31/07/20: Sarah Waters – The Little Stranger (2009)

This 500-page novel, shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize, initially frustrated me. I don’t like to give up on books, but for 200 pages I found it fairly uninvolving. A couple of times I nearly hurled it across the room. Only as I approached the halfway mark did it begin to come alive and hook me in.

The story deals with a country doctor becoming involved with the Ayres family (a mother, her son Roddy and her daughter Caroline) and the fading Warwickshire stately home in which they live. It pretty soon becomes apparent that supernatural forces permeate the house and influence events there – with tragic consequences – but the doctor refuses to accept this possibility and attributes everything to mental delusion. His relationship with the house and family is further complicated when he falls in love with Caroline Ayres.

The supernatural material is handled expertly and with real subtlety. Allowing everything to be explained away, the author enables her narrator to doubt the very events he is observing. But it is infuriating to only see the world through his dull, unimaginative eyes. He’s a stuffy, rigid character, and while the story clearly needs his scepticism, his inflexible worldview does make for a less interesting authorial voice. He’s also there to draw out the theme of class inequality. His attraction to the family is ambiguously tied up with his own social aspirations.

By the end of the book, the slow pace has become transfixing. You know that more bad things are going to happen and sure enough they do.

15/06/20: Luke Haines – Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll 1997–2005 (2011)

A sequel to Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall (2009), this second volume of Luke Haines’ recollections covers Black Box Recorder, the final demise of The Auteurs and the start of Haines’ eccentric solo career.

It's even more whimsical than the first volume, diversifying into “conversations” with a cat and various dead rappers. These flights of fancy – not usually my kind of thing – work surprisingly well.

As his career strays further from the mainstream, there’s less of the anecdotal wit and satire about fellow bands. However, he does detail a run-in with Chrissie Hynde and his first Top of the Pops appearance. You also get to hear of his plans for a “Pop Strike”, which pre-dated Bill Drummond’s No-Music Day.

Highly recommended. I'm hoping he will write a third volume covering 2006–2020.

26/05/20: Luke Haines – Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in Its Downfall (2009)

“I am none of the following, but have been described variously as: the pioneer of, the godfather of, the man who invented, the butcher of, and the forgotten man of Britpop (1990s version). Let’s not get too bogged down in tracing the lineage any further back. It’s never cost-effective and always leads back to a caveman banging a rock with the tusk of a woolly mammoth.”

Luke Haines was never really a part of Britpop. The Auteurs were a band on the outskirts of that scene, who predated most of the nonsense associated with those acts. He’s a brilliantly acerbic, extremely witty narrator (I read both of his books twice) and most of what he has to say about his contemporaries is not very complimentary:

“The full idiocy of the era has yet to be felt. But I already loathe the brashness, the vicars-and-tarts-forced-jollity of the Blur–Elastica alliance. The head boy and head girl appear to be doing rather well for themselves. I had more of a Carrie-style ending in mind for the nauseating couple.”

He reserves particular dislike for Suede. “The Auteurs are European, intense and intellectual,” he states. “Suede are a quick fix. Baked beans and sulphate. Brett’s pseudo-bumboy androgyny is more Grange Hill than Bowie.” He keeps coming back to them, too: “I’ve heard their single and I know I can outwrite them. Brett’s got a few good lines and knows there’s a bit of mileage to be had in writing lyrics about ‘retards’ and ‘dads’, but overall they’re just a little too reliant on the old wasted-glamour-in-council-estates routine.” He also has a bash at The The, who he toured and fell out with.

Haines depicts the rise and fall of The Auteurs, not shying away from his own self-destructive role in their ups and downs. By the sounds of it, they were never a “proper” band in the old-fashioned “gang of mates against the world” sense of the word. The bassist was his girlfriend and the cellist irritated Haines so much that he refuses to call him anything other than “The Cellist” throughout the text.

The book concludes with a happy ending of sorts – the formation of a second group, Black Box Recorder.

A savage satire on 1990s culture, Bad Vibes is hugely entertaining.

