Just as some people have perfect pitch, which they can then learn to tune even more finely, and some have eyes which are attuned to see ever finer gradations of tone, colour and shade, and can then further train and refine this gift, some, I believe, resonate with a precision and refinement towards words, language itself, and are capable of conceptualising and describing the world new-minted, fresh, present.
Such a one is Olivia Laing, as this marvellous book effortlessly demonstrates. When I say `effortlessly' I don't mean that its construction necessarily came trippingly and fully formed for the writer - maybe it did, I don't know - but that the reader has no sense of affect being striven for, no sense of `my, what beautiful writing in terms of showy flashness in description. It isn't that I read with a sense of `what a beautiful description of a sunset' - more, I read without effort, slowly, presently, observantly. Sentence followed sentence, and both the parts and the whole just WERE. This is authentic writing, and from first to last I just had the sense, which might often come with music which is balanced, and somehow winds the listener more deeply into itself, that `this is the moment; and this; and this'
Laing has written a walking journey the length of the River Ouse, which effortlessly weaves the long history of the planet, of geological time and evolution, with recorded historical fact, with the industry of place, with social history - and with the short lives of individuals, and how they connect to place. She renders all fascination, and the powerful presence of her writing had me reading with a kind of breathlessness, heart and lungs almost afraid to move on, so much did I want to ingest and inhabit each step of the journey, each sentence of the book.
Presiding over all, for Laing, and moving through the feel of the book, is Virginia Woolf, who, as we know, on a day in 1941 walked out into the Ouse with a pocket full of stones. Woolf was a woman perhaps too finely calibrated for the world, sharing with some other writers with an exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, a feeling too attuned to unsheathed nerve endings, unmyelinated. But what such writers can do is perhaps to waken and unwrap those of us who are too tightly sheathed AGAINST perception.
Laing solidly walks the journey, feet well on the ground, noticing, noticing.
I could have taken virtually any and every sentence from her book to illustrate the harmony, perception, reflection of her writing. I did start underlining, but quickly abandoned, as the book itself needs underlining
"The path spilled on down a long lion-coloured meadow into a valley lined with ashes. There the river ran in riffles over the gravel beds that the sea trout need to breed. I crossed it at Hammerhill Bridge, running milky in the sun, and climbed east again into Hammerhill Copse.The land had lain opento the morning and now it seemed to close up like a clam. There was a woman's coat hanging over the gate to the wood, the chain padlocked about it like a belt. Who drops a coat in a wood? The label had been cut out, and the pink satin lining was stippled by mould"
Reading this book, I feel invited, constantly by the writer, to both inhabit the presence of the time and place of her journey, and, in an echo of Robert Frost's poem, stay aware of the other paths and possibilities that might have been taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other,
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“I’m haunted by waters,” flows the opening line.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 February 2018
All rivers flow to the sea, but no idea, where they can take you, if followed. After a painful breakup, where a longterm couple, still in love, couldn’t agree where to live in England, the author starts a week long journey. In a midsummer week she packs her bag and walks along the River Ouse in Yorkshire, from the source to the sea.“To The River: A Journey Beneath The Surface” is written by British author Olivia Laing, and is her first book, published in 2011, after many years of reviewing books by others for newspapers and magazines. Olivia Laing holds a degree in herbal medicine and she practiced as a herbalist for several years before becoming a journalist, specializing in treatment of anxiety and depression. Descriptions of flora of the riverside is one of the many gems of this magical book.“To The River” is a story of the River Ouse and the layered history on its banks. It is a book on the mystery of water. “I’m haunted by waters,” flows the opening line. Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse at age of 59. Early spring, fur coat pockets filled with stones, wearing Wellington boots. Decisions seem unavoidable only in biographies. Life is more layered than that and is hardly ever explainable. Olivia Laing has the delicate touch not to smooth out the wrinkles in known stories.Virginia Woolf is one of the main currents in this book, but not the only one. Laing digs through the many skins of the Ouse as deep as prehistoric time goes, when the land of Great Britain was covered in tropical plants. One of the stories is about Gideon Mantell, geologist who discovered the big lizard in the territory of the Ouse, later known as a dinosaur. Another tells about Kenneth Grahame who wrote “The Wind in the Willows”. Many kids have grown up with this novel, while Grahame failed to grow up himself and lead a tragic life. Mythological underworlds and ghosts of the river banks are flushed away with historic floods, sheep drown in meadows.Olivia Laing is a disarming and honest travel companion with a wonderful sense of humor. She throws away her “hated shoes” when her feet hurt bad after walking “like an idiot” in a hot day without any socks on. She starts to feel sick after swimming in a polluted part of the river and all she wants is to stand beneath a cold shower “for a year” to wash the phosphates away. She doesn’t feel safe in woods and admits with a shame her fear from cows. But all the ego business drops away when Laing is swallowed by deep moments in the boundless nature.As a reader you somehow await, when the author will start to untangle her broken relationship and mend the pain with shared epiphanies. But once again you meet with her delicate touch not to smooth out anything with a wishful haste. Now and then like a blue dragonfly she touches the surface of water and reflects on nature of memories, on feeling anxious and sad, but doesn’t dwell on it too much. Till in the last part of the book Olivia Laing admits feeling more safe, after walking alone for so many days and barely speaking to anyone.During the book the reader is filled with the healing potion of proportion, where nature and epochs are so immense, that you feel how magically tiny you are. And all you are left with, all that matters now is to be home, in each and every moment, wherever you are. On your journey beneath the surface.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 16 February 2018
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