Reading: Footnotes
Sep. 15th, 2019 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartPeter Fiennes's Footnotes is subtitled 'A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers'. Given the title, I had been expecting the journey to be on foot, but in fact although there is some walking (including a walk up Snowdon in a fog, which exactly mirrors my experience when we climbed Snowdon some years ago) the writers in whose footsteps Fiennes is following use a variety of modes of transport, particularly horseback and train, while Fiennes's journey is mainly by car. He starts in Swanage, Enid Blyton's preferred holiday destination and the inspiration for the fantasy Devon of her books, all cream teas, smugglers' caves and lashings of ginger beer; he then moves on to Cornwall, where he follows Wilkie Collins and the surrealist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun around the coast. The seventeenth-century diarist Celia Fiennes' journey takes him from Launceston to the Welsh borders; he then follows medieval cleric Gerald of Wales through South Wales and the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Anglo-Irish writers Edith Somerville and Violet 'Martin' Ross through North Wales. Returning to England, J.B. Priestley and Beryl Bainbridge take him to Birmingham, Bradford and Liverpool, and Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins to the Lake District and Doncaster. He follows Boswell and Johnson around Scotland before returning to Priestley and Bainbridge who take him from Newcastle to Lincoln, and then, finally, he shares Dickens' final journey from his home in Gad's Hill to Westminster Abbey.
Fiennes's narrative merges together background information on the authors he has chosen to follow, many of them writers who are not particularly well-known, and key facts about their journeys, with his own observations as he follows in their footsteps, and, linking them, a meditation on the ways in which Britain has changed over the centuries; what has been lost, what has been gained, and the impossibility of ever really quantifying this. It's a interesting and thought-provoking book, and also a very enjoyable one, as Fiennes has a chatty, self-deprecating style which makes his narrative a pleasure to read. I very much appreciated that he managed to include equal numbers of women and men among the authors he follows (which can't have been that easy to do, given the male dominance of the travel genre) and now very much want to seek out the writing of some of the ones I hadn't previously encountered, in particualar Ithell Colquhoun, Celia Fiennes and Somerville and Ross.
(Because I had an e-ARC for review, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, I can't comment on the maps and illustrations, though a quick glance at the hardback in the gorgeous Highland Bookshop in Fort William suggests that it is also a beautifully presented book.)
Fiennes's narrative merges together background information on the authors he has chosen to follow, many of them writers who are not particularly well-known, and key facts about their journeys, with his own observations as he follows in their footsteps, and, linking them, a meditation on the ways in which Britain has changed over the centuries; what has been lost, what has been gained, and the impossibility of ever really quantifying this. It's a interesting and thought-provoking book, and also a very enjoyable one, as Fiennes has a chatty, self-deprecating style which makes his narrative a pleasure to read. I very much appreciated that he managed to include equal numbers of women and men among the authors he follows (which can't have been that easy to do, given the male dominance of the travel genre) and now very much want to seek out the writing of some of the ones I hadn't previously encountered, in particualar Ithell Colquhoun, Celia Fiennes and Somerville and Ross.
(Because I had an e-ARC for review, thanks to NetGalley and the publisher, I can't comment on the maps and illustrations, though a quick glance at the hardback in the gorgeous Highland Bookshop in Fort William suggests that it is also a beautifully presented book.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-15 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-15 09:19 pm (UTC)"In Eastern countries, when the beaver finds that it cannot evade the dogs which are following it by its scent, it saves itself by self-mutilation. By some natural instinct it know which part of its body the hunter really wants. The creature castrates itself before the hunter's eye and throws its testicles down. It is because of this act of self-castration that it is called 'castor' in Latin. [Ed: it really, really isn't] If a beaver which has already lost its testicles is hard pressed a second time by the hounds, it rushes to the top of a hillock, cocks up one of its hind-legs and shows the hunter that the organs which he is really after have already been cut off."
There follows a bunch of Classical quotations to show that he's read Wikipedia. I mean, that he's studied hard.
That's from the Penguin Classic The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales, Gerald of Wales, translated by Lewis Thorpe (1978)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-15 09:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-15 10:04 pm (UTC)Also Arthur and his spear called Ron (though that's from Geoffrey of Monmouth, along with the naked men on dragonback, which has left me with a whole bunch of unanswered questions).
no subject
Date: 2019-09-16 11:30 am (UTC)