In theory, 'The Marches' is a tale of two walks and a funeral, in which Rory Stewart - soldier, diplomat, academic, author, Tory MP, government minister and now a new father too - meditates on landscape, identity, and his own relationship with his father, who died last year at the age of 93. In practice, this marvellous book is actually a lot more than that.
Stewart, who campaigned for the Union in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, sets out to discover whether there is such a thing as British identity, English and Scots identities, Border identity — or, as he later ruefully postulates, just thousands of individual houses, each with its own story. As anyone who has read Stewart's 'The Places In Between' or 'Occupational Hazards' will anticipate, Stewart finds no easy answers.
Stewart is an engaging, well-informed and enthusiastic traveling companion. He has a lot to say about the geology of the Borderlands and Scotland up to the edge of the Highlands, the history of these regions, his own family background, sheep farming, rewilding, Scottish country dancing, the creation of personal and national identity, fatherhood, war, empire, memory and forgetfulness, love and death. His tone is sometimes gently teasing, sometimes a bit wistful, often elegantly ironic, but never once strident or dismissive. In this sense as in others, Stewart is not really a conventional politician.
As befits a narrative defined by long and wilfully indirect walks, 'The Marches' might be accused of rambling — but the indirection, the refusal to signpost anything, the unapologetic embracing of paradox is surely central to the book. Stewart, for instance, clearly adores his larger-than-life father, a charismatic Normandy veteran, colonial administrator and intelligence officer. His father calls him 'darling', they hold hands, they share wonderful in-jokes. He learns a lot from his father about 'just getting on with it'. But here, love does not preclude a sharp eye for his father's blind spots, obfuscations or the darker side of his colonial experience. The result is an admirably rich, nuanced, genuinely beautiful book where everything - memories of Roman conquest, Dark Age linguistic shifts, Border reivers, Stewart's own time in Iraq - turns out to function as counterpoint for everything else.
Stewart writes with skill but no artifice. His self-critical honesty can be disconcerting. The sections describing Stewart's father's death are almost unbearably moving - don't read them, as I did, when out in company. Stewart also has gift for listening generously and imaginatively to the disparate voices he encounters on his journeys.
Ultimately, more than anything else, this is a book about identity, difference and love. Again and again, however obliquely, Stewart seems to suggest that respect, good manners, sympathy and affection can bridge borders, whether these are geopolitical or indeed personal, and that love, whilst acknowledging difference, can sometimes transcend it. And in a ropey year like 2016, what could be more apposite than that?
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Margaret S.
Perhaps she will like it. I was quite disappointed in the little ...
Reviewed in the United States on 10 December 2017