13/05/20: Dean Karnazes – Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner (2005)

“Just as a race-car driver pushes his vehicle to the limit, or a pilot tests the ‘edge’ in an experimental plane, I wanted to see how far I could go. What I now realize is that the way other people seek physical comfort and blissful well-being, I seek extremes. Why run 10 miles when you can run 100? Moderation bores me.”

Dean Karnazes lives for running. He can run for days. He eats while running, and organises pizza deliveries along the route. He has fallen asleep while running. He even dictated this book while running. He ran in Death Valley, where it was so hot that his trainers started melting.

I really enjoyed his account of his obsession.

04/03/20: Joan Lindsay – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)

A masterpiece. On Valentine’s Day, 1900, the girls from an Australian boarding school go on a day trip to the ominous Hanging Rock – a notable geographical feature. It soon becomes clear that there’s an essential wrongness about the place. Clocks stop at midday and, amid the sweltering heat, the girls – in a state of “exquisite languor” – enter a kind of disorientated enchantment. Seemingly bewitched and in a trance, three of them (and one of their teachers) disappear.

They return to the school as early in the narrative as page 36. The remainder of the book deals with the various investigations and the aftermath as the events of 14th February cast a malignant shadow over the lives of many people.

It works on multiple levels. It’s a supernatural thriller but also a historical drama that examines class division, female repression and sexuality, and social control.

Peter Weir’s 1975 film, also highly recommended, is shot in a way that really captures that sense of dazed, ethereal bewitchment. Its utterly haunting image of the girls in their white dresses – walking, somehow mesmerised, towards a fate that is brilliantly never explained – has stayed with me ever since.

In 1987, an additional final chapter of the book was published after the author’s death as a standalone book. Titled The Secret of Hanging Rock, it unwisely “explained” the mystery of the disappearances with reference to possibly supernatural events and the Aboriginal concept of dream-time. But other theories suggest that there is no evidence that Joan Lindsay actually wrote this chapter, which differs so much stylistically from the rest. The purpose of the novel, for this reader, is to set up an uncanny mystery (like all the most terrifying stories, it understands that the less you explain the more scary it becomes), and it would have been a far lesser book if that mystery were simply unravelled at the end. Indeed, Lindsay herself told an interviewer: “Well, it was written as a mystery and it remains a mystery. If you can draw your own conclusions, that's fine, but I don't think that it matters. I wrote that book as a sort of atmosphere of a place, and it was like dropping a stone into the water. I felt that story, if you call it a story – that the thing that happened on St. Valentine's Day went on spreading, out and out and out, in circles.”

25/02/20: Bernard MacLaverty – Midwinter Break (2017)

The slow-motion disintegration of a marriage. He drinks too much. She seeks spiritual enlightenment. A retired couple, they are in Amsterdam for a brief holiday, but their problems and their differences are only magnified by the change of routine.

MacLaverty is brilliant on the minutiae of life, and how these details reveal bigger truths about the two characters.

It’s also a book about the uncertainties of growing older.

30/01/20: Neal Stephenson – Seveneves (2015)

“But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head.”

For reasons never fully explained, the Moon is destroyed. The shattered pieces of rock threaten to rain down on Earth, killing everyone. Humanity has approximately two years to build a “Cloud Ark” (a collection of spaceships able to group and swarm around the International Space Station) in order to save the species. But of course it’s not that simple...

Neal Stephenson explores this brilliant “what if?” scenario across a huge novel of 867 pages. The best passages deal with the creation of the new, improvised orbital world before – inevitably – politics begin to threaten the idealism of its social structure. The level of technical and procedural detail he packs in is fascinating and I found myself wanting this part of the book to be even longer than it was, because its encyclopaedic reach is so powerful.

He has fun with specialist terminology, jargon, acronyms and so on, such as:
• BFR = Bolide Fragmentation Rate
• CAC = Cloud Ark Constitution
• Flivver = Flexible Light Intracloud Vehicle
• HGA = Human Genetic Archive
• MIV = Modular Improvised Vehicle
• PSAPS = Periods of Simplified Administrative Procedures and Structures

It might annoy some readers but I really like the way he explains the science as he goes along.

