days beyond the walk remain a big unknown.

A few passages of worldly wisdom and philosophising occasionally seem overbaked until you consider what the couple have been through.

It’s an entertaining, moving and oddly gripping read.