The author is also good on the nature of power/authority and what social rules mean without Earth’s laws and structures to maintain them. The US President is a major character and significantly influences the way events unfold.

Stephenson wasn’t particularly strong on the emotional aspects of the story. In some ways this worked: astronauts building a brave new civilisation cannot be sentimental. But in another sense, the death of planet Earth and everything we have ever known or loved seems like it should’ve been a bigger deal than that experienced by the few survivors.

Either way, It’s an exciting read – not least because it seems so plausible. Stephenson explained in interviews that he didn’t want fictional get-out clauses (such as the hyperdrives of Star Wars or the teleports of Star Trek). Instead, pretty much everything in the book feels like it follows known scientific laws. This makes it a lot easier to relate to and a lot more believable.

Following an awkward cut-off scene (it seems that the author didn’t know how to resolve the story), the final third of the book is set 5,000 years later. This, inevitably, feels like a different novel entirely, even though the human society it depicts is very clearly derived from the survivors of the first two thirds. We are told that there are now 3 billion humans, so the “will they?”/“won’t they?” survival story of the earlier sections is completely deflated, replaced with an exploration of what survival was like and what happened next. This section is hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff and arguably didn’t need to be written. I would have far preferred a brief postscript set 300 or 500 years later letting you know how the handful of survivors were getting on.

Despite – or because of – the endless descriptions, I found it impossible to visualise the structures of the Eye, the Habitat Ring, the Great Chain and the Cradle. Sometimes, in this section of the book, the passages become dense and turgid as layer upon layer of detail is accumulated. This is ironic as it was precisely that obsessive detail that made the earlier sections so enjoyable. Here’s one example:

If you took a large number of Flynks – flying, autonomous chain links—and joined them together into a long chain, and connected its ends to make it into a continuous loop, and then got the whole loop moving through the air like a train composed of little airplanes, each using its stubby winglets to generate its share of the lift, then you had a thing known as an “aitrain,” pronounced the way a resident of Old New York would have said “A train.” The concept was old enough that its etymology had been obscured by time. It might have been “air train” with the first r elided, or a contraction of “Aitken train.” Sometimes, as here, it was a captive aitrain, passing continuously through a fixed installation on the ground and rising from there to a considerable altitude before reversing direction and plunging back down for another circuit. But aitrains could also fly freely in the air: a technology crazy enough that it had become associated with the Aidan big-brains known as Jinns, or Ghenis, and tended to be used only by Red.

There are other flaws with this final section. The notion that the human population divides neatly into seven distinct races descended from the original “seven Eves” is hard to believe. Even more improbable is the discovery that humans survived on Earth after all and that their leader was none other than Ralph McQuarie, father of the “Eve” named Dinah. Another survivor was the submarine-inhabiting fiancé of the Eve named Ivy. What are the chances? By this point I was ready to hurl the book across the room. Also, the potentially interesting notion of “epigenic” shifts amounts to nothing when Kath Two transitions into Kath Three (Kathree), with no bearing on the plot at all. And the end just fizzles out completely.

It’s simply not convincing, which is a real shame and also infuriating because there are dazzling passages in the earlier stages of the novel as compelling as any sci-fi I have read.

02/01/20: Lawrence Block – The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep (1966)

Slightly underwhelming thriller about a man’s quest to retrieve a stash of hidden gold. Evan Michael Tanner travels through many countries and encounters many characters, even getting mixed up in a revolution in Macedonia.

It’s fast-paced and fun, but unusually “thin” on tension and credibility for Lawrence Block. I was left unsatisfied and happy to make it to the end.

The character’s most remarkable feature – the fact that he “hasn’t slept a wink since a piece of shrapnel destroyed the sleep centre in his brain during the Korean War” – is oddly underplayed.

The cover image of a sexy girl leaning on an American car has absolutely nothing to do with the story.

